Whiskey Creek

by Dave Hugelschaffer

  Shrink wrapper. Chocolate. Boxes of chocolate.

  I open the cupboard and pull out several of the big gift-type boxes of chocolates. Two of them look brand new, covered in plastic wrap. One has been opened — or has yet to be wrapped. Perhaps the doctor is smuggling drugs. I open the unwrapped box. It’s half-filled with big oval-shaped chocolates, with a larger one in the centre of the box. Maybe the guy just really likes chocolate. I pick one out, find a large kitchen knife and cut the chocolate in half, expecting a creamy centre, caramel, maybe cocaine.

  What’s inside is hard and leathery. Blackish-green fluid seeps out.

  I take another and peel off the chocolate coating. It looks like the pig galls I found in Rufus Hallendry’s garage, but why would the doctor be coating pig galls with chocolate? I think of the dead bear I found near Hallendry’s cabin and realize these aren’t pig galls — these are bear galls, illegal and highly prized in Korea and China. The doctor is smuggling them in as chocolate treats. I pick out the chocolate in the centre of the box, larger and shaped differently, chip off the chocolate coating. There were wires for drying something in Cork’s garage as well, which I assumed were for beaver castors, or fish, or something legitimate like that. Perhaps they were both selling bear galls to the doctor. The coating on this one flakes off easier, revealing pink mottled skin with short wiry black and grey hairs. There are stitches on one side, like a baseball, holding together two rough flaps of skin. When I realize what I’m holding the shock causes me to fumble and drop it.

  A scrotum and testicles — probably once attached to Rufus Hallendry.

  I take a step back, disgusted as I look down at the thing on the floor.

  Damn — I have to pick it up again, take this to the RCMP. I pull a sheet of paper towel from a spool under the counter, lean over. The floor creaks and in my peripheral vision something moves. I manage to turn my head in time to see a dark leather shoe coming at me. The kick hits me hard in the ribs, knocking the wind from me as I crash to the floor. I just have time to lift my head and see Dr. Cho turn, lips set in a hard line, before another kick connects with my head. A bright flash and I’m flat on my back. The ceiling seems to drift slowly, like a cloud on a summer day. Specks of light descend and wink out.

  My thoughts drift too, trying to latch on to what happened.

  Suddenly, Cho is above me and I see a needle heading for my neck.

  A jolt of adrenalin and I lunge to the side, feel the needle penetrate into my shoulder, scramble frantically back, crab walking, Cho after me, trying to pin me down with his foot. I grab at the foot, miss, get the side of his shoe hard against my cheek, push back and slide under the kitchen table. Under here, I have protection from above and can kick at anything within range.

  Chest heaving, I watch Cho’s legs, wait for the next attack.

  It doesn’t come. I realize the needle is sticking from my shoulder and yank it out. The syringe is nearly empty. He’s waiting for whatever he gave me to work. Already, I feel faint. I trace my hand along my leg until I find the little radio the RCMP gave me in its pouch, feel through the thin leather for the buttons. Transmit or panic — any will do. Numbness in my shoulder is spreading into the muscle of my chest and back. I slide over enough I can see Cho. He stands a few yards back, tensed and waiting.

  “Why did you kill Rodney Whiteknife? Was it over bear galls?”

  “He was just a tool,” says Cho. “A dull one.”

  “But why? Bear galls aren’t hardly worth anything here.”

  “You westerners know nothing of face,” he says vehemently.

