Hazel put the key in the ignition. Greene was watching her blankly. “Now give me your radio,” she said to Commander LeJeune. The woman appeared to be in shock, her mouth held in a small moue. She was lost in thought. “Radio,” Hazel repeated, and LeJeune passed it to her silently. She put the car in drive. She raised the radio to her mouth and depressed the call button. “Bellecourt, come in.”
“Ah, Hazel Micallef,” came Bellecourt’s voice. “Good to be on the same page at last.”
“If you harm him, you die.”
“Dammit,” said Bellecourt. “We should have spoken before now.”
“I want to talk to him.”
“He’s unreachable right now.”
Hazel pushed the gas pedal down. This woman was going to die in pain. “Well, I guess I’ve played my part excellently, haven’t I?”
“You did what any good detective would have done, Hazel. Don’t get down on yourself now.”
“Where’s your fiancé?
“Taking care of business.”
“I gather you know you’re already surrounded by police?”
“Of course. I’ve had access to your frequencies since you came up and visited us last week. I know everything. Where are you right now, Hazel?”
“I’m coming to see you.”
“Company! How nice.”
“Will you come out and meet with me?”
“I’d love to, but I have pressing business. Can I propose we postpone?”
“I’m on the 26. I’m going over the speed limit.”
“Well, you should know your James Wingate is in a hole below one of these fields. There’s a hole poked in it so he can breathe, but I can stop it up anytime, if need be … are you still there, Detective?”
“I’m here.” She tried to keep the relief out of her voice. Maybe he really was still alive.
“So let’s do this my way. You go back and wait a spell with your colleagues. I’ll call you when you can come and collect your friend. And you might want to tell everyone to use their cellphones from here on in.”
Bellecourt disconnected. Hazel pushed the accelerator to the floor. She got Greene on her cell.
“Where’s LeJeune?”
“We’ve asked her to stick around and ‘aid’ the investigation.”
“Put her on.” LeJeune was on the other end in an instant. “Mr. Sugar. Who is Mr. Sugar?”
“I don’t know a – ”
“It’s not his real name. If Travers is involved with this, then maybe there’s a link through the casino. Find out.”
She didn’t wait for LeJeune’s response. She slowed down to forty for a stop sign.
Where the light was, there were also thin jets of air. It provided the only fresh oxygen they were getting, but it also contributed to the cold, which was wearying. Wingate ran his fingers over the opening of the steel pipe that ran to the surface. The bottom of it was closed over with a steel lattice that appeared to be screwed into place. Not that any of them would be able to climb up the pipe if he could get the lattice removed: the opening was five inches in diameter.
The two girls were holding each other to keep warm. It was hard to imagine that either of these women would ever recover from their trials. Only Kitty had been strong enough to survive. Perhaps Bellecourt and her accomplices deliberately chose women they thought they could break. They’d been wrong with Kitty.
He saw a fluttery movement in the corner of his eye, and it was Cherry reaching out to him. They needed his bodily warmth. Where before he had recoiled from the horror of the fact of her imprisoned body, now he went to her willingly. He found his arms were long enough to enclose them both.
] 31 [
The sound of the television was louder in the back of the house. She would have to pass through the kitchen. She pushed the kitchen’s side door open slightly, the one that led into the dining room and from where she would have a vantage on him.
Through the crack in the kitchen door, she heard a voice – a TV anchor reporting the news. She saw the colours of the television program reflected on Sugar’s eyeglasses. He held a bottle of red wine in his lap, his screwcap wine. Matthieu had taught her how to appreciate wine. They were going to drive through Bordeaux together. That was another of her futures she wasn’t sure would happen now.
She let the door swing closed quietly and then opened it in toward herself so she could slip into the dining room. She quickly tucked herself against the wall to her right and began slowly tracing the wall to the corner, then along the side of the dining room, looking down the long wood table that never got used, and to the other corner where the wall turned to the cut-out between the dining room and the TV room. She held herself tightly up against the edge here and collected herself. She felt in her back pocket for the hunting knife that had paced her run.
