“Hey, babe. It ain’t just me!”
Robyn reached up and twisted the mirror back to its approximate original position. She smiled at Chris and said, “How’s that — can you see okay?”
Chris glanced up at the mirror. Robyn tried to punch him in the groin but he brought his leg up and caught the blow on the thigh. Even so, it hurt like hell. He said, “Careful, toots. Hit me there, you’re likely to break your hand.”
Smiling, Robyn said, “You’re such a jerk.” She rested her hand gently on his thigh. “Take me to see the whales, okay?”
Chris fiddled with the mirror, getting it right. He said, “What happens when you pump a gerbil full of helium?”
“I don’t know, what?”
“Figure it out. Think about it.”
Robyn nibbled at her lower lip as she mulled it over. Chris ejected the Italian tenor and slipped a ZZ Top tape into the machine.
Robyn said, “It turns into a dirigible.” She smiled sweetly. “Now take me to the aquarium.”
“No can do, sweetheart.”
“Baby, don’t make me lose my temper.”
Chris fiddled with the mirror, getting it right. Behind them, the road was white except for two parallel black stripes left by their tires.
He tapped the brakes and skidded to a gentle stop in the middle of the road. To their right a couple of hundred sail and power boats were moored in individual boathouses. As well, several big sail boats, all of them covered in snow, were moored out in the open.
One of the boats was occupied. A row of round yellow lights glowed along the line of a graceful hull. At the stern, an American flag drooped wearily.
The snow had drained all the colour out of the world. It was as if they were looking at an old movie. Behind the boathouses, the city’s skyline had been transformed into an abstract in black and white. It was very quiet. Chris rolled down his window. Somewhere in the distance a duck quacked grumpily.
Chris rolled the window back up. They drove through a metered parking lot and turned left. The wheels spun as they ascended a gentle slope. A scrim of rainforest loomed on their left. To their right the low, flat concrete roof of the bear pit was almost invisible. Chris parked behind the stone-faced building that housed the zoo’s collection of exotic birds and, at the far end, a handful of poisonous snakes stuffed into glass cubicles the size of a shoebox.
They climbed out of the car. Chris activated the burglar alarm. “Lock your door?”
Robyn shrugged prettily. She gave him a taunting, over-the-shoulder look. “Beats me, Chris. Maybe you better check it for me.”
Chris scooped enough snow off the car’s roof to make a nice fat snowball. Robyn stood there, smiling at him, snow falling into her hair. She’d get up in the morning and nibble at a piece of dry toast and go happily off to work — eight hours of zombie tedium she didn’t seem to mind at all. And then she’d come back to the apartment at the end of the day and change into another personality as easily as she changed clothes.
Chris admired her for that — her ability to adapt to the terrain. She was a disciplined, feisty chick. Cute, too. Fine bones, a dairymaid’s complexion, big green eyes and mysterious smile, a wild mane of flaming red hair beautiful as a postcard sunset. A wonderful laugh, endless energy. Deep in his gut, Chris knew that one of these days Robyn would see him for what he was — just another drifter with a nice smile — and take back the keys to the Subaru and kick his ass out of her life.
But that was later. This was now.
Chris finished packing the snowball and rolled it across the roof of the car towards her. Trusting her, providing her with the ammunition to do him in.
Robyn snatched up the snowball and cocked her arm. Chris held his ground. Laughing, she turned, adopted a bowler’s stance, took three quick strides and rolled it down the road.
Chris watched the snowball gain bulk and gradually slow down, finally roll to a stop.
Kind of like life itself.
He lit a fresh joint, took Robyn’s wool-mittened hand in his, and led her down a narrow asphalt path past the public washrooms and then the massive Bill Reid sculpture of a killer whale. The orca was made of bronze and the artist had depicted it at the apex of its leap above a small, frozen pool.
Chris dug into his pants pocket. He flipped a shiny new penny at the pool. It struck the ice with a clear ringing sound.
Robyn squeezed his hand. “Did you remember to make a wish?”
Chris squeezed back. “How could I forget?”
