by Ron Corbett
Yakabuski rolled his neck and said, “Stay here behind your sled. I’ll be right back.”
He fell to the ground and began crawling toward Buckham. The snow was falling so heavily Yakabuski could barely make out the survival school, although as he crawled closer he could see the front doors, wide open, snow blowing through. It had been five minutes since he’d heard gunfire.
“What happened here, Donnie?” he said, reaching Buckham.
“Shit, Yak, did you see any of this?”
“Could see it from the bluff. What happened?”
“I knocked on the door. Guy answers and I tell him there’s a police investigation going on, he needs to come up to the Mattamy. He says sure, turns around, and all of a sudden people are shooting at me.”
Buckham paused a minute. Took some deep breaths of air. Despite the coldness of the day, heavy beads of sweat were rolling down his face.
“You returned fire?”
“Right away. I tried to get the bastard at the door, but he’d already disappeared. I ducked outside and stuck to the walls till I got to the rear, high-tailed it toward the bay, and circled back.”
He may have been a young cop on his first posting after three years of patrol but that part had been smart. Buckham hadn’t panicked and run in a straight line toward the Mattamy. Hadn’t been cut down easy like that. If someone was going to take him out, they were going to need to work at it. A good, tough kid from the Springfield Valley.
“How many do you figure are inside?”
“I’m not sure, Yak. Did you see anyone shooting from the second floor?”
“I was too far away.”
“I don’t know. More than us. And better guns. What the hell is goin’ on?”
Yakabuski turned to look at the young cop, then back at the survival school, the large white-frame building a blur in the falling snow, the hard lines getting lost so the building shimmered and undulated and only the darkness inside gave you any sort of steady reference point. He turned and crawled his way back to the sleds, motioning for Buckham to follow him.
. . .
“If I’m right, in a few minutes people are going to come running out of that building.”
Buckham and the tree-marker stared at the ground where Yakabuski was etching a map in the snow with the flat edge of his mitt. The tree-marker was holding the Sig Sauer P229 Yakabuski had given him.
“You stay right here,” Yakabuski said, looking at the tree-marker. “Donnie, I want you to reposition to the end of the drift. Keep to the ground and no one should see you. Now, if anyone comes out of that building, I suspect they’re going to be shooting at you.” He stared at them. Buckham would be a few years older than the tree-marker. Not many.
“If that happens, you cannot think what your response should be. You cannot wonder why anyone would be doing a thing like that. If anyone comes out of that building firing a gun, you need to return fire.”
He gave them each a long hard look. Then he said it again, using different words, because he wasn’t convinced they’d got it.
“This isn’t what you were expecting today, I know that. But we need to deal with what we’ve been given. You boys will need to return fire. Without hesitating. Can you do that?”
“Yes, Yak, not a problem,” said Buckham.
“Yes,” said the tree-marker, and Yakabuski smiled at the boy.
“Consider yourself deputized, son.”
“Can you actually do that?”
“No. That’s TV bullshit. But if it helps you, yeah, you’ve just been deputized.”
They each chuckled. A curt laugh: just enough to show each other they were men who could laugh on the tough days.
“I’m heading toward the back of this building,” Yakabuski said. You’ll lose sight of me, but I’ll give you a signal for when you should start watching the building.”
“What’s the signal?” asked Buckham.
“You’ll know it.”
Yakabuski took one last look at the building in front of him, imagined how the interior may have looked from the many times he’d been inside lumber-company bunkhouses, how the hallways would have run and the rooms connected. He scanned the second floor, confirming as best he could that there were no shattered windows there, and then he pulled the hood of his parka tight around his head, propped himself on his elbows, and started a slow crab-crawl toward the back of the survival school.
. . .
For most of his crawl, Yakabuski stayed behind a six-foot snowdrift that ran beside the walkway of the survival school, needing only a short run at the end to reach a maintenance shed. He lay beside the shed and stared at the back of the building. The main-floor and second-floor windows. Back and forth. Wondering if there were better odds for one.
He took a minute to run it through his mind — more convenient on the main floor, but better venting perhaps on the second. Better storage on the main, you would have to think, but it didn’t look like anyone had been firing from the second. Eventually, he decided he wouldn’t be able to figure it out. There were too many variables. He would go with the main floor.
He reached into his pockets and took out the six emergency flares he had taken from the cargo bins of the snowmobiles. Using bungee cords he had also taken from the bins, he tied two groups of flares, three to a group. He scooped some snow and began breathing on it, making it softer, moister, until he was able to wad the snow around the flares.
He took one last look at the back of the bunkhouse and calculated the range at thirty feet. Manageable. He wouldn’t need to run toward the bunkhouse to get a good throw. And he would have two attempts. Hopefully.
He took out his camp lighter and lit the first group of flares, waited a few seconds, his back turned to the building. When the flares were burning well, he stood out from behind the shed and pitched them toward the middle of the five lower-floor windows.