It was a good knife. It was a curved, heavy one made entirely out of steel. Four inches closed, and heavy and balanced in her hand. It was spring-loaded, and small enough to hide. The night he’d given it to her, she’d sat in her dirt room weighing it in her palm. It seemed like a thing with a mind of its own. It wanted to kill.
The night she’d gotten out, shift change had come at around eleven as usual. She’d been hearing Gene’s voice outside. Bobby would come in and replace him and he’d be there the rest of the night. Nothing unusual happened down there in the rooms, and whichever guard sat on the couch beside the single heater in the whole space usually fell asleep within minutes. Bobby snored. She waited in her locked cave for the sound that would tell her she could use the tip of the blade in the door handle. There was some shuffling without; she listened to it through her door. Bobby was a big man with a huge, round belly. She knew him to be careless and soft-minded. She could probably convince him to let her out to use the bucket that was in the corner of the dug-out room. But it would be better to take him asleep.
She didn’t have to wait long. Soon, his deep, rumbling snores filled the room. The noise would disguise the sound of the blade working the latch bolt. She pushed it in slowly, but the sharp tip wouldn’t release the latch. The curved edge faced away. There was no handle on the inside to work.
She imagined “Henry” was already back at the Eagle, the name of the smoke shop he said was connected to Sparrow’s. She’d never heard these names and she had no idea if what he was saying was true. But he told her where he’d be waiting for her. In that parking lot, at the back, near the trees. She wanted nothing more than to be on a plane heading over the ocean to home, but the more she went over the details in her mind, the more she realized there were things to be accomplished first. Housekeeping. Bookkeeping.
Cherry had told her that there was a market for their passports. A real passport could bring many thousands of dollars on the black market. But, she told Kitty, what she’d heard was that some of the men who patronized Bochko actually bought the passports as souvenirs. It was less risky for Bochko that way. You didn’t want the passport of a missing woman floating out there in the world. It was better off in someone’s underwear drawer, a fond memory.
Maybe Henry was the sickest one of the lot. Not only did he have the passport already, he was indulging himself in being a part of her further corruption. If Bochko could use Henry to help her escape, then Henry could use Bochko to torture her at a remove. Maybe that was the source of his apparent disgust when she had been brought to him in one of the rooms. He did not want to touch her, but he would be pleased if Bochko did.
The door’s strike plate had been screwed into a flimsy frame. She could feel its wood splintering under the blade. If she could pry the plate out, she’d be able to carve under the hole that had been chiselled out for the latch bolt. It took fifteen more minutes to jimmy the plate loose, and another fifteen to get the tip of the knife under the end of the bolt. She leaned on the door and levered the bolt open and then she was free. She stood silently in the cold, open space. The other two girls had stirred and Star had whispered to her, but Larysa did not answer. She crept over
the dirt floor to the couch where Bobby was sleeping and neatly sliced his jugular open. Her anatomy classes had come in handy after all. A geyser of blood burst from his throat with a sudden gush, and the big man lurched upright, grasping his throat and making a high squealing sound. He lunged off the couch instinctively, reaching for her in the near dark, and she snatched the weapon he kept in his belt from him before he crashed to the floor. The space came alive with sounds: Cherry and Star calling out in Ukrainian and Russian in panicked voices. Larysa did not answer them. She pounded on the outer door with the handle of the knife, knowing that Gene was taking his turn sleeping in one of the real beds upstairs. She didn’t know how the gun she’d taken from Bobby worked. It had a handle like a gun, but the barrel was a square plate made out of plastic and metal. A cartridge of some kind was stuck into the end of it. She’d never seen a gun like it before. There was the sound of rushing treads outside and then a key turning an outer lock. She stood five feet back from the door and kept the gun at arm’s length, her finger on the trigger. The door opened and she flexed her finger. A pair of wires shot out of the end of the gun and suddenly Gene was standing taller. His hands opened and the keys as well as a gun, identical to the one she was holding, dropped to the ground. He fell in a heap on top of them.
