Up in Smoke

by Ross Pennie

  Two tests were telling Zol the same thing, but uncertainty was making his heart beat overtime. Eddy Pakozdi’s X-ray machine had revealed no interpretable shapes or shadows inside the envelope. No wires, no bits and pieces made out of metal. And now, Dad’s homemade device seemed to be saying the same. Could he trust it? Trouble was, neither Eddy nor Dad could promise there wasn’t a wad of plastic explosive waiting to blow them from here to Lake Erie. Or a fine, dispersible powder teeming with enough anthrax or bubonic plague to infect the entire county.

  Dad laid the detector against the wall and picked up the envelope. He shook it next to his ear, held it up to the light, sniffed it.

  “Pirate smoke inside here,” he said, finally. “From the rez. And not properly cured.” He took a penknife from the shelf above the workbench and waved it toward the door. “Outside, son. This, I do alone.”

  “No, Dad. It’s my problem, my responsibility.”

  “And this my workshop. You — you have Max and Colleen to thinking about. And your important work that — that makes me so — proud. Yes, I never say, but I am very proud.” He put his left hand on Zol’s right shoulder and gave it a long, hard squeeze. Was he aware that his thumb was pushing against Zol’s old collar-bone fracture? No, but there were tears glistening in his eyes. “Soon, I will not have . . . well, you know what we facing . . .”

  Zol squeezed his dad’s arm, held his watery gaze for a long, quiet moment.

  “It’s addressed to me, Dad. I should be the one to open it.”

  Gaspar closed his eyes and turned away. Zol had seen that manoeuvre a thousand times before and knew there was no breaking through it.

  Now he was blinking back the tears as his dad closed the door behind him with a resolute clunk. Zol plodded across the yard, stood beside kiln number one, and focussed on the work-shed door.

  The moments crept by, and nothing happened. What was Dad doing? How long did it take to slice open an envelope?

  An explosion tore from the back of the workshop. Zol dove behind the kiln and shielded his eyes as he hit the ground. He crouched motionless on the grass, his heartbeat hammering at his throat.

  What . . . ?

  He looked around. Nothing had changed.

  Oh, for God’s sake.

  What a skittish idiot he’d been. It was only a Harley, misfiring as the driver gunned down Jenkins Road.

  He jumped up, swiped at the telltale mud and grass on his slacks, and squinted at the shed.

  Dad was standing at the open door, still in possession of the penknife and four intact limbs. And beaming a satisfied smile.

  “You come see this, Zollie.”

  “What is it?”

  “You will see.”

  “Nothing dangerous?”

  “Not for us. Not anymore.”

  Gaspar had opened the envelope and removed its contents. Displayed on the workbench were an unmarked piece of corrugated cardboard roughly the dimensions of the envelope and a zippered food storage bag of about the same size. Sealed within the transparent plastic was something that at quick glance was thin, brown, and crinkled.

  Gaspar swung a gooseneck lamp over the bag. “In old days, that blight in there bring tobacco farmers big trouble.”

  Zol looked through the bag without touching it. It contained a single tobacco leaf. At least, the major part of one. It looked aged to some extent, cracked in several places as if fairly brittle, and discoloured in a strange way.

  “Looks like it’s got a rash, Dad. Our crop didn’t looked like that, did it?”

  “Never. TMV spoils yield and selling price.” Gaspar Szabo’s tobacco had enjoyed the best of reputations. If he’d wanted, he could have bought himself a new car every year on the bonuses his crop earned from the brand-name tobacco companies.

  Zol picked up the bag and examined the leaf on both sides. A healthy plant at this stage of curing would be an even, caramel brown. This one looked diseased. The top side was mottled with irregular swirls of yellow, grey, and brown. The underside was covered in red spots.

  Zol pointed to the spots that looked like dried blood on sun-weathered skin. “What are those?”

  Gaspar fished a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket. “Never seen those red marks before. Not with TMV.” He turned the bag over. “The top side, that’s TMV, tobacco mosaic virus. Stunts plant growth and gives bitter taste. Dark spots underneath? I do not know. Maybe it’s from — What you call it? — a mutant?”

