He followed Mercy to a bathroom, and she left him to wash off at the sink. The bathroom was large and its fixtures had once been grand but had become loose and rattly, the finish rubbed flat. The toiletries looked pricy and the towels were white and fluffy, too good for a filthy man to be washing off dog shit and blood, so he filled the sink with hot water and used his palms to scrub his face and neck. He used the hem of his T-shirt to dry off.
When he came out she was in the living room, and she had a tumbler of Scotch in each hand. She held out a glass and said, “You look like you need this. I know I sure do.”
He took the drink and drained half the glass. He was studying her face, looking for signs of trauma. He’d never owned a dog, but Looch had, once. It was a terrier. The dog had died of old age, and it was the only time Dion had seen Looch break down and bawl. It had taken at least a week for the man to regain his spirits, but he’d never wanted another dog, that’s how painful it had been.
Mercy seemed depressed, but he had the feeling she’d been depressed before he kicked the door. She said, “I put some more wood in. I’m already running low and rationing. This is my first real winter here, and I thought two cords would be plenty. It’s impossible to keep this house warm. It’s impossible to stay warm anywhere in this horrible place.” She gave a shiver and then frowned with what he took to be anger at herself. “I’m sorry if I offended you. I didn’t mean to insult your hometown. You’re from around here?”
He wasn’t offended. He wasn’t actually listening, much, his mind still full of headlights and tail lights, and a dog in pain, a dog gone quiet, facing its own death but looking up, making contact in its last moments. He was still thinking of Looch’s terrier, and close to tears, and hating himself for it. He hadn’t cried in his life till waking from coma, and now look at him. Disgusting. Weak and weepy and afraid of everything, he couldn’t get through a day without his eyes welling up, sometimes without warning. Sometimes out of the blue.
To hide the tears, he looked at the walls, fixing on the photographs, all those people and their instruments. Mercy featured in many of the photos. There she was in an outdoor shot, a casual but posed group photo. She stood between two men, an arm around each. The lighting was strange, not quite natural.
He was touched on the arm by icy fingers, gave a start, and looked aside, down, into her eyes. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Do you want to sit down?”
He finished his Scotch and handed her the glass. “No, thanks. I need to call a cab. I don’t know the number.”
“Oh, of course, you mentioned you were walking back to the highway.” It was about all she knew of him, which way he was heading. She didn’t know his name or that he was with the police, and since he actually was no longer with the police, it didn’t really matter. She had a cellphone in hand, ready to call that cab for him, but paused and said, “I’m getting the feeling you’re from elsewhere. What’s your name?”
He didn’t answer, distracted by her stare. It was unsettling. She was attractive, somewhere in her forties. She had clear skin and well-defined features, but most startling were her probing grey eyes. She was concerned about him, he could see, but the concern was scientific. She said, “Have we met? You look familiar.”
“I doubt it. I live in Smithers.”
“And what are you doing on this lonely road in the Hazeltons in the middle of the night?”
“Just finishing a job,” he said.
“Oh. Who do you work for?”
“Odd jobs,” he said, admiring his own ability to lie on the fly. Better yet, to lie without actually lying.
“That’s kind of serendipitous,” she said, with a lift of her brows. “Because as you can see, I’m in desperate need of an odd-jobber. I’m tackling this house on my own, and not too well. Maybe we can work something out.” She didn’t allow him to answer, moving on to a more immediate problem. “You’re still quite dirty, you know. And you stink. You’re welcome to have a shower. You’re welcome to stay the night, if you’re in no big hurry to leave.”
True, he stank, and he took her words at face value. There was nothing scientific in her manner now, only concern. She said, “Sometimes a person can be more traumatized than he knows. I think you’re traumatized. I probably am too, it just hasn’t hit me yet.”
He had a shower, but he didn’t stay the night, though she offered again, almost insistently. Instead she drove him back to the hotel in a silver Beamer that might have been glamorous once but now had a cracked windshield and a great dent on one side. She kept her eyes on the road the entire way, as if enemies might pounce, and he wondered if her nerves had been shot by a recent MVA. Like his. She repeated her suggestion of hiring him to help with the renos.