“Shut up!” she called out in Russian to the girls in their cubicles, and silence fell. Larysa stood, listening to the dark. No one else was out there.
The spent cartridge had ejected from the mouth of the weapon. A new cartridge had chunked into place. Gene lay on his back at her feet, but he was breathing. Nice weapon, she thought. Not lethal but effective.
She stepped over the man’s insensate form and looked back at Bobby’s. He wasn’t dead yet, but to judge from the bubbles subsiding against the dark earth, it wouldn’t be long before he died with his sins on him.
From there, it was easy to find her way out of the house. The front rooms were completely vacant. Bochko must have purchased the property and left it empty except for the spaces they needed for their activities. She had to break a couple of locked doors on her way to the front hallway, but then she simply unlocked the front door from inside and stepped out into the night.
It had been two months and nine days since she’d last stood alone and free in the night air. Their meeting place, according to Henry’s map, was six kilometres away. At a good walking pace, it would take her just over an hour to make it. She stepped away from the house and began walking with long, strong strides south from where she stood. It was dark enough to walk between the fields of soy. Even at night, the peace of the deep green fields overwhelmed her with their beauty and the secret they held. She dropped to her knees and wept. But only for a minute. Then she stood straight and high and continued walking. Henry’s map showed her how to avoid the main road on the way to where they would meet. She kept to the inside of the treelines along various sideroads that led in a disconnected, jagged line to her destination. A sign announced that she was entering Queesik Bay Reserve, a native territory. She heard the traffic for the first time.
Henry had told her to keep her eye out for a big red neon sign – THE EAGLE – that would be close to the main road. Now she saw it, and she crept toward it, still staying within cover, and keeping her eye out for her supposed saviour. He was at the back of the parking lot, standing beside a red pickup, waiting just as he said he would be. She emerged from the woods and he immediately dropped his arms and came toward her.
“Oh god! You made it … do they know you’re gone?’
“I am sure everything is going as you have planned,” she said, and the expression on his face changed.
“I don’t know what you mean –”
“When you wake up,” she said, and now he stepped away from her, seeing the gun raised before him, “tell Bochko I am not such a good girl as he was hoping. No, in the truth, I am very bad.”
She fired at his face and he crumpled to the ground beside his truck.
“Am not stupid,” she said to his quaking form. She was still holding the trigger down. Larysa yanked the leads out of his face and crumpled them up around the spent cartridge and stuck it all into her pocket. He had brought her a change of clothes, as he’d promised. It was all in a plastic bag on the front seat. Nothing too fancy. What did he care, when he was planning on having her out of them for most of the time anyway?
She dug in his pocket for his wallet. She rifled through his ID. One of the cards had the name of Doug-Ray Finch, but the rest gave his name as Henry Wiest. So he had told her his real name. Not worried, since she was never going to be able to use it against him, if he’d gotten his way. Sly fox. His home address was on one of the cards. She memorized it. She would have to see what he really was.
Now Mr. Sugar was sitting on a couch just a few feet away from her, utterly unprepared for what was about to happen to him. She took a deep breath. Then she turned into the room and faced Carl Duffy.
Bochko was sitting at the other end of the couch. He was wearing a suit jacket with a white silk T-shirt under it. She could see a wall of muscle beneath the shirt.
“Hello, Kitty,” he said. “You almost missed pizza.”
She realized that Duffy’s head was smoking.
“Say hello, Carl.” He waited and then leaned over and knocked on the man’s forehead. Larysa saw the tidy black hole there. That’s where the smoke was coming from. “You didn’t hear the shot?”
“No,” she said.