“What did you wish for?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because then it wouldn’t come true, would it?”
Robyn said, “I doubt it will anyway, Chris.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Remember last summer, when you threw some money into the fountain behind the art gallery, on Georgia Street. I asked you what you wished for and you told me it was always the same thing. And then whispered your filthy, disgusting needs into my shell-like ear?”
Chris said, “I’ve changed, honey. You know it’s true.”
“I do, huh.”
Chris wiggled his eyebrows. He said, “Okay, I admit it — Somewhere deep inside I haven’t stopped hoping you’ll buy me a dishwasher.”
They strolled around the outside of the building housing the monkeys, down a snow-drifted asphalt path that skirted a small pond. High above them in a fir tree, an unseen great blue heron croaked nervously, and then was still. They continued to follow the path until it dead-ended at a sheer eight foot high wall made of rough slabs of streaky orange rock.
Chris said, “It’s cold as hell — you sure you want to do this?”
“I think it’s kind of romantic.”
Chris said, “Yeah?” Hopefully.
“Romantic, Chris. Not carnal.”
“So what’s the difference, exactly?”
At the base of the stone wall there was a narrow strip of black soil planted with a few small deciduous shrubs. The ground was lumpy and hard. Chris offered Robyn his hand but she ignored him. One of the things about her that vexed Chris and yet so attracted him was her refusal to be dominated in any way. Robyn was a strong-willed woman. Sex or a donut; if she wasn’t in the mood, forget it. Somehow she instinctively knew what was good for her, and what wasn’t. Chris envied her ability to define her needs and abide by them. In all facets of her life, strength of purpose seemed to flow out of her.
They made their way along the rock wall and then Chris knelt and braced himself against the cold stone, made a sling of his interlocked hands. Robyn stepped into the sling. He gave her a quick kiss on the mouth and she fleetingly kissed him back.
They’d paid unauthorized late-night visits to the whales several times before, and had gradually worked out a routine. Robyn held tightly to his jacket collar while Chris stood upright, then she reached up and got a grip on top of the wall, stepped on his shoulders and hauled herself up the rest of the way.
The stratagem had been a success on their previous trips, but now, in the middle of a snowstorm, it was much more difficult. Chris’s hands ached with the cold. It was a lot more difficult to keep his balance. Snow tumbled out of the sky and into his eyes and down the back of his neck. Robyn’s expensive leather boots were slick with mud and slush. He grunted as he boosted her a little higher. Her boot heel scraped his collarbone as she pushed away from him, scrambled up on the wall.
Chris waited until she was clear and then pulled himself up after her.
Robyn hugged and kissed him as he reached the top of the wall. She said, “God, Chris, you climb like a spider!”
Stooped low, they hurried towards the whale pool and out of sight of the path. The joint had gone out. Chris paused to fire a match, sucked smoke deep into his lungs and passed the joint to Robyn.
The whale pool was shaped roughly in an oval. The viewing area with its open seating was on the far side. Chris and Robyn squatted near a wall of mock-s
andstone planted with a fringe of ferns and other small plants. The wall dropped almost straight down into the pool. A thin grey fog hung above the black water. Snow falling on to the quiet surface made a faint hissing sound.
Robyn passed the joint back to him. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him. Staring deeply into his eyes, she kissed him again and again.
Chris inhaled deeply, held the smoke.
“Love me?”
Chris said, “You betcha.”
“How much?”
“More than, uh…”
Robyn tweaked his nose. “More than what? Words can say?”
Chris said, “Sounds good to me.”
There was a heavy whuffing noise as one of the two killer whales in the pool breached and vented a rising column of mist.
Robyn turned towards the sound and, Chris could plainly see, forgot him in the moment of turning.
Robyn said, “Bjossa.”
The whale’s body was blacker than the black water. There was a flash of white saddle as the huge creature slipped beneath the surface, sounding at such an acute angle that its broad, flat, glistening tail rose high into the speckled air.
A second, smaller whale suddenly thrust its head out of the water at the far end of the pool. Chris caught a quick glimpse of a mouthful of blunt, rounded teeth and a darkly glittering eye, and then the whale crashed heavily down, sending a foaming wall of water into the snow-shrouded bleacher seats.
