by Sheena Kamal
“You got a point?” asks the man.
“Oh yeah. Sorry, I forgot. I’m getting to it, though.”
“Well, hurry up,” says the woman.
“There are lots of ways a man—or woman, but let’s just say it’s a man—can get into the country if he’s tapped into one of these human smuggling networks. My point is, since you asked, when he gets to town, let him know I’m waiting for him, won’t you?”
“Are you done now?” asks the woman.
“I think so, yeah.”
“Good. I’ve got a point, too, hon.”
“I’m all ears,” I say, knowing full well that when another woman calls you hon, she wants to rip your throat out.
“My point is that I would like you to get up and walk toward the ladies’ room nice and easy, where we can finish this chat privately.”
“No thanks, sweetie pie, my business isn’t with you. It’s with Dao.”
The name doesn’t register with her, but the man recognizes it. I file that away for later. “I like your jacket,” I say to the man. “It’s a nice color. What would you say it is?”
“Green.”
“Wow. You’ve really got a knack for description. I think I’ve seen this jacket before, at a Water Is Life march a little while ago. Then again, maybe I’m wrong.”
But I’m not. This is the man from the protest, the green jacket I’d been following right before someone tried to grab me.
I slide off the stool. “I just have this feeling—I don’t even know where it came from. But it’s this powerful instinct that if anything happened to me—if, say, I get hurt in the time it takes me to get from here to my car—you’ll have someone a lot more dangerous than me to answer to. That dangerous someone may want the pleasure of chatting with me himself.”
While they’re still processing that, I leave. They’ll figure out soon enough that Dao doesn’t care how hurt I am when he finds me, as long as he’s the one who gets to do all the murdering.
But I’m not taking any chances, either. I get out of there as quickly as I can and keep an eye on the rearview mirror as I make my way back to the city.
It’s late by the time I return to Leo’s apartment. He’s sleeping elsewhere with Whisper for the time being, so I’m alone. I barely have time to remove my shoes and turn up the thermostat, when there’s a knock on the door. It’s only been five minutes since I walked through it. I don’t answer it.
Lynn’s directive rings in my ears. Take care of it, she said.
I’m about to dial 9-1-1.
Then my phone rings. It’s Brazuca, calling to see why I’m not answering the door even though he has seen me enter the building.
I let him inside.
“Where’ve you been?” he asks.
“Where have you been?”
He hesitates, wondering if this is a loaded question, which, of course, it is. But before he can speak, I tell him about the video and the apartment being watched by the man and woman I’d followed back to a biker bar.
He looks away. His face is bathed in the neon pink light from the Szechuan place. “So we’re just going to sit and wait for Dao to show up?”
“He knows we’re here. Well, that I am, anyway.”
“Fuck. Why go to that bar and bait him?”
“It’s time to finish this.”
“I gather Simone is helping to spread this snuff video?” Brazuca asks.
“Like the helpful global citizen she is. She tells me she’s even moved to let the Canadian authorities know that this fugitive might be in Vancouver. Out of the goodness of her heart.”
He smiles, and the meanness goes out of me.
For a while, we talk about other things. He tells me about his telescope and gets lost in various constellations. I hear how his mother had taken him once to the Canary Islands and he’d seen the night sky in a way he’d never seen it before. He wants to go to Alberta and see a new purple-colored ribbon of light in the aurora borealis that scientists are calling Steve. Even though it’s now known that Steve is actually a twenty-five-kilometer-wide concentration of hot gasses, he still thinks it’s worth a trip to Alberta, which is insanity. Nothing is worth going to Alberta.
Contemplating all this helps to pass the time. We’re getting to the end of all this talking about every topic except for the thing that’s on both our minds.
Brazuca yawns.
He should be tired. It must take a lot of energy to be that deceitful. There’s a moment when I have the courage to ask what he said to Bernard Lam’s father in that car. But I don’t have the courage to hear the answer. I don’t think he would sell me out to use as bait the way that Bernard Lam did. I can’t bring myself to believe him capable of it, though it has become clear to me that just about anyone is capable of anything.
The moment passes, and we settle in for the night.
Somewhere out there Steve is flashing purple and creating awe in the universe. We’re bathing in some pink light of our own, until there’s a flicker, the Szechuan place across the road goes dark, and we are alone in the way I’ve come to associate with him. Ever since he was my sponsor and we’d sit beside each other in the cold of the night and retreat inside ourselves. Alone but together.
I still don’t know what to call the sex, but it’s good in the way it can be when someone is familiar with your body. I haven’t learned someone like this in far too long. Better this than talking. The inch of skin at his shoulder is still my favorite place to visit and stay awhile.
Brazuca doesn’t seem to mind.
I’m not sure his lies matter to me right now.
52
The next morning I find Brazuca sitting at the kitchen table. Abandoned to the side are two breakfast sandwiches from the shop around the corner. His full attention is reserved for the object on the table in front of him: a pistol in a sleek pancake holster meant to sit on the hip.
“Is that licensed?” I ask. “Did you have it with you last night?”
“Yes and yes. Here.” He offers it to me in the holster, but I shake my head.
