by Ron Corbett
“I like to travel.”
The man took another sip of Scotch. It was fine Scotch and burned his throat only a little while going down. Once there it sat in his stomach like a late-night ember, the same comfort and worth as a hearth at the end of day. After a while he asked, “Why have you come here tonight?”
“You don’t know? That surprises me.”
“We have a deal. Did he make you a better offer?”
“He offered me nothing.”
“Then why are you here?”
Cambino did not answer. The only light in the room came from a shaded lamp upon the desk, and shadows settled further into the room, curling under the furniture and hiding in the corners like animals bedding down for the night. The room was still. Neither man reached for a glass. No finger tapped. No lash moved across the iris of an eye.
“So I am betrayed.”
“I would not call it that.”
“They used to hunt us down like vermin, did you know that? As soon as we were of no use to the fur trading companies and the lumber companies, we were hunted down and executed. Burned on our timber cribs. Banished and shunned. You should consider that. If we stole every diamond, tree, and chunk of ore on the Northern Divide, we would still not have taken what is owed to us.”
“That is a nice speech, my friend. And if it were true, you might get what you wish.”
“It is the truth. How can you doubt it?”
“I have no doubts,” said Cambino. “Let me ask you a question. When you kill a false man, what do you think you have killed?”
The other man gave him a strange look and then thought about the question. In time he said, “I think you have killed a sinner before God, like any other.”
“And what about a false prophet?”
The other man felt something wet and ancient move in the bottom of his stomach. He took a long sip of his Scotch before saying, “This is about the girl, isn’t it?”
“You do not wish to answer my question?”
“I was told it was necessary. That without the kidnapping of the girl, the police would not care as much. The murders of two gangsters would not be enough to scare them. The airport would be left protected.”
“I know what you were told. The message came from me. But you are a man of free will, yes? The decision to put your family at risk, it was yours, correct?”
“You are making a mistake.”
“Never. And a false prophet is more than a sinner before God, my friend. He is a shadow of a man. He is nothing. When you kill a false man, you kill nothing.”
“I can pull a gun right now and shoot you.”
“But you won’t.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because you know the old stories. Because you knew I would come one day. And because you know it would be useless. Your throat would be slit before you had the gun out of the drawer.”
“You think so?”
“It is a certainty, my friend.”
The voice was pleasant and reassuring and the cold chill that had passed earlier through the man’s body changed suddenly to a warmth and calmness that startled him. He closed his eyes. Already in God’s sweet embrace.
Neither man spoke for a long time. Eventually, Cambino asked, “Do you have a request?”
“No.”
“Most people have a request. It makes no difference to you?”
“No. We are done here.”
Cambino gave a deferential nod and rose from his chair.
Chapter Fifty-Two
The feeling of coming to the end of a long, hard trail was so palpable when Yakabuski fell asleep that night it might as well have been a living, breathing person caressing his cheek. It was a deep sleep, but not long. By 7 a.m., he was already showered, dressed and driving back to the detachment. He was not looking forward to the day, knew that Springfield was awakening that morning not with a sense of relief at news the Shiners–Travellers war had been averted, but with a sense of disappointment, a vague feeling of emptiness that was hard to describe and that would turn to surliness by noon.
Most people who lived along the Northern Divide were familiar with tragedy and its many stages, and they had done the prep work for whatever the gangland war might bring. Had rationalized things in their mind, getting ready for the tough days ahead, and so they would feel cheated. Like doing a half-day portage, following the signs the whole way, and then ending up back at the trailhead. It pissed you off. Hard work was never considered a problem on the Divide. Death and violence weren’t even considered problems a lot of days. But being cheated and tricked — one more time — that drove people crazy.
He took a detour and drove through Cork’s Town before reaching the detachment. The neon sign for the Silver Dollar, once proudly displayed right on Belfast Street, fifty feet from the actual nightclub, was an ingot of melted chrome and busted neon. The façade of the nightclub was badly charred, though it was still standing. The maintenance shed out back did not fare as well. It had burned to tinder, and so there was a clear view that morning right down to the river. Further down the street, a gang of boys was searching through the rubble of what had once been a dollar store.
A middle-aged man in white T-shirt and factory pants was sitting in a folding chair in the rubble in front of O’Keefe’s, drinking a quart of beer and giving Yakabuski’s Jeep a nasty glare as it passed. Never seen a man drinking in the morning, asshole?
Yakabuski looked at the man in his rear-view mirror, lighting a cigarette and flashing him the finger. He didn’t seem to mind being outside. Yakabuski wondered if O’Keefe’s was actually open and serving, or if the man was just a creature of habit. Seven a.m. was O’Keefe’s normal opening time, to catch shift workers before their day started.
When he got downtown, the city had a dank, dirty feel to it. Soot particles floated in the air, a light wind just strong enough to make them spin and converge but not strong enough to blow them away. The scent in the air that morning was of wet, charred wood, a charcoal sort of scent — a fat, smudge of a scent you could not avoid. Nothing about the day was appealing. And it was going to stay that way. O’Toole had scheduled a full criminal investigations departmental meeting for 8 a.m.
