Zipping her over to Kispiox would be a lot more than five minutes. He phoned Spacey, told her he was finished the subdivision, and asked how about if he took a cruise through the outlying areas for a bit, then report back in. Spacey didn’t care what he did. He loaded Evangeline’s backpack into the trunk, and she got in the passenger seat, and he carved a U-turn on the highway and headed back toward Kispiox.
Which technically he shouldn’t do. Technically, he should report in that he had a civilian in the car, and technically he could be disciplined for providing taxi service to the public. Technically, too, she should be in the rear seat, kept at bay by the bulletproof barrier. But technically he was at the nothing-to-lose stage of his career, and didn’t really care what rules he broke. Anyway, he had a question or two for her, which made it less of a taxi ride and more business. “D’you know the Laws much?”
“Rob, Frank, and Lenny,” she said. “Not too much. I’ve been to a couple parties over there. Scottie adores those guys. Funny, but he’s more of a mother hen than you’d think.”
“You don’t have any idea where Frank could be right now?”
She didn’t, and his duty was done. He said, “I can loan you bus fare if you want. Hitchhiking around here isn’t a good idea. You know that, right?”
“I know that. I’m ready for it.”
“I’ll give you the bus fare.”
She laughed. “I’ve got money, and I’ll take the bus, if that makes you feel better.”
They drove in silence for a bit and had left Two Mile behind, and Old Town, and were deep in the woods that flanked the Skeena when she said, “Hey, that’s his bike.”
“Whose bike?” Dion said, slowing the vehicle, looking at his passenger, following the line of her finger out to the woods.
“There. Scottie’s bicycle.”
Something blue shone from within the trees, and Dion pulled to the shoulder and reversed till he could see it better. “That’s his bicycle?”
“That’s his bicycle. Weird. It’s the only way he gets around these days, ’cause his dirt bike’s out of commission too, and he can’t fix it. How dumb is that, Scottie the Fix-All can’t fix his own bike. Great advertising.”
Dion got out of the car and went to take a closer look. Sure enough, it was Scottie Rourke’s crappy blue one-speed, leaned up against a tree off to the side of the highway. There was no lock and chain around it, and it seemed intact. Its tires were firm. With collar high against the cold, he looked up and down the dark, little-travelled byway that wound through forest toward the Law residence, and beyond that to Rourke’s trailer, with a whole lot of nothingness in between.
The bike was pointing away from the village, so Scottie had been heading home, by the looks of it. He supposed it was no mystery; somebody had driven by and given him a lift. Not to Rourke’s trailer, because why bother leaving the bike for subsequent pick-up if he was just about home anyway? No, he’d been given a lift back to the village, or somewhere else altogether. The police would be out crawling this road looking for Frank, so maybe Rourke had been picked up by one of the constables for questioning. But a pick-up would have been broadcast, and it hadn’t been. Same if he’d gone to the pub or the Catalina. He’d have been scooped, and the scoop would have come across the police frequency. So the drive-by and the pick-up would have happened before the alert went out, and who would be driving by, by chance, on this remote road? One of the Laws. Not Lenny and not Rob. Frank in his old green Jeep. That’s who.
He sat back behind the wheel and drove past the Law driveway, looking for police activity and seeing none, and a minute or two further to Rourke’s trailer. The lights were off in the place except for one burning low in the area of the kitchen. He hauled Evangeline’s pack from the trunk of the car and went up to the door with her. She had found a business card stuck in the jamb, and she showed it to him. Thackray had left his RCMP card with a note scribbled on the back to call this number ASAP.
Evangeline fished into an empty flowerpot and found the house key. She let herself into the trailer, and Dion followed and set down her pack. The place wasn’t warm but not cold either. Evangeline was calling out for Scottie, and Scottie wasn’t answering. She had turned up the heat, switched on lights, was pouring water into a kettle, and asking Dion if he wanted coffee or a beer or anything. How about some antioxidant tea with ginger?