  He pulled a sheet of letter-size paper from the envelope and handed it to Zol. “I didn’t put my glasses. Maybe there is message?”

  There certainly was, laser printed in capital letters at the top of the page:

  OKAY, OKAY.

  A LOT OF REZ TOBACCO LOOKS LIKE THIS.

  BEST I CAN DO. BALL’S IN YOUR COURT.

  Zol’s cellphone chirped on his belt. It was Colleen.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m here with Dad. What’s up?”

  “Oh Zol. I feel terrible.”

  “What’s wrong? You sick?”

  “It’s all my fault.”

  “For pity’s sake, tell me — what’s wrong?” He could barely formulate the next words, but he had to get them out. “Is it Max?”

  “Olivia. They got her in the parking lot. At the LCBO.”

  Anyone who drank as much Southern Comfort as Olivia Colborne was bound to get dinged for drunk driving sooner or later. “On a DUI?” Getting nabbed by the cops in the parking lot of the government liquor store sounded like karma.

  “A drive-by. Asian faces with a high-powered rifle.”

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  Colleen’s voice dissolved into a flood of sobs. “She’s on her way — to the morgue. And — and I put her there.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Zol ushered Colleen into his office and asked Nancy to rustle her up a cup of tea. It wouldn’t be Colleen’s favourite, South African rooibos, but at this point any hot drink would probably do.

  He’d never seen her look like this. Puffy eyes, blotches on her neck, shaky hands clutching at her handbag. He closed the door.

  “I might as well have shot her myself,” she said, her voice cracking. “If it weren’t for me she’d still be alive.”

  He knew that could not be true. But there was no point in arguing.

  He eased her purse from her grasp and set it on his desk. He took her hands in his. Their clamminess surprised him. “Tell me the story from the beginning,” he said, hoping his unease at her agitation wasn’t registering on his face. “You found something incriminating in Olivia’s house when you and Matt Holt were there on Saturday?”

  “We got so little out of her at the house that I phoned back a couple of hours later — threatened her with exposure and criminal prosecution if she didn’t cooperate with our investigation.”

  “What could you have exposed?”

  “The pad of blank prescriptions she stole from a doctor in Hamilton.”

  “You found them lying around?”

  “In her underwear drawer.”

  Of course. That’s where Francine used to hide her cocaine. Not that she ever held onto it for long. “Olivia filled them out herself?”

  Colleen nodded. “I found the remains of a bottle of two hundred OxyContins — and three others like it, empty.”

  “Alcohol and opiates, eh?” It would be difficult to keep the neurons firing properly with all that in her system.

  “And nonstop nicotine.” Colleen described how Olivia had lit one cigarette on the butt of the other in an almost unbroken chain.

  “What did you pressure her to do?”

  “Tell us what had poisoned the rez’s tobacco supply. And how it got there.”

  He was amazed at Colleen’s directness. She was usually much more subtle, a master at finesse.

 
“I know what you’re thinking,” she told him. “But it worked. She got edgy and defensive. And no matter how much she tried to hide it, she knew we were on the right track with the contamination angle.”

  Nancy knocked and said she had Colleen’s tea ready.

  Zol let go of Colleen’s hands and quickly relieved Nancy of a steaming teacup and two digestive biscuits.

  He handed Colleen the cup and said nothing until Nancy was on the other side of the closed door and — hopefully — well out of earshot. “You figure Olivia had a word with her bosses?”

  “She must have. Sometime after my call.” Colleen’s face crumpled. “And clearly, they didn’t like what they heard.”

  A wave of shivers slammed his shoulders. Was the Badger that cold-blooded, or was the hit on Olivia the work of his Asian partners?

  “Your little talk with Olivia got her to do more than contact her colleagues on the rez,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think she sent me a parcel.”

  “When?”

  “I got it this morning.”

  He pulled the packet from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and set it on the desk.

  Colleen sniffed at the envelope and made a face. “Reeks of rez tobacco.”

