No Going Back

by Sheena Kamal

  Some souls unfamiliar with the country’s colonial history wonder what is happening in their nice country.

  Aspersions are cast all around.

  All law enforcement involved are reminded of that time two bike cops in Montreal were responsible for apprehending one of the FBI’s most wanted during a routine stop. If bike cops can do it, why can’t they? There are jokes on the radio about hiring some Montreal bike cops to teach Vancouver PD a lesson.

  The weather joins forces with the criminal element against the good men and women in uniform. Also against the bad ones, because weather doesn’t discriminate. There’s snowstorm after snowstorm. Nobody in the city can get their hands on road salt. Between astronomical gas prices and this lack of ability to get out of their own driveways, Vancouverites give up and stay home.

  After the first day, Lee starts to assume Nora Watts is dead.

  Secretly, so does Brazuca.

  The stolen pickup truck is discovered parked on the side of an abandoned logging road in Abbotsford. The truck had been doused with gasoline and lit on fire, so all the police found was a burned-out shell of a vehicle. And human remains that have yet to be identified.

  When he’s released from the hospital, Brazuca sits in his apartment, by his telescope, and puts his face in his hands. He hasn’t been taking his antibiotics, so his ulcer has returned. With friends.

  He gets a call from IHIT, the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team. They’re investigating the pickup truck death.

  Brazuca is asked to come in to go over the Nora story yet again. He does, with the same level of detail that he’d given to Lee and Strauss at the hospital.

  “You’re telling me,” says Detective Hiroshi Ito, “that a man who worked private security for a VIP developed some kind of grudge against a local woman, the passenger in your vehicle at the time it was struck, and that he had put a hit on this woman. He used a biker gang to kidnap her.”

  Ito is famous in police circles for his quiet manner, which is at odds with the steroid-filled life he’d lived as a youth. Though he was born in Vancouver, he had a few sumo wrestlers in the family tree and decided to continue the tradition by becoming a competitive body builder. The running joke was that he couldn’t handle the pressures of competition and took the easy way out by becoming a police detective.

  “Yes. I’ve already explained all this to Vancouver PD. The man you’re looking for also has connections with organized crime in China through the family he used to work for, or maybe he’d had them before—I don’t know. I personally think he’s using his organized crime links to evade the authorities. He did that once before.”

  One moment he feels light-headed. The next he feels weighted down.

  It goes on like this for several minutes as he tells Ito how Dao had disappeared after Bonnie was found, the time she’d been kidnapped. “He has a network in place here. It might be a loose network, but the ties are strong for him to have accomplished what he has. Maybe they owe him favors; maybe he’s paying them.”

  “That’s a hell of a lot of speculation. I find this hard to believe.” Ito isn’t as incredulous as he sounds. He’s clearly been following all the salacious details of the case.

  “Let me give you some examples. Two decades ago an alleged triad boss from Macau set up his family in Vancouver and funneled assets into the country. A rival gang put out a contract on his head to the tune of one million dollars, to be executed in Vancouver. About two years before that, Jimmy Fang, head of Three Phoenix here in Vancouver, was involved in a street gang rivalry, money laundering, drug and arms trafficking. He jumped bail and fled the country. He’s suspected to be in hiding in Southeast Asia. A Vancouver man was recently arrested on charges of selling encrypted phones and access to an encrypted network to Mexican cartels. Vancouver has ties to organized crime circles from all over the world and it gets messy. You know that.”

  This clearly isn’t new information to Ito. He doesn’t speak for a long time, just looks at Brazuca thoughtfully until Brazuca can’t take it anymore. “Want some more examples?”

  “Yes, and when you give them, also make sure to tell me where you think they would take the woman. Nora Watts.”

  “I don’t know!” Brazuca shouts. He recoils almost immediately. The outburst came out of nowhere. Ito doesn’t look shocked, but then again, he wouldn’t. He’s used to dealing with irrational people. Brazuca can’t ever remember losing his temper quite like this before.

  With his dark eyes wiped of expression, Ito reminds him of Nora. Who used to look at him in a similar fashion. Like she could see right through him.

