by Ron Corbett
. . .
Once he was over the North Shore Bridge, Yakabuski turned right and followed a service road that ran beside the escarpment. When the road dead-ended at a municipal garage, he cut up LaPierre Street and made a right on Tache Boulevard. This was the main commercial street on the North Shore: thirteen blocks of taverns and corner groceries, nail parlours and dollar stores, all the businesses sitting in day-long shadows because of the high-rise apartment towers running parallel to the street.
The apartment buildings were lettered and identical in every way except for the graffiti. Yakabuski took an alley that ran between Buildings G and H and saw the patrol car. Then he saw a young police officer standing a hundred metres away from the vehicle. She had her cap in her hand and was staring at the east-side fence of Filion’s Field.
Yakabuski slowed his Jeep to a crawl and leaned over the steering wheel to look at the upper-floor windows of Buildings G and H before popping the curb and driving across the soccer pitch, leaving the patrol car behind in the parking lot. When he reached the fence, he parked broadside to the apartment buildings, so the driver’s door was facing away. He got out of the vehicle slowly, took one last look at the upper windows of the apartment buildings, and then motioned for the patrol officer to join him.
When she was standing beside the Jeep, he said, “How long have you been standing here?”
“Twelve minutes.”
“Right here the whole time?”
“I have not left the crime scene, Detective Yakabuski.”
She knew who he was. Yakabuski was no longer surprised by this. He had been with the Springfield Regional Police fourteen years, the first few years seconded to a joint task force with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Sûreté du Québec, working undercover during the Biker Wars. He had befriended the head of the Popeyes motorcycle gang, Papa Paquette, and later testified against him in court, helping to send the biker to the Dorset Penitentiary for twenty years. He was well-known in Springfield after that.
But then two winters ago, he was sent to the remote town of Ragged Lake, high up on the Northern Divide, to investigate the murders of a squatter family. What he discovered when he got there was a secret meth lab owned by the Popeyes and the Shiners. The Battle of Ragged Lake was what the media came to call the events of the next three days. A journalist from Springfield had written a book with that title, and there was now talk of turning it into a movie. Yakabuski could not go anywhere in Springfield these days without being recognized. He leaned against his Jeep, looked at the fence, and said, “Where are you from, Constable?”
Donna Griffin looked confused. “Where am I from?” she stammered.
Yakabuski kept looking at the fence. He was staring directly into the sun, and he twisted his head to the right then far to the left. He shielded his eyes and stepped closer to the fence. Then he stepped back.
Tethered to the fence was the body of a man. A large man, dressed in an expensive three-piece suit. His legs were pinned together, his arms were outstretched, and his head hung down, touching his chest, so his face was obscured.
“What do you think happened to his head?” he asked.
“I’d say someone put the boots to him,” answered Griffin.
“You’ve got a bad angle. I’ll give you that.”
“Detective Yakabuski, if I have done something wrong, please tell me what it is.”
“You never told me where you were from.”
The look of confusion came back to Griffin’s face. She couldn’t follow the narrative track of this hulking, Polish cop standing beside her. He was changing direction too often. Keeping her off-balance. Before she could answer, Yakabuski said, “I know you’re not from around here for a few reasons. One, you’re standing outside your patrol car in the North Shore projects with your back turned to those two apartment buildings. How long did you say? Twelve minutes? There are men living in those buildings, Constable, who would consider that a free shot.”
“Detective Yakabuski, I’m aware of the dangers on the North Shore. It’s the reason—”
“The second reason I know you’re not from around here is because you’ve been doing all this while standing in front of Augustus Morrissey, who for some reason is tied to this here fence.”
The young cop’s face went white. She stared up at the dead man. “Are you sure?”
“Oh, I’m sure all right. Want to know the worst part?”
“All right, now I know you’re having a go at me. How can there be anything worse than that?”
“It’s worse because Augustus hasn’t been given the boots. He’s had his eyes cut out.”
Chapter Four
The border guard saw the vehicle shortly after 10 a.m. The sixth vehicle in lane four. A Falcon campervan with Texas plates, a raised roof, and travel stickers glued to the rear windows. All the windows tinted black, which you didn’t normally see on a campervan.
The guard walked to lane four and tapped the window of the booth. When the other guard opened it, he said, “Thomas, you must do me a favour.”
The guard in the booth was from Arizona, a young man with powerful arms and barbed-wire tattoos on both wrists. He didn’t say anything right away.
“Switch lanes with me,” the first guard continued. “There is a car in your lane I would like to put through.”
The guard with the powerful arms broke into a smile. “The Miata?”
“Yes. I have put her through a couple times before.”
In front of the Falcon campervan was a cobalt blue Mazda Miata, driven by a woman in her mid-twenties wearing a low-cut blouse and white denim shorts. She had a model’s face and blond hair that blew in the wind the way blond hair like hers should blow in the wind.
“Let’s hope you fuck up,” said the guard in the booth, opening the door and stepping out. “A woman like that will leave you on a street corner begging your wife to take you back.”