  “You got that right. Drives my dad crazy that they don’t process the tobacco properly before turning it into cigarettes.”

  She sniffed at the open end of the envelope and cocked her head to the side. “There’s something else trying to come through. Several scents, actually.”

  “What do you get?”

  She thought for a moment. “Hmm. Mandarin peel. Oil of bergamot. And something else.” She put her nose in the envelope and sniffed again. “Sorry, can’t place it.”

  “Oak moss?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Adding up to?”

  She looked puzzled for a few seconds, then answered. “Of course. Calvin Klein.”

  He raised his eyebrows and ventured a smile. “Good on you.”

  “I should have nailed it immediately. I saw a bottle of Obsession in her upstairs bathroom. She’d sprayed it on rather too generously before our visit. Probably trying to hide the smell of her Southern Comfort.” She warmed her hands on the teacup for a moment, then asked, “What’s in her envelope?”

  He held up the note and read it out loud. “Okay, okay. A lot of rez tobacco looks like this. Best I can do. Ball’s in your court.”

  The first line made sense now that he knew Colleen had pressured Olivia over the forged prescriptions.

  Colleen closed her eyes and shook her head. “Poor thing, I did put her in a bind.”

  His eyes strayed to the packet. “I hope what she sent us is more than a riddle.”

  “Zol! The woman just got herself killed by doing the right thing. It wouldn’t hurt to give her the credit she deserves.”

  He wasn’t sure about that, but let it go.

  He slid his hand into the manila packet and pulled out the mottled tobacco leaf, still in its resealable plastic bag. “This is what she included with the note.”

  Colleen put down her tea, and as she scrutinized the leaf under the desk lamp, he could see the wheels turning inside her head. “If,” she said, “those spots and swirls are even close to what I think they are, this was Olivia’s way of telling us her factories use blemished tobacco.”

  “Hell, it’s not merely blemished. It’s infected.” He summarized his discussion with his dad and explained the significance of the two sets of markings. There was the mottling caused by tobacco mosaic virus infection, classic in appearance and harmless to humans. And there were the mysterious blood-red spots Gaspar had never seen before and suggested could be caused by some sort of mutant microbe.

  “Mutant?” she said. “Could we talking about the matchstick particles that reminded Winnipeg of that weird virus in the facial blisters — a hybrid, was it? — in the family from Mongolia?”

  “Finding matchstick particles in those red spots would explain Hamish’s cluster of lip and finger lesions, all right. But not the liver failures.” He reminded her that the pathologist who examined the liver biopsies was categorical when he excluded infection as a cause of the liver damage. “To explain the liver failures,” he told her, “we need to find a poison, not a germ.”

  “That brings us back to Tammy Holt’s research, doesn’t it? As I understand it, Tammy was genetically engineering a tobacco mosaic virus to produce an appetite-suppressing wonder drug. Was the project shut down because the virus morphed into something that behaved more like a human toxin than a plant infection?”

  “But why was Tammy murdered?”

  Colleen chewed on that until she’d swallowed her last bite of digestive and drained her tea. She put down the cup. Her eyes were less puffy, the red blotches on her throat starting to fade. “Because Tammy knew the virus had escaped her controlled laboratory conditions and was infecting the lucrative tobacco fields of Norfolk County and —”

  “She confronted Dennis Badger, warned him he couldn’t use any of the infected tobacco in his cigarette facilities.”

  “And he pictured his empire going —”

  “Up in smoke?” Zol said.

  Colleen gestured toward Olivia’s leaf, now another indictment against Dennis Badger. “By sending you that bit of evidence, and admitting that much of the tobacco processed in her factories looks like that, Olivia is telling you what happened: Tammy’s drug-making virus did escape. It got into the open tobacco fields of Grand Basin Reserve and surrounding Norfolk County, and is now being turned into Native cigarettes.”

  “That’s a great theory, but how do we prove it?” He knew the answer to his own question, but maybe Colleen had a better idea.

