Blackfly Season

by Giles Blunt

  “I fantasize about running a carpentry business. But then if I did woodworking full time, I’d probably get sick of that, too.”

  “Me, sometimes I wish I’d just gone into business. I wasn’t too far from an MBA when I got sidetracked.”

  Cardinal realized after he hung up that that was the most personal conversation they’d had in six months.

  29

  THE BLINDS WERE ALL SHUT; the house was in the dim, lightless grey of limbo. Terri was sitting on her jacket, but even folded up it couldn’t soften the hardwood floor. Run, run, run. The words reverberated in her head as if they had become the soundtrack for her life.

  She stared at the red-brick fireplace and its sooty interior. Whoever had last lived in this house had certainly cleaned the place up before shutting the door for the last time. She wondered who they were, and if they had been happy. There was nothing special about the house itself. There were a hundred just like it in the neighbourhood, but Terri had been happy here.

  How odd that she should be so unhappy now, because as a child she had been completely sunny. She had got along fine with her parents, got along fine with Kevin, her kid brother. But then disaster had struck, and Terri and Kevin had had to go out to Vancouver to live with an aunt and uncle whom she didn’t much like. She remembered the stink of her uncle’s pipe, and how her aunt had always thought everything was just “precious” or “darling,” words that set Terri’s teeth on edge. That was her mother’s sister, but she couldn’t have been more different. Her aunt and uncle hadn’t been bad people, but they couldn’t replace her parents, and that made Terri resent them.

  This house had been the last place she had been truly happy—carefree, the way a kid should be. She remembered how the fireplace had glowed on cold winter nights. It used to have a glass screen, and she and Kevin used to fight for the patch of carpet just in front of it, lying on their bellies to watch television. The TV had been in the corner—except at Christmas, when they moved it to make room for the long-needled tree they always got.

  Terri got up and walked again through the dining area. Her parents’ dining set, Swedish modern, had been too big, and if you sat at the end of the table opposite her father you were actually sitting in the living room. In the kitchen, a peculiar memory assailed her: She had been drying the dishes, and fainted clean away while drying the carving knife. It had stuck in the floor where it had fallen and was still there when she woke up moments later with her parents’ worried faces looming over her. A touch of anemia, the doctor had told them.

  Her bedroom was much bigger than she remembered. Of course, back then, it had been crowded with bed and dresser and desk, with clothes and CDs and a computer and a skateboard and a huge stuffed tiger that her father had bought for her once when she had been sick. Now it was just an empty box with a cheap window and gouges in the floorboards. She lifted a corner of the blind. Some years, the snowbanks had come right up to the bottom of the glass. There was a swing in the backyard that hadn’t been there when she’d lived here, one of those black-strap swings that look like instruments of torture.

  She let the blind fall. It sent up a cloud of dust that made her sneeze.

  Down in the basement she had no trouble finding the main water valve. When she had been about twelve, a pipe had burst and her father had had to shut off the water. She had been down there at his side in Wellington boots, the little tomboy helping Dad, while Kevin, five years younger, floated a toy destroyer on the flood waters, making bombing noises. Upstairs, she turned on the cold water tap. It gasped and clattered before water, brown and disgusting, jetted into the sink. She sat down on the floor and let it run.

  One good thing about coming to this abandoned house and its swamp of nostalgia: It kept her thoughts—for a few minutes, anyway—off the more recent memories, which ran through her mind like movie trailers.

  Trailer number one: Sunlight beating down on the camp, so fierce Terri thinks she is going to be sick. She is taking a stroll on the pebbly beach, past what seems to be the edge of the camp property. But as she cuts through the woods on the way back, blackflies swarming around her, she comes across another cabin. This one is smaller than the others, and someone has bricked up the single window. On the front door, a heavy brass padlock gleams. There is a terrible smell, and she veers back toward the water.

