by Giles Blunt
“Not only are you taking sides with a whore against your so-called right-hand man, you fail to notice that this poor girl got a face would stop a Mack truck. She’s gotta be downright grateful anyone would want to touch her. When the hell else is anyone not afflicted with outright insanity gonna lay a hand on her? I mean, look at her.”
Back in the woods, Nikki had kicked him and punched him and finally, when he wouldn’t stop, bit him. That made him let go and she got away from him. What she couldn’t figure out was, why did his words hurt so much? She pressed her chin to her chest and would not cry, but she couldn’t speak either.
Papa’s tone changed entirely. “How are your new boots, Nikki?”
Nikki had nothing to say to that.
“I noticed you favouring your right leg. Are they pinching?”
“A little.” She kept her chin pressed down, but she had to keep sniffing back tears. They all knew she was crying anyway.
“Wait here,” Papa said. “Jack, I’ve finished now, but please, all of you, just indulge me.” He left the table and went into the kitchen and clattered around in the cupboards, one after another, looking for something. Jack sat back down, and Lemur just watched with a look on his face like WTF.
Papa filled a huge metal mixing bowl with hot water and brought it back to the table and set it down. He got Nikki to turn her chair sideways to the table and he knelt in front of her. She wasn’t wearing any shoes, just thick red socks. Papa took hold of one of her cuffs and rolled it up, slowly, with concentration, nearly to her knee. Then he did the same with her other cuff. He rolled off one sock. Then the other. Normally Nikki would have said WTF like Lemur was obviously thinking, but there was some kind of major pressure in her chest and she mistrusted her ability to say a single word.
Papa took her left foot in his hands. They were cool and dry and felt like a doctor’s, but more tender. He examined her foot this way and that, changing his grip. It tickled but felt good too. No one had ever handled her feet before, not that she could remember.
“Left one looks okay,” he said, and set it down gently before taking up her right foot. “Little tender there, I bet, huh?” He gripped her ankle where it was sore and she nodded. “And maybe here a little too?” The fat part by her big toe. She nodded again.
Papa stood up and got the bowl of hot water and set it down in front of her. He went over to the bathroom and got some soap and a big fat red towel. He put the towel on her lap and she could smell the Downy on it, a smell she loved. He knelt in front of her again and took her left foot in his hands. Sudden heat of the water as he placed her foot in the bowl. Then the right one.
Hearing her intake of breath, he said, “Too hot?”
Nikki shook her head.
Papa took a red face cloth and soaped it up. Strong scents of lemon and lavender wafting up between her knees. He washed her left foot, the sole, the arch, the ankle, in between the toes. A sexual tingle up the inside of her leg. When the foot was soapy enough, he gripped it with both hands and rubbed the sole with his thumbs, warm swirling circles that made her sleepy even while they tickled. He bent her toes back and rubbed each one, giving each a gentle tug.
Nikki fixed her eyes on the top of his head, the short hair much flecked with grey. She watched his capable hands that handled her feet with such tender firmness. She felt Lemur and Jack staring, but she didn’t want to see their faces. Neither said a word. Papa took her feet from the water, first the left, then the right, and dried them and rubbed them with some kind of cream that felt slippery and cool, and then he patted them with the towel.
“Feel better?” His eyes, deep blue, looking up at her.
She nodded and tried to say yes, but nothing came out.
Papa raised her left foot and cocked his head to plant a kiss on her instep. The pressure of his lips just so, then gone. He did the same with her right foot, holding the kiss just a moment longer.
23
NINE P.M., AND DELORME WAS IN THE last place she wanted to be, parked in an unmarked car in the darkest spot of an outdoor parking lot. She had spent the afternoon re-interviewing the two victims of the ATM mugger. They were both young, both women, and Delorme patiently coaxed every possible detail out of them. But in the end it had only served to upset them and she had come away with nothing new. From her dark corner of the parking lot she had a good view of the ATM across the street. It was in an area that used to be well lit, but the new building going up next to it now blocked the street light.