  My voice is beginning to slur and I’m starting to feel lightheaded. If I’m going to make it out of here, it’s going to have to be on my own, and soon. I release my grip on the radio, slide my hands beneath me and crouch under the table, as though I might sprint out. Cho watches, wary. I’m drugged, the clock running out, and beat-up. Cho clearly is a martial artist and knows that as soon as I show myself from under the table, he has me. Or he can wait, and he has me. I’m not prepared to let him have me either way and I rise suddenly, taking the table with me. Tilting it forward, I grab the supports and charge at him, use the full expanse of the table top like the front of a bulldozer. He wasn’t expecting this, tries a kick that deflects up and sideways over the face of the table, knocking him off his feet. I stagger, dark splotches in my vision, lose my balance and fall forward, pinning Cho beneath the overturned table, with me on top. As he struggles to rise, the table begins to break, the seam between the two sides of the top separating over his back. If he manages to break free, I’m done for. On the counter, just above me and to the right, I see the handle of the knife I used to cut open the chocolate, grab for it and swing the knife around. As Cho gets his legs under him, I thrust the knife as hard as I can through the crack in the two halves of the tabletop, hear a scream.

  The table collapses beneath me, falling into a dark silent pit.

  In the blackness I hear only my breathing until that too is gone.

  14

  •

  MY EYES BLINK open to a blazing overhead light, eclipsed suddenly by a white coat. Dr. Cho has escaped from beneath the table and is closing in to finish me off. I thrash blindly to push him away, find I’m tangled by cords.

  “Whoa — easy there,” calls a strange voice.

  It takes a moment for me to realize that I’m not in danger. A nurse and an older man in a white coat — a different doctor — have retreated a few steps from my bed. Weak, shivering and confused, I push myself up on my elbows and look around.

  “You’re okay now,” the doctor says. He has grey hair and kind eyes.

  “What happened? Where am I?”

  “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Porter Cassel.”

  “Do you know what day it is?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s been a bit of a blur lately.”

  The doctor smiles, seems pleased with my response. “You’re in the hospital in Fort McMurray. I don’t have all the details, but I can tell you that someone injected you with a powerful anaesthetic. Your blood pressure was dangerously low when they brought you in. After we stabilized you we brought you back slowly. You’re going to feel a bit strange for a few hours. You may experience some confusion, disorientation, or difficulty thinking clearly. This is normal. It will take some time before the effects of the anaesthesia are completely gone.”

  “Anaesthetic?” I say, puzzled,

  “You were fortunate that it was given in the muscle.”

  The needle I pulled from my shoulder. “What happened to the guy that put it there?”

  “I can’t answer that one for you,” says the doctor, checking my pulse. “I believe there’s a member of the local constabulary waiting to speak with you, though. Perhaps he knows.”

  The doctor confers with the nurse, then turns back to me.

  “You are going to be just fine, Mr. Cassel. You’ve got a lot of general trauma to the head and torso, including a cracked rib, so I advise plenty of rest. We’ll give you a pain killer when we let you out of here.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Tomorrow perhaps, but we’ll see.”

  “No — I’ve got to get out of here right away.”

  The doctor chuckles. “I admire your spirit, but have concerns about your body.”

  “You don’t understand,” I say, thinking about Collette Whiteknife.

  “Patience, Mr. Cassel,” the doctor says, laying a veined hand on my arm. “You’re not going to be back to your old self for at least twenty-four hours. Your body is recovering from a major drop. You can’t operate a motor vehicle. Your muscle coordination and control are going to be impaired. And you shouldn’t be making any decisions for the next day or so, so you might as well lay back and get some rest, enjoy the hospitality of our lovely nurses.”

  The nurse, an older lady, beams at me.

  I settle back, troubled and restless. The nurse takes my blood pressure; still a bit low, then
I’m on my own, listening to the bleep and sigh of the hospital ward. I’m woozy and close my eyes. I don’t get to rest long.

  “Cassel,” says Waldren, coming into the room. “Good thing we gave you that radio.”

  “What are you doing down here?”

  “I escorted you on the medivac. We’ve got a few questions.”

  “Me first,” I say, struggling to sit up.

  “Let me get that.” He presses a button on the side of the bed. “Better?”

  “Yeah. So what happened to the doctor?”

  “He’s down the hall, with a punctured lung. You got him good.”

  I glance at the door and Waldren chuckles. “Don’t worry, he’s under guard.”

