by Ted Wood
"Get your coat and we'll go." Her coat was on the back of the door on a hanger. It was raccoon, but made from lush pelts sewn in a chevron pattern. It was as expensive as most mink coats but without the pretension.
"That's good. You'll be snug in that. Put a scarf over your head and we'll go."
She came out of the room and I locked it. Anyone who chose could slip the lock in a moment as I had, but it was the closest I could come to sealing the crime scene for forensic investigation later. Nancy was taller in her boots, but frail-seeming and timid. I took her by the elbow and checked her for a moment.
"Nancy, the man I shot is lying on the stairs. He can't hurt you any more, so don't be afraid. I'll take your arm. When we get to him, tell me if he was the guy who assaulted you."
She looked at me wide-eyed, as if I were speaking a foreign language. I gave her a little nod. "Come on, now, be brave." I held her elbow and walked one step ahead of her down the stairs to the body. When we reached it I asked her, "Is he the one?"
She burst into tears, nodding her head over and over, wordlessly.
"Then he got what he deserved," I said. "Come on." We negotiated the rest of the stairs and she spoke angrily through her tears, like a child who has been wrongly scolded.
"I'd never done it with anybody before. I was a virgin."
I patted her arm. "You still are. Nobody in the world knows your secret. He's dead and the bad news died with him."
It wasn't true, but it was the best thing to say even though just telling her made me feel dirty and unshaven and uncouth. I felt the old familiar disgust growing within me. I wanted this to be over. The other member of the Guard group could go to hell for all I cared. I wanted to be in the station with Val until sanity came flooding back with the morning daylight and we could turn over Tom's description to other people and go away and rediscover the fact that gentleness still exists in the world.
Outside, the snow was still whirling and Nancy gasped as the chill hit her face. Fortified with Black Velvet and adrenalin, I didn't even notice it. I picked up my snowshoes but did not put them on. Shoulder to shoulder with Nancy, I struggled through the drifted snow to my machine. I had one bare hand on the gun in my pocket, ready to shoot if anybody fired on us, but nobody did.
I started the machine and sat on it, wearily, instead of kneeling. Nancy sat behind me, hanging on tight enough to break my heart.
I took us slowly up the road to the station. It was hard to tell, with the snow that had fallen nonstop for the last six hours, but it seemed to me that there was a skidoo trail there, that the surface had been broken in the last hour or so. I wondered if somebody had talked his way out of the Legion and headed home on his skidoo. I hoped that was it. Tom was still out somewhere, a potential for trouble, and I didn't want any more. Outnumbered and outgunned I had found Nancy, and now I wanted to wait till morning before I did any more police work. I wouldn't be able to go home to bed, but I could doze at the station.
The wind had shifted and reshaped the snowdrift beside the back door of the police station, laying it longer and lower so that I was able to pull up close to the door that led to the cells. I felt uneasy. There were definite tracks here, more recent-looking than my own. I felt my heart bump a couple of times rhythmically. Maybe I was just tired. I'd been shot at three times, had someone try to frag me, and found a rape victim. My adrenalin was running like maple sap in February.
In the silence that followed my stopping the machine I heard Sam barking inside the station. That relieved me. Whatever else happened, Val was safe. Sam could bring down any man with any weapon he could hold. I tapped Nancy on the shoulder and she followed me over the last six feet to the door. Then I whistled once, a short clear note, and Sam stopped barking. The door was locked and nobody came to open it, but that made sense. I had told Val to stay inside and she was taking no chances. I fumbled for the key and opened up, stepping in first. It's not gallant but it's sense. It put me in the firing line, if any—that's what I was paid for. Nancy wasn't.
Then I stopped and looked around with my mouth hanging open in disbelief. Val was gone. Both my prisoners were locked in one cell. Sam was locked in the other.