She and Chouinard had discussed at length which ATM would be most likely to be struck next. There weren’t all that many in Algonquin Bay, but even so, the police had nowhere near the resources to stake out every one. The two easiest targets had already been hit. The first was in a tiny strip mall at the top of Roxwell Street, a quiet area that made for a pretty soft target. The second had been more brazen, but also made tactical sense. It was downtown, but at the back of a bank rather than the front, beside an alley that ran the length of that particular block, which was where the robber had waited and where he had fled.
The security videos revealed nothing. He was too smart to set foot inside. He came up behind each of his victims as they stepped away from the machines, shoved a gun into their ribs and demanded money. Over in a matter of seconds. Young man, eighteen to twenty-five, they thought. Dark pants, dark hooded coat. The hood had been up, and he also wore a wool cap low on his forehead and a scarf over nose and mouth. No one would be able to identify him in a lineup.
Of the ATMs that remained, this location, central but dark, made the most sense. There was very little traffic around this corner after eight o’clock, which was why Delorme was sitting in an unmarked car with the snowflakes twirling slowly to the pavement around her. Of course, she had pointed out to Chouinard, the mugger could just as easily decide to target the first ATM again; he might figure no one would expect that. That’s true, Chouinard agreed. He could.
She shifted her position on the car seat. She was in the back because nobody notices the rear seat of a parked car. A backup unit was tucked discreetly in a driveway nearby. Cardinal and the others were chasing down one of the biggest murder cases ever to hit the province, and here she was stuck trying to trap some dork robbing ATMs. She knew it was important—people have to be able to go about their business without being mugged—but there wasn’t going to be any glory in catching this guy.
Only four customers had used the ATM in the entire two hours Delorme had been watching, and there was no sign of trouble, no sign of anybody else watching. She made a note every time someone went by: 9:14 lady walking dachshund wearing tartan coat; 9:36 juvenile about sixteen, skates slung over his hockey stick, hockey stick on shoulder like a rifle; 9:43 Stuart Cort (a homeless alcoholic well known to police) lurches by, clutching a Subway sandwich bag.
Algonquin Bay police service, she said. Be all you can be.
The radio squawked and she had to reach around the front seat to get it. “Get your ass up to Roxwell and Clement,” the duty sergeant told her. “He hit the first one again.”
I knew it, I knew it, I knew it, Delorme said as she got into the front, started up and headed for the other side of town. She also employed several French Canadian curse words that she usually considered beneath her dignity. She was at the scene in under three minutes. A couple of cruisers were already there, and the whole front parking lot was taped off. She spoke to a female constable who directed her to one of the squad cars.
A woman was sitting in the back. Her name was Stella McQuaig, and she was in not too bad shape, considering, although there was a tremor in her voice as she told Delorme what had happened. The other two victims had been hysterical by comparison. Her description was no more useful than anybody else’s: young man, dark clothes, hood and scarf. She had seen the hood and scarf reflected in her car window.
“Do you think you could show me exactly how it happened?” Delorme said.
“You mean go over there with you?”
“You’re safe now.”
The woman looked from Delorme to the scene outside and back to Delorme. “All right. I mean, I guess. If you think it would help.”
Delorme led her back to the ATM, a free-standing machine outside a convenience store, and Ms. McQuaig showed her how she had put the money into her wallet and headed back toward her car. “He came out of nowhere, just as I was about to get into my car.”
“Did he come from a car? From the street? He must have been waiting somewhere.”
“I didn’t see where he came from,” the woman said, her voice edging up the panic scale. “There were no cars other than mine.”
“What about the phone booth?” Delorme pointed to a phone booth at the edge of the mall’s parking lot.
“Could have been. I don’t know. Like I say, I didn’t see anything. Then, just as I was getting into my car, I heard footsteps—fast steps—and before I could turn, I felt the gun in my ribs. Oh, God …”
“It’s all right. You’re doing great,” Delorme said. “You saw his reflection in your car window?”