. . .
In the conference room were eleven nervous people, laptops opened in front of them, because the laptops held all the intel that had been collected since Augustus Morrissey was found dead and hanging from a fence in Filion’s Field one week ago. The computers had the situation reports and wiretap transcripts; the surveillance photographs and minutes from previous meetings; the complete criminal records of at least twenty men, with corresponding mug shots and cross-referenced files of all known associates. It was meticulously categorized information. A complete compendium of the known facts and revealed secrets of the investigation into Augustus Morrissey’s murder, what law enforcement people needed to collect so they could feel good not only about their work, but also about their place and purpose in the world.
All of it useless.
Not suddenly useless, either. Not the-investigation-just-went-bust, or the-state-won’t-prosecute sort of useless.
Always useless.
It still hadn’t sunk in for everyone. Those that had figured it out shuffled their feet beneath the conference table and tried to avoid eye contact. They were embarrassed. Already wondering if this had ruined their careers. But they hadn’t been the only fools. You have to remember that. They had been up most of the night and that was what they had come to work with, what they were hoping might save them — I wasn’t the only idiot. Yesterday, they had walked with confidence. Today, they avoided eye contact and waited for others to speak.
Yakabuski sat to the right of O’Toole and Donna Griffin sat to the left of him. As a patrol officer seconded to Major Crimes for the week she didn’t need to attend the meeting, but Yakabuski thought she deser
ved to be there. She had put in the work. He didn’t want to cheat her out of the ending.
O’Toole motioned for the lights to be turned off and started the security footage tape from hangar five. It was displayed on an old-fashioned white screen set up at the front of the room, a black-and-white video with night-vision turned on, so that most of the objects appeared pallid and ghostlike. The De Kirk plane taxied into view, according to the time stamp, at 12:43 a.m. Came into the frame moving right to left, so that the cargo doors at the rear were in the middle of the frame when the plane stopped. The view could not have been better if you had blocked it out for a movie.
The cargo doors opened, and a tall, thin man dressed in a grey pilot’s uniform with piping on the legs and a crest on his shirt pocket was standing there. Next to him was a cargo container on wheels, measuring about six-feet-by-three, the sort of container you see roadies wheeling into concerts. The doors were open only a few seconds before a Ford Econoline van drove into view. No markings on the vehicle. Rear licence plate covered with some sort of cloth. The driver’s door and the passenger’s door opened at the same time and two men got out, wearing balaclavas and windbreakers over turtleneck sweaters, black jeans tucked into workboots. One man had blond hair sticking out the back of his balaclava, and it was this man that approached the plane, while the other man went to the back of the van, opened the doors, and pulled out a metal ramp.
Although it wasn’t caught on the videotape, the pilot must have done something to begin lowering the ramp of the plane. The man with blond hair waited until it was down, grabbed the cargo container and began pushing it to the back of the van. The second man took over the job and the first man ran back to the plane, then up the ramp and disappeared inside the plane with the pilot. The man in the balaclava was in the plane for fifty-five seconds before he reappeared, pushing two more of the cargo containers. The pilot was not seen again.
It took one minute and ten seconds for the two masked men to load the new containers into the back of the van, and then the Econoline made a three-point turn and drove away. Total elapsed time was two minutes and fifty-six seconds. The final shot — the De Kirk plane with its cargo doors open and no one around — stayed on the screen for almost the same length of time, as though O’Toole wanted it to sink in a little bit more. Finally, he stopped the tape and motioned for the lights to be turned back on.
“The pilot was found dead inside the plane,” said O’Toole. “He’d taken two .38-calibre slugs in the back of the head. His name was Rene Charlebois, and he lived just outside the Kesagami Reserve. He must have had something to do with the robbery because the co-pilot had been drugged. We found him sleeping on the plane. He’s one lucky guy. We have no idea who the two men in the van might be. The plane was on its way to New York City.”
“Where is Gabriel Dumont now?” asked one of the RCMP officers who had shown up earlier in the week.
“We can’t locate him.”
“And Sean Morrissey?”
“Can’t find him either.”
“So this was nothing but a hustle? The war between the Shiners and the Travellers, it was just a diversion for a jewellery heist?” said the Mountie in disbelief. “Shit, the army was almost called in. That’s a hell of a lot of work to go through just for an armed robbery.”
O’Toole looked at the RCMP officer for a long second. Then he picked up a piece of paper lying atop the file folder in front of him.
“De Kirk has sent us the bill of lading for the plane,” he said, his voice sounding as distant as some radio signal skipping over the dark side of the planet. “The insured value for those three cargo containers is one-point-two billion dollars.”
. . .
The people in the room were too tired to give it the import it deserved. Or too fearful. Each person just starting to comprehend how badly they had been played, just starting to feel the vertigo that overcomes people when they have once and for all, truly and for all time, fallen off the edge of the known world.
One-point-two billion dollars. Nobody was going to survive this.