  To add to his troubles, just minutes after the interview, Krushnik calls to ask if there’s been any news. He can hear the dog barking in the background, so he ends the conversation as quickly as he can. The noise is like a jackhammer pounding into his head.

  Back in Detroit, Nora survived a burning warehouse. What a cruel joke if she’d been the one burned in the pickup. A cruel, cosmic joke that only happens to people like her. Who were living on borrowed time, anyway.

  She should have died a long time ago, he thinks.

  Then he wonders where that thought came from.

  56

  If she’d been wearing steel-toed boots when she kicked me, my back would have been broken and my cheekbone shattered.

  I’m in so much pain, even still, that I don’t know how much time has passed. Eventually the car stops and I’m pulled out again, this time carefully, with Nguyen holding Brazuca’s gun on me while his goon drags me from the inside of a garage into a basement.

  Nguyen follows us down.

  His man zip-ties me to a chair as Nguyen watches. From the way he’s looking at me, I get the impression he isn’t one of those sick fucks who takes pleasure in other people’s pain. He’s just okay with it as long as it serves his purposes.

  “So much trouble,” he says to me. “For just one woman.”

  “I’m going to die . . . tell me . . .”

  “Yes, you’re going to die. You fucked with the wrong person, lady. I feel sorry for you to be on Dao’s bad side.”

  “It was you,” I say. “You helped him escape. Back then. You helped him . . . now.”

  “He paid good money for it. He had a lot put away in China from some of our other businesses, and Ray Zhang left him some dough, too, but he didn’t care about that anymore. He just wanted to know where you were, what did you look like, were you happy. I told him, who cares if you were happy? Just get rid of you if you’re such a problem. And I thought when he said yes to the hit in Detroit, that was the end of it. Then you come back and he wants more eyes on you, plus on the little bitch pup of yours in Toronto.”

  “Boss,” says the goon. “What do you want me to do with this?” He holds out Brazuca’s gun.

  “Ditch it.”

  “How long we gonna keep her here?”

  “What is this, four hundred questions? Get upstairs, I’ll take care of this.” Nguyen is losing patience. He’s had a hard day lending people vast sums of money and is clearly over this conversation regarding my fate.

  The goon flinches and disappears.

  “You shot him,” Nguyen continues. “Man doesn’t forget a thing like that. You shouldn’t have done it. Plus, both the old man and the baby he was trying to save died. What a shitshow. And now look at you.”

  Sometimes when you’re beaten down, the soul accepts that death is an inevitability. I’ve felt this way once or twice in my life. Once the question of death is out of the way, the soul gets salty.

  “I should have done a better job,” I say, around the blood in my mouth. “Aimed better.”

  “Ain’t that the truth! Don’t you worry, he’ll be here soon enough. You can discuss it with him.” He turns to leave, then remembers something. “Oh, by the way, scream all you want. You’re in the basement, and this is a six-thousand-square-foot property. The houses on either side are unoccupied.”

  As soon as he gave me the square footage, I
knew our location. At his house in West Vancouver, where Krista Dennings said the neighbors hadn’t seen him in months . . . years? I can’t remember. It strikes me that no one is going to come around with an apple pie or to ask for a cup of sugar. That as soon as he leaves, I’ll be alone in the dark.

  “Wait!” I said, stalling for time.

  “What?”

  I say the first thing that comes to mind, something that has not taken as much space there as it perhaps deserved. “There was a bouncer who died a couple weeks back. Joe Nolan.”

  “Who?” Nguyen continues up the stairs, as casual as could be.

  But I’d already heard the lie.

  He knew exactly who Joe Nolan was, when I mentioned his name. Nguyen is who Vidal must have called to take care of a messy situation. He just took care of it too well, for poor Joe Nolan’s sake. I was feeling sorry for Nolan, because I was feeling equally sorry for myself. I’d been so close to going to the police and telling them everything I knew and some things I didn’t. How I wish I had.

  After Nguyen leaves, I work on trying to loosen the zip ties. Nguyen’s man comes back down with a bottle of water. He pinches my nose until I open my mouth to gasp for breath and then pours as much of it down my throat as he can.