He ducked behind the shed. No gunfire. No one had been stationed at the rear windows. Or someone was stationed but not doing his job. Good news either way.
He heard the window break. Glass cascading for a few seconds. A high-pitched jingle-jangle sound he could just make out above the wind.
Yakabuski started counting the seconds — one, two, three, four, five, six — then he stopped. Threw the second bundle away.
Main floor it had been.
. . .
The explosion was loud and cacophonous and so bright it seemed to kick a hole through the low-hanging clouds. But it wasn’t the noise and sudden fire that startled the tree-marker and Buckham so much as it was the wind that swiftly turned direction and came at them, knocking them down; a wind turned sharp and ferocious, rushing toward the imploding survival school, punching it down as though it were a crash test dummy house in some old nuclear safety film.
After the winds came flames that shot more than a hundred yards into the sky and stayed there for a long time, until running out of whatever fuel was feeding them, and then collapsing back on themselves, falling as though solid, like a wall tumbling down.
Through all that — the wind, the noise, and the light — the tree-marker and Buckham heard Yakabuski shout, “Pay attention, boys. This is the part I was telling you about.”
Two men came running out the front door. One was running erect, with flames licking the back of his parka. The other was stumbling blindly. He had the gun — a military issue M16 — his finger pressed down on the trigger, laying down a line of fire with tracer bullets, ratio of three-to-one it looked to Yakabuski, who stared at the red flashes and wondered who would do a thing like that. Tracer bullets. In case they were ever under siege. In case they ever had to beat a hasty retreat in the middle of the night with someone giving chase.
Buckham rose from his hiding position and fired his handgun at the man with the gun. Aiming below the waist. But he rushed the shot and missed. The man with the M16 turned to
the sound of Buckham’s gun, a smile coming to his face.
But he never took his finger off the trigger. And as he turned, the man standing next to him flew backwards in the air as though hit by a boom.
The firing stopped. The man with the gun stared at where the second man had been. Buckham took his time on the second shot, his mind racing but a voice inside him telling him to stay calm, that he probably had the jump on a near-blind man in shock at having shot his friend.
Buckham hit him in the right knee and the man pitched forward. Dropped his rifle and grabbed his kneecap. Let out a loud scream that he tried to stifle but couldn’t completely.
At the same time, what was left of the survival school collapsed behind him. Flames shot back into the sky. There was a plume of ash and soot. Then a gurgling sound, or a sucking sound, it was hard to say what it sounded most like, although it reverberated and roiled and seemed half-human, and when it faded away three men stood and walked toward the fire — Yakabuski, Buckham, the tree-marker — recognizing the finality of the sound.
When they got to what was left of the survival school, they stood in a semi-circle, guns in their hands and no one speaking. Noticing for the first time that the fire had turned the falling snow to rain. For a twenty-yard radius. They were standing in a cold rain.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Cambio heard the explosion. A loud rumbling sound that came from nowhere and then was gone. He held the phone close to his ear and spoke only once: “François?”
Even before he hung up, he saw the flaw in what only days ago had seemed a brilliant plan, one that had worked exceedingly well for, what was it now, four years? He and his business partners had often congratulated themselves on how clever they had been. For knowing some things in life are eternal. Some of those, transposable.
You could look upon his career in many ways, but it did not seem an unfair thing to Cambio, or an inaccurate thing, to say the primary source of his great wealth and power, the thing fundamental, was what a man was allowed to do in a desperate village. What desperate people were willing to do.
He forgot who had said it first, on one of his trips up north, sitting in a private dining room in a hotel in Toronto, Papa’s little brother there, Papa himself speaking on a cell from the penitentiary where they had him locked away, talking about whether ships or planes would be best to bring in product from a new lab near Juarez, trying to figure out the supply line. Someone had said, “Why don’t we make the shit up here, in one of our own fucked-up little villages?”
It seemed a silly suggestion. Everyone laughed. An accountant Little Papa brought with him said maybe desperate villages were a “scalable business model,” and everyone laughed some more. A few minutes later, they stopped laughing and started talking.
He couldn’t remember who had suggested Ragged Lake. He didn’t think it was one of Paquette’s boys. They were big city through and through, right down to the black silk socks they wore inside their boots. But someone had known about that village. A near-abandoned village on the Northern Divide, with good rail lines, a floatplane base, not even an operational police service nearby. It had seemed a gift.
But the world’s best hiding place, once discovered, can become the worst. He sees that now. Seclusion tracks back on itself. Like a wounded animal often does. Becomes a thing easily hunted. It was always assumed the cops would never come, or if they did it would be because someone had been arrested, someone had been turned, and they would know. To be discovered because of crimes they had not committed? It was such bad luck that Cambio wondered if that was all it was.
He was in Houston that night. A tall glass building downtown where he kept an office with a bedroom. He stared down at the Buffalo Bayou River, dusk coming on quickly, the water turning a dark molasses colour. Was he being played somehow? If so, Cambio could not see who would be gaining an advantage. Or what the game might be.