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14
I paused only a second, but in that time I could read what had happened in the expressions on the faces of the two women. The thin one from the Legion was smiling a thin, smug little smile. The other girl was close to tears. I knew then that Val was gone. I went through the obvious drills anyway, kicking open the door to the front of the station and jumping in, gun drawn, to search it. There was no one there. The teletype was clacking under its plastic cover, the gun rack still held two guns, the same empty Coke bottles stood under the counter where the public could not see. But Val was gone.
I put my gun away and came back to the cells. Nancy Carmichael had come in and was looking at the two women with a gaze that must have told them everything that had happened to her that night. They were silent. I let Sam out of the cell and fussed him and told him he was good, then I turned to the prisoners. "What happened?" The thin one said, "Find out, pig," but the other one said, "He came for her, Chief."
"Who is he?" I had a hundred questions, including how had he gotten into the station without being pinned to the floor by Sam, but for now I wanted some facts.
"The others called him 'Tom,'" the pretty girl said. I remembered she was Freddie.
"Did he say where he was taking her?" I could imagine what he would do to Valerie, was perhaps already doing. She had come to this place trusting me, trusting the whole system of Canadian law to keep her as safe as she would have been in Toronto, and now she was the hostage of a hoodlum. I knew this was no revolutionary group. Terrorists don't rape, it's a bourgeois crime. They maim and kill, but they don't rape. Bikers rape. This Revolutionary Guard talk was a smokescreen. These were personal crimes being carried out and I hadn't seen it until now, when it was too late.
"Where would he have taken her, Freddie?"
She opened her mouth to answer but the thin one cut in, her voice tingling with excitement. "Somewhere you won't find her." I reached through the bars and grabbed her by the arm, pulling her against the bars, not savagely but too close for comfort. "Stay out of this, you don't know what these people are like." Then I shook her arm away and repeated my question.
Freddie said, "I don't know, Chief. He didn't say." And the thin one added her own message. "He said you had one hour and then he was going to show her a good time."
The blood roared in my ears. I took Nancy by the shoulder and led her to the cell. "You'll have to wait, Nancy. I'll call your parents in a little while. First I have to attend to this new business." She went into the cell without speaking and I locked the door. Her face was deadly white. She sat on the wooden bunk, not looking at the others. I could understand her fear but I was more concerned about Valerie's safety.
Sam was keening as if he could explain how he had been outsmarted but I had no time to find out now. I patted his head and told him "Keep" and left him while I went into the front of the station and unlocked the shotgun from the rack. I knew it was loaded but I pumped the action one time to load the chamber and pushed another round into the magazine. Then I scooped a half-dozen extra shells out of the box and slipped them into my pocket. With that gun I was the equal of fifty men.
I took the time to top up the fuel in the snow machine. I didn't want to run dry a mile from my destination and waste even more time trekking up there in snowshoes. The snow was still falling, although it seemed that the wind was slackening. I was glad of that. I had some tracking to do.
The tracking was easier than I had expected. The skidoo had followed the road almost to the bridge in town, then turned east through the trees. I followed it, keeping my speed as high as I could, ducking under branches, showered with dumps of snow from those I could not miss completely. It occurred to me that they might be setting me up for an ambush. I shouldn't be barreling down a red-ball ro
ad like this. I would never have done it in Nam, but here I didn't care. I had heard enough about this Tom to believe he meant what he said. He would want to take his revenge on me by violating Valerie. The thin girl from the Legion had told him about our relationship, I could count on that. Now he would punish her for helping me, punish us both, punish the world. Unless I got there first.
A quarter-mile north of town the tracks swung back onto the lakeshore road that serviced all the cabins along the east shore, and I began to guess where he had gone—back to the cottage where I had left Elliot and the women. I patted the shotgun that lay under my knee on the saddle of the machine. I would need it now with four people against me.
The tracks turned off on top of those I had left earlier and I slammed up beside the cottage door and jumped onto the snow, clicking off the safety from my shotgun. I opened the back screen door, not even checking to see if it was wired, and fired my first round up through the glass of the back door into the ceiling above. I heard a yell of alarm from inside and I reached in and unlocked the door.