  “Bathroom,” I sputter.

  “Piss yourself. What do we care?”

  Charming.

  He leaves after doing the bare minimum to keep me alive, switching off the lights and plunging me in darkness.

  Now I’m back to the zip ties, rubbing at them until my wrists are bloody and raw. I’m still working away at those when the door opens again and someone comes down the stairs, armed with a small but powerful flashlight. I blink as the light catches me.

  “Hello again,” says a voice I vaguely recognize but can’t quite place. “You really did a number on those wrists, didn’t you?”

  I shut my eyes tight against the glare and then slit them open again, only a sliver this time. It doesn’t help. I still can’t see a damn thing. “Who are you?”

  And the voice laughs.

  57

  Brazuca goes to a meeting for the first time in a long, long while. The scratches on his face are mostly healed, but people still flinch at his appearance and his shuttered expression. There’s a hard edge to him now that nobody likes. Tough. He doesn’t like it, either, but he’s not going to change for these losers. Sitting and listening to his fellow alcoholics repeat their sad stories and their limp motivations, he feels nothing but distaste.

  Simone slips in toward the end of the meeting. He catches her stealing glances at him throughout the meeting. With her electric blue hair and violently green nails and lipstick, she’s easy to spot. Especially when she tries to make a quick exit.

  He catches up to her in the parking lot. It’s a cold and blustery night, but even so he thought she’d be less annoyed to see him. “What?” she asks when he puts his hand on her arm.

  “Nora . . . have you heard anything?”

  “No,” she says, looking inexplicably angry.

  “If you hear from her—”

  “Nora’s gone! Okay?”

  “That seems cold.”

  “Yeah, well, fuck you very much. What do you think must have happened to her by now, Jon? She’s dead! You see that, right?”

  He does see it. But he doesn’t want to. What he wants is Nora back.

  Simone can tell, and she pities him. “Don’t you want your life back, Jon? Don’t you want to be happy? There are signs, and then there are signs. Don’t let her take any more of your life. Don’t let her jeopardize your sobriety and your mental health.”

  She spins on her sky-high platformed heel and walks away.

  There’s nothing for him to do after that but go home. He thinks about calling Bonnie, but Strauss had warned him that, due to the high-profile nature of the case, they’re not revealing details about Nora’s disappearance until they figure out whose remains were in the pickup. If she’s still alive, Nora is in the hands of the people who want her dead. There’s no use reaching out to her daughter without answers.

  There must have been a call placed from Ito to Lee after Brazuca left his IHIT interview because Lee stops by with some Korean barbecue on his way home from work. Ito worked homicides for IHIT, and Lee worked homicides for the city of Vancouver. Maybe they’re friends, Brazuca thinks, but he doesn’t care enough to ask. Lee eats most of the barbecue while filling Brazuca in on the developments of the case. There aren’t any, so Lee just talks at him while throwing him perceptive looks over his food.

  The way Lee eats everything in sight without question reminds him of Nora. Though she regularly forgot mealtime unless you reminded her, she had a big appetite for a woman her size and always ate everything on her plate. As though she knew something no one else did about a famine just around the corner. He thinks of her body, the surprising wiry strength of her. With a jolt he realizes that, again, he’s just put her in the past, though she hasn’t been found yet.

  Lee thwacks him on the shoulder before leaving, a semblance of a manly embrace that he should return but doesn’t.

  “I’ll keep you up to date, but you know you can call me anytime, bro,” Lee says. Then he zips his coat, which he hadn’t bothered to remove, and is out the door before Brazuca can respond.

  Suddenly he’s tired of it all.

  His ulcer and its friends are twisting inside of him. They’re getting to know one another, becoming drunk off his stomach fluids and making little ulcer babies to plague his nights. He can’t take this anymore. What his life has become, he doesn’t know. He thinks of Nate Marlowe.

  Bernard Lam had given him an obscene amount of money to work on Clementine’s case, and Brazuca has some savings of his own. The only purchase he’s made since the money cleared was his beautiful telescope. He stands in the middle of his living room, guts churning, and looks at it while he comes to a decision.