  Trailer number two: She and Kevin are in town together. It’s the one day they have any fun, strolling down Main Street and then walking along the lakefront. Hanging out at the public wharf, and then a visit to the farmers’ market. A diamond of a day, bright and clear, and Kevin behaves like the old Kevin—funny, mischievous—the nonaddicted Kevin she grew up with. He drives her around in the old, beat-up Nissan he calls a car, and they take a spin along the lake, then back to the highway. The happiness pierces the armour Terri has lately been wearing in order to deal with Kevin’s drug problems. She can’t remain silent.

  “Why don’t we just leave?” she says. “Why not just take off and go back to Vancouver? You say you’re having a good time here, but I can tell you’re not.”

  “Aw, Terri, don’t start.” Kevin gives her that wounded little-boy look. “We were having such a great time.”

  “I know. And I want you to keep having good times, Kevin. I don’t want to wake up some morning and find myself going to my little brother’s funeral.”

  “Lay off, will ya? I’m not little any more, all right? I realize, after Mom and Dad died, you kinda looked after me. Moving to a new family, new city, you were really great. But I’m not a kid any more.”

  “You’re still my brother. I still care about you, even if you don’t.”

  “Terri, I’m not doing that much dope.”

  “You haven’t got a job, so I assume you’re dealing to pay for it. Think about what’s going to happen when you get caught. Do you know how many years you’ll get this time?”

  “I just want to stay with this till I have enough money for a couple of years. Then I’m going to get clean for good and go somewhere—Greece or somewhere—and do nothing but write and get sunburned.”

  Sometimes it’s Tangiers. Sometimes Marrakesh. He got the Greece idea from Leonard Cohen, she knows. He’s been carrying around a Cohen biography for ages.

  “Can you honestly say you’re not frightened of Red Bear? You don’t think he’s dangerous?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. He’s not that bad.”

  “I think he’s crazy.”

  “I know how to handle him.”

  “Red Bear is not a person anybody handles, Kevin. Haven’t you noticed his eyes? Those eyes are dead, Kevin. There’s nothing behind them—no heart, anyway. Nothing real. That’s why he wears sunglasses all the time. He doesn’t want people to see his eyes.”

  Kevin looks over at her, slowing a little for a Wal-Mart truck.

  “Look, Terri. You’re my sister. You’re not my mother. You can’t be doing this. You can’t be telling me what I should do. How I should run my life.”

  “I want you to have a life, Kevin. Do you think I enjoy chasing after you? Do you think I want to be like your chaperone or your maiden aunt or something? I’m missing work, I’m missing acting class, I’ve got two auditions coming up—believe me, Kevin, I have better things to do than follow you across the bloody country trying to pull a needle out of your arm.”

  “So, do them! Terri, please! Go back to Vancouver and do them! Just leave me the fuck alone!”

  “I can’t leave you alone. You’re killing yourself—whether by accidental overdose or by getting caught up in some idiotic turf war with Red Bear and his friends—you’re killing yourself. And I’m not going to stand by and watch it happen. Why are you pulling over?”

  There they are on the highway and he’s pulling over onto the gravel shoulder. Several cars shoot by, horns blaring.

  “Kevin, what are you doing?”

  “Take the fucking car. I’m going back into town where people don’t fucking tell me what to do.”
r />   “Oh, don’t do that. Kevin, wait!”

  She jumps out of the car and follows him a little ways, highway grit stinging her eyes. Kevin is walking fast, stalking away from her, back stiff, shoulders raised. Talk about armour. When he gets like that there’s no talking to him.

  Trailer number three: She isn’t sure if this was later that same day or a couple of days after. She’s in the “guest” cabin stuffing things into her backpack. Her heart is pounding, and all she wants to do is run. Kevin has gone somewhere and she knows she has to get out of this cabin, out of the camp, instantly. Her hands are shaking so bad she can’t make the backpack zipper work. The door opens, no knock or anything, and she lets out a scream.

  Red Bear is standing there, a black silhouette against a rectangle of light. She drops the backpack, stoops to pick it up, drops it again.

  “It’s time for you to leave,” Red Bear says, his tone not unpleasant.