The Elliot kid was standing facing me. He had his pants on, but the cuffs had kept him from dressing further and he had a towel over his shoulders. There was no sign of anyone else.
"On the floor," I told him. He got down, but slowly, sneeringly. I knew I was in the right place. I prayed I was still in time. "Who else is here?"
He grinned even more broadly, half bowing mockingly. "Simply everybody," he said, and I heard a woman's voice shriek, "Reid! He's holding a knife on my neck."
Two sounds blended. One was a cackle from Elliot, the other was a man's voice telling me, "She's right, Bennett, put the gun down."
I kept the gun, swinging it toward the voice, which came from upstairs. "I'm putting nothing down until I see my policewoman is all right. If she isn't I'll blow your legs off." I tried to keep my voice even. I was a businessman making an offer.
"We're coming down now," the voice said. I heard the stairs creak, then saw Valerie coming toward me. I was debating whether to drop the shotgun and draw my pistol, hoping for a shot at his elbow on the arm he must be holding up to menace her throat. But he was too clever even to give me that opportunity. He was holding her hair, pulling her head back, and the knife and his arm were out of sight behind her. "He's got it in my back now," Valerie said. Her voice was high and scratchy. I could see a thin red line along her throat. He had marked her, letting her feel the sharpness of the knife. "Put the gun down," he said again from behind her.
"What if I say no?"
"Then the next thing that happens is I push this shiv into her." He let that hang before going on, "Not to kill her. I'll hit her in the neck so she'll be a basket case. You want that?" I looked at Val. She had shut her eyes and her lips were moving softly. I knew what I had to do. If she had been a policeman or another Marine in the same situation I would not have surrendered, but she was a trusting woman in a situation she could have avoided by staying at the Legion and leaving me to play copper on my own.
"All right. You win." I pointed the gun at the floor and worked the action, spilling out the shells on the floor. "There." I tossed it aside and Elliot jumped past me to grab it, then grovel for the shells, stuffing them back into the magazine.
"One's enough. Cock it and hold it on him." The man had straightened up now behind Valerie. He was dark, with an unkempt beard, but his clothes were expensive. I judged him to be five-eleven, two hundred pounds, and he looked mean. He pushed Valerie to one side and she sprawled away from him onto the couch. Then he flipped his knife, a neat little motion that made it circle once and thunk into the panel wall.
Elliot was holding the gun on me, aiming at my stomach. The other man came forward, staring at me as if I were in a zoo. He stayed clear of the gun. I had no chance to swing him in front of it and throw him at Elliot. I kept my arms by my side. "The kid's back with her parents," I told him. "It's all over."
He snorted. "All over. Hell, it ain't hardly started yet." I studied him, trying to make out the face to compare it with the photographs of terrorists and most-wanteds that the R.C.M.P. put out. I couldn't recognize him. I could see that he had a slabby usefulness to his build. He had been a manual worker at one time. There were tiny black pits on his face. I figured he had worked in the coal mines but I couldn't pick out any regional accent—not Nova Scotia nor Alberta nor any of the Yankee states.
He reached out to the kid. "Keep the gun on him, Elliot, but bring it here." Elliot handed it over, never letting the muzzle waver. I had no chance to move. When the older one had the gun he said, "Put your hands on your head, Bennett."
I did it, slowly, wondering why he was using my name. He might have learned it in a briefing before all this began, but in a normal situation like this he would have called me "pig" or "copper." This was almost personal. I wondered why, and how the news could help me.
He told the kid, "Look on his belt, he'll have keys for them cuffs." Elliot took a step toward me but Tom stopped him. "Work from behind him, this is a mean one, this is a real he-eero."
Elliot wasn't smirking now. He came behind me and felt around under my parka until he found the key ring on its chain. I felt the tugging as he uncuffed himself. "Now put them on him. Crank 'em up good, we wouldn't want him getting too comfortable, would we?"
I hoped he would cuff my hands as they lay on top of my head—that would mean I could bring them down in front of me, a tiny advantage, but Tom was too clever for that. "Hands behind you, Bennett," he said.