The two guards laughed. Neither one liked the other. The guard from Arizona thought it unfair so many guards of Mexican descent worked at the Brownsville, Texas, border crossing. The guard of Mexican descent thought the other guard was crude, stupid, and had a bad tattoo. But the woman was beautiful, and so the guard from Arizona played along. It would be entertaining, whatever happened.
. . .
When the Mazda arrived at the booth, the guard was thorough and officious, as he had been instructed in the email he received the day before, the one from an uncle in Mexico City he had never met but who so loved his nephew, he deposited money into his bank account every month. He ran the woman’s driver’s licence, passport, and vehicle registration through every imaginable computer check. The other guards were staring at lane four and smiling at how much time he was taking. When the guard waved her over for a full vehicle inspection, two guards actually laughed. They all turned and watched the Miata drive toward the security lanes and waited for the woman to step out of the car. They had yet to see the full view.
The campervan drove up and the guard took the passport offered to him through the window. He stared at his feet. Flipped to the tenth page and inked an entry mark, not bothering to touch his computer. He returned the passport, pushed the button that raised the draw-arm, and the campervan drove away, entering the four-lanes-merging-to-two melee of cars, motorcycles, cargo vans, trucks, and campers that had just entered the United States.
. . .
The driver of the Falcon set his cruise control at fifty-five and rolled down his window. Took a deep breath of this new country. Salt, shrimp, and gasoline, beef cooked on an open fire, the dung of a million gulls, pine needles — he picked out the scents one by one. Identified them. Categorized them. Nothing unfamiliar yet.
He drove north on the coastal highway, the Gulf of Mexico on his right, dotted with massive oil rigs and smaller pumpjacks, sailboats darting around them like white moths, attracted not to light but
to the scent of fossilized dung and bones from millennia ago. The sun was high in the sky, and rays of heat simmered on the highway, layers of them, shimmering and moving across the asphalt like schools of silvery fish. Road signs appeared out of the rays as if they were flash cards seen in a hallucination.
He stopped for gas at a Texaco station, had coffee in the diner, and when enough time had passed, he went back to the Interstate. Twenty miles south of Corpus Christi, he started to look for the turnoff. He found it and turned away from the gulf, down a secondary road that soon turned to gravel, travelling past fields of sugar beets that stretched uninterrupted to the edge of the western horizon. The abandoned farmhouse he was looking for, used as a storage warehouse now, had beets growing to within two feet of its frame. The small road dead-ended at the rear of the building.
The Miata was already there, and he parked beside it. Checked to make sure there were no clouds of dust atop the fields of sugar beets. No vehicles moving. No one approaching. He sat in the campervan a long time, looking at nothing more than a field of sugar beets. Eventually, he left the camper, putting a screwdriver in his jacket pocket before opening the door. He stopped at the Miata to remove the licence plates, placing them atop the hood.
He entered the farmhouse and saw the woman had followed her instructions to the letter. A good worker. Hired in Heroica and sent to the most expensive salon in the city to turn her hair blond, the colour that most attracted American border guards. Now she was naked. Standing in the shadows and swirling dust of the abandoned farm, sunlight coming through the slats of the wood-frame building and touching her skin to form a geometric pattern. The driver stared at the woman for a moment, wondering if he had seen the pattern before. Whether it might be a portent for his journey.
But nothing came to him. The woman, thinking the man was enjoying the sight of her naked body, raised her arms above her head, a gesture that raised her breasts, pushed forward her pelvis. She was running both hands through her long hair when the man took the pistol from the waistband of his pants and shot her.
The bullet entered the forehead, just above the bridge of the nose. A perfect shot. But then the driver was a skilled marksman, and the woman could not have done much more to present herself as a shooting target.
He walked to where she had fallen, bent, and placed two fingers of his left hand against the right carotid artery in her neck. When several seconds had passed, he removed his fingers.
She had a beautiful body. It had been offered freely. She didn’t expect men to turn away from such a gift. Which meant she was never suspicious. Meant she was killed with ease, the way beautiful people always seem to be killed. He stared at the body for another minute, then walked back to his van, picking up the licence plates along the way.
He drove until the sun started to set, then stopped at a rest area south of Houston. He went inside to a bank of payphones on the wall outside the men’s washroom. He picked a phone with no one standing to either side. The number was memorized. The American change already in his pocket. The phone rang only once before being answered.
“You are on your way?”
“Yes.”
“Six days?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll see you when you’re here.”
Nothing more was said. The driver hung up, got more change from his pocket, phoned another number, and had the same conversation with a different man. After that, he walked outside. The night air was cool, and there were no longer stars in the sky, just the low-hanging sheen of false light coming from the city of Houston. His disappearance was now complete. At that moment, not a soul on the planet knew where he was. Only two knew where he was going. And to one of those, he had just lied. He did not know which one. The answer would come to him during his journey.
Chapter Five
Augustus Morrissey weighed more than three hundred pounds, and his body was strung to the top beam of the twelve-foot fence. Which meant he had to be lowered using the arm of an aerial fire truck, a process that took — from the time the call went out until the body was on the ground — more than two hours. By then, there were more than fifty police officers and medical personnel standing on the soccer pitch. Not all of whom needed to be there. Some of the cops weren’t even on duty.