He didn’t. He stood in the middle of the tiny trailer kitchen, and it was coming to him like a home movie played without sound, everything that was happening. He remembered the photos on Rourke’s wall, that snapshot of Rourke grinning at the camera, the grin cut in half by a terrible scar, an arm around each of the two older Law brothers’ necks, throttling them with fatherly affection. That same suffocating love of Rourke’s had destroyed a man and driven a woman to suicide. The crime was history, and maybe he’d mellowed, but it still ran in his veins, that terrible, overblown passion.
Dion experienced a fleeting moment of wonder at himself, that he was still here, knowing some things, not knowing a lot more, facing the end of life as he knew it, but still ticking away as if he must close the deal. He said, “Does Scottie have a gun?”
Evangeline didn’t think so. “Why?”
And maybe he was totally off the wall, but in a further epiphany he could see where it was playing out, too, at least in vague composite form. Now he had to decide: call it in, alert the team what he thought and where they ought to go — or go there himself.
Time and space and a certainty that they’d drag their feet told him he didn’t really have a choice. He would fire up his own engines and go there himself, now. Except he couldn’t go there, because he still didn’t know where there was. What he needed were coordinates. He said, “Evangeline.”
She had her nose in the cabinets, looking for teabags. She turned and said, “Hm?”
“Do you know anything about the Gates of Heaven?”
She abandoned the cupboard and turned so she was facing him, no longer bustling but still and watchful. “The what, sorry?” He saw her glance to her right, at the knife rack, and to her left, at the door, and of course the question had scared her, put that way out of the blue, because psychos roamed the earth, even dressed as policemen. He explained there was a place Scottie had described to him the other day, and he needed to find it, fast, that was all. Did she have any idea?
Her shoulders relaxed, and she shook her head. “No. But tell me more. Maybe I can help.”
Dion ploughed backward through that casual conversation at the Old Town Pub. “It’s a place up on a mountain somewhere. It’s got a great view. It’s open to the skies. Scott wants his ashes scattered there when he dies. Ring any bells?”
“Oh, the place with the hubcaps?” she said.
“Hubcaps? Like a wrecking yard?”
“No, hubcaps like stuck on this big log arch thing. We buried the red-tail there.”
This was hardly what he needed right now, more random puzzle bits. “The what?”
She said, “The red-tail, the hawk with the broken wing, last fall. We couldn’t save it, and it died, and Scottie had a truck then, so we went up to the place with the hubcaps. He didn’t call it the Gates of Heaven, far as I know, but it’s something he’d do, Mister Schmaltz. He said he was going to build a cabin there, but raising the two posts and decorating them was about as far as he got. Anyway, he wanted to bury the bird. That was before the ground froze solid, right? So, great, except he wanted to bury it right on the edge there where its soul could soar free, blah-blah-blah, and he wanted me to stand with him as he did so and say prayers, but it was too scary, the edge, way too far down, eh? Made me dizzy. So he did it himself. He’s not afraid of heights. He says he’s got Mohawk blood in him that makes him not afraid of heights, but I don’t believe him. It’s wishful thinking. He’s whiter than I am, and I am very white.”
Dion was weeding words as she spoke, as
best and as fast he could. He said, “This hubcap place, is it up the Matax trail, up that way somewhere?”
“No, no. It’s a whole different mountain. It’s over here.” She poked the air to her left.
The Hazeltons were surrounded by mountains, so it wasn’t a helpful poke. “D’you have a map? Could you show me where it is?”
She didn’t have a map. He brought the one printed for tourists from his vehicle and flattened it on the kitchen counter, and Evangeline’s pearly pink fingernail showed him it was pretty well just across the highway from the entrance to the Bell 3. An old logging road that didn’t have a name, far as she knew.
“You take this road called McLeod, past this ranch, and then about five miles along there’s a sign on your left warning people about logging trucks, and you take that. It’s steep and gravelly, but not too bad, you don’t need a four-by or anything….”