“That’s amazing. I bought a new silencer and they say you can’t hear it past six feet. I guess it works.” He rose and she took a step back. “Don’t worry about Carl. You didn’t need him in any case.”
“No?”
“Of course not. I’ll take care of you, Kitty.”
“I bet,” she said. “Anyway, is good. Saves time.”
“See? You have an excellent attitude. Come and sit.”
She hesitated and he raised the front of his shirt over his muscled stomach and showed her the butt of a gun that was tucked into his waistband. She had the urge to throw her hand out and pull the trigger on that gun. But she sat instead, across from him in an upholstered chair.
“I know what you are looking for, Kitty. And I am going to give it to you.”
“Why would you do that?”
“To reward you. For all your effort. And, anyway, what am I going to do with it? I have to get rid of it. You might as well have it back.” He tilted his head at her, but nothing in his two tiny eyes showed the least hint of compassion. “Come here. Come to me, Kitty. Look, here it is.”
In his hand was the dark blue booklet with the crest of her country on it.
“Why didn’t you just go to the police, poor little Kitty? They would have taken you in, they would have brought you right to your warm cozy consulate in Toronto and they would have worked it all out for you. Now, instead, you are back with me,” he said, smiling. “And I am a little upset with you, you know.”
“Do you want to know why I do not go to police?”
“I do. I do very much,” he said, smiling warmly at her, as if he were proud of her.
“Because I get myself in this,” she said. “I get myself out.”
“I don’t see that happening” – he opened the passport and looked at the photo page – “Larysa Kirilenko. I almost –”
At the sound of her name in his mouth, she lunged without thinking and knocked him sideways off the couch and onto the floor. But he merely lifted her off of him. He had not defended himself or even gone for his gun. He just stood and straightened himself. He held the passport out again. “Do you want it or not?” he asked.
“I want it.”
She stretched her arm out and snatched it. She flipped through it quickly and saw that it was complete. Complete, but useless to her now. He would not have given it to her if there was any hope of her using it again. But she had it in her hands, this document that said she belonged somewhere, existed somewhere, had rights somewhere. She knew this would be
the last victory she would ever have.
Bochko was studying the hole in Carl Duffy’s forehead. “Bullet’s still in there,” he said. “These things break apart like the instant they meet any resistance.” He looked back at her. “You’d think Carl Duffy’s head wouldn’t offer much resistance but –” He held his fists together in front of him and then pulled his arms apart, spreading his fingers wide. “You know? Boooomm! I bet it looks like pizza in there now.” He laughed and leaned down to kiss the top of Duffy’s head. A thin rill of red glugged out of the hole. Standing behind the dead man, Bochko looked over at her.
“So, Kitty. Where should we do this?”
She knew what he meant.
“It is up to you. Where you wish to die.”
He smiled at her again, a wide-open, devouring smile. And he was about to say something else when they both heard a woman’s voice coming from the street. It was small and tinny, but it was clearly saying a name. It was saying, “Lee Travers.” He retreated carefully to the window, walking backwards, and lifted a curtain a little. Then he crossed the room again and grabbed Larysa by the wrist. “We have some company,” he said. “Let’s go.”
] 32 [
Late afternoon
The burning in her cheeks and neck had subsided, and Hazel had suppressed the urge to smash the steering wheel with her fist. They’d been stupid; thorough but stupid, and the whole investigation had been tainted from the start. She tried to identify the point at which she could have seen the devil on her shoulder, but the case had been so opaque in places, and her life beyond the case so nerve-wracking … Had she been distracted? Had she dismissed a warning sign anywhere that might have drawn her attention back to the leak? Of course it had never occurred to her that Lydia Bellecourt had simply slotted Hazel into place in their plan, but that is exactly what had happened. It was shameful and horrifying. She had asked the questions What is the girl running from? and What is the girl searching for?, and these questions had been so worthy that at no point did she ever wonder if there was a fatal flaw in her point of view.
A Door in the River Page 21
