Inside the cruiser, Carl Levesque is horror-stricken. He sits, watching and listening. The front window is still open a few inches from when Nolan lowered it, and he can hear the whole conversation.
“You got to Wade first,” McKelvey says. “And used your Chief’s gun.”
Nolan nods. McKelvey brings down one arm and then the other behind Nolan’s back, working slowly and methodically. He slips the cuffs on and locks them tight.
“I thought it would be hard, more than I could do,” Nolan says, and McKelvey turns him around to face him. “But everything was so easy. Wade’s eyes when he saw me. He knew. He knew what was happening. He had such clarity in that final moment. Everything was the way you imagine it to be.”
“All of these kids, Ed,” McKelvey says, and he is both angry and lost. “What about the damned kids? You ruined their lives. Scott Cooper is facing murder charges and his friend Mark Watson is dead. You were there for the memorial. You comforted his parents, for God’s sake.”
“Nobody is blameless, Charlie. The kids around here had a choice to make and they made the wrong one. I put the packs of meth in the washroom at the arcade, just where I’d caught Wade Garson putting his pot before. I left it there and I walked away. They should have reported it to me and I would have confiscated the drugs. It could have been so different for this town, for the people in this town, if the right choices had been made.”
Nolan nods toward the back seat and he says, “Carl Levesque is a predator, you said that yourself. These young girls he preys on. And he’s a cheat and a liar. He deserves what he gets.”
“Levesque will face a judge,” Madsen says, “and he’ll do serious time for forging property deeds. But that’s up to the judge, not me or you.”
Levesque is there, listening. “I’m not going back to jail,” he shouts. He grabs the door handle and yanks it hard, but the auto locks are employed and he can’t open it. He leans back like a big pendulum and throws all his weight at the door. He does this three or four times, banging the door.
“I need to go check on my dad.”
“Your father’s dead, Nolan,” Madsen says quietly.
But Nolan simply stares. “My dad needs his soup at nine o’clock.”
“The OPP has a team on the road,” Madsen says.
“I’m sorry,” Nolan says. “I thought about what you said, Charlie. You know, about being chief. I think I’d like that. I could be a good chief.”
Madsen lowers her weapon now that Nolan is cuffed, and she shoves his sidearm into the waistband of her pants. McKelvey hears the hammer cock from inside the back of the cruiser, turns to Levesque, turns too late, catching the slug square in the centre of his upper body — the critical mass at which he’d trained a lifetime to aim his own line of fire — glass from the back window exploding to dust. Another two shots follow, quick as an echo, and Levesque topples over sideways across the seat, a black .38 in his hand. He doesn’t move. Madsen steps to the vehicle and holds her weapon trained on Levesque until she can reach in through the shattered window and take the .38. She tosses it into the snow on the other side of the cruiser.
The slug seems to have cut McKelvey in half, splintered inside his chest cavity. He falls back with the force of a hard shove, lands on his ass, and now he rolls to the side, winded. He tries to set himself right by planting his hand to the cold ground, but the earth wavers and rolls. There is no pain. There is no feeling, not yet, simply a pressure that won’t allow his lungs to fully inflate, as if he can’t quite catch his breath.
He is rolled to his back by unseen hands. The sky above is splitting open in gold and crimson. Two hands push into the meat of his body just beneath his collarbone, and he looks down for the first time and sees the blood, his blood, pumping through Madsen’s naked fingers like oil sprung from a leaky crank case, and steam rises from the wound as the warmth meets the cold air. The blood begins to fill his mouth so fast that he can hardly swallow it. He is drowning in this taste of deep rusted iron, the taste of his life.
He tries to slow his breathing, all of those mandatory first-aid sessions coming back as they said it would: slow the breathing, slow the flow of blood, do not succumb to shock. He turns his head to look toward Nolan, who is now slumped cross-legged on the ground, hands behind his back, face white and terrified.
“Goddamned rookie mistake,” McKelvey says, pulling the words breathlessly. “Levesque told me he had a gun the other day. He warned me …”
He feels the weight of the world pressing down on his chest, his ribs bending to the breaking point. But there is no pain. Not like when he was shot by Duguay in his own home. He thinks of this in the longest moment, a moment that spans his lifetime from boyhood to that very instant in the darkened hallway, and he thinks: I survived that to come to this.
He can’t hear. The world is muffled, under water. Madsen is yelling into her cellphone. Are they out of range?
