by Ron Corbett
“But he doesn’t even know me. Why would he do that?”
“You’re family. That matters a lot to the Travellers.”
“To who?”
“The North Shore Travellers. Do you not know any of this?”
“No. Should I?”
“Fuck, your granddad is Gabriel Dumont.”
“I don’t know his name. My mother never told me.”
Later that night, visitors came to the apartment. They stayed in the kitchen and the girl never saw them. Two men who did not stay long, who argued with her captor, one man yelling near the end of their visit: “She should have been dead yesterday. What the fuck are we doing Bobby?”
When they left, the man with the tattoos came back to the living room and said, “Use the bathroom if you need to. We’re out of here in two minutes.”
She went to the bathroom. Ran the faucet and looked in the medicine cabinet, in the cupboard below the sink, searching for something she could bring, something that might help her. Outside the bathroom door, she heard her captor talking again on the phone.
“We shouldn’t be that surprised,” she heard him say. “They don’t know what the fuck is going on. If you don’t know, it makes sense, what they’re saying.”
There was a knock on the front door. “Wait a minute,” her captor said and then she heard his footsteps going down the hallway. The girl found herself wishing again that there were two entrances to this apartment. How easy an escape would have been.
Then she heard a gunshot. Grace Dumont jumped away from the medicine cabinet and put her hands over her mouth. She heard more gunshots. And screams. And large objects falling to the floor. The noise lasted only a few seconds and then the apartment was quiet. She heard footsteps coming back down the hallway. She looked around for something to grab, something she could use as a club when the door opened.
When it did, the man with the tattoos and the long blond hair looked no different than he had when she went into the bathroom. He was not bleeding. Not sweating. If anything, he seemed happier.
“Forget what I said, we’re staying here,” he told her. Before walking away he added, “You should probably stay out of the kitchen.”
. . .
When Yakabuski arrived in Cork’s Town, the Silver Dollar was in full blaze. An aerial firetruck had its arm extended, and two firemen were in the bucket, directing a torrent of water down upon the club. There were red and blue flashing lights up and down Belfast Street, and paramedics were treating people lying on the pavement, white gurneys and ambulances scattered everywhere.
The roads into Cork’s Town had been sealed, and there were reporters and television vans being kept on the other side of the blockade. The photographers weren’t arguing with the cops who were keeping them away. A photo taken a mile away would have been the most dramatic photo many of them had ever taken. Flames reaching toward a darkened sky, the spires of St. Bridget’s in the background, blue and red spinning lights anywhere there wasn’t fire.
Yakabuski had been in Southern Afghanistan the night an American B-52 bomber accidently dropped a guided missile on a Canadian infantry company doing a night training exercise. Belfast Street seemed no different than that training range. Same shouts of terror and confusion, same blood stains, same paramedics hunched over men ripped apart the way God never intended a man to be ripped apart. In Afghanistan, to show the aftermath of the attack, to help the forensic team collect all the body parts, glow sticks had been used. So many glow sticks it looked like candles burning in a cathedral when Yakabuski arrived. He looked around Belfast Street looking for signs of this being different, but he didn’t see them right away.
He found Sean Morrissey sitting on a curb outside the Silver Dollar. His rifle had been confiscated by a detective who told Yakabuski none of the paramedics had treated a gunshot wound. Unless someone turned up with a bullet, Morrissey wasn’t going to be arrested. Same for Peter O’Reilly, who had been found firing his Uzi at shadows on the river.
“Even if we could arrest him,” said the detective, “I don’t think the charges would stick. If this isn’t protecting your property, I don’t know what is. It looks like a fuckin’ bomb hit this place, Yak.”
Morrissey stood up when Yakabuski approached him. His white shirt was soot-stained and torn, his hair singed, and there was blood on his cheeks. He stood with his arms by his side, his hands balled into fists, and when Yakabuski was five feet away he shouted: “Have you caught any of the cocksuckers who did this?”
“We’re searching for them right now, Sean.”
“Searching? Like you’ve been searching for my dad’s killer? Dumont was here tonight, wasn’t he?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Well I do. I saw the bastard with my own eyes. It’s the North Shore Travellers who did this. The same bastards who killed my father.”
“The death of your father is an ongoing investigation. Gabriel Dumont is a person of interest. If you had been more forthcoming with us, perhaps we could have made an arrest by now.”
“You’re saying this is my fault?”
“I’m saying you are keeping secrets, Sean. And that you probably know more about what has been happening in Springfield this week than any other person standing on this street.”
“Fuckin’ priceless. I can’t believe you’re the motherfucker who took out Tommy. How did you get so lucky?”
“I don’t think luck has much to do with anything right now. What do you think?”
“I think this ends today. That’s what I think.” Morrissey spat on the ground, inches from Yakabuski’s feet, before turning and walking away.
Chapter Forty-Two
When he reached Detroit, Cambino caught a Greyhound bus to Petoskey, on the Upper Michigan Peninsula. It was early evening when the bus arrived, and he started walking right away. He avoided all highways and roads, kept to fields and forest, did not use so much as a footpath or hydro-line to guide him.
