Another loud rap at the door.
“Get back,” I tell him. But he doesn’t listen. Instead, he grabs a wireless keyboard and stands by the curtained window with it raised above his head. There’s no time to argue with him, a key is turning in the lock. I press myself against the wall on the other side of the door just before it flings open. When the Korean lady from motel reception walks in, she barely escapes having the brunt of Deep’s QWERTY keyboard come down on her black bobbed head.
“I bring your liquor,” she says as she steps right past us and over to the mini-bar, plunking a box on the floor. She starts restocking the shelves with little bottles to replace the ones I depleted the night before.
Deep lowers the keyboard.
“Hi, Ink,” he says.
Ink? Deep really is the Miss Congeniality of our little group. I’d crawled through the woman’s living room and we still weren’t on a first name basis.
Ink looks up from her task and beams at Deep. “Hello, Mr. Bains. How are you today?”
“Quite well,” he replies, stepping over to the spare bed to drop the keyboard there and fetch a plaid robe to cover up his lounge pants and naked chest. I still stand there in nothing but the buttoned dress shirt that barely skirts my bush. “And you?”
“I am very good.” She shuts the mini-bar and picks up the box. “Thank you very much for your help with Skype yesterday. I talk with my cousins using it. All the faces on the screen, so wonderful to see people from so far away.”
“Well, I’m glad we were able to get it sorted.”
“How did you know we needed the mini-bar restocked?” I ask, still suspicious. I’ve stepped out from behind the door.
She turns to look at me, and her smile drops into a compact frown. “You call me at 5:30 in the morning. Say you need more liquor. I tell you to wait. I am not bartender.”
I remember now, making that call. I was half-asleep, mumbling into the phone. I thought I was talking to her voice mail.
“You send the car for cleaning, Mr. Bains?” she asks, turning her attention back to Deep.
“No,” he says. “Why do you ask?”
“It’s not in the parking space I give you,” she says, pointing through the open door.
Deep rushes over to take a look.
“Bloody hell,” he says. “It’s gone.”
I stand beside him in the doorway, see the empty space where his Celica should be. I can’t remember if it was there when the cab dropped me off. I usually have a keen eye for detail. But I suppose my mind was on other things.
“Do you have your keys?” I ask Deep. Ink has joined us at the doorway now, gripping her box of booze tightly with concern.
“I think so,” Deep says, going to the closet to look through the pockets of his coat. When he doesn’t find his keys there, he looks in his pants’ pocket, and then the bedside table. Still no joy.
“Maybe I left them in Janet’s room?” he says. “We were playing Risk in there last night.”
I walk over to the adjoining door and knock. No answer. I knock again, this time harder. But there’s still no response. I yell through the door so loudly that Ink chastises me with a sharp hiss.
“Stop making noise. You will disturb my guests,” she says, dropping her booze box on the table. “I have key.” She pulls a large ring from the inside of her blue motel reception blazer and goes to unlock the door.
After she opens it, Deep and I pile through the doorway like a couple of Keystone Cops. Janet’s room is dark, and her bed hasn’t been slept in.
I check the washroom, but she’s not in it. Her big puffy parka is gone from the closet.
I turn on my bare heels to face Deep.
“Did you tell Janet the address of the doctor’s retreat?” I ask him. Ink peeks through the doorway then retreats, knowing the start of a fight when she sees one. I bet that’s why she left Korea.
Deep swallows hard before he answers.
“Yes.”
I picture my thirteen-year-old sister jacking Deep’s car in the dead of the night to go find our mother. That kid really does have a good dose of the family genes in her.
“Well, Deep,” I say, sitting down on the empty bed. “You probably shouldn’t have done that.”
CHAPTER 20
DEEP AND I WASTE PRECIOUS HOURS looking for a replacement for my Ruger. They’d emptied the skip behind the Brooklyn Street Local, which was lucky for Deep, or else I’d have made him crawl around in the stink to look for it. Cruising the usual places and neighbourhoods for illegal trade, the best I can come up with is a guy who leads me to a trunk full of Prada purses.