I lowered them and Elliot snapped the handcuffs over my wrists. I was splaying my fingers, pulling my hands up into my sleeves, but he carefully pulled the sleeves back and clamped the metal on my bare arm tight enough to cut the flesh.
"Done," he said triumphantly. It hurt but I was grateful that he had not cuffed me around something. I would be mobile, at least, handicapped as I was.
"That's good." The dark guy grinned, a humorless parting of his lips, a crinkling of the small amount of skin I could see outside his beard. His eyes stayed cold as the night outside. Now he pushed the gun under his arm as if he was going hunting. I weighed the odds. It would give me an extra second but I needed more. He was eight feet away and I was slowed by the handcuffs, they pulled my shoulders back and dulled my edge. I knew he would step back a pace if I moved and cover me, perhaps even shoot. I had to wait for a better chance. I needed a clear kick, at least.
He reached behind him for a chair and sat down, gun on his knees, looking at me. "You don't remember me, do you?"
"Should I?"
"Yeah. I think you should. You cost me six years of my life, you know that?"
I fed his face through my memory again. How many men have I sent to prison? How many of them looked like this man had, years earlier?
"Six years. In Millhaven, mostly. And that ain't no summer camp, you know that."
Now I remembered. My heart thumped hard. Millhaven, Canada's toughest maximum-security prison. Tom? Tom Burfoot. He grabbed ten years on an extortion charge. Extortion, nothing. It had been a dynamiting group. The year I joined the Toronto Police Department after three with the Marines. They put me undercover, infiltrating a group that had started up to copycat the successes the F.L.Q. had scored in Quebec. They had claimed they were revolutionaries, but that story was a scam. They were booked for straight violence, bombing restaurants and movie houses to collect money for their cause. None of the money was recovered. Tom had spent most of it on vacations and on betting at the track. They had been very skillful. Their bombs were dirty, filled with scrap metal and soaked in oil to tattoo survivors forever with black scars. Fortunately only one of the bombs had been set while people were in the restaurant. Only one man had been wounded seriously, the owner. He lived his last few years in a wheelchair, fewer years than this man had spent inside.
"Yes, I remember you."
"Ever been in Millhaven?" He asked it casually. I shook my head. The longer he talked, the looser he would be, the more chance I might have
to rush him.
"Yeah. It's where they put the bad-asses, all of them. There's a bunch of bikers in there. They hang together, run the drugs, hand out the punks."
There was nothing to say. He went on, rambling. "Hell of a place. Looks like a furniture factory from outside. Inside, it was the worst place in the world." He looked over at Elliot and grinned the same cold grin. "You would've dug it, Elliot. Five, ten guys takin' turns."
Elliot lowered his eyes and said nothing. Tom turned back to me. "I was lucky. I guess I looked mean, a little ugly even. Nobody wanted me real bad." He cleared his throat and spat on the carpet. "An' if you didn't go for that stuff, nothin'. No tail for six stinkin' years." His anger was building. "No women. So when I got out I had me some catchin' up to do."
I glanced at Elliot. He was flushing. I guessed that he and Tom were lovers. Or that was his reading. To Tom, Elliot was just another object for casual sex, a vehicle for the tastes he had built up during his six years, tastes he still didn't want to talk about. I fed him a question.
"How come you killed a good thing like that Katie? Way I hear it she was crazy for you."
He snapped alert. "Who said I killed Katie? That wasn't me. That was Nighswander."
"Yeah, well, the room was in his name, I know that."
He grinned again. "Cool, eh? I bring the broad up here an' she books the room using his name, like I told her."
"And he killed her for that?"
He spat again. "No. He killed her for me. He was jealous of her. He figured I wouldn't want him no more once I got hold of her."
"You kick with either foot?"
He snorted. "After six years in Millhaven you take what's there. Men, women, I don't care." He said it proudly, the vicious, biker's pride in shocking normal sensibilities. He didn't know that my capacity for being shocked was long since overloaded and burned out.