  “I know. I know. I’m packing right now.”

  She takes a step behind her bunk, instinctively wanting something between her and Red Bear. “I’ll get a ride into town with Kevin.”

  “Kevin is not here. Kevin is not going to be back for some time.”

  “I’ll catch a bus, then.”

  “There are no buses for miles. I will have someone drive you.”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll just hitchhike.”

  “I can’t allow that.” Red Bear doesn’t take his sunglasses off, but she knows he is looking her up and down. “You might get raped. Have you ever been raped, Terri?”

  Terri has nothing to say to that. The answer is negative, but an answer is not required.

  Red Bear remains a motionless darkness in the doorway.

  “I didn’t see anything,” she says. “I have no intention of talking to anyone.”

  “Of course not. That would be bad for Kevin. And neither of us wants to hurt your brother, right?”

  Then he is gone from the door.

  But what had she seen? And who had driven her away from the camp? Terri could not recall. Her last memory of the place was that empty doorway. Now, she got up from the floor. The water was running cold and clear in the sink. There was no hot water, and no electricity to heat this with. But it still felt good to splash it on her face, almost as if she could wash away the fear that Red Bear had stirred in her. How was she going to get Kevin away from him? The first few threads of a plan were beginning to form in her mind, and she stood for a few moments in front of the sink, letting the water run, hoping they would soon become something she could hold on to.

  She would get this plan together, and then it would be run, run, run, all right. Only this time it would be the two of them.

  30

  “EXPLAIN SOMETHING TO ME, CARDINAL.”

  Detective Sergeant Chouinard didn’t ask Cardinal to sit down. Even if he had, there would have been no place in his office to sit. Every chair in the room served as part of Chouinard’s idiosyncratic filing system, if it could be called a system. But even if his own routines were haphazard, Chouinard was a man who prized precision and reliability in the men under his command, which was why he was looking a little flushed just now. The detective sergeant suffered from high blood pressure, and when he was angry his face got very red, very fast.

  “Explain to me, if you can, how we manage to misplace an attractive young woman with red hair and a bandage on her head. How is that possible, and who was guarding her when it happened?”

  “Larry Burke was on duty, but it’s my fault. I should have briefed him better.”

  Chouinard shook his head, his face getting redder. “Spare me the street-cop solidarity. Burke fucked up, is what you’re saying.”

  Cardinal explained as best he could. Luckily for Burke, as a uniformed officer he wasn’t directly under the detective sergeant’s command.

  “You’ve put out an all-points on this young woman, I trust.”

  “Yeah, I did that right away.”

  “Bloody Burke. I’ll kick his ass.”

  Chouinard’s phone buzzed; he picked up the handset. “I’ll tell him,” he said, and hung up. “Bob Brackett’s here for you. You’re saved by the shark.”

  Bob Brackett was a roly-poly little man with a plain gold hoop in one ear. You wouldn’t have known to look at him that this pudgeball was Algonquin Bay’s most lethal defence attorney. Naturally, this gave him a reputation around the Algonquin Bay Police Department as an irredeemable pain in the ass, a champion of the criminal classes, a cowboy of the courtroom who’d never seen a technicality he didn’t like or a cop he did. Bob Brackett, Q.C., was so mild-mannered that many an unsuspecting policeman or -woman (Brackett was all for equality when it came to dishing out legal mayhem) had had his or her testimony rendered worthless, if not outright ridiculous, before he or she even knew what had happened.

  “Please note for the record, Detective Cardinal: My client did not have to come in.” Brackett was seated at the interview table, almost hidden behind his open briefcase and a panama hat. “In the first place you have no warrant, and in the second place he resides outside your jurisdiction.”

  “I realize that, Mr. Brackett. That’s why I called you. I could have called the OPP. I’m sure the provincial police would have been happy to round up a few bikers for us.”

  “Then why didn’t you call them?”

  “I wanted this meeting to be as friction-free as possible. We’re only trying to weed out obvious suspects at this point.”

