by Brad Smith
‘Did you know he was going to do that?’ Pulford demanded.
‘No,’ Rufus said quietly.
‘A heads-up would have been nice,’ Pulford said. ‘This is a disaster.’
‘It is that,’ Rufus said. ‘Do you have enough to hold them for trial?’
‘I doubt it,’ Dunbar said. ‘They’ll be back on the street by the weekend.’
Rufus shook his head, still watching in the direction Carl had gone.
‘I asked him,’ Pulford said bitterly. ‘I asked him on Sunday if he was good to testify after the pipe bomb. He claimed he was. He told me to my face he was good to go. Goddamn it.’
Rufus turned to the two cops. ‘What are you talking about?’ He stared at them as he realized. ‘Christ, you don’t know, do you?’
‘Know what?’ Pulford snapped.
‘Frances Rourke died during the night.’
‘Oh lord,’ Dunbar said softly. ‘What happened?’
‘Her heart stopped,’ Rufus said. ‘As, I suspect, has Carl’s.’
THIRTY-TWO
The sap ran early that spring. The last week of February was warm and by the first of March the maples were flowing freely. The days were sunny and in the forties while the nights remained cold and crisp, the temperatures slightly below freezing, perfect weather for gathering sap.
Carl tapped fifty-seven maples and ran a total of roughly four hundred feet of plastic tubing from one to the other, using a transit to determine the gravity flow, moving everything toward the sugar shack. On the third day of tapping he began to boil the sap. He had stacked four cords of seasoned hardwood against the back wall of the building and he kept the fire box going day and night.
He had Norah order five hundred jugs – pints and quarts and gallons – for the finished product. Carl was constantly on the move between the bush and the warehouse at the farm, driving the Ferguson tractor with the rebuilt engine and pulling the wagon behind. He built a plywood box atop the wagon to transport the jugs.
The insurance company sent a trailer to haul Carl’s truck away and a few days later he bought a used Ford – a red pickup – from a lot outside of Talbotville. He could use the truck to deliver the syrup to the farmers’ markets and other stores in the area. When he was ready to start selling he had Norah design a label for the maple syrup. She came up with a retro image of a horse drawing a cutter through the woods.
‘I think we should put Frances’s name on it,’ she said to Carl.
They were standing in the warehouse, just the two of them, and she had just shown Carl the image on her computer screen. He looked at it for a time before replying.
‘What were you thinking?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe something like this?’ She leaned forward and typed Rourke’s Old Tyme Maple Syrup on to the screen beneath the image.
‘That’s exactly the type of thing she hated,’ Carl pointed out.
‘Shit – I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’
‘What would she want, then?’
‘River Valley Farm,’ Carl said. ‘That’s what she would want.’
After the first week of boiling sap, Carl built a plank bed against the end wall of the sugar shack and put a piece of foam on it for a mattress. After that, he slept most nights there in a sleeping bag, cooking his meals on the wood fire and tending to the boiler and evaporator. At nights he read by an oil lamp he’d found in the garage at the farm. His books had been lost in the fire so he bought more in a used book store in Talbotville. He re-read early Steinbeck and Faulkner, a couple of Zane Greys. He read modern spy novels that didn’t hold him. Books on raising poultry, on farming, on syrup production. Various magazines he picked up in town. He read until he was tired and the next morning he got up and carried on again.
During the day, when the sap was slowly evaporating, he had time on his hands. He cut more dead trees for firewood and split the logs by maul and wedges, even though there was a hydraulic splitter in the machine shed up at the farm.
Rufus came to visit a couple of times, again making his way down the muddy lane in his street shoes. Carl suggested he invest in a pair of rubber boots but Rufus told him that he’d lived over fifty years without such footwear and wasn’t about to change now. The two men drank beer and talked about things of little consequence, mostly the weather.
Carl was surprised at the sheer volume of syrup he was producing. Halfway through the month of March Norah had to order more jugs. The temperatures rose late in the month and the sap slowed, but then a cold snap came and it began again. Carl kept the boiler going.