Her finger travelled up the mountainside, ended at more or less where she thought the plateau was located, and marked it with an X for him in ballpoint. “East Band,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Scottie called it East Band. I don’t know, East Band mountain, or road. He just said East Band.”
When she was done, he told her to wait there. Out in his car he phoned directly to Jayne Spacey, his point person for the night, and told her where he was, at Scott Rourke’s residence, and where he was going, up to a lookout on a logging road past McLeod, in an area possibly called East Band. He told her that he needed backup, because he believed Scott Rourke was up there with Frank Law, and it could be a dicey situation.
“What, where?” she said.
He looked at the map, so little of it marked with names. The lookout wasn’t a tourist hotspot, and there was nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the green. There was no East Band that he could see. “I can’t explain everything right now,” he said. “But Evangeline Doyle’s here. She’ll give you directions, or maybe she can just take you out there. That would be better.” He thought a moment, staring at his map, struggling through the logistics as the clock ticked. If the team had to come out to Rourke’s trailer to get Evangeline, there would be a good half hour wasted, considering the road leading to the area she had pointed out started somewhere up Highway 37, not up Kispiox Road. The closest point between the detachment and the East Band, as he saw it, was Old Town.
He said, “I’ll leave her at the Black Bear Lodge. You can meet her there. Get a team together. I’ll go up ahead and see what I can find out, and wait there for backup. I’m not sure if Rourke is armed. You have to move fast on this. I don’t know what exactly I’m headed into.”
“Yes, fine,” Spacey said.
He shut his phone and jogged back to the trailer to get Evangeline. She sat in the passenger seat and he fired the engine, aware that it was all wrong, somehow, him and Spacey, the games they were playing and the dynamite they had underfoot. But in this case she would have no choice but to act, and he could hardly sit here mulling it over anyway. Rourke had at least an hour’s head start, and Dion was almost certain that if Frank wasn’t dead already, all in the name of mercy, it was just a matter of time.
Twelve
The Gates
THE SKIES WERE NO LONGER a weird, writhing pink but black velvet spangled with stars. He found McLeod Road, no problem, passed a ranch, and about five miles farther found a logging road jotting off his left, with a brown government sign warning about logging trucks. So far Evangeline had it all dead right.
The road started good and flat, and his high beams cut a white path before him as he sped along, exposing so many blurry kilometres of frozen gravel. Then it began to slant uphill, the grade increasing until the engine had to clear its throat and change gears.
The last of the ranch lands fell behind and the wilds closed in fast, and he became aware of his isolation, and almost worse than what he couldn’t see before him was what he could, caught in the periphery of his lights, the flanks of nightmare forests. Something loomed in the headlights bigger than a deer and flashed away as he jumped on the brakes and slid into a spin across gravel and ice.
He sat breathing hard till his heart slowed, straightened out the vehicle, and carried on.
The road branched, and he braked at the unmarked crossroads and swore. Evangeline hadn’t mentioned any branching. He left the car idling and went around to the back to dig out a reflective marker to leave for the team to know which branch he’d gambled on: the left.
From here the gravel steepened, deteriorated to ruts, and forced him to a crawl, and he knew he’d lost the race. It was time to find a good place to turn around, go back and wait at the crossroads for the backup that was bound to be just minutes behind him. Twenty minutes, he figured, if Spacey had jumped to it.
A fairly good place to turn around came up, but he passed it, thinking the next would be even better. Another chance didn’t seem to come up, and he kept climbing the narrow road, higher and higher, alternately accelerating and braking, swerving to avoid the potholes, suspension jouncing crazily. When the gravel levelled out and gleamed away ahead of him, a pale blue ribbon touched with ice, he made a deal with himself that he would travel up this stretch as far as it went, and soon as it got rutty again he would turn back.
A kilometre into the stretch his headlights glanced against something man-made, off the road to his left. He pulled over again, this time shutting off engine and lights so the night’s blackness invaded his lungs and made it hard to breathe.