Everything is waiting for us…. The things we do in the moment, in the action, the line and the drive. What we get lost in, these small details, these tiny moments that we believe to be so incomparably important …
Madsen is kneeling beside McKelvey now. She has pulled her long blue scarf free and she balls it against the wound, pressing down.
“Charlie, they’re coming,” she says. “Hang on …”
The words play through McKelvey’s mind.
Hang on.
How he’s been hanging on his whole life, fingers curled around those monkey bars, swinging against the wind. The stubbornness his father always pointed out in him, the apple not falling far from the tree.
He sees all of the medical brochures, the pictures of grey-haired men playing with grandchildren, smiling through the slow carving out of their bodies, the cancer eating them in increments. A Survivor’s Checklist.
But you didn’t get me, he thinks. You didn’t get me …
McKelvey closes his eyes. He sees Pierre Duguay pulling the gun, he sees Detective Leyden stretched on the catwalk of the old factory, he sees his son set out on that cold steel bed in the morgue, his father climbing a fence at a mining yard … the bodies, the lives lost to all of this human fumbling.
“One two three and up.”
Feels himself lifted and carried, and his hearing rushes on like a TV set, the heavy thump-thump of the air ambulance rotors cutting through air. He hears a young paramedic talking into his headset, and then the paramedic leans down to McKelvey’s ear and shouts that they’ll be landing at the hospital in about seventeen minutes — ETA.
Seventeen minutes.
Sixteen minutes.
Fifteen minutes.
McKelvey opens his eyes but it hurts too much, the early sunlight shreds like shards of glass. He closes his eyes tight, knowing it won’t be fast enough, not by a long shot. He is leaving; he is in many ways already gone.
Against the blackness of his closed eyes he sees projections of his boy with the perpetual cowlick. And he holds the final and brutal inequality of burying that precious child before his time, this notion he wants so very much to bring before the feet of God, lay it at His feet and say what for, and why?
And Caroline. She is young — they both are — before loss and disappointment came uninvited into their lives, all of the dark confusion that drove a wedge between them. This woman who loved him more than he ever loved himself, she is here, right here, her fingers moving the sweaty hair from his forehead …
“Was I good?” he asks. But they can’t hear him.
The rhythmic thud-thud-thud of the long rotors reverberates through his body like a voice whispering words he can’t understand as he sails through the air somewhere between heaven and earth. And for once in his life, Charlie McKelvey figures he is exactly where he is supposed to be.
Acknowledgements
I owe thanks to my editor, Allison Hirst, and the dedicated team at Dundurn; Emma Dolan for the great cover art; Allister Thompson and Sylvia McConnell for early support; Tracy Forrest for surviving ear
ly drafts; Abby Forrest; Tim Wynne-Jones; Katherine Hobbs; Dave MacDonald; Ariane Sabourin; Ulrike Kucera; Lejla Latifovic; Eryn Kirkwood; the Anatomical Pathology crew at The Ottawa Hospital; John Churchill; Stephanie Smith; Vicki Delany and Barbara Fradkin for patronage; Scene of The Crime; Bloody Words; Capital Crime Writers; Crime Writers of Canada; Margaret Cannon; Linda Wiken; Don Graves; Derryn Collier; and the motley gang at BTN.
Copyright © C. B. Forrest, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
Editor: Allison Hirst
Design: Courtney Horner
Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Forrest, C. B.
The devil's dust [electronic resource] : a Charlie McKelvey mystery / C.B. Forrest.
Type of computer file: Electronic monograph.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN 978-1-4597-0193-9
I. Title.
PS8611.O77D48 2012 C813'.6 C2011-906007-8
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
www.dundurn.com
Also by C.B. Forrest
The Weight of Stones
9781894917780
$15.95
Detective Charlie McKelvey’s life has been stuck on pause since the murder of his runaway son. As his wife focuses on healing, McKelvey is burdened with guilt for kicking the teen out of the family home — and his inability to solve the case. Obsessed with the stalled murder investigation, McKelvey’s behaviour becomes increasingly unhinged.
Slow Recoil
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Retired Toronto detective Charlie McKelvey’s tedious life is torn wide open when a friend, Tom Fielding, enlists his help locating a recent Bosnian immigrant who has disappeared. When a woman’s body turns up in Fielding’s apartment — and Fielding is nowhere to be found — McKelvey finds himself a prime suspect in an increasingly obscure murder investigation.
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