“I said handgun, not handbag,” I tell him. He still insists Deep and I fondle the knock-off leather before we go.
We try a legit gun store, but Deep gets turned down because he isn’t a resident of Michigan. We give up and start looking for a car to rent.
“I can’t believe you threw my fucking piece in the garbage,” I say once we’re in the warmth of the Uber.
“I can’t believe you tried to convince the bloke at the gun store that I’m Italian.”
I reach down and pull at the tan Chelsea boots Deep gave me to wear. They’re a half size too small, so I’m feeling the pinch of them. I wish Janet had inherited the family foot size along with her stubbornness and talent for theft. But when I tried to put on the polka-dot high tops she’d left behind in favour of her UGG boots, I couldn’t even get them past my fucking instep.
The Uber pulls up in front of the address that Ink gave us. A friend of hers rents cars. She said she’d call ahead, and they’d give us a good deal.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” I ask the driver.
“Dave’s Cars,” he says, pointing at the small sign hanging crooked on the side of a rusted trailer. Late-model cars are strewn across the pocked asphalt in front of it, protected by a sagging chain-link fence. It looks like a place where vehicles go to die.
Deep and I get out of the Uber, walk up to the metal door of the trailer, and knock. A woman answers, her silver-blue hair sticking up at the back of her head. She’s short and stout, like the infamous teapot.
“Are you Dave?” I ask.
She laughs, deep and throaty, then starts to cough, like she’s going to hack up a lung right there on the steps of the trailer.
“Dave was my ex,” she finally manages to say once her hacking has died down. “He took off with a bitch from the DMV years ago. But he left me this place. I figure between her and me, I got the better deal.”
“We’d like to rent a car, please,” Deep says. “Ink sent us.”
“Oh, yeah, she’s a terrific gal. Gave me some great herbal stuff for my emphysema. Although it was the herb that gave it to me, if you know what I mean.”
“Do any of these cars even run?” I ask.
She laughs again. But this time manages to keep the hack to a minimum. “Oh, they all run all right. My son comes and tunes them up once a month.”
“Would they run as far as Lake Huron?” Deep asks, looking doubtfully at a Ford F150 truck with its tailgate half falling off.
She doesn’t laugh at that. “Oh, that is a fair ways. Most of my customers are just looking to toodle around town.”
I look past the woman who is not Dave and see a clock on the wall inside the trailer. It’s already almost two in the afternoon. We’d spent way too much time looking for a gun. But I’d really wanted to get a replacement for my Ruger. I hated the idea of going up to this retreat unarmed. My dad would be ashamed. He’d taught me how to stop a man’s heart with just my hands and my wits. Reliance on a gun was just plain laziness in his opinion.
“C’mon, Deep,” I say. “We’ll just have to try somewhere else.”
The car lady sees a potential customer falling through her arthritic hands and steps out of the doorway. “I could let you have the loan of my car,” she says. “Seeing as you’re a friend of Ink’s and all. Cost a little bit more than my usual rate, though.” I look at the
cars on the lot, one of them has no roof, and it’s not a convertible. I can’t believe she has the balls to charge anyone for the use of these wrecks.
“We’d be very interested,” Deep says, sensing the ticking clock as much as me.
“It’s out the back.” She locks the door of the trailer behind her. “Come with me.”
The car behind the trailer is newer than the jalopies in the front yard, but so small you could park it in a bike rack. It makes Charlotte’s hatchback look like an SUV.
“A Smart car,” Deep says. But I don’t see what’s so smart about a car that only seems to consist of a front end.
“She can only go so fast on the interstate, but she’ll get you where you want to go. Fifty bucks plus mileage if you return it by tomorrow. I’ll take one of the rentals home tonight. What do you say?”
“We’ll take it,” Deep says. He gets out his wallet and hands her his credit card.
“That’s the spirit, young man.”
