A Door in the River

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  “You need to face what’s happening,” Hazel said.

  “Go left here,” said Bellecourt quietly.

  The topmost road on the escarpment was Highland Crescent. Now Bellecourt sat up in her seat. She drew the back of her hand shakily over her lips and tucked a strand of hair over her ear. Hazel watched the house numbers go by. She stopped well short of number 175.

  “I’m going to get out of the car now. You stay there until I open your door and then you get out. I have you in a beam of light right now, do you understand?”

  Hazel got out, the gun trained continuously on her passenger, and she came around the front of the car. Bellecourt sat calmly, the eyes in her wrecked face tracking Hazel. She pulled the door open and shot a fast look down the street in case Lee Travers did have some powers she’d not yet encountered in another person, but the street was empty. Bellecourt slid out. She was holding her head at an angle, and the blood still seeped from her temple. Hazel marched her prisoner in front. “Don’t give me a reason to react quickly.”

  “You don’t want to go up to the house,” Bellecourt said.

  “Why?”

  “You might get in his way.”

  “What has the girl been looking for?”

  “The same thing we all are. Something that will prove we were here.”

  Hazel grabbed her under the armpit and spun her around. “I’m going to have three different shrinks testifying to your fitness. You can get as kooky as you want, Bellecourt.” She let go of her. “Walk in front of me.”

  Bellecourt began to move up the street, leaning forward as if magnetised to something. “Now call him,” Hazel said to her as they approached number 175. “If he’s so sensitive, surely he’ll hear you out in the street.”

  Bochko muscled her out of the house Carl Duffy had lived in. Carl Duffy was dead, and Bochko was in a hurry now. She wasn’t sure if he’d planned to kill her in the house or move her, but now he was sped up. The webbing between his thumb and forefinger held tight against the tendons at the back of her neck. She was being forced down the stairs and although she stumbled, his grip on her neck, like a clamp, kept her from falling to the bottom.

  “You are going to die, Bochko,” she said.

  He spun her around on the landing and crashed the back of her head against the wall. He pressed his kneecap into her pubis and she roared in pain. In her front jeans pocket, he roughly dug the passport out. Pinning her so ferociously meant there was no chance of his finding the knife in her back pocket. It pressed on a point high up on her buttock and lit up her nerves, connecting her pubic bone to the back of her knee in a lightning arc of pain.

  He slapped her with the passport. She was surprised how much it hurt, like the end of a bullwhip. “I gave you what you wanted, Larysa Kirilenko. Now I will get what I want. I’ll give this back to you when I have it.”

  “Even when you have it, it will not be yours.”

  His mouth widened into a bright, cheerful smile. “Come and see what I am.” He let her step away from the wall, and she went down the stairs in front of him.

  She felt the first threads of the cool evening as he led her down and out of the back of the house, and the air through the door carried the scent of the unseen lake behind the house. Under it all was the fragrance of lavender. A perfect August night. He took a handful of cloth between her shoulderblades and shoved her forward into Duffy’s car, a white Porsche 911 Turbo Cabriolet. She fell into the passenger seat with a heavy thud and he walked around to the driver’s side. The car smelled of leather and tobacco. Bochko slid his huge, sleek body in, like a knife into its sheath.

  He put the car in gear. She lay back against the seat as if resigned and exhausted, her empty left hand hanging down with its palm up beside the gear shift.

  He powered the Porsche toward the road and turned left onto it, hard, in the direction of town. The blood was shoving through her head and then he stopped suddenly and her face struck the dash above the glove compartment. A flare of orange burst behind her eyes. She smelled dried blood, cold steel, ocean. “Look at this,” he said.

  She raised her head to see two cops walking slowly toward the car. The one in back had her gun out, pointed straight at them.

  “The door is open,” he said to her. “Why don’t you run?”

  She heard her name being spoken loudly by both women – one calling her Kitty, the other Larysa.

