by Ron Corbett
“Tyler,” he said calmly, “this city is one bad incident away from blowing up, and it’s all because of that man you work for. So you’re going to tell me what the hell is going on around here, or I’m going to beat you so badly you won’t be having sex with my sister for a very long time.”
“You’re fuckin’ crazy.”
“Crazy. Fed up and annoyed. It won’t make much of a difference to you, Tyler.”
. . .
The two men sat on bar stools in the basement of Lawson’s house. He had poured them Scotch and they were sipping their drinks. Occasionally, Lawson would blow his nose, wading up the tissue and placing it in a pile of red-stained bar napkins he had assembled near the ice bucket.
“What do you think I know, Yak?” he said angrily. “Do you think he tells me everything? Is that what you think?”
“You know nothing? Is that what you’re telling me, Tyler?”
His brother-in-law didn’t answer. Touched the bridge of his nose and said, “I think you’ve broken it.”
“I know I’ve broken it.”
“Fuck, Yak. You couldn’t have just called? Honestly, you’re fucking crazy some days. I don’t know how you hang onto a job.”
“Don’t know if now is the time to be giving me career advice, Tyler. So — nothing? Is that what you’re telling me?”
Yakabuski began to stand, and Lawson waved him back down. “I don’t know what’s going on, Yak, I really don’t. I know it’s not what it seems. You’re right about that. This whole thing seems like some big scheme on Sean’s part, but I don’t know what the scheme is.”
“They’ve kidnapped a little girl.”
“Yak, you don’t think I know anything about that, do you? Because I swear to God, there is no fuckin’ way I would ever . . .”
“She’s the same age as Sarah.”
Lawson stopped speaking. His eyes seemed to glaze over for a second, and he reached for another bar napkin. Blew his nose until the tissue turned crimson red.
“Why do you keep doing it, Tyler?” said Yakabuski quietly.
“Why don’t I quit? Is this career advice from you now, Yak?”
“You should consider it.”
“You should consider it’s not that easy.”
Lawson stared at his brother-in-law with a tough man look, but his gaze wavered after a few seconds.
“Fuck, I saw how old she is,” he said quietly. “You don’t think I read that?”
“Then you should help me. I’m looking for someone.”
“Who?”
“Sean Morrissey’s mother.”
“His mother? What the fuck would she have to do with any of this?”
“No idea. But I’m told if I find her, I’ll know who killed Augustus.”
“You believe that?”
“I do.”
“Well, don’t hit me right away, but I don’t know where you can find her. I’ve never even heard about Sean’s mother. I don’t have a clue who she is.”
“Neither do I.”
“Really? You don’t know who she is?”
“No. We’ve tried a few different ways to track her down, but no luck. So here is how you can help, Tyler — I want to find out who Augustus had for neighbours back in 1974.”
“Why would you want to know that?”
“Because someone in this city knows who that woman is, and I think an old neighbour of Augustus’s from the year Sean was born might be the person.”
Lawson nodded. Wiped his nose. “An original source. That’s good. Why not the hospital?”
“Already tried.”
“Friends and family would be tricky, because they’re all criminals,” Lawson said, sitting up straighter.
“You would suspect.”
“So track down a neighbour. That is indeed good.”
“I figure Augustus would have chosen his neighbours carefully. Associates, for the most part. Maybe one of them had a family. Any woman living on that street would probably know something. Know anyone who fits that bill?”
Lawson smiled. “Like I said, Yak, you should have just called.”
He reached for another napkin, this time for a pen as well. He wrote something on the napkin and passed it to his brother-in-law.
“Paddy McSheffrey. Wife and five children. Lived next door to Augustus for years.”
“Where I can find him?”
“He’s dead. But his widow is still in Springfield. Don’t know where. Her name is Fiona. You should be able to take it from there, right, Yak?”
“Fiona McSheffrey. All right, I’ll check it out.” He looked at his brother-in-law and added, “You should probably go to the hospital for that nose, Tyler. It needs to be set.”
“No kidding.”
“And I wouldn’t bother telling Sean about my visit.”
“You must think I’m an idiot. I’m cleaning up the foyer and pretending this never happened. This nose is going to have a hell of a racquetball story to go with it by the end of the day.”
At the front door they shook hands.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Yakabuski phoned Griffin from his Jeep and gave her the name Fiona McSheffrey. Neighbour of Augustus in 1974. Once married to Paddy McSheffrey.
“You think she’ll know the mother?”
“I think there’s a good chance.”
Paddy McSheffrey. The man who replaced Terry Maguire as Augustus’s right-hand man and chief enforcer, who stood trial with Augustus for the killing of his brother, both men acquitted for lack of motive. Before Tyler Lawson’s time. Before Yakabuski’s time. He had read about McSheffrey in one of Augustus’s criminal files. He turned onto the highway and merged with the early-evening traffic heading out of the city.