“Just his hood and scarf. I didn’t see his face. Thank God. He probably would have killed me.”
“You heard steps. From which direction?”
“That way.” She pointed toward Clement Street. Delorme looked at the pavement. The parking lot had been well ploughed. No footprints.
“Then what happened?”
“He told me to hand it over and I did. I just handed him my wallet and he took off.”
“And you didn’t look at him then?”
“No. I didn’t want to see his face. Can I go now? I think I’m having a delayed reaction.” She covered her mouth with a mittened hand.
“Did he take off the same way he came?”
Still with one hand covering her mouth, she pointed in the other direction.
“Up Roxwell?”
She lowered the mitten. “That way. Back toward the buildings, but toward that way.” She was pointing beyond the ATM, toward the far end of the strip mall.
Delorme thanked her and walked her back to the cruiser, then she headed back past the ATM. They had set the perimeter too narrow. She ducked under the tape and stood on the other side. To her left was the edge of the parking lot, a high hedge and, beyond it, Roxwell Street. To her right was a small gap between an adjacent house and the end of the mall.
Light from the street and the parking lot didn’t reach back here, and Delorme called across the lot, “Hey, Benson, lend me your flashlight.” Benson brought it over and she shone it down the alley. She had gone barely ten feet when she found the wallet. She picked it up and flipped it open. The driver’s licence showed an unflattering picture of Stella McQuaig. No money. Delorme put it in her pocket and shone the light down the alley again.
Beyond a row of recycling bins, she could see the legs of a homeless man.
“Police,” Delorme said. “I need to ask you some questions.”
The man didn’t move.
She went up and tapped his foot with her boot. His clothes were too good for a homeless person, and he was wearing a hood. Delorme stepped back and trained her Beretta on him. He didn’t move, and his stillness was not the stillness of the living. Delorme bent down, and in the beam of her flashlight the small black hole in his forehead glistened. His eyes were only half closed, the crooked track of a tear straying down one cheek. The lips were slightly drawn back, as if he had been interrupted in the middle of speech, exposing a sizable gap in his front teeth. When Cardinal arrived, Delorme brought him up to speed. “No wallet, no ID, but we found the ten fresh twenties he’d just taken from the victim. Also a nine-mil Browning Hi-Power with at least one good thumbprint. Clothing labels are Gap, Guess?, Hilfiger. Coroner’s been and gone.”
Cardinal went over and spoke to Collingwood and Arsenault, who were taking prints from the body. A few minutes later the wagon arrived and the removal guys loaded it in back for the trip to the Forensic Centre in Toronto.
“So what do you suppose went down?” Delorme said to Cardinal. “A vigilante?”
“How would a vigilante know the kid was going to hit this particular ATM again? We didn’t.”
“We certainly thought it was possible. Maybe it was a chance thing.”
“Pretty slim chance.”
They left Ident in charge of the scene and drove back to the station. In the silence of the deserted meeting room, Cardinal slotted the security video into the player and sat next to Delorme to watch it. Grainy, dark in some frames, washed out in others. Stella McQuaig comes up to the ATM, makes her withdrawal, puts the bills in her wallet and turns to leave. No robber. No killer. Not so much as a shadow.
“Maybe it was a freak of timing. A good-Samaritan thing,” Delorme said. Her voice sounded loud in the quiet of the empty room. “Happens to be going by and sees a woman in trouble, chases the kid into the alley. Kid pulls the gun and boom—the guy drops him first.”
“But your witness didn’t see anybody else. Didn’t hear anybody else.”
“You’re right.” Delorme picked up the remote, pressed a button, and the monitor went dark. “Also, the way he was shot in the face, it looks more like he was stopped head-on. Like the person was coming the other way down the alley. Or waiting for him.”
The fluorescent lights went out and Delorme and Cardinal both yelled out, “Hey!” The lights came back on and someone down the hall yelled back, “Sorry!”