The car lady waddles away to run the card.
Deep walks up over to our new ride and kicks the tires, pronounces them safe. I feel the gap in the front of my jeans where the Ruger should be. This car might get us where we want to go, but I’m still worried about what we’re going to find when we get there.
“You know, it might turn out just fine, Candace. Your mother could have been at the retreat all along just like Alex Scarpello said. We might get there and find both her and Janet with everything sorted.” We’ve been driving for close to two hours. The fucking Smart car starts to whir like an overtaxed vacuum if we go over sixty.
“You think a guy who tags women like animals isn’t above lying, Deep?”
“Yeah, but why would he lie?”
“Why does anyone lie?” But I try to hold out some hope for what Deep is saying. It would be a nice ending to the story. But most of the stories I’ve lived to tell don’t end that well.
“It’s more likely that Scarpello’s been holding Angela there until he figures out what to do with her.”
“You still reckon she was trying to blackmail him because he’s her son?”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t know, Candace. We found a Russian birth certificate for him. And so far, my contact in Pavlovsk hasn’t found anything else to contradict that.”
“We know Angela was making trouble for Alex, and that it had something to do with her son, Deep. There has to be some reason why that nurse who delivered my twin and me had to push up daisies in the deep freeze because of it.”
He doesn’t have an answer for that one. We drive silently for a while.
“Are you nervous?” he asks. “About seeing your mother again?”
“I’m nervous about a lot of things, Deep, but that’s not one of them.” I turn up the radio, the heavy bass starts the windows humming. Despite its economy size, the Smart car’s sound system is epic. Top of the line Bose speakers fill up the space where a back seat should be.
The truth is, I’m not looking forward to the prospect of seeing my mother. What do you say to a woman who left you in the care of a contract killer when you were still sleeping with a night light? Although my dad did a bang-up job as far as I’m concerned. Even if the night light was a flashing red cherry he stole off the top of a cop car after too many beers.
Down a dirt road, hidden in the trees, we find the address of the retreat. There’s no official sign, just one of those decorative flags with burnt-orange-and-yellow flowers hanging limp on a pole attached to the rural mailbox. I think it says Welcome, but you can only make out the come part without a breeze. A freshly painted white clapboard farmhouse sits at the end of the long driveway, with multiple peaked roofs and the trim they call gingerbread, after the story with the cannibal witch. Deep’s Celica is parked next to a red barn with a rooster weathervane, also straight off of the fairy tale page.
“We better park on the road,” I tell Deep.
He pulls the Smart car behind a cluster of sugar maples. There are buckets fastened to the trunks even though the sap has to be frozen. Probably a ploy to make it look more like a working farm, rather than a hideout for women whose hormones have run amok.
Deep and I find a path through the woods banking the house on one side. It’s only 4:30 in the afternoon, but the sun’s already beginning to set. December is a shitty month for light. But in this case, it’s to our benefit. I don’t want anyone knowing we’re here until I’m ready. Deep carries a flashlight he found in the glove compartment of the Smart car. But I won’t let him turn it on.
“What do we do now?” he asks as we crouch down at the edge of the tree line.
“We watch,” I tell him, rubbing my hands together in the cold. Deep had offered me his gloves as well as his Canada Goose jacket, but I refused both. I’m still mad at him about the gun.
Half an hour passes, but there’s no movement inside the farmhouse. No lights come on, even as the sun disappears behind the red barn.
“I’m going around the back,” I say.
“Right. I’ll come with you.”
“No fucking way,” I tell him.
“I’m not going to sit idly by while you storm the place, Candace. I’m not completely useless, you know.”
He isn’t, I realize. But his most useful asset is his non-threatening nature. It’s a good yin to my yang.
“Okay, give me a minute, and then go knock on the front door. Pretend you’re lost or something, or your car broke down and you need a phone. It’ll distract them while I try to find a way in from the back.”
“Nobody does that sort of thing since the advent of mobiles, Candace.”