He knew that Frances would have enjoyed the process. She loved being in the bush in general, away from the computers and telephones. She would have been in her element spending the month in the woods, even if they only produced a single pint of syrup. It was something she had talked about constantly, something she and Carl would do together.
They had been so close to doing it.
The sap finally slowed and then stopped during the first week in April. Carl boiled the last of it off, filtered it and siphoned it into quart containers. He passed the next two days shutting down the operation. He hauled a hundred gallons of water to the bush and spent a day in the shack, cleaning the boiler and the evaporator and the rest of the equipment. He swept the pine floor clean and treated it with boiled linseed oil. He brought back a generator and air compressor on the wagon and blew out the plastic tubing running to the trees. He removed the spikes and stored them in the cabin.
He finished in the bush at the end of the second day and drove the tractor and wagon up to the farm and into the machine shed. He stacked the equipment on shelves there. It would be ready for the next year, should anybody decide to use it.
Maple syrup season was over.
The next morning Carl got up and made oatmeal. He drank a cup of coffee after he ate, then went into the bathroom and shaved and took a long shower. As he got dressed he could hear Norah’s car coming down the drive, heading for the warehouse. He looked out the window and watched as she unlocked the door and went inside. It was a bright spring morning. The grass in the yard was beginning to show green.
Carl retrieved the canvas bag from beneath the mattress and left.
THIRTY-THREE
Friday would be Dunbar’s last day on the job. He knew that they were planning something for him, a little celebration of sorts in the squad room, probably something low key with cake and coffee and gag gifts. The veterans on the force knew that he wouldn’t be thrilled with anyone making a big deal and most of the younger cops barely knew who he was. Dunbar had decided he would go along with whatever they came up with. It would only happen once.
On the Wednesday that week he got a call from a detective out in Markham County, a cop named Linklater whom Dunbar had known casually for years. He said he was at a homicide scene that he thought might be of interest to Dunbar, and to Pulford as well.
‘Why’s he calling you?’ Pulford asked. “Markham isn’t our bailiwick.”
‘I can’t say,’ Dunbar replied. He was driving and they were on the parkway, heading out of the city. It was shortly past noon and they had stopped at a burger place on Main for take-out. They were eating on the run.
Dunbar hadn’t seen much of Pulford the past couple of months. With his time short Dunbar hadn’t been given any new cases, and so Pulford had been working on other investigations with other cops. Other than passing hellos at the station, they hadn’t talked much. Now she finished her burger and balled the wrapping up and placed it on the seat.
‘He didn’t give you any details?’
‘Nothing,’ Dunbar said. ‘He was being kind of coy, actually. I can tell you this – if he wants me to be involved, it had better be something we can clean up in two and a half days.’
Pulford smiled. ‘You know where we’re going?’
‘Oh, he sent the address to my phone.’ Dunbar took his phone from his pocket and handed it over. ‘Put it in the GPS.’
&
nbsp; Pulford looked at the info. ‘Did you see the address?’
‘No,’ Dunbar said.
‘Sonofabitch.’
Chino was sitting on the ground, his back against a broken chain link fence. He wore greasy coveralls and work boots with the steel toes worn through the leather. He had welding goggles propped on top of his head and two holes in his chest. There was a set of acetylene torches a few feet away, the hoses and cutting torch lying in the dirt. A length of rusted angle iron, stretched over two oil drums, was cut partway through. It seemed as if the gunshots had interrupted Chino’s work day.
The body was behind the metal shed located across the yard from the bungalow where Dunbar and Pulford had arrested Chino a few months earlier. All around was scrap iron, along with a couple of coils of copper, the insulation burned away, the odor of the melted plastic in the air.
The local police were on the scene – a forensics team sniffing about, a few constables talking in the driveway, drinking take-out coffees. Linklater had met Dunbar and Pulford when they pulled up in the sedan and led them through the shed to have a look at Chino out behind.