  “Hamish said Jovan Ligorov, Tammy’s chief research tech, seemed scared to death. You’re only that frightened when you’re hiding something dangerous.”

  “He needs to give up the whole story,” Zol said. “Every last detail.”

  Something had changed in Colleen’s face. Today, her moods were impossible to keep up with. First, she’d been almost inconsolable over Olivia’s murder. Then, she’d seemed excited at interpreting the blemishes on the tobacco leaf. Now, she looked wary. No, more than wary, terrified.

  “Zol — no!” she said. “Ligorov’s position is extraordinarily dangerous. He knows far too much.” She squeezed his arm. “And if he tells you what he knows about Tammy Holt’s project, then you’ll know too much.”

  “But I’m supposed to be in the know. Getting to the bottom of all this is my job.”

  She shook her head and squeezed harder. “It’s time to call in the police. Let them get the story out of Ligorov. And protect him from the Badger.”

  “You serious? I thought you private-eye types never —”

  “There’s nothing wrong with calling in the cops at the appropriate stage of an investigation.”

  “Come on, you go up against bad actors every day without involving the cops.”

  “Not like this. Dealing with criminal gangs is no cricket match. It’s a very dangerous game. There are no gentlemen and no rules of fair play.”

  “You didn’t seem to mind going after the chop-shop guys.”

  “I didn’t go after them, Zol. I just watched them. And reported what I saw to my client.”

  “The car dealer guy?”

  “Who then called the police.” She lifted her empty cup and tapped at it absently. “And when the chop-shoppers thought it was Matt Holt who’d ratted on them, they tried to burn his place down.”

  He chewed on that for a moment. Had Colleen dodged a much bigger bullet on that case than he’d imagined?

  “But hell,” he said, “what are the cops going to do with our theories and empty allegations? Unless we hand them solid proof that rez tobacco is contaminated with a pa
rticular poison or lethal virus, they’ll laugh us out of the station. Native reserves are forbidden territory as far as the cops are concerned — too politically hot for the provincial police and the RCMP. Nothing short of a national catastrophe will ever get our nation’s finest to poke their noses inside Grand Basin Reserve.”

  She looked inside her teacup, seemed disappointed it was empty, and dropped it onto the saucer. A stew of emotions was simmering on her face. “I’m sorry, Zol, but at this point, this case is too hot for us to handle. The way things have been going, I feel like a bloody amateur. The Badger knows Max’s phone number, he threatened you in no uncertain terms, and look what his lot did to poor Olivia.”

  She didn’t have to spell it out for him any more clearly, especially the part about Max.

  But still, he needed hard evidence. Without it, this case was going nowhere. Should he give it up? Leave the Badger and his gang to the police, which amounted to the same thing? Or could he get the information he needed some other way, by a completely different route? One that didn’t involve Ligorov.

  Tammy Holt’s project had been bankrolled by an American pharmaceutical company, that was common knowledge. U.S. drug companies answered to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The FDA would have a record of every human study Tammy’s sponsoring company had conducted. If pushed, the FDA could force Tammy’s backers to cooperate with Zol’s investigation, tell him why they’d shut her project down. That was it — he’d get the information he needed through the front door.

  But then it hit him: the international paperwork would be a nightmare. It would take months to grind its way through multiple layers of bureaucracy on both sides of the border. He couldn’t bear to think how many livers would be destroyed and how many lives would be lost along the way. And Erie Christian Collegiate wasn’t the only school that was going to be affected. Any day now, the phone was going to ring with news of a string of liver failures erupting in another school on his patch.

  He had no choice. He had to lean on Ligorov. The man knew the chemical composition of Tammy’s wonder drug and the reason the project was abandoned so abruptly. When Ligorov coughed up that information, Zol could run the appropriate tests on Olivia’s blemished tobacco leaf and the cigarettes Hamish and Colleen had purchased on the rez. If any of the rez tobacco contained the problem drug, he would call in Health Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Health, the Grand Basin cops, the provincial cops, the RCMP, the Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, and whoever else it would take to shut down Dennis Badger’s trade in poisoned cigarettes.