For the next few hours, he sat in his office, smoking hashish and looking at the river, thinking random, contradictory thoughts: a sanctuary turned to a prison, black and white, yin and yang, transformation and transmutation, and change speeding up and taking over the world, out-of-control change, which could be either chaos or momentum. Cambio could not decide.
Eventually, he placed a call.
“You need to go to Ragged Lake.”
“All right.”
“Tonight.”
“There is a terrible storm here, my friend. Everything is shut down.”
“Are you asking me to repeat myself?”
“No.” A short pause and then the man who had answered said, “It is the complete op?”
“Yes. As we discussed.”
“I do not wish to bring this up right now my friend, but—”
“The money will be wired to your account as soon as we are finished here.”
“Very good.”
“Anything else?”
“No. We kitted up yesterday. We’re good to go.”
“Phone me before you leave Ragged Lake. If François is still alive, I would like to say goodbye.”
Just before the phone went dead, Cambio thought he did indeed hear a storm in the background. A howling, white-static noise that stayed on the phone for several seconds, building and growing louder, even after the dial tone had returned.
. . .
Yakabuski stomped out the fire still flicking on the back of the man cut down by the M16, turned him over using the heel of his boot, and confirmed without needing to bend down that he was dead. The man had no head. Just a charred and bloody ball of flesh trapped inside the hood of his parka, where a head should have been.
The man who had been shooting the M16 was sitting on the porch, screaming and clutching his knee. Yakabuski kicked the gun farther away and knelt to have a look. He stared at the man’s clothes. At the ground around him. Then he said, “It’s just the knee, isn’t it?”
When the man began to nod, Yakabuski punched him, under the chin so his head snapped back, lolled briefly to one side. His body fell backward into the snow.
“What the hell?” yelled Buckham.
“I don’t want to hear him right now, Donnie. He has no other wounds. He’ll live. Nice shot, by the way.”
Yakabuski began to frisk the man. He found a Glock 34 in a front pocket of his parka. He searched the body of the dead man but found no weapons. He picked up the M16 and checked the clip.
“Cuff him to the back of your sled, Donnie, and let’s head back to the Mattamy.”
Buckham looked at the unconscious man, then to his snowmobile, then back at Yakabuski.
“You want me to drag him behind my snowmobile?”
“We’re not carrying him,” said Yakabuski, and he started walking toward his snowmobile. Halfway there, remembering something he had forgotten to say, he turned to yell, “You probably don’t want to be going too fast, Donnie.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The bar in the Mattamy was dark when they entered — a just-before-last-call darkness, although it was only late afternoon. Downey had not bothered to turn on the overhead lights. Or light any of the candles on the tavern tables. He went to start bringing people in from their rooms while Buckham stoked the fire.
Yakabuski sat the biker in the middle of the room, handcuffing his feet to the legs of a chair. He left his hands cuffed. The man had not screamed while being dragged behind the snowmobile. Had not yelled or complained. Indeed, he had yet to say a word.
While people were being brought back to the bar, Yakabuski took off his parka, shook out the snow, draped it over the back of a chair, and walked to the fire. There, he rubbed his hands back and forth to bring some warmth back to them. Although his back was turned, he knew everyone in the bar was staring at him right then. Waiting like patrons in a theatre for the show to begin.
Yakabuski rotated his neck from side to side to work out a kink, gave his han
ds one last rub, turned, and said, “Anyone know this man?”
“He’s from the survival school,” said Holly.
“How do you know that?”
“I’d see him in the bush sometimes. He fishes Lake Simon.”
“That’s right. His name is François,” said the bartender. “He comes in here sometimes with some other guys from the school, when they’re picking up people on the train.” The bartender looked over at the handcuffed man, sneered, and said, “What the fuck happened out there?”
“Well, there was one big mother gunfight,” said Yakabuski, “then there was one big mother explosion. Would you say that about covers it, Donnie, what happened out there?”
“That about covers it, Yak.”
“And, oh yeah — dead people. We got more dead people.”
There was no reaction. None that Yakabuski could see anyway. No sharp intake of breath. No surprise. The room right then was filled with a languor so thick and warm it was almost sensual. Yakabuski had never been in an opium den, but he had read about them and thought they might have much in common with a cabin in the bush when a winter storm was moving in, a fire going in the airtight, and people hunkering down for a few days. He thought there would be similarities.
“I don’t know how many dead people we got,” he continued. “I suspect we’ll find a few more when we sift through what’s left of that old bunkhouse. Looks like you’re going to need some new drinking buddies, François.”
The man had long, greasy hair that must have been tucked into a toque most of the winter, because it was tangled and misshapen, pushed into geometrical shapes. He had a scraggly black beard that hid a lower cleft of pimples. His eyes hadn’t moved off Yakabuski’s face since the detective had started talking.
“What do you say, François? Want to tell us why you and your buddy would be shooting at the local law enforcement just for knocking on your front door?”