  Bochko rolled down the window. “Hello, Lydia,” he said. Now there were cars closing into the space behind the women, moving slowly into position.

  “Get out of the car, Travers,” called the woman behind, and she fired a warning shot into the air. “I’m Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef.”

  “We’ve met,” he called back. “You’re just in time for the wedding.” He levelled the gun against the bottom of the windowframe and fired a single shot, which lifted Bellecourt off her feet and threw her backwards, her right arm flying lifelessly up behind her. He pushed the accelerator down and Larysa allowed her right hand to slip into her back pocket where the knife was hidden. The steel was warm from lying against her body and she closed it in her fist and jammed her hand against her thigh. The car bucked and squealed: he was making a sharp right onto another road. Now there were more gunshots behind and the car began to go even faster. She stole a look at the speedometer. It said 130 kilometres per hour. Some kind of centrifugal force was keeping her pressed hard against the back of her seat. The road was a hardpack of dirt and a plume of dust enclosed the car, but inside it was silent. There was a loud, thrumming sound in her skull, though: the sound was electrical, atomic, seismic, a hum like a huge machine powering up, and the skin against her cranium had tightened like a glove on a fist. The car jostled right and then spun and turned left, and out of her window, she saw a second phalanx of squad cars coming toward them. Larysa saw, however briefly, that the one in front had another woman in it bearing down over the steering wheel. It seemed fitting to her that she would die now surrounded by women. Bochko wrenched the wheel again and now they began to pound over the ruts in an empty field, heading toward distant trees. Larysa released the catch on the knife handle and felt the blade spring open in her hand and lock into place.

  “You better put your seatbelt on, Kitty,” he said.

  She shouted, “Mena zvut’ Larysa!” and swung her arm up in front of his eyes. The blade – a gleaming comet, a natural force – arced before her as she plunged it into the middle of his chest. He sucked air violently as she sank it and tried to turn it, one of her hands on the handle and the other reaching under it. His own hands had gone instinctively to the knife, releasing the steering wheel, and Larysa grabbed it and dialled it down like she was closing a safe. The car leapt into the air and then there was silence for what felt like a long period, the two of them suspended as the field spun counterclockwise in the windshield. Then it vanished above her head and they were inside a small bubble of silence, airborne, and she kept her other fist clenched around the knife handle to brace herself, the blade buried to the hilt under his ribs. Then the car landed upright and charged across the field jumping and alighting, twisting and crashing.

  And then they stopped and she was alive in the clenched steel. And he was alive as well, clattering in his skin, slamming himself back and forth in the three pinned inches he had between the steering wheel and the seat. Words bubbled up through his wet mouth, sputterings spoken through a bloody mist, but she could make none of it out. Her native tongue had been a mystery to him, and now his deathwords were a language she had never heard before. She kept the knife in its place, even as his blood-slicked hands tried to pry hers away. The women were coming, the women who meant to kill her or stop her or rescue her, they were coming from all sides, she heard them crying out her name, and he was still alive.

  She grabbed the gun from the front of his pants and left the knife buried in his breastbone. She could end it for him, but she didn’t want to. He could suffer and die or suffer and live, it didn’t matter n
ow. He’d be dead or in prison forever. She kicked the passenger door open and reached back to grab Bochko’s jacket lapel. She yanked him toward her, pulling his face down over the gearshift. He grunted in pain, his animal eyes full of hate, and blood frothed in front of his teeth. “Give me my passport now, Bochko.” He said nothing and she put her hand on the knife handle again, and pulled it slowly down, like a lever. “Just look with your eyes what pocket it is in.” He was beginning to go. His eyes drifted down, toward the floor of the car, but then they ticked right and she shoved her hand into his breast pocket. He clamped his fist over her forearm.

  “You’re not that girl anymore,” he whispered, struggling to keep just one eye open. “You are Kitty. Forever you are – ”

  She spat in the eye. And then she was out, and into the field, under the rising moon, stumbling desperately toward the safety of the woods.