King of the Shiners. That’s what Augustus Morrissey called himself, and no one ever argued with him. Out of fear. Out of knowing it was true. The Shiners were a criminal gang as old as Springfield. They’d come to the Northern Divide to work as labourers, building dams and reservoirs high up on the Divide and were marooned there when the company that hired them wouldn’t pay their passage home. For years, the Irish lived on the Divide as little more than foraging animals, until a man named Peter Aylin organized them into a gang that terrorized the city for more than a decade. The Springfield Regional Police Force was formed in 1847 for the sole purpose of tracking Aylin down and bringing him to trial.
Augustus Morrissey had led the Shiners for forty years, a giant of a man who always dressed in three-piece suits and used a walking cane with a jewel-encrusted head, one he’d had specially made after reading about a similar cane being owned by J. R. Bath, a wealthy lumber baron who once lived in Springfield. It was rumoured men had been beaten to death with that cane, a story so well-known in Springfield most people were careful to keep their distance when first meeting Morrissey. To step back after shaking his hand.
Yakabuski had interviewed Morrissey once, when a man was beaten to death outside the Silver Dollar, the nightclub the Shiners owned in Cork’s Town. Yakabuski stood six-foot-four and weighed 250 pounds, and it was one of the few times in his police career he was in an interview room with a bigger man staring at him from across the table. The suit Morrissey wore that day was houndstooth wool, and he looked like a Victorian couch that had decided to get up and walk. He smirked through most of the interview.
Yes, he was at the Silver Dollar that night. No, he never saw the unfortunate victim of the unfortunate homicide. Yes, he was acquainted with the victim. Not well. Billy Garret used to be a bartender at the Silver Dollar. And he did odd jobs. He once repaired the wharf in back of the Silver Dollar, where Morrissey kept his boat. He had not seen Billy in several years. Was surprised to hear what happened.
“Surprised?” said Yakabuski, and Morrissey smiled serenely.
“A complete surprise.”
“So you haven’t seen Bill Garrett in years, but his body ends up in the yard behind your nightclub. Any explanation for that?”
Morrissey kept smiling, shrugged his shoulders, and, after thinking about it for a few seconds, said, “River was too low?”
Yakabuski watched as Morrissey’s mutilated body got taken down from the fence, remembering the man’s arrogance that day. All gone now. Long way gone for Augustus “King of the Shiners” Morrissey. Yakabuski had been in the army for fourteen years, a light infantry unit that deployed to Bosnia many times. He had marched into villages where bodies lay rotting in the street, half-eaten by the dogs that ran wild in the Balkans. As an undercover cop, he was present for the Lennoxville Purge, seven bikers murdered in a remote farmhouse, their bodies stacked like cords of firewood in a backroom until they could be weighted down and dumped in a lake. He thought if more people saw how some people ended their days, there would be less arrogance in this world. Generally better behaviour all round.
The inspector in charge of the Ident department, an old-school cop by the name of Fraser Newton, had arrived at the crime scene and was examining Morrissey’s body when Yakabuski walked over to get a closer look.
“You were first on the scene, Yak?” Newton asked, not bothering to turn away from his work.
“Patrol officer called it in. I was first after that.”
“No one around, I take it?”
“Only the patrol officer.”
“You notice the crowd we’re holding back at the perimeter?”
; Yakabuski looked over at the yellow crime tape that now encircled the soccer pitch. No one was standing there except cops and paramedics.
“When was the last time you were at a murder scene, victim outside, and there wasn’t a single gawker?”
“Not sure if it’s ever happened.”
“Hope you’re not counting on getting much from the canvass of those apartment buildings.”
“Never was. It’s all up to you, Newt. What do you have?”
“He’s had his eyes cut out. I didn’t think they still did shit like that around here. How do you figure they got his body up there?”
While waiting for Morrissey’s body to come down, Yakabuski had walked the soccer pitch, looking for blood stains, tire tracks, any clue as to what had happened the previous night in Filion’s Field. He had walked the perimeter of the fence, and he now pointed to a clump of trees by a service road on the other side.
“I found fresh vehicle tracks on the other side of the fence. Standard issue winch for any Jeep would have done it, so long as you had enough cable. Throw it over the fence and winch him up.”
“And to get him tied like that?”
“It’s a chain-link fence, Newt. You climb it.”
“Well, we have multiple stab wounds here, Yak. Some blunt-force trauma. I suspect one of the stab wounds will be the cause of death. He wouldn’t have been killed here. Not enough blood on the ground.”
There was an Ident cop on a ladder, taking photos of the fence where Morrissey had been hanging. Yakabuski could see that blood coming from his head had trickled down the edges of his coat and left a silhouette mark on the metal links. He had seen photos that looked somewhat like it. Shadow outlines of people living in Hiroshima on a hot August morning in 1945. The ground itself, though, as the Ident inspector had said, was relatively blood-free.