  “Fine. Please note that Mr. Lasalle is only here out of a sense of civic duty and loyalty to a fallen comrade.”

  “We’re talking about bikers, Mr. Brackett, let’s not make them sound like war vets.”

  “I merely point out that—”

  “Noted, Mr. Brackett. Let’s move on.”

  “So tough,” Steve Lasalle said. “Maybe you could have made something of your life if you hadn’t become a cop.”

  Brackett silenced his client with a raised forefinger. Lasalle sat back and propped a foot on one knee, smiling at Cardinal as if they were old buddies. He was wearing an expensive sports coat with an open-necked shirt and pressed jeans. His loafers gleamed, making him look more like the head of a small Internet concern than president of the Viking Riders.

  “When did you last see Wombat Guthrie?” Cardinal said.

  “Exactly twenty-one days ago. Around four in the afternoon.”

  “And what were the circumstances?”

  “Wombat was on sentry duty. He was supposed to be guarding a certain property of ours. When we came back next day, Wombat was gone and so was the property.”

  “He ripped you off, in other words.”

  “Your words, Detective. Not mine.”

  “This is what you said a couple of days ago …” Cardinal flipped back through his notes. “‘Last time I remember seeing him we had a few people round, we watched a video, Wombat passed out on the couch. Not unusual for him. I expected to find him here next morning but I didn’t.’ Your story’s changed since then.”

  Lasalle conferred with his counsel.

  “I don’t think my client should say any more.”

  “You also said …” Cardinal consulted his notes again. “Let’s just say old Wombat has some ’splaining to do.”

  “Yeah, well, it never occurred to me back then that Wombat was gone for good.”

  “Oh, I think you can count on that.”

  Cardinal pulled a forensic photo from his file and tossed it across the table.

  Lasalle looked at it for a moment. He tried to maintain his cool posture, but his neck turned pale where it joined the jaw.

  “My, my,” he said. “That looks nasty.”

  Brackett took the photo from him, glanced at it and tossed it back on the table with a snort.

  “Really, Detective. My client is already cooperating. Shock tactics are beside the point.”

  “Your client has admitted having a reason for revenge, Mr. Brackett.”

  “No, he
has admitted he believes his colleague is the victim of foul play. That’s why he’s here. To help find out who has committed this extravagant act of violence upon his colleague. His lifestyle differs from yours; it doesn’t make him a liar.”

  “How did you know Wombat was a victim until I told you?”

  “You think you told me?” Lasalle said. “Get real. Believe it or not, I don’t rely on cops for my information. I’ve known Wombat was dead pretty much from the moment he was gone.”

  “Like I say, how would you know that?”

  “His bike. His hog is still right where he left it last time I saw him.”

  “Hardly conclusive evidence of murder, Mr. Lasalle.”

  “We’re talking about a bike that’s worth forty thousand dollars. Not something you leave unattended for long.”

  “Where, exactly, did he leave it unattended?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  Cardinal looked at Brackett. “So much for cooperation.”

  Brackett whispered in his client’s ear.

  Lasalle looked at Cardinal. “It’s not in your jurisdiction, I can tell you that much,” he said. He picked up the photograph again, looked at the headless, handless corpse and shook his head.

  “That’s not very helpful,” Cardinal said. “You’re telling me you know where Guthrie was last seen. That his bike is still there. That in all probability he was abducted from this site and then tortured and killed. But you won’t tell us where that is. This must be the biker loyalty we hear so much about. That famous code of honour.”

  “He runs the Viking Riders,” Brackett said into his double chin. “Be reasonable.”

  “Suppose we call in the OPP or the RCMP to take a look at your clubhouse. How long do you think it would take them to do a really thorough job?”

  “It’s got nothing to do with the clubhouse,” Lasalle said. “Give me some credit. Assume I’m not an idiot.”

  “At the moment, Mr. Lasalle, all I see is one dead Viking Rider and another one who had a motive to make him that way.”