  ] 35 [

  Hazel was the first one to the car. They’d seen the girl burst from the passenger side and she was still hobbling for the treeline as the two forces converged from the road. The Porsche was about two hundred metres in, sitting like a ticking bomb in a cloud of smoke and dust. “Get Travers out!” Hazel called to LeJeune. She was crossing the field toward the commander and her officers. “I’m going after the girl!”

  As she ran, Hazel kept twitching her head over her shoulder and she watched the officers of the QBPS yanking at the handle behind which Lee Travers was sitting in a pool of his own gore. She saw his giant chest clearly, still moving up and down. The radios had come to life again. An ambulance was coming from Kehoe River, and a SOCO team was on its way to catalogue the mess in the house and in the field.

  Larysa had reached the treeline and Hazel was going to have to follow her into the dark.

  Bars of light from the edge of the woods lay across the uneven forest floor. They stretched out like pathways into the trees, where they joined other shadows and became a mass of variegated grey and black.

  Hazel stood within the cover and listened. She had to shut out the sounds behind her now – voices calling to each other, and, in the distance, sirens. She closed it all off and focused her listening toward the dark. She expected to hear the sound of Kitty’s footfalls fading in the distance as she plunged forward. How injured was the girl? It would have taken a few moments for her eyes to adjust, as hers were doing now, and then she would have to pick her way through the fallen branches and the moss-covered boulders that hunched in the larger darkness.

  “My name is Hazel Micallef,” she called out. “I’m a detective with the Ontario Police Services. I know what’s happened to you. I know what you had to do. I want to help you.” She listened for any sign, any movement. There was nothing. She moved deeper into the trees. There was no order here – it was old forest, an ancient forest that had forever lined the backside of the Gannon escarpment, a thick carpet of brown and green. The trees here had never been harvested or cleaned out, and eons of growth crunched and moaned underfoot. Deeper in, the trunks of the oaks and chestnuts thickened and crowded one another.

  She was about a hundred metres further when she saw the glow of a grassy patch beyond the next line of trees, and she stepped onto the edge of it. The last of the light was filtering down and the clearing sat in a disk of metallic light. Ten metres away, on the other side, the girl who had been called Kitty was standing calmly in the half-light, a reedlike figure in a hoodie and sweatpants. Lit by the dusky sky, she looked phantasmal, like an image out of Grimm’s. A maleficent Goldilocks. She was holding what appeared to be a gun fashioned out of red metal. It was only when she realized it was covered in Travers’s blood, did Hazel begin to realize what this woman had accomplished, to be standing at liberty in these woods, alive, and only one more person standing between her and freedom.

  Hazel took two steps into the dusk-tinged light and stood where the girl could clearly see her. Larysa was ceding the light to Hazel. Her face was not totally unlike the police sketch that had been made of her on the Wednesday night, but almost. It was a like a face remembered out of the distant past.

  “Are you Kitty?”

  “No,” the girl said. “I am Larysa. I have been rescued by Kitty.”

  “I am not going to try to convince you that I can fix what has happened to you. But I know there were other girls. You can help the ones who have survived. You can tell us what you saw.”

  “Cannot help. Cannot tell.” She was half-holding the gun on Hazel. Now she pulled her arm backwards and lobbed it toward her, and the gun described a gentle parabola and landed in the loam a metre from her feet. Hazel leaned down to pick the weapon up with her thumb and index finger. It was another Glock; Travers’s gun, cadged for him by Bellecourt. The girl was unarmed now, but she came toward Hazel, covering the distance between them quickly, and Hazel instinctively took a step backwards, raising Travers’s weapon in front of her. Larysa grabbed the barrel of the gun and drew herself into it, steadying it an inch from her eyes, eyes that were concentrating the last of the August light into two sharp beads. “Choose,” she said.

  They stood together, connected by the gun. Larysa’s fingertip balanced the muzzle in front of her own face.