A moment later the surface of the pool had calmed and the enclosure once again was silent and lifeless.
Then Bjossa surfaced and the base of the whale’s dorsal fin sliced through the water as she raced around the pool, completed a circuit and then slowed, abruptly smacked her tail flukes against the water, the impact loud as a pistol shot.
Robyn said, “Did you see that!” Whispering, as if she was in church.
Chris leaned into her and kissed her softly on the neck, just below the line of her jaw. He tried to cop a feel, but she was wearing so many layers of clothing he might as well have fondled a mattress.
The smaller of the whales, Finna, rose slowly out of the water directly in front of them, no more than twenty feet away. The whale continued to rise to about the level of its pectoral fins. Its interest seemed to have been captured by the snow, which was falling fast and thick.
Very slowly, almost reluctantly, Finna began to sink beneath the surface.
Neither Robyn nor Chris noticed the glass doors by the narwhal pool swing open, or saw the metal dolly with the naked corpse splayed across it, as it was pushed through the snow towards the pool.
At the far end of the pool Bjossa suddenly surged straight up out of the water like a slightly overweight black and white ICBM. The whale crashed back into the water and a rolling, foamy wave slopped over the lip of the pool and turned a ten-foot span of snow to slush.
Chris said, “Holy Christ!”
Robyn’s breast swelled beneath his groping hand. She was about to scream.
He clamped his hand over her mouth.
Dr Roth’s corpse, naked except for the bright blue flippers and his face mask and TAG Heuer watch, rolled off the dolly, hit the slush and went splat.
Robyn’s big green eyes were bugged out. She was hyperventilating like crazy. Chris held her tightly. He told himself that he and Robyn were sharing the same hallucination and that the root of their common terror had to be an impurity in the marijuana — fertilizers or insecticides, some other essentially harmless chemical.
Or they might be the victims of some maniac farmer who’d dusted his crop with strychnine.
Dr Gerard Roth’s acned butt was kicked hard and trembled like a lump of milk-white jello. The rest of him didn’t move an inch.
The dolly rammed into him, hard. Chris flinched as the sharp sound of cold steel on dead meat carried to him across the body of water. He squinted into the glare of the lights from the aquarium. The snow was tumbling out of the night sky with such enthusiasm that it was difficult to see exactly what was going on over there.
Chris winced as he was once again assaulted by the distinctive thud of steel-on-flesh. Dr Roth’s corpse slid across the slush towards the pool. The dolly smacked him on the hip. A ridge of slush was building in front of him as his progress towards the pool continued. His eyes were wide open and so was his mouth. The dolly hit him again.
The surface of the pool bulged smoothly. A darkly glittering eye assessed the situation and then vanished in a welter of foam.
The dolly’s hard rubber wheels thundered across the snowy tiles and there was that nasty beef-bashing thud again, sharp as the crack of a whip.
Dr Roth’s corpse slipped headfirst into the pool with scarcely a ripple, vanished beneath the surface so abruptly he might have been pulled under by some unseen subterranean presence.
Chris said, “Oh my God.” He slowly realized that Robyn seemed to have stopped breathing. He unclasped his hand from her mouth. She continued to stare at the pool as if hypnotized.
Chris said, “Robyn, honey. Are you okay?”
Bjossa breached with the naked dude held sideways in his huge jaws. He shook his head. Dr Roth was flung high into the air. Timing it perfectly, the whale smacked him with its broad tail, knocked him all the way to the far end of the pool.
A moment later Finna surfaced beside the corpse. The whale nudged Roth’s torso with its blunt snout and then opened wide, fixed the doctor’s weary head in its jaws delicately as a skilled jeweller wields a pair of miniature tweezers on an almost invisible screw. Roth was yanked under, slapped around. He might have been the rope in a not-so-friendly game of tug-of-war.
Robyn turned away and emptied her stomach over an azalea bush.