He had no bread left and so he ate berries and mushrooms he found in the forest, drank cool water from a spring that burbled in the darkness and that he found by following the sound. Whenever he heard a distant car, or any sort of mechanical sound, he stopped walking and waited for the sound to pass. Around midnight he came to a great river and swam its breadth, followed the shoreline on the other side until he could follow it no more, seeing smoke from a village that must have been around the next bend, and so he was forced inland.
For a while he followed the scat of a large cat, hoping to see the animal, but then he lost the trail and knew the cat had spotted him. Cambino sat on his haunches and did not move until he figured out how. Then he got up and continued walking. The forest he walked through was maple and oak, poplar and pine, the hardwood trees still holding most of their leaves, and so he moved in shadows and pools of darkness, the pine needles beneath his feet making a dry, rustling sound as he passed. The moon was high in the sky and offered little light. There were few stars.
He never heard a siren that night, never the bark of a dog or the sound of a human footstep. The darkness was near total and his isolation seemed complete. The world had been reduced to what he could dimly make out in front of him and whatever thoughts he carried in his head. Halfway through the night a feeling of great sadness overcame him, and Cambino knew it was because his journey was coming to an end. He had made his decision about the men from the North, which gave him a final destination, and when that happened there was always sadness. Decisions were a form of self-negation. Fences and boundaries erected around a world of possibilities, no more distant horizons, no more flights of imagination. This is what you must do. This is where you must go.
The sadness did not last long. It never did. As always, Cambino took comfort from the task he had given himself, knowing he was right in all the ways that mattered. The false man must die. Who could argue? It was a fantasy of Cambino’s to li
ve one day in a world where falseness had been cleaved away, where the physical world was nothing more than the physical world: no stories, no myths, the brutality of the wolf was merely the brutality of the wolf; the flood that killed a village was merely water searching for the sea. It was not tragedy. It was not a loving God who had fallen asleep.
He travelled through the night forest, and just as the moon was starting to slip away he crested a hill and saw the lake before him. A lake the size of an inland sea. With three shorelines he could not see and ships travelling down a distant channel, flying brightly coloured flags.
He had done well. The ferry terminal was at the bottom of the hill, not more than a mile away.
Chapter Forty-Three
The sun started to rise the next morning at 6:51 a.m., another winter sun that didn’t have the season to accompany it. Seventeen degrees Celsius when it had fully risen, with a predicted high for the day of twenty-eight. Windows in the detachment were already open, trying to catch a breeze that hadn’t been around in weeks.
Twenty-seven people were in the hospital. All from Cork’s Town. To everyone’s surprise, there had been no fatalities. Eddie O’Malley was the most badly wounded, with a broken leg, six busted ribs, and a left eye that was hanging by its optical nerve when he arrived at the Grace Hospital in the middle of the night. At 8 a.m., O’Toole phoned and asked Yakabuski to come to his office.
“The mayor is considering asking the army to come in,” he said, as soon as Yakabuski had sat down.
“Martial law?”
“State of emergency. It would work out to be the same thing.”
“Maybe that’s not a bad idea. The army was called in a couple times during the Biker Wars. It settled things down a bit.”
“How would it affect your investigation?”
“Hard to say. Wouldn’t be good news for any prosecution.”
“Martial law would be a defence lawyer’s wet dream.”
“You would have to think so.”
“That’s what I told him. He asked if we could keep the city from outright exploding, and I said we could.”
Yakabuski didn’t bother answering. The two men stared at each other.
“We’ve got to find that girl,” said O’Toole. “If we can find Grace Dumont, this situation might stop escalating.”
“What if it’s a body we find?”
“Then we’re royally fucked, aren’t we?”
O’Toole stared at Yakabuski with what looked like anger in his eyes. Then a startled expression came to his face, and he said quietly, “Listen to me. We’re talking about a little girl. I should be ashamed of myself.”
“You’re not wrong. If Grace Dumont is dead, this whole town will go up in flames. The Travellers burned down half of Cork’s Town last night just because she went missing.”
“What is happening here? What in hell is happening?” O’Toole looked at Yakabuski, but his senior detective didn’t bother answering. Because he didn’t have an answer. Didn’t feel remotely close to having an answer. And knew anything he said would be an annoying confirmation of that.
“The mayor said he would hold off making a request for military assistance until tomorrow. He wants to see what happens tonight. He also said he’d like to see an arrest — pick your case — pretty damn soon.”
“He’d like that?”
“His exact words. He’ll hold off making the request, but he would like to see an arrest.”
“Amazing.”
“Not really. Rather generous, I thought.”
O’Toole gave him a stern look. The two men had known each other for more than ten years, but right then, Yakabuski could not decide if he was serious.
The town was unravelling. You could feel it even here.
. . .
Evans came to Yakabuski’s office shortly after 9 a.m. He stood in the doorway holding a sheaf of papers and said, “The FBI has found our serial killer.”