  “He’d better be — he’s got a mean snap kick. You found the bear galls?”

  Waldren nods. “And something else.”

  I shudder, remembering the hideous lump in my hand. “What’s your theory?”

  Waldren sighs, puffing out his cheeks. “We’re still working on it. Forensics are running DNA from the testicles, which they can compare to a sample they took from Hallendry’s crispy critter. Hell of a thing,” he says, shaking his head, “cutting off a man’s balls.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “It’s a pretty strong statement, emasculating a person like that.”

  “You still think it was about the rape?”

  Waldren places a hand on the bed rail. “I don’t know, Porter, but the bear galls do complicate things. We thought we had a pretty clear case up until now. Older man in the company of two younger females gets drunk, rapes one or both of them. Relatives find out and go medieval on him, then get stupid when the law starts to sniff around.”

  “But the doctor isn’t a relative.”

  “Exactly,” says Waldren. “What reason does he have to be involved?”

  “Were some of those bear galls fake?”

  Waldren frowns. “We haven’t checked. What are you thinking?”

  “Hallendry’s brother Charles told me he was sending pig guts up for his brother to make lure for trapping. What if Rufus Hallendry was selling bear galls to the doctor and decided to slip in a few pig galls? How would the customers react if they noticed the slip?”

  “They wouldn’t be happy,” says Waldren. “It’d be like buying cocaine and finding out someone sold you baby powder. The supplier would lose credibility.”

  “He would lose face.”

  “You may be onto something. Maintaining face is a big thing in business over there. Right up there with loyalty. But tell me something — what tipped you off?”

  “Magic tea.”

  “What?”

  I explain the tea the doctor gave me, the effect it had, and finding a similar wrapper in the trash at Rodney Whiteknife’s house. My blood test and the call from the hospital.

  Waldren’s expression goes from excited to sombre.

  “This explains the bag of beans we found in Cho’s residence.”

  “Magic beans?”

  “Yeah, we sold a cow for them. No, they were castor beans.”

  “Doesn’t sound nearly as interesting.”

  “They’re magic if you want to kill someone. Castor beans are used to create an extract called ricin. Six thousand times more toxic than cyanide. Depending how it’s ingested it can be pretty quick and it’s nearly impossible to detect in an autopsy unless you’re looking for it.”

  “What if he gave it to Rodney Whiteknife?”

  “Might look like a heart attack.”

  We’re both silent for a moment.

  “So let me get this straight,” I say. “Dr. Cho was buying bear galls from Rufus Hallendry and Hallendry slipped in a few pig galls to top up an order. The doctor looks bad and has to save face, so he hires Rodney Whiteknife to kill and castrate Hallendry and burn down his cabin so it looks like an accident. Then he ships the poor bastard’s nuts to his customer to show he’s taken care of the problem. Finally, to limit exposure, he poisons Whiteknife.”

  “Holds together so far,” says Waldren.

  “But why hire Whiteknife? The doctor could have bumped off Hallendry himself.”

  “True,” says Waldren, drumming his fingers on the bed rail. “Killing Hallendry would have been easy for the doctor, but the other thing would have been messy. There would have been a body to explain, that was missing a few parts. Might have seemed better to get a local to do the dirty work, incriminate himself, then quietly take him out.”

  “No mess. No connection to him.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And none of this is related to Simon Cardinal?”

  “Not that we’re aware of,” says Waldren.

  Something else occurs to me. “What about the rape?”

  “If there was a rape. Makes a good cover story.”

  “There’s only one person who knows the truth about that,” I say.

  “Yeah,” says Waldren. “And she’s still missing.”

  WALDREN GRILLS ME for more detail for the next hour, then leaves to brief the rest of the team in Fort Chipewyan. I try to rest, but can’t stop thinking about everything that’s happened. I try to get in to see Dr. Cho, but the door is blocked by a rather large Mountie, who won’t so much as let me peek in the narrow slotted window on the door. I wander to a common room, flop onto a sagging couch and brood about Collette Whiteknife, run through every possible place she could be, and what has been done to look for her.