“If the killer was waiting for him,” Cardinal said, “that would seem to indicate someone who works with him. Maybe they had a falling-out.”
“Except none of the victims has mentioned an accomplice, and there’s no other evidence of one. It would help if we had some idea who the kid was. We don’t even know if he was local. Pretty hard to make any sense of it. What? Why are you looking like that?”
“Nothing,” Cardinal said. “I was just remembering what the Russian lady said—about not having to understand people.”
“That Russian lady,” Delorme said, “has Sparky Noone’s problem.”
24
FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HER YOUNG LIFE, Nikki was experiencing silence. This brand new house out in the Canadian woods didn’t creak or rattle like older houses. And no cars, no trucks, no boats, no trains or planes going by. Almost no wildlife. The other night a squirrel or something had scrabbled across the roof of her bedroom and woken her up wide-eyed and scared. She liked the quiet during the day, but at night it put her on edge. Every now and then the furnace would make a muffled whump, then a mild hiss from the air vent, then nothing. How could you relax when you could hear every little thing—the scratch of your fingernail on the pillow, a strand of hair falling across your forehead?
And the darkness. She had never known what darkness was before now. When she turned off the light in her bedroom, it was as if she had gone blind. She wanted one of those little lights you stick in a socket, but she didn’t want to ask Papa and sound like too much of a wuss. Tonight at least there was a moon, bright enough to cast shadows. She held a hand straight up and turned it, bone white in the air above the bed, and admired the shadow it cast—elegant and slim, the arm of a ballerina, the neck of a swan.
She sat up cross-legged and bunched the pillows behind her back. Smells of lavender and lemon wafted up from her feet. She held each one and rubbed with her thumbs, the soles softer and smoother than usual. Papa’s washing them had thrummed a chord deep in her chest, as if there was an instrument inside her—not harp, not organ, no instrument she had ever heard—that had been yearning to be played since the day she was born.
She picked up her watch and tilted it in the moonlight. Two a.m. She got off the bed and stood before the mirror, backed away from it until she was lit by the moon. Her silly pyjamas, blue and white striped and utterly sexless. The first gift Papa had given her, telling her how modesty was the most underrated virtue in the world, the one thing maybe the Muslims could teach us something about, whatever that meant. The pyjamas had felt stupid and c
lumsy and ugly at first—Nikki had been sleeping naked as long as she could remember—but she had come to love them. There was something consoling about dressing for bed, as if you were going somewhere special, somewhere private, someplace no one would bother you.
She lifted up the striped top, gathering the material with both hands. So cool and clean, the metallic glow of moonlight on her skin, the dime-sized spot of her navel. She pulled the bottoms down a little, exposing the ridge of her hips. I’m hot, she said. I’m a hottie. The ridges and planes of her face, alternately glowing and shadowed, made her look aloof, ethereal—alluring, that aching word she came across so often in the vampire novels that were her only reading. The night made her features regular and even, her eyes deep and black.
She went to the door and opened it and listened. Silence. A glow beneath the door of Papa’s room. The feel of carpet under her bare feet as she covered the short distance to the door. She raised a hand and held it an inch from the wood. For some reason it was a moment like on the diving board at the juvenile centre, knowing it wouldn’t hurt but afraid anyway.
She tapped on the door with her fingertips.
Silence.
Nikki raised her fingers to tap again, when Papa’s voice, no louder than conversational level, said to come in.
She opened the door a little and stuck her head in. Papa looked at her over the paperback he was reading, a crescent moon in flames on the cover.
“What is it, Nikki? You should be asleep.”
“I need to be with you for a little while.”
“You do? Why? What’s up?”
Nikki closed the door and crossed the room and got on the bed beside him. She curled up and laid an arm across his belly and hugged him, pressing her forehead into his ribs.
He didn’t say anything. He adjusted his elbows, but he was still holding the book up over his chest.
Nikki sent her hand straying up over his chest and belly and down between his legs. She felt the soft outline of his penis beneath her palm and rubbed it.