Donna Griffin turned to Yakabuski and mouthed the words “holy fuck.”
It was the only motion in the room until Yakabuski leaned forward and said, “The guy driving the van is Sean Morrissey.”
Each person turned quickly to look at him. The first quick movements of the morning.
“The other guy,” Yakabuski continued, “if I didn’t know for a fact he was dead, I’d say it was Tommy Bangles.”
“How do you know this, Yak?” said O’Toole. “Ident has not found a single distinguishing feature on either of those two men, except for the blond hair, which they think is probably a wig. They have been going through the tape for five hours now.”
“Ident should go down to Cork’s Town and see how people walk. It’s Morrissey. I don’t know about the other guy, but he’s a Shiner. We should start checking to see just how many cousins Sean Morrissey has.”
“Does that make any sense, Yak? If the Shiners and the Travellers were in this heist together, wouldn’t the second man be a Traveller?”
“The Travellers already had someone. They had the pilot.”
Yakabuski gave them time. Looked around the table to see who would figure it out first. Was surprised to see it was Evans, nodding and muttering, “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch.”
O’Toole and Griffin seemed to get it at the same time, although it was O’Toole who spoke. “Shit, Yak, are you saying there was a back end to all this?”
“I am. It wasn’t just De Kirk that got ripped off last night.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
Evans came to see Yakabuski in his office shortly after the meeting ended. He didn’t walk in but stood in the doorway, swatting his knee with a file folder he carried in his hands.
“One-point-two billion dollars,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t fuckin’ believe it.”
“Believe it.”
“Any idea where my psycho fits into all of this?”
“The back end, I would think.”
“Yeah, you would sort of have to think that.”
He kept swatting his knee, looking down the hallway that led to Yakabuski’s office. After a while he said, “I spoke to a Mexican ranger this morning who knows the guy. Says his name is Cambino Cortez. He’s Mayan. His family runs one of the cartels in Heroica, and he’s a wealthy and powerful man, according to the ranger, but he likes to disappear from time to time. His father did the same thing. They just up and vanish. Ranger spoke about the guy like he was some sort of demon. He didn’t think he would ever be caught.”
“Sounds like that guy has got inside the ranger’s head,” said Yakabuski.
“Can you blame him? I’m beginning to wonder about the guy myself. Harry Sloan — he hasn’t said a word yet. Catatonic shock and not a scratch on him. Doctors have no idea when he might snap out of it.”
“I’ve seen Popeyes put the fear of God into people so bad, they didn’t know which side was up. Didn’t make them demons.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” said Evans, a faraway look in his eyes, and then he straightened his back and said, “Listen, I’m sorry for rattling your cage when I first got here. I didn’t know what you were dealing with.”
“No one did. That ranger, did he have a photo of Cortez?”
“What do you think?” And Evans walked away.
. . .
Yakabuski phoned Ridgewood and was told Jimmy O’Driscoll was sleeping. He was put on hold, and a woman from the accounting department came on to confirm Yakabuski’s mailing address. He phoned his sister but couldn’t get an answer. He phoned his father, who answered on the first ring.
“Thought it might be you,” he said.
“Have you heard what happened last night?”
“One-point-two billion dollars. Am I hearing that right?”
“You are. A
reporter told me an hour ago it might be the largest armed robbery in history. They’re trying to confirm it.”
“Well, that’s going to put us on the map, isn’t it? And they’re both missing — Sean Morrissey and Gabriel Dumont?”
“No sign of either one. Although one of them is probably dead. It looks like the Shiners tried to get away with all the diamonds, cut the Travellers out on the back end.”
“Can’t trust a thief. I’m surprised to hear that.”
“Where would you stash one-point-two billion dollars in stolen diamonds, Dad?”
“On that private island I just bought, the one with the good stone breakweater and the warehouse full of RPGs.”
“Think that would be enough?”
“Fuck no. You coming over tonight?”
“I’m going to try.” Yakabuski hung up the phone.
. . .
At 12:30 p.m., the day-duty sergeant from the RCMP detachment at Fort Francis phoned Yakabuski to tell him Gabriel Dumont was dead. His body had been found that morning, in the office of his home outside Cape Diamond.
“You guys have been phoning up here looking for him,” said the sergeant, explaining the reason for his call. Yakabuski asked how Dumont had died. He heard the sound of rustling paper and then the sergeant said, “He was murdered sometime last night. Serrated knife was the murder weapon, not recovered at the scene, minimum six-inch blade to have hit some of the bones that were broken. Either that or the killer struck with such force he was burying the hilt. No way of knowing because of the mess. It was a vicious killing.”
“Any suspects?”
“No one so far. Not even sure who we should interview. You knew he was a Traveller, right?”
“I did.”
“Those guys have been keeping secrets for centuries. I’ve got granite up here that would be more talkative.”
“Who found the body?”
“A girl that worked for Dumont as a housekeeper. She phoned it in a little past nine. There’s a lot of security at that house, but no cameras. Go figure.”