‘Who found him?’ Dunbar asked.
Linklater pointed to a farmhouse, a quarter mile to the east. ‘Next door neighbor heard the shots and came over to investigate.’
‘Curious sort, is he?’ Pulford asked. ‘I would have thought gunshots would be pretty common out here in the boonies. Hunters and whatnot.’
‘Oh, he’s got a story to go with it,’ Linklater said. ‘I heard all about it. It seems he and the deceased have been fighting over a real estate deal that went sour. Farmer claims that he’s owed twenty-five grand he put down on the place.’
Dunbar knelt down for a closer look at the body.
‘This is Chino Carter, right?’ Linklater asked.
‘It’s him.’
‘Well, I remember you guys busting him so I thought I’d give you a call,’ Linklater said.
‘I guess we have a time of death,’ Dunbar said. ‘If the farmer heard the shots.’
‘He says around twenty past ten this morning.’ Linklater waited until Dunbar stood up. ‘Any idea who might have done it?’
‘The farmer who claims he’s owed money?’ Pulford suggested.
‘You think so?’ Linklater asked.
Pulford shrugged. ‘I’d be having a conversation with him. He’s got motive and maybe he thinks he’s got a built-in alibi, saying he found the body. He put himself at the scene before you or anybody else could.’
‘He did that,’ Linklater said. ‘Come to think of it, he was in a big hurry to tell me his story too.’
‘What else is he saying?’ Dunbar asked. ‘Did he see a vehicle?’
‘No, but he says he can’t see the driveway out front from his place. Says the house here blocks it.’
‘He just might be your man,’ Pulford said. ‘People have been killed for a lot less than twenty-five grand.’
Dunbar walked around the body, looking at the ground. ‘If it’s not him, I can tell you there’s probably only about a hundred people in the world who had it in for Chino. You might want to talk to a lawyer named Pearce Walker from the city. He and Chino had dealings.’
As Linklater wrote the name down Dunbar knelt again, this time along the chain link fence. Pushing the dead grass aside, he took a pen from his pocket and used it to retrieve a shell casing. He smelled it before showing it to the other two cops.
‘Forty-five ACP. Smells recent. Should be another one around here somewhere, unless the shooter retrieved one but couldn’t find the other.’
He handed the pen and casing to Linklater, who called to one of the forensics guys and had him put the casing in a baggie. They looked around for a while for the second casing but never came up with it. Dunbar and Pulford walked out to their car shortly after that, with Linklater tailing.
‘Any other ideas where we might look?’ he asked.
‘Chino had dealings with Wild Lucifer,’ Dunbar said. ‘I’m not sure the Wild would be involved in this but he did rip them off in the past. They’ve got their hands full these days with the Hubert bribery thing, but you never know. Seems as if people like that can always find time for revenge.’
Neither Dunbar nor Pulford said much on the drive back to the city. Dunbar knew that Linklater was merely exercising common courtesy in calling him, but in truth he could just have told Dunbar over the phone what had happened. It had nothing to do with him or Pulford at this point. Still, Chino had been their concern at one time, right up until the charges against him and the other two had been dismissed.
Pulford must have been thinking along the same lines. As they got close to the city she looked over at Dunbar.
‘What goes around comes around, eh?’
THIRTY-FOUR
On his last day of employment by the Rose City Police Department, Dunbar was awakened by his cell phone at half past six in the morning. After hanging up he told Martha to stay in bed and he got up and dressed in the half dark. He bought a coffee for himself at the Tim Hortons drive-thru. He was about to call Pulford when he remembered she was away for a long weekend, visiting her sister in Winnipeg. She would miss Dunbar’s retirement party later that day.
Coffee in hand, he drove out to the city’s north side. It was the first he had been to the bar called Hard Ten since the night they’d raided it a few months ago. The parking lot was full of cops when he pulled in.