I know how to fire a gun. Have more than a passing familiarity with them. But I don’t have to feel it up, the way some gun nuts do. I have no desire to romanticize it, to take it apart and put it back together. To wax poetic, call it Baby, and go out with it to destroy some innocent beer cans. I never forget that Baby killed my father and is responsible for what happened to Nate Marlowe in Detroit.
“Why did you bring it?”
“Thought it would be useful to have it if you’re going to be staying here.” Brazuca isn’t offended that I won’t touch his gun, but he’s got something on his mind.
“But.”
“But I think it’s time we try something different. Your idea of a trap is a good one, but I gotta say there’s a better way to do this. I spoke with Detective Christopher Lee, my ex-partner at VPD, while you were sleeping.”
“You told a cop about me.”
“Not everything, but some. I had to,” he adds, somewhat apologetic. “Did you see this?”
He pulls up the video Cristina Guerrero took in Indonesia and pauses it at the moment Dao jumps the wall. His shirt snags as he lifts himself over and his torso is briefly revealed. There’s a scar running down his abdomen, but his lower belly is oddly distended.
Brazuca zooms in and indicates toward Dao’s bloated stomach, an anomaly on his lean, muscular body. “Experts have pored over this video, and I even asked an ER doctor friend of mine to take a look. Judging from the scarring and the condition of his lower belly, he was in serious pain. She thinks he had a bowel obstruction from a previous gunshot wound to the abdomen. Something about adhesions and scar tissue . . . apparently it can recur with those types of injuries and it’s very painful.”
“And I shot him. I caused it.”
“Yeah, you did.” He hesitates. “Look, Nora. It didn’t seem like it at the time, but our play on Lombok worked. There’s a video of him committing murder, and he’s linked to the mines
and Acosta through the protester he attacked. That’s what gets him arrested and out of your life. Edison Lam will make sure he pays for Bernard’s death. You have nothing to lose by getting the authorities involved. Nothing.”
My memory backlog of cops being shitty to me, not believing me, not helping when I needed it, looking at me as though I don’t belong on this land, comes back. After discovering Brazuca was talking to Lam and being ordered to end this by Lynn, I must have gotten reckless. But Brazuca is right. It’s time. “Okay.”
He looks relieved. “Okay. My old partner is willing to talk to us. It’ll extrapolate from there and more agencies will get involved, but I thought he’d be a good person to start with.”
“Alright, let’s go.”
He pushes a breakfast sandwich toward me but makes no move to unwrap his. “Eat something first.”
I shake my head. Suddenly I can’t wait to talk to the cops, for the first time in my life. To tell them everything, talk about the video, let them do the work for a change.
I grab my jacket and toss Brazuca his own. “We can eat on the way.”
That’s why my stomach is empty when the truck comes speeding into us in the alley behind the building, a huge souped-up pickup ramming into the rear end of Brazuca’s MINI.
Brazuca was just in the middle of putting on his seat belt, but it wasn’t fastened. His head goes slamming into the wheel.
I get whiplash, but I’m belted in so there’s nowhere to go. I’m still stunned by the suddenness of it. My door is yanked open, and a man I vaguely recognize reaches over, unbuckles my seat belt, and hauls me out. He shoves me into the bed of the truck.
Brazuca is left behind, bleeding from the head.
Part 5
53
When Brazuca wakes, he’s in the hospital but he can’t open his eyes. His lids have anchors on them. “Nora,” he rasps.
“Easy there, bud,” says a familiar voice. “Let me tell the doc you’re awake.”
Brazuca hears footsteps, and then Lee, his old partner from Homicide, returns with a doctor. By this time, he can just manage to open his eyes to slits. It’s too sudden, the room too bright. He blinks, and when he tries again, his vision clears a little.
“Where’s Nora?” he asks the both of them, his voice sounding as though it belongs to someone else, someone who slurs. For a terrifying moment he’s transported back to his days as an alcoholic, to the few times he got blackout drunk and couldn’t say a clear word when he woke up. But then he thinks of the crash and remembers why he’s been asking for Nora in the first place.
“You’ve got a concussion,” says the doctor. “And fractures to your skull. You’re pretty banged up, Mr. Brazuca, but you’ll live.”
“Nora Watts.”
The doctor whispers something to a nurse, and they both leave. Lee remains standing.
“Tell me,” says Brazuca.
“Your tiny little goddamn car I’ve told you to upgrade a million times was rear-ended this morning by a stolen pickup truck. We caught the plates on a red-light camera. The pickup was driven by a woman. According to a witness, upon striking your vehicle, a man exited the passenger side of the vehicle, approached the passenger side of your vehicle, and pulled a woman out of your car. The woman was put in the bed of the pickup, which was then locked. The truck took off. It was heading for the highway. Then we lost it.”
“How long?”
Lee hesitates.
“How long have I been out, Chris?”
“Four hours.”
“Shit.”
“It’s a stolen vehicle, and we put out an alert for the car as well as Nora. Do you have any idea where they would have taken her?”
Brazuca tells them about the bar she’d just gone strolling into.