“Also, I’ll need Coal taken care of,” she said. “Poor Coal. How about it? There’s at least a month of work for you, with that drywall. You could stay at my place, of course. It’s huge. You could have the whole top floor to yourself. I’ll pay well, better than what you usually get.”
“I don’t think I’ll be back this way,” he said.
Her profile looked tense, angry. She said, “Still, take my number, in case you change your mind. And give me yours.”
“I saw some ads on the bulletin board at the IGA, men looking for work.”
“Hm,” she said. “Okay.”
At the parking lot of the Super 8, she idled the engine, wrote her number on the back of an old business card, and handed it over. He didn’t offer his number in return. Then he climbed out and the Beamer scudded off, slithering on the entrance to the highway. One thing was for sure, he thought, watching the tail lights disappear: her send-off of Coal was about as moving as the flick of the fingers.
Ten
The Run
MORNING BROKE, WET and drizzly. A new document was up on the board when Leith arrived in the office, a large-scale aerial shot with a line arcing across in crooked formation. Giroux and Bosko stood in front of the board, talking about departures. Bosko was saying he was due back on the Lower Mainland in a day or so but would keep in touch; he just had to know how it all panned out.
“What pans out?” Leith said.
Giroux thumped the aerial shot with the side of her fist. “Spacey found a way through. We’re zeroing in.”
Leith looked at the photograph, at Spacey’s trail drawn in black marker, at the mileage scale. Doing the quick and dirty math, he didn’t think they were zeroing in at all, were just wasting taxpayers’ money. The whole thing was crazy, as he went about telling his colleagues now. “That’s at least five clicks. You can run five clicks in an hour, sure, on an even sidewalk. But we’re talking woods here. We’re talking incline, nasty weather, lot of weaving and climbing. And say he’s fast enough to get there and back in the time frame — that doesn’t leave him a lot of minutes to commit the crime, does it? Three, four minutes? What, he races up to the girl, hits her on the head, wheels about, and starts tearing back to the worksite? Face it, Renee, it’s brilliant, but it’s a write-off.”
Giroux seemed unworried by his logic. “Right,” she said. “So to put a mileage or timing on it, Spacey’s going to run it again. Soon as she gets in, we’ll set her up and get her on her way. I’ll send Thackray out to spot her from a distance. He can’t run, but he can handle a radio.”
Leith gave up trying to convince her of anything, let alone who was in control here. He saw Bosko was studying the map up close, as if he could see a tiny runner making its way along the black line. Bosko said, “Jayne Spacey is quite the powerhouse, isn’t she? Why hasn’t she put in for promotion?”
“She has,” Giroux said. “Twice. Always something gets in the way. Why, you’re not thinking of stealing her away from me, are you?”
“She may just steal herself away.”
Leith frowned at the back of Bosko, big and graceless, a circus bear in an off-the-rack suit. He’d never been great
at reading between the lines, but it sounded to him like Spacey was going places, city-bound, to join that man in his shiny new Serious Crimes Unit. It didn’t surprise him, but did tweak his professional jealousy, and he said grumpily, “Did Spacey tell you about the menace? Who I fired, by the way.”
Bosko turned, eyes vanishing behind white sheen as his glasses caught the light. “You mean Dion,” he said, as if he knew of the incident already.
Giroux was looking at Leith too, expressing overblown shock. “What d’you mean, you fired Dion? You can’t do that. If any officer could fire any other officer, there would be no officers left to keep the peace.”
“I know that,” Leith said. “Let’s just say he’s suspended till you get him in front of the board, or whatever you have to do. I’m not saying this lightly, but he’s got to go. He’s worse than incompetent. He’s dangerous. They were supposed to stay together on the mountain yesterday. He didn’t. He abandoned the search, got lost in the woods, and Jayne had to go find him, wasting an hour in the bush. Then they get back to the office and he physically assaults her. He grabbed her arm and pushed her down, all witnessed by Pam. All over some dumbass misunderstanding.”