He walked into the room and placed an 8 x 10 black-and-white photo on Yakabuski’s desk. The photo showed a middle-aged man wearing a Texas A&M baseball cap, with short hair and a moustache, dressed in a windbreaker and collared shirt. He didn’t look all that big.
“That’s him?”
“The FBI thinks so. When they knew he got away in Chicago, they started watching the border crossings. Bit of a job that one because they don’t have a fuckin’ clue what he looks like. But they made assumptions. He would need to be in good shape, probably not young, probably not old, middle-aged man travelling alone, nothing distinctive about him to attract attention, but if you looked closely you might think he can handle himself. Seem logical to you, Detective Yakabuski?”
“Seems logical to me.”
“That photo is a screen-grab from security video taken last night at the North Channel ferry terminal in Sault Ste. Marie.”
The North Channel ferry used to run between the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Sault Ste. Marie. It was busy enough at one time, with miners from Canada and the United States going back and forth to work at U.S. Steel or Stelco, both companies needing workers and no one caring much back then what country they came from. The workers went to whatever mine was busiest. Then the price of steel collapsed, terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Centre, and the daily, cross-border migration came to an end. Most of the passenger ferries on the Great Lakes were long gone, but a company out of Buffalo restarted the North Channel route last year, getting steady business from any motorist who had done the map calculations and figured out the ferry was the quickest way to get from Northern Ontario to the American Midwest.
“What makes the FBI think this is the guy?”
“Because there is no record of him being on the ferry. He didn’t get on, he didn’t get off, but there he is, on the security tape,” Evans said.
“They’ve accounted for everyone else on the ferry?”
“They have. Twenty-three passengers in sixteen vehicles. All went through customs at the Port of Algoma.”
Yakabuski picked up the photo and took a closer look. The man seemed to have a smirk on his face. Was looking directly into the camera. He must have known it was there, thought Yakabuski. But he didn’t care. As though he were disguised. Or was planning on doing that later.
“How did the FBI account for all the passengers?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You said the FBI had accounted for all the passengers and vehicles. How did they do that?”
“I just told you. Everyone that boarded the ferry went through customs on the Canadian side. No one is missing.”
“So it was a computer check, of the passports and entry documents?”
“Right.”
“He’s in one of those vehicles right now.”
Evans looked at him. The look on his face was half angry and half curious. “Impossible. All the cars were inspected when they cleared customs.”
“He would have waved someone down on the road outside the terminal. Probably spent the ferry ride picking out his target. Snuck off the boat when it docked. You need to get in touch with every motorist on that ferry. Get cellphone numbers. Start calling.”
. . .
An hour later Evans was back.
“The FBI reached fifteen drivers. No answer on the cellphone for this fellow. Harry Sloan. His customs declaration says he’s a softwood broker from Sault Ste. Marie.”
Evans put down another photo grab from the security footage. It showed a portly, middle-aged man in a thin, summer suit. No overcoat. His shoulders were hunched against the cold.
“Have they tried him at home?”
“An FBI special agent spoke to his wife. She’s trying to reach him as well. She expected him back last night. It’s a forty-five-minute drive from the terminal to their home.”
“What sort of car was he driving?”
Evans looked at him and bit his lower lip. Didn’t answer right away.
“A campervan,” he said eventually.
Chapter Forty-Four
Harry Sloan stared straight ahead into the darkness. Too scared to turn his head. Not wanting the see the man who had kidnapped him. The man who held a gun pointed to his abdomen. The man who would . . . kill him?
The thought made his body tremor. His wife had warned him so many times. This isn’t the ’70s anymore, Harry. You shouldn’t be picking up hitchhikers. But the man had been standing just outside the gates of the ferry terminal. Middle-aged. Wearing only a thin windbreaker. Probably worked at the terminal and was having car trouble. He stopped. The man jumped in. Pulled a gun.
That was two hours ago. The only word the man had said so far was “drive.”
. . .
Cambino had never seen land such as this. For the first hour, it was as though they were driving through a cloud, a thick cumulus cloud that had been run to ground. Not the morning mists of Heroica. Not the fog that sometimes swirled in the harbour. A cloud that had fallen from the heavens.
The land, when it was glimpsed through this cloud, appeared to be nothing more than dark rock and distant gorges. Tall pine with needles as long and sharp as boar’s teeth. Land that seemed as unwelcoming as land could possibly be, and he wondered if the people who lived here were grateful for the thick morning mists, for keeping hidden the land they had chosen to call home.
“What do you do?” Cambino asked, not bothering to look at the driver.
“I’m a salesman for North-Central Forestry Products,” said Sloan.
“You sell trees?”
“Yes. You could say that.”
“You have a family?”
“A wife and three boys. The boys are young, and I . . .”
Sloan stopped talking. He did not want to beg right then. Maybe when he was on his knees, with a gun pushed against his head, but not now. And he suspected it would make no difference to this man anyway. He did not seem in any way panicked by what he was doing. Did not seem uncertain. Did not seem like the worries and concerns of a salesman from Sault Ste. Marie would ever be his worries and concerns.