Bug Murdock’s body was behind a dumpster in the back corner of the lot. He was lying on his side, his eyes closed, and he looked to be sleeping. His fly was open. Whoever had shot him had caught him about to take a leak, or just finishing the task. There was a bullet hole in his temple. Without turning him over Dunbar knew that the other side of his head would be mostly missing.
As Dunbar knelt beside the body an unmarked cruiser pulled into the parking lot and Detective Fisher got out and went around and opened the rear passenger door. The bartender from Hard Ten got out. Her name was Joni, Dunbar recalled. She didn’t look particularly happy about being summoned at that hour. Fisher led her over to where Dunbar stood.
‘Yeah, I know him,’ she said when asked. ‘Calls himself Bug. I got no idea what his real name is.’
‘Was he in the bar last night?’ Fisher asked.
‘Yeah. He’s been hanging around.’
‘Is he involved with the Wild?’
‘Fuck you, man. You think I’m gonna answer questions about the Wild?’
Dunbar glanced at Fisher before turning to the bartender. ‘You happen to remember when he left?’
‘Maybe midnight. He was drunk. Usually is.’
‘You remember him arguing with anybody?’ Fisher asked. ‘Any sort of altercation at all?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He sits in the fucking corner all night, eyeballing me.’
So that was how it was, Dunbar thought. He wondered why Bug would be patronizing the Hard Ten after what had gone down between him and Chino and Tommy Jakes. But then Bug wouldn’t have known it was Tommy who put the finger on Chino and the Indian.
‘And he left alone?’ Dunbar asked.
‘He always does.’
After a few more questions they let her go, with Fisher asking a uniform to drive her home. She didn’t bother to say goodbye.
‘Chino Carter yesterday and now this,’ Fisher said. ‘Looks like the Wild is settling some hash.’
Dunbar regarded what was left of Bug Murdock for a moment.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘They’re not going to shoot Murdock and leave his body five hundred yards from their clubhouse.’
‘So you’re thinking they’re not connected?’ Fisher asked. ‘Kind of a bizarre coincidence, isn’t it?’
‘I didn’t say coincidence.’ Dunbar knelt by Bug’s body. The stench from the dumpster was strong. ‘You didn’t find a shell casing?’
‘Nothing. Good-sized hole, though.’
‘A forty-five would be my guess,’ Dunbar said.
; Dunbar ended up being late to his own party. While the office staff was mixing non-alcoholic punch (not like the old days) and putting up banners, he was driving around Tareytown looking for a red Ford pickup.
At four thirty he had given up on the search for the truck and was parked in the lot by the city park, down the block from Billy Taylor’s house. It was a warm day and there were a number of people in the park, a few adults and quite a few kids, playing on the playground equipment. There was a wide wooded area that separated the park from the street where Taylor lived.
Dunbar recognized the white Pontiac as it came down the street and pulled into the driveway. Billy got out, wearing work clothes and carrying a lunch pail. He went inside the house as Dunbar watched the surrounding area.
A few minutes later Billy came out again and crossed the street to a path that led through the woods. As he disappeared into the trees Dunbar saw a man approaching along the river to his right. It was Carl Burns, and he was heading in the direction of the park and the woods where Billy had gone. He wore jeans and a leather jacket. A baseball cap, pulled low.
Dunbar got out of the car and began to move. As he did he saw Billy emerge from the trees and walk to the playground. He went directly toward a group of kids surrounding a young woman wearing a bright yellow hoodie. One of the kids, a boy of about two, saw Billy and started for him on a run. Billy scooped the boy up. Dunbar saw Carl stop now, watching the scene in the playground.
The woman, obviously a daycare worker, came over and spoke to Billy. After a few moments Billy lifted the boy up on to his shoulders and started back through the trees.
Carl was a hundred yards away. He’d been moving at an angle that would have him intercepting Billy in the woods. He began to walk again now, sliding his right hand into his jacket pocket as he did. Billy and the boy approached the woodlot, the boy laughing atop his father’s shoulders. Dunbar picked up his pace, coming at Carl from behind. He pulled his Glock from the holster.