“Then tell them you want to buy some fucking maple syrup, I don’t care. You got to improvise in these sorts of situations, Deep.”
“Okay, but I still think we should be ringing the police.”
“Janet will end up in Social Services for sure if you do that. She stole your car, remember, drove without a licence. Plus, we’re here now, and I don’t want to waste any more time. We’ll just get her and get out.
“And if your mother is in there, as well?”
I look over at the dark farmhouse, wonder if the mother I haven’t seen in thirty years is behind one of those silent, white-framed windows.
“I don’t know, Deep. Like I said, you gotta improvise.”
The rear portion of the property slopes down into a ravine; flagstones mark trails through it, and there are handmade signposts I can’t read in the failing light. They’ve built a modern, three-tiered, wood-plank deck off the back of the house. Stairs attached to it lead up to sliding doors. I keep down low as I make my way up them, then huddle behind some modular patio furniture, covered up for the winter. I grab a steel-wired brush from the gas barbecue pushed up against the railing. It’s not a gun, but it’d rip the face off of a person if you got yourself close enough.
Soon I hear Deep’s knock on the front door. It’s met with silence. I peer around the stacked patio furniture to look through the sliding doors, make out the shadowy outlines of a country kitchen. No movement. Deep knocks again, more loudly this time. I’m starting to worry about putting him on the front line like this. Anything could happen. He’s just a civilian. I’m about to come out of my hiding place when a light comes on inside. Flattened against a wicker settee, I hear the sliding doors move along the track. Deep comes out on the deck and shines his flashlight on me as I brandish the wire brush.
“The door was open,” he says.
“Jesus, Deep.” He removes the beam from my face and points it through the sliding doors.
It looks like nobody’s home.
I find a filleting knife in a block on the kitchen counter. Long and slim with a deadly point, it’s just as good for gutting people as fish. Deep takes up the barbecue brush, and we clear the main floor room by room but find no one, only low-slung couches and bay windows lined with embroidered cushions. I check out a curled-up schedule of daily activities tacked to a bulletin board on the wall. So
ul Collage. Yoga. Vision Boarding with Sue! I wouldn’t last a day in this place without stabbing someone in the sharing circle with a talking stick.
I make Deep walk single-file behind me as we mount the stairs to the second floor. The upstairs hallway runs the length of the house. We pass empty bedrooms on each side, the doors open, the beds made up with floral comforters and pastel afghans. All the heavy curtains have been pulled closed. Dust swirls in Deep’s flashlight beam. It doesn’t look like anyone’s been staying in these rooms for a while.
The last bedroom at the end of the hallway is the only one with the door closed. I put my ear up flat to the door. I can’t detect any sounds from within, just the usual creaks and settles of an old country place. Counting silently down from three with my fingers for Deep’s benefit, I boot the door in with a basic stomp kick. I didn’t have to do that, given the door was unlocked, but it provides an overall startle to an entrance that catches people off their guard. When Deep shines his flashlight on the two unmoving lumps in the canopy bed, it is apparent that they are well past being startled. They are also well past their best-before date. Deep pulls his plaid scarf up over his nose, but I’m used to the stench of death. I turn on the light switch and find the good doctor, not looking unlike his online picture, despite his face being contorted into a rigor mortis mask. The woman beside him doesn’t have the luxury of a face. It’s been blown off, leaving only hanks of bleached blonde hair sprouting around a bloody void. She lies naked on top of the covers, a victim of being in the wrong bed at a lethally wrong time. There’s a jagged chunk of flesh missing from her hip.
All of this is disturbing, to say the least, but not as disturbing as the shattered pair of owl glasses that Deep picks up from the carpet in front of the bed. I guess my sister doesn’t like to wear her contacts when she drives.
“Now, can we ring the police?” he asks, still holding the scarf up to his nose.
“Yeah,” I admit. “Now might be a good time for that.”
In the kitchen, I phone Malone, still holding the knife.
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