Giroux was upset, her plans and diagrams on hold as she dealt with this troubling personnel issue. “Dion assaulted Spacey? Why? Was she hurt? How come she didn’t mention it to me? Is she going to lodge a complaint?”
“Actually, I heard something about crucifixion,” Leith muttered. He frowned at the awful ring of the word, reminded of the seriousness of being fired from the RCMP. It was tragedy to some officers, tantamount to execution to others. Dion struck him as an officer on the edge, the sort that might jump off a bridge. He glanced at Bosko, who was still looking at him, still shielded by the glare off his lenses.
“Spacey won’t be pursuing the matter,” Bosko said. “She and I discussed it last night. It was a rough day. Tempers flared. But she did mention something about a notebook?”
A demand was embedded in the question, Leith realized, and once again he felt there was some off-the-record connection between Bosko and Dion, and it worried him. “It’s not his duty notebook, I think,” he said, hesitantly. “It’s personal.”
“Right,” Bosko said, still waiting.
Leith walked to his desk, unlocked it, and produced the little book, which he had flipped through last night, finding nothing remarkable, lists and diagrams, strange catalyst for a dust-up. Bosko took it from him and slipped it into an evidence bag.
“Well, excuse me,” Giroux said. “If that’s his personal property, you can’t just seize it without cause and without warrant. Can you?”
“I have cause, and I can, actually,” Bosko said. “Don’t worry. He’ll get it back.”
She blinked at him. “So what am I supposed to do with him today? Send him packing?”
“Cancel the suspension, please,” Bosko said. “Give him a warning to be good. He’ll finish his week here then return to Smithers, where he’ll get his orders. I don’t have time to deal with it right now, but I’ll be making arrangements.”
“And why exactly is he your problem?” Leith asked.
“He’s my problem because he’s officially posted in North Vancouver,” Bosko said pleasantly. “And that’s my turf.”
Giroux said, “Smithers isn’t his first posting? Wow. We all thought he was fresh out of boot camp. Why didn’t you tell us before?”
“I’ve only found out myself,” Bosko said, and Leith thought it was a lie, and alarm bells were going off in his head now. No doubt about it, the troublesome Constable Dion was under investigation. He crossed his arms, wanting to ask more questions but afraid to step over the line, because a shadow crossed Bosko’s face, the first Leith had ever seen, and it looked like impatience. He didn’t know Bosko was capable of such thing. “Anyway,” the man said. “Excuse me, I have to make some travel arrangements. Don’t want to miss the bus.” He gave an apologetic smile but was on his phone already, thumbing in a number as he left the room. The door banged shut behind him.
When he was safely out of earshot, Giroux said, “Who is that guy? I mean, really.” She sat at her desk and pushed papers around for a bit, still upset. “Hang on,” she said. “Dion. I know that name. Isn’t he the detective in North Vancouver who crashed his car last year? His colleague was riding with him, and died? Remember that, Dave?”
If Leith had heard of the incident, it was long since forgotten. His memory banks were overstuffed with work-related crap these days, and didn’t have room for much else. But Giroux was already answering herself. “Couldn’t be him. The guy in the crash was older, and experienced. A vet. Our Dion’s just a boy, and greener than spring.” She checked a folder and said with triumph, “Yes, I’m right, he’s the one. Crashed his car and was out of commission for a while. Lucky man, to walk out of that mess in once piece.”
She assumed he’d been repaired. Leith wasn’t so sure. Dion must have passed whatever tests they’d put him through, but somewhere along the way there’d been an error. With that attitude, that temper… He looked up as Jayne Spacey walked in, bright-eyed and sharp as a whip, a study in contrasts. She bounced to attention, telling Giroux she was ready to hit the trail again, this time with a stopwatch, and would have bounced right out the door to put her boots to the ground, but Giroux called her back. “Hang on there, Jayne. Come here. Look at me. What’s wrong?”
Leith didn’t see anything wrong with Jayne Spacey. No broken arm, no post-traumatic stress, no anger. She looked good as new, to him. A woman who was going places, places he would never see, damnit.