  I find no answers. Every place she might be alive has been searched.

  A salesman on the television tries to sell me laundry detergent.

  A frail old man totters into the room, towing an IV stand.

  My eyes come to rest on a large faded wall map of the area from Fort McMurray north to the territorial border. Lake Athabasca is a long wide tract of blue. I peel myself off the couch, stand in front of the map, visually tracing the shoreline and river where we’ve searched. Currents would move a floating body inevitably downstream, to be caught on the weir. We’ve looked there. Repeatedly. My gaze wanders northeast along the lake into Saskatchewan. Uranium City. Fon du Lac. Then back in Alberta, where a small speck in the centre of the lake catches my attention. A tiny island surrounded by an ocean of water.

  Egg Island Ecological Reserve.

  I frown, stare at the little speck. The label dwarfs the island.

  Something about that island bothers me.

  Cork, at the grocery store, getting into my face when I asked about Collette.

  She’s having fun without you.

  Then having the audacity to toss something into my cart.

  You should have some eggs. They’re good for you.

  “Damn,” I curse, startling the old fellow on the couch.

  He peers at me, squinting. “You all right, son?”

  “I need to charter a plane.”

  I KNOW THE nurse in charge will give me a hard time about leaving without clearance from the doctor, so I simply decide to call a cab, change out of my backless hospital gown and into my grubby clothes, and walk out. I can explain later. On second thought, I find a pen and write a quick note on a napkin, which I leave on my bed. Then I walk out. Or try.

  “Mr. Cassel —”

  I ignore the nurse calling out to me from the nursing station.

  “Mr. Cassel —”

  I hear her running to catch up and I stop.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Cassel, but where are you going?”

  She’s a young attractive redhead who needs a bit of sun. I shake her hand.

  “Thank you so much for your generous hospitality, but I have to go.”

  She pulls away her hand. “Oh — no, you can’t go without the doctor’s release.”

  “Actually, I can,” I say. “But I promise not to operate any equipment for the next twenty-four hours, or to make any major decisions. Well, any more major decisions.”

  She’s not impressed. “Even if you do go, there’s paperwork.”

  “No time,” I s
ay, and walk briskly away. I hear her take a few tentative steps after me before turning back to the nursing station. No one else tries to stop me and I climb into a waiting cab. A minute later, the hospital is behind me and I’m on my way to find Collette.

  I have the cab take me into the river valley, past the old downtown core, to what is locally known as the Snye. It’s an old oxbow of the Athabasca River which flows through Fort McMurray and serves as the runway for a float plane company. The cab drops me in front of a small faded white building. There’s no one inside. I walk down to the floating dock, find a pair of legs sticking out the open door of a float plane.

  “You open for business?”

  The owner of the boots, a young stubble-cheeked pilot, backs out of the plane, steps down onto the float. “Hello there,” he says, extending a hand, which I shake.

  “I need to fly to Egg Island.”

  “You can’t,” he says. “It’s an ecological reserve, closed to the public.”

  “That’s why I need to go there.”

  “Well, we could fly over it, so long as we don’t go too low.”

  I hire him on the spot, providing we can leave immediately. He checks his watch, guesses he has time for a quick flight. When the sticky point of payment comes up, I mention that I’m with the Forest Service. “I don’t know,” he says, lifting his ball cap and scratching his head.

  “I usually get a call and an aircraft request, with the codes and all that.”

  “Do you take Visa?”

  “Yeah, that’ll do.”

  I’m anxious to get into the air, but we go to the office, where he takes my credit card, runs it through an old manual imprint machine, has me sign something. If I’m wrong, this will cost me everything I have left in the bank. If I’m right, I might just save Collette. It’s a chance I’m willing to take and we return to the plane, belt ourselves in.