  “Who is this girl?” Larysa said. “Whatever then, now she’s murderer. Why not she go to polis, for the polis to help her? No, she go and hunt. She can SAVE girls but does not! The dirty girls in the dirty hole, she leaves them. Takes her revenge!” She tugged the gun in toward her forehead, and Hazel felt it bump against the girl’s skull. “Choose.”

  “There’s no choice,” said Hazel. She pulled the gun away from the girl’s forehead. There was a perfect red circle of Travers’s blood imprinted on Larysa’s forehead. “I have to take you in.”

  “Shoot the gun,” Larysa said. She began to walk away.

  Hazel was not going to shoot the gun. Her feet were rooted to the forest floor; she had become one of the old maples here, that had seen everything for a hundred years and been incapable of action. “Please stop,” she said.

  Larysa stopped. She turned around again and faced Hazel. “Do you have child, Miss Polis?” she asked.

  “You have to come with me.”

  “You have daughter,” Larysa said plainly, stepping backwards, away from her. “Imagine, your daughter, this happens to her. Imagine.”

  The fabric of the girl’s shirt was catching concentrated lashings of light as she slid away into the cover of the trees, and soon Hazel only heard her footfalls softening in the distance. The decision was too complex to make under these conditions. The girl was dangerous. The girl had suffered and done what anyone else in her position would have done. But Henry? Why had Henry known this girl? “Wait, wait a second. I want to ask you a question. Was Henry Wiest trying to help you?” She couldn’t hear the girl’s footsteps over her own voice. She called out, louder: “Was he trying to help you?”

  But she was gone. The girl had vanished into the forest.

  When Hazel emerged from the woods, an ambulance was already in place on Highland Crescent and two men were marching a stretcher over the field. She walked up to it and she saw the extent of Travers’s injuries. She could tell that his survival would take a miracle. The paramedics carried him back across the field carefully.

  She realized that her shoulders were up around her ears. So much of this case had been fugitive in nature that she had begun to mistrust her peripheral vision. She was expecting the ground to jump again, was braced for it. Even now, with the apparent kingpin dead or dying; his accomplices dead, gone, or perhaps even trapped underground; his victims silenced or missing, she still worried there was more to come.

  When Travers was safely inside the ambulance, she looked for LeJeune. She found her standing with some of the men and women of the Ontario Police Service, Central Division. “Anything?” LeJeune asked.

  “Nothing. She’s gone.”

  “Where is my car?”

  “Not now, Commander.” She stopped as she was passing LeJeune and turned to face her.
“I’m sorry. This has been a very unpleasant case for me, as I imagine it must be for you too now. If I’d known more sooner …”

  “There were unexpected complexities.”

  “Yes. There were.” There was more to be said. But she couldn’t take her hand off her radio. “I need to talk to my people right now, Commander. Your car is smashed up on Sideroad 1, right near where all this stuff was going on.”

  “This stuff with girls.”

  “Yes. I’ll come see you tomorrow and explain it. As best I understand it.”

  LeJeune let her go. The ambulance was pulling away from the curb, its siren silent, its beacons off. Travers was dead.

  Hazel raised the radio to her mouth.

  4

  Tuesday, August 16—Wednesday, August 17

  ] 36 [

  Tuesday, August 16, midnight

  By the time she returned to the soy fields, they’d brought in two more excavators and a flatbed-mounted bank of klieg lights and they were excavating from the side now. They had been communicating through the pipe with a girl named Katrina Volkov. She was trapped in a corner of the room, where “James,” she said, had told them to crouch and pin themselves. The roof had come in. She was alive, and she could hear breathing from somewhere else in the pit, but just one breathing.

  Hazel stood by helplessly, watching the machines. She thought of the girl, probably still on her way toward them through the woods. Somewhere to the west, she’d pass them later that night. Probably on her way to the States, or another province. Maybe she would try to go home.