One more coincidence in a murder investigation that was starting to have far too many. Like a killer heading to Springfield just as a war was breaking out between the Shiners and the Travellers. Like a million-dollar uncut diamond showing up on the North Shore, just when Gabriel Dumont was filing a land claim for all of Cape Diamond. A strange coincidence, and the only problem was Yakabuski didn’t believe in either. Strange, or coincidence. Spend any time in the bush, and you stopped believing in strange. It wasn’t strange that geese could fly in a half-mile V-formation, even though scientists were baffled by it and suspected everything from undetected sonar capabilities to primeval memory. The birds just had lousy peripheral vision. So they flew in formation. Same way it wasn’t strange that a she-wolf will kill her newborn cub if she knows the animal has no chance of survival. Strange only if a wolf can’t be sure of a thing like that.
Coincidence was no different. True examples of it were rare. There was normally something that connected random acts, some explanation for happenstance. If you looked long enough, you found it. Yakabuski often wished he could believe in strange coincidence. His life would be easier. He could give his mind a rest and sleep better at night. But he had found no way of doing it. He would stay with any investigation until it was solved or a priest in High River was throwing dirt on his casket. Not because he was more virtuous than other cops. Not because he was better. But because he felt uncomfortable and anxious when he didn’t understand the world around him.
So assuming there was no such thing as strange, and no such thing as coincidence, what did he have? How could he explain the bomb blast in Chicago, the murders of Augustus Morrisey and Tete Fontaine, the kidnapping of Grace Dumont? What was the link that connected them?
He drove until he was at the gates of Ridgewood.
. . .
Jimmy O’Driscoll was in his room. Yakabuski had a bag of clothes with him, and he put it on the bed.
“Picked these up from your apartment, Jimmy. Thought you could use them.”
O’Driscoll looked at the plastic grocery bag. A carton of Player’s cigarette
s sat on top.
“Why’d you do that?”
“Is that your way of saying thank you, Jimmy? You’re welcome.”
“I already told you I haven’t made up my mind about testifying against the Popeyes.”
Yakabuski looked around the room. It had wood panelling on the walls and some cheap prints showing scenes from the Old Testament, a single bed and nightstand, a chair in the corner. There was a window looking out on the rear grounds, and in the daylight there would have been a view of the Springfield River, a good view, probably, as the river was at its widest point near here.
“You know, Jimmy, as much as I like living around here, some days I think everyone is a little off. Do you honestly think the only reason someone would help you is if they want something?”
“What other reason would there be?”
Yakabuski looked out the window. He stared for a long time, thinking if he stared long enough he would be able to pick out differences in the darkness, different hues of black that would let him know there was a tree there, or the shoreline was fifty metres in that direction. But it stayed a uniform black. He thought it must have been the window. He could usually start breaking it down.
“Have you never done something for someone, Jimmy, just for the sake of doing something for someone?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because it’s a way to feel good about the world and about yourself. And I don’t feel too good right now. I’ve been working five days, pretty steady, and I don’t think I’ve helped anyone. That makes me feel useless. Makes me feel like a fraud. That make any sense to you?”
“No.”
“Maybe it will one day. How they treating you?”
“It’s all right. The food’s good. The doctor isn’t a complete jerk.”
“High praise coming from you.”
O’Driscoll laughed. Not a sneering laugh. Not a nervous or false laugh. Something genuine. Almost joyful. Yakabuski smiled and turned away from the window.
“I’ve known people who turned their lives around after leaving this place, Jimmy. Happened to an uncle of mine. He came in a mess, walked out right-thinking and ready to take care of his family. Same thing could happen to you.”
“I don’t know, Mr. Yakabuski. I like getting high.”
“I know that, Jimmy. Everyone does. You just need to pick a better drug. Do you play cribbage?”
“Uhhh? Yeah, I guess I do. I mean I haven’t played in a long time.”
“Want to play a game?”
“We don’t have a board.”
“They do in the games room. I’ll go get us one.”
“You have time for that? Didn’t some girl just go missing?”
“Never confuse a man running around with a man doing work, Jimmy. I need to think. Card games usually help me with that.”
“Well, all right, I guess.”
Yakabuski went to the games room and came back with a cribbage board and a deck of cards. O’Driscoll wasn’t bad. He pegged well. Knew what cards to throw away. Yakabuski won the first game by only a few points. The boy was ahead in the second when Yakabuski saw something outside the window. The blackness was no longer total. No longer uniform. In the distance, far down the river, there was a light. Not a navigation light from a boat. Not a streetlight from the shore. Something else. Yakabuski stared for several seconds before he was sure.
A fire. Burning somewhere on the south shore.
“We’re going to have to finish this game another time, Jimmy.”
“You’re about to get beat. You can’t quit now.”
“I think you’re more right than you know.”
Chapter Forty
The North Shore Bridge had patrol cars at each end of the span that night with lights flashing. Police officers scanned every vehicle as it passed. It was not an official roadblock, but cargo vans were being pulled over for spot checks, as was any large vehicle with tinted windows, any minivan with a driver who didn’t look like a soccer parent. It had been twenty-eight hours since Grace Dumont was reported missing.