“A biker clubhouse? You sure that chick messed with a biker gang?”
Brazuca nods wearily. That’s Nora alright.
Lee comes back an hour later. Nora wasn’t at the clubhouse. Neither were the man and woman who’d taken her. “We’re looking for her,” Lee says. “But what’s this got to do with this fugitive?”
“Everything,” Brazuca says. “We find him, we’ll find her, too.”
“I think you need to do a better job of explaining what’s going on.”
“It’s going to take a while.” He tells Lee this not as a deterrent but more as a general warning.
“You’re lucky, bro. I’ve got all the time in the world. But hang on, let me get someone in here.” He goes to the door and brings in a woman.
Everything about her is shiny. Her blond hair, her lipstick. The silver pen she takes out to jot notes. The sheer brightness of her hurts his eyes.
“Detective Ellie Strauss, from the Fugitive Task Force,” she says. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Brazuca.”
Brazuca ignores the attempt at making nice, which is more in her tone than in her statement. He gets right down to it, this mess he’s found himself in with Nora. It does take a bloody long time to get through it all. As the minutes tick by, he can think of nothing but Nora’s life seeping away as Dao draws closer. He doesn’t even think of himself. Maybe that’s what a concussion does to you.
After they leave, he remembers when he was in Detroit, searching for Nora.
He’s under observation because of the head injury, the doctor had said. He’s doing some observing himself, which has turned from concern for Nora to the mess he’s created for himself by his inability to stay out of her life.
Sleep is elusive tonight, so he mostly stays up. Waiting. Thinking. He so badly wants Nora to be okay.
54
It’s just me and Baby in the bed of the pickup.
Baby and I?
A woman with dark red hair comes to mind. She’s someone’s mother, but not mine. She would know if it’s me or I. Whose mother is she? There’s something important I’m trying to grasp about mothers and their children. But I can’t figure it out.
It could be that I was left in the trunk of a pickup truck for far too many hours. By the growl in my stomach it could be a day. By my thirst, it feels a decade longer.
I think phones are the instrument of the devil, but I would have sold my firstborn child for one as it grows colder.
Then I remember that my firstborn child is what this is all about anyway, and I can’t sell what’s not mine. But I can still find a way to protect her.
The man waiting for me is prepared for a fight, but he isn’t expecting Baby.
I’m ready when he opens the trunk. I hear a sound like a garage door lifting. The first three shots go wild, but they shock the hell out of him. I fall out of the truck. Try to stand. Fall again. Fire another shot wildly. There’s a shout and a cry of pain.
The garage door is still open, so I run. Trip on an old tire on the ground, get back up, and run some more. There’s shouting behind me, but I’m free, goddamn it. I make it out onto a road dotted with potholes.
I’m somewhere rural, which is terrifying. If you’ve ever heard the name Robert Pickton, a serial killer who preyed on women in British Columbia for years, you’d understand. He lived on a farm in rural BC. These isolated stretches are no good for women, no good at all. Bad memories come slashing out at me in the dark. I’m weak from hunger and thirst. I drop the gun twice but have the good sense to put the safety back on after the first time. Time moves slowly. The memories won’t be pushed aside.
There’s a car idling on the road ahead. Turning to look behind me, I see someone dart out of the shadows, but I can’t find anything to aim at. My vision blurs.
The car door opens. Van Nguyen and his friend emerge. They recognize me immediately.
“Hey, it’s the neighborhood watch!” says Nguyen. He grins at someone behind me.
I turn, raise the gun. It slips from my hand, and as I bend to pick it up, someone kicks me in the back. A spear of pain ices up my spine. When I can open my eyes again, to see past the pain, there’s the woman from the bar. She kicks me again, this time in the face.
“You’re early,” the woman says to Nguyen.
“Be glad I was. I heard a gunshot,” he responds.
“This bitch had a gun on her when we picked her up. She came out of the truck shooting.”
Nguyen tsks. “Sloppy. Shoulda checked.”
“Curt’s been slipping recently,” says the woman. “But he didn’t deserve that. Let me kill this bitch.”
“No. She’s the package. You know that.”
“She has to pay for Curt.”
“Is he dead?”
“No, but she shot him! I called a doc we’ve got. Should be here soon. Let me have her.”
“You don’t demand from us. We get you your stuff.”
“Yeah, well, we bring it in from the ports! This is bullshit, and you know it. She has to pay.”
“You were asked to deliver a package and you did. You have our thanks.”
Hands lift me, and I am put into another vehicle. This time the trunk. Before it closes on me, I hear Nguyen say: “Don’t worry. She’s as good as dead.”
But good as isn’t the same as dead. Cold comfort, but it’s all I have.
55
The manhunt is a joint affair. Because of the video showing Bernard Lam’s execution, authorities in Indonesia request assistance through Interpol, which means the Department of Justice becomes involved. Local police work with the elite Fugitive Task Force out of Toronto.
Conservative American pundits howl for Canada to do a better job at policing their borders. Liberal Canadians gently remind everyone that America is not a model they want to emulate. Conservative Canadians shout that maybe they do.
Because tensions are high, nobody in the country is apologizing.