Turning on the flashlight only made the blackness worse, so he flicked it off again. He backlit his wristwatch to show the time, calculated his backup ETA once more, tried his radio, got nothing but static, waited another full thirty seconds, then left the car, and with light on full blast headed toward the object downslope that had caught his headlights.
The object, as he’d thought, was a vehicle that had driven off the road across the dead grasses of a broad clearing, churning the snow and leaving twin tracks, and yes it was an old green Jeep. Frank’s wheels. He touched the hood and found it cool but not icy. All doors were locked. There was nothing of interest visible inside. The footprints, two sets, headed off into the woods toward an opening in the trees. If he could read anything in the tracks, they seemed unhurried. Two friends ambling along.
He called out Frank’s name, and Rourke’s, and listened. This was where he would post himself, then, and wait for backup. Again he backlit his watch, and it dawned on him that there was something wrong with that ETA. He tried his cellphone again and found again no reception. That was what mountains did, threw walls up between towers, killed the signals.
And now he felt so tiny and alone, here in the vastness of the night. Grasses rustled, branches swished, wood creaked, but nothing in all those sounds warned him of company. The two friends were long gone. He could stand here and freeze, or he could return to the car and head back down the mountain, or he could follow those tracks. The risk, as he saw it, was moderate. Rourke didn’t have a gun, at least not registered, and he, Dion, did.
The tracks didn’t lead far. The trees formed a thick canopy that kept snow off the trail, and there were no signs of passage, leaving only the path itself as a guide. The path was decent at times and at times became nothing, leaving him to cross boulders along the brink of what looked like a bottomless pit in his torch beam. When he’d gotten past the big rocks, the hillside dipped, and he could just make out the trail angling across its face. No footprints still, and he wondered again if he was going the wrong way. His feet propelled him downward in jerking strides through scrub and loose shale, until his passage caused a small avalanche and he lost his footing and went down in a slither, onto knees, then butt, then back, trying to dig in his heels as brakes but his weight carrying him down till some jagged obstruction brought him to an abrupt stop. Not just abrupt, but painful, and whatever had blocked his fall was sharp against his body. Worse, h
is flashlight had flown from his chilled grip. He lay still, eyes squeezed shut, listening to rocks clattering downhill.
The silence resettled, except for his own gasps. The pain drove up through his torso, flaring at his right side, and he eased upright and explored the area by touch. Something, a ragged branch stub probably, had ripped through his patrol jacket and gouged him. His hand came away wet.
For a minute he stayed where he was, in case the wound was fatal. According to plan, he tried to make his last moments not so lonely. Shivering, eyes closed, he imagined Kate leaning over, kissing him gently on the mouth. He waited a moment longer, still shivering. He opened his eyes and looked around. Down the slope a ways and stuck under a bush was a patch of light. He moved sideways and downward until he had the flashlight in hand again. He crawled back up to the path, got to his feet, used the light to check his wound. Not fatal, he decided. Hardly worth a bandage. Just an added aggravation in a difficult situation.
The path took him downward some distance farther and ended at a plateau of tall grasses poking up through the rain-tattered snow, and the sky opened before him into a dome, not quite black but a solemn midnight blue, and across the length of a football field, maybe, was the brink. He couldn’t see it but could feel it, a hollowness, a near silent roar that told of empty space. This, he was sure, was the edge of the vista that had made Evangeline dizzy.
And there were voices, far away but distinct. They came from the brink, he believed, carried to him on the wind. He cast his light downward then flicked it off, and as he walked forward and as his eyes adjusted, a structure became visible, a hundred metres distant now, rough timbers raised to create a small silhouette against the sky. The hubcapped arch, the Gateway to Heaven. The voices came from there, and toward them he walked. He had found Frank Law, and since backup had screwed up, it was up to him to bring the guy back to town. Which he would do, no problem. He wasn’t dead yet.
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