  When the truck smashed into his MINI, the left side of his head took the brunt of the impact. He heard a door open and had managed to slit one eye, just in time to see Nora hauled out. He couldn’t move, could do nothing to stop it. There was a moment of perfect lucidity that rose past the roaring sound in his ears.

  For a split second, he could see clearly.

  What he saw was a face he recognized all too well. Curtis Parnell, the biker who’d been affiliated with Three Phoenix. When Brazuca was investigating the supply chain for Bernard Lam, trying to find who was responsible for his mistress’s overdose death, Brazuca had made an enemy of Parnell. He shouldn’t have been surprised to see the biker there, but he was. Parnell took Nora, and now she’s gone. Dao is gone, too. He tried to save her and failed. Now he feels nothing. No outrage, no fear. Weary resignation is all that’s left of him.

  He puts his phone to charge and lies down. Waits for it to ring with news about Nora.

  It doesn’t.

  58

  Bonnie replays the Indonesia video over and over. She has seen it a hundred times. Her father, Everett, walked into her bedroom at the cabin once, when it was playing. He was angry at her for watching something so violent, but she didn’t have the heart to tell him it was the guy from the time she’d been kidnapped.

  The video becomes an obsession. Dao looked different from how she remembered him. Thinner. Even more frightening.

  She’s so scared. But it’s not like she can go back to Toronto, where someone tried to grab her off the street. She focuses as much as she can on schoolwork. The private school she’s enrolled in is based on modules and not on classroom attendance, so at least she’s not falling behind. But it’s still hard to concentrate and she keeps waking up in the night. Even though the burns on her wrists were mild and have disappeared, she still feels them stinging.

  It snows every day. With its snow-capped mountains and never-ending forests, it’s the most beautiful place she’s ever been—and she grew up in Vancouver.

  Lynn also works from the cabin. Every day they go to Whistler
Village for lunch. Everett and Adele are on a work trip, but they promise to visit this coming weekend.

  “I haven’t heard you talk about your friend Alix in a while,” says Lynn. “What’s she up to?”

  “We got into a fight,” Bonnie says, picking at her salad.

  “Why? What happened?”

  “She posted a photo of me on social. My account is set to private, but hers isn’t.” She catches Lynn’s worried look. “I told her to take it down as soon as I saw it. But she knows how I feel about posting stuff.”

  “What was the photo of?”

  “Me in front of the ski lift in Whistler Village. We were messaging the other day while I was waiting for you outside and she asked for a pic.”

  “You mean right here?” Lynn asks, gesturing out the window. “Did she tag your location?”

  “Yeah. But the photo was only up for a day. And I told her never to do it again.” Alix knows Bonnie’s adopted, but she doesn’t know any of the details of Bonnie’s kidnapping a couple of years ago or why she’s so secretive about her whereabouts all the time. Bonnie told her that she left Toronto to spend time with her dad in Vancouver. Alix is her first friend—well, more than a friend, really—that Bonnie has who doesn’t know anything about her crazy past.

  Lynn puts down her napkin. She looks worried. “Have you heard from Nora?”

  “No. Her phone is off. She’s not answering any of my calls.”

  Lynn pays the bill and they leave. She is still preoccupied. Still worried. They had gone through this after the kidnapping. Online safety one-OhMyGodThisIsSoBoring-one. Lynn had consulted a professional skip tracer who’d turned her skills from finding missing people to advising people how to stay hidden if they wanted.

  “Listen to this,” said the woman who’d come by the house, back when they first moved to Toronto. She was in her fifties, dressed sharply with little cat-eye glasses perched on her nose and startling blue nail polish. She had the urgency of one of those evangelical preachers you’d see sometimes on TV. “You’re on a social media platform and you tag your location. Someone can look at that location and come find you. You keep tagging your locations and they know your whereabouts, what you do at certain times of the day. They can work out your schedules, your exercise routines. They know who your close friends are because those are the people in the photos with you, who are liking and commenting on your posts. If they can’t find you, then they’ll find one of your friends and work out where you are. They can get a snapshot of your school life, your home life. Be very careful.”