Spacey hung in the doorframe. “Nothing’s wrong, boss.”
“Don’t give me that. You’re sick.”
“Bit of a cold. It’s nothing.”
And Leith saw it now too, that the young constable wasn’t herself. Her voice was thick, nasally, and her eyes swam about, and it came to him in an epiphany that she had emptied her medicine cabinet to get her through this day. Nothing to do with the assault, probably, but yesterday’s traipsing about in the cold. Traipsing about looking for Dion.
The women were arguing now, loudly, about Spacey’s fitness to run the trail in this condition, and the argument was lively but brief, ending in Giroux physically marching the young woman to the door and telling her, “Go home. Now. Somebody else can do this.”
With Spacey gone, Giroux was back at her roster, once again looking for volunteers. “So which of you wants to do it? I would, but I’m about half the size of Rob Law.”
“Get Mike Bosko to do it,” Leith grumbled.
Giroux gave him a sour look. “How about you? About time you shifted your weight.”
Leith was fit enough, just barely, but desperately didn’t want to run that trail. He said, “One of the constables, then. Thackray.”
“I told you, Thackray can’t run.”
Leith’s mood was starting a dangerous downhill slide. Maybe it was the fact that Spacey had been wooed away by Mike Bosko, while he hadn’t even been courted. Maybe it was distrust of Bosko’s weird agenda. More likely it was just the threat of having to run up a mountainside in the pouring rain. He raised his voice. “What d’you mean Thackray can’t run? He’s a cop. He’s got to be able to run. It’s a prerequisite.”
“And Ecton’s been working all night,” Giroux went on, ignoring him. “Lynn Daniels couldn’t compete with Rob Law any better than me. Well, a bit better. Augie’s on another file that requires his undivided attention, and my other two are testifying in Prince George as we speak.”
There were half a dozen others that she and Leith ran through before he gave up. They were out-of-towners, all good candidates, he thought. But Giroux seemed to think it unnecessary to pull them from their tasks when a perfectly good David Leith was going to be sitting around twiddling his thumbs all day.
He looked at the sleety grey window and saw himself slogging a
long at two thousand metres above sea level with a stopwatch. Exercise was not his thing these days, and so what he if was looking more solid than ten years ago? Alison said it looked good on him, and he agreed.
Giroux said, “Don’t mope. You’re not our last resort. Constable Dion can do it.”
“Dion cannot do it,” Leith snapped. “He’ll fall and break his neck. And while he’s at it, he’ll cause an avalanche that’ll wipe out your precious village.”
But the Queen of the Hazeltons only nodded, a mule at heart. “He can do it. And he will. After he and I have a little talk.”
Leith considered her stubborn face and considered the menace of Dion, and sighed. “No. I’ll talk to him.”
* * *
In civilian clothes, jeans and sweatshirt, boots and leather, Dion stepped into Giroux’s office, finding not Giroux but Constable Leith standing by the window, his back to the outdoors. He looked more tired than usual, and pissed off in advance. “Weren’t you told you’re back on duty?” he asked, eying Dion’s well-worn black jeans and leather car coat that said loud and clear I’m not here to work.
“It’s probably not your choice to make,” Dion said, sounding cool and firm, because he’d thought this out, every word planned in advance. “It’s probably mine.”
David Leith had only three expressions as Dion had counted them: fed up, indifferent, or angry. He looked the first right now. “I see,” he said. “Quitting, are you?”
“I’m not quitting, but I’m leaving,” Dion said, and then an unexpected surge of emotion swept him badly off script. “… and I don’t know why. How did I mess up? Filed a few late reports? Got pushed and pushed back? Forgot to kowtow?”
“You screwed up every task you got, that’s what,” Leith said.
Dion bared his teeth and stepped forward. “Like what?”
The answer came at him in a near shout. “You really want me to count ’em off for you?” Leith tried to count it off on his fingers. “Shoddy paperwork, punctuality issues, snotty attitude. Insubordination. How about assaulting a fellow officer?”
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