Because of the police cars, the Travellers left the North Shore by way of a footpath down the eastern flank of the escarpment. The footpath was a half-mile upriver from the apartment buildings, and the Travellers descended in darkness, not a man among them needing a flashlight to show him the way. They were two score in number, and they went down the cliffs as silently as mist rolling in from the river.
The path brought the men to an old ferry crossing, the land still cleared, though no ferry had run in more than a century. A half-dozen locked-oar skiffs were waiting for them. As they approached the boats, a large man dressed in the hide and skin of animals patted each man on the back. Most of the men had never met Gabriel Dumont. Just heard the stories. How Dumont had increased the wealth of the Travellers tenfold, by expanding their smuggling routes far down the Divide, almost onto the Great Plains. How he scalped his enemies and hung the hair from maypoles set up in the backyard of his home. How he had been given the sacred texts and talismans, was a true child of Riel.
To some men Dumont gave not only a pat on the back, but a two-armed hug. For a select few, a kiss on both cheeks, the men exchanging brief words from an old language as their lips touched the other’s skin. Dumont wore a trench coat made of caribou hide tanned to a dark brown sheen, leather britches, and knee-high moccasins. Around his waist he wore a red sash with tassels that ran down his leg, as did each man who boarded the boats with him.
On the river, the boats moved just outside the arc of light cast by the North Shore Bridge. A shadow that could have been anything, the men hunkered below the gunnels, the oars moving in unison, the strokes cutting the water clean, creating no more disturbance than a ripple sent on its way by a summer breeze.
When they reached the south shore, they pulled the boats ashore and hid them behind some sumac bushes. They were standing on a service road that went from the shoreline to an unmanned hydro switching station, but the men turned away from the service road and began walking down the shoreline. Marched up and down the rocky grade. Through pools of water. Dense stands of chokeberry bushes. Never a misstep. Never a sound.
Ninety minutes after starting down the footpath, the Travellers reached their destination. A stretch of shoreline with a small dune in front of them. Without a word being spoken, the men formed two parallel lines. An old infantry formation that assured there was always a man to take the place of a fallen comrade. When the lines were formed, Dumont walked past each man, as though doing a parade inspection. A few times he stopped and a man would hold out his hands to show him what they were holding. A glass bottle containing gasoline. A length of cut wire. Woollen socks, packed with shards of metal that were sharp enough to perforate the wool.
After the inspection was done, Dumont said, “All right, let’s go pay those bastards a visit.”
The men strode up and over the rocky dune. Ahead of them were the bright lights and carnival sounds of Belfast Street on a Friday night.
. . .
The Travellers moved down the street throwing Molotov cocktails through the plate-glass windows of stores, and in the bed of any pickup truck parked on the street. People started to run, and the Travellers gave chase, falling upon anyone who fell or made a wrong turn. Within five minutes, Belfast Street was ablaze, from the shoreline all the way to the Silver Dollar.
The nightclub went up like a tinderbox, the wooden structure engulfed in flames seconds after the first Molotov cocktail hit the exterior walls. Customers fled from the front and rear doors, but the Travellers were waiting for them. Eddie O’Malley battled three of them before he fell to the ground and then disappeared from view, at the bottom of a red-sashed scrum, fists flailing. It was wrong to call what happened that night a battle. It was too brutal. Too cruel.
When Sean Morrissey came outside the nightclub, his hands were clutchin
g a snub-nosed rifle, and he was firing rounds into the night. Peter O’Reilly followed him, also firing an automatic rifle. They fired at shadows running the other side of the flames. At any red sash. At a man in a full-length, buckskin coat, throwing back his head and laughing at them.
Ten minutes after the Travellers started their march down Belfast Street, above the gunfire and the screams, the hiss and crackle of burning wood, the explosions and the pounding of running feet, a whistle was heard. A high-pitched note that sounded five times and then faded away.
The Travellers’ retreat was as fast and soundless as their attack. Within minutes they were running down the shoreline, pushing their boats back out onto the river, hunkering low and making broad, sweeping oar strokes, as soundless as a piece of driftwood floating downstream. They took a wider arc across the river on their way home. Needing to avoid not just the lights of the North Shore Bridge this time, but also Cork’s Town as it burned through the night.
Chapter Forty-One
Grace Dumont saw the flames from the living room window. As she watched, her captor came into the living room, a cellphone pushed against his ear. He looked out the window and said, “I can see it from here. It’s just on Belfast Street.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. Nodded a few times and then said, “What if he screws it up?”
As he was listening to what the person on the other end of the phone was saying, he looked over at the girl. A strange look came to his face. Grace Dumont sat on the couch, wondering if her captor was a man who kept his promises.
“What do you want me to do if the cops come here?” he asked, then laughed at whatever the person on the phone had answered.
When he put down the phone, the girl said, “What is happening out there?”
“Your grandfather is burning down Cork’s Town.”
“Why?”
“He’s pissed that you’ve been taken, I guess.”