Dr Roth shot high into the air again, as if he had been fired from a large-calibre cannon. As he reached the apex of his arc he hung motionless among the flakes of snow for a fraction of a second, and Chris saw that the whales’ boy toy had lost most of a leg.
No, wait a minute, he was wrong. Dr Roth hadn’t lost his leg after all. Because there it was, bright blue swim fin still firmly attached, bobbing in the swell over by the feeding ramp.
Chapter 5
The snow had slowed to a trickle and then stopped completely at a little past eight in the morning. But the air was wintry crisp and clear, the sky dark with low-lying cloud. The short-term forecast was for more snow, and plenty of it, and Willows believed the weatherman might hit two in a row, for once.
The streets were a mess; downed trees and power lines littered the side streets, and several main arteries were cluttered with dead buses, a tangle of dented automobiles and apoplectic drivers. At nearly every corner, milling knots of foul-mouthed, mad-as-a-hornet commuters fought over the few taxis that were available. The snarl of congestion added almost half an hour to Willows’ trip. It was ten to nine when he finally parked his unmarked car in the underground garage across the alley from the Public Safety Building at 312 Main.
He locked the car, turned in the keys and hurried across the alley. As he took the elevator up to the third floor, he enjoyed the sensation of being snug and warm — inside.
As Willows made his way towards his desk, Eddy Orwell sliced the flat of his hand rapidly back and forth across his shiny blond brush-cut, as if smoothing it down prior to sticking a tee in his skull and reaching for his putter. Willows gave him an odd look. Orwell noticed. He said, “I look like I’ve been up all night butting heads with a train, don’t I?”
Willows said, “You could use a shave, Eddy. And a long hot, soapy shower as well as a change of clothes and a new barber. Toss in a good night’s sleep and a three-egg breakfast, you’ll feel like a new man.”
Orwell said, “I’m consoled by the knowledge that no matter how terrible I look, Farley must be twice as bad.”
Orwell’s partner, Farley Spears, was slumped in his chair at his desk, his mouth wide open and the back of his left hand trailing on the pale grey carpet.
Orwell said, “You could stuff a sm
oke alarm up his ass and light him on fire, I bet he’d sleep right through it.”
“Had a busy night, did you?”
Orwell yawned hugely. “Hear about the Russian?”
“What Russian’s that?”
“Vladimir. Calls himself Vlad the Impaler. The guy and a couple of his brothers slipped into the country a few years ago. They operated a chop-shop for a while, then moved into the wholesale drug business.” Orwell scratched his jaw. He peered myopically at his thumb and then dug something out from under the nail. “Me ’n Farley have been up all night, taking turns interrogating the guy. The way he tells it, he was simply scratching out a living the best way he knew how, intended to go legit once he’d satisfied his basic needs. All he wanted was a mansion in Shaughnessy, ski cabin in Whistler, a condo in Maui and — he admits he may have overreached himself here — a private jet and maybe some English lessons from Berlitz.”
“How’s he doing so far?”
“I know he’s got the mansion and the cars, because I helped tear ’em apart. The rest of it he refuses to talk about. Modest, I guess.”
Willows said, “You can’t blame him for wanting to get ahead. In this imperfect capitalist world of ours, a guy’s got to have a little ambition. Where’d Vlad go wrong?”
“His girlfriend liked to skin-pop once in a while. Not that she was an addict, understand. Just that she liked the rush, during those really special times.”
Willows leaned against his desk, folded his arms across his chest and listened patiently as Orwell told his tale of greed and woe and terminal incompetence.
It turned out Vlad didn’t know all that much about the art of profit maximization — a simple process that depended largely on how much he cut, or diluted, his product. Consequently sweetheart had overdosed. While Vlad and a few friends were out in the backyard pool playing bare-ass water polo and drinking champagne from the bottle, sweetheart had nodded off in the middle of her fettuccini, slipped under the table and asphyxiated and died.
The thing was, the two brothers volunteered that lately Vlad and the girl hadn’t been getting along too well. In fact, a couple of hours before her death she’d tried to run him through with a fondue fork. So was her death an accident, or was it murder?
Killers Page 4
