Speeder sounded hoarse. “She’s got a problem, the crazy cunt!”
“. . . Vinnie’s dead. Found him with his skull caved in.”
Sweet gasped and moved away from Carrie. An eerie silence claimed them.
Her voice was calm cool collected Carrie: “You know he murdered Vinnie, Mr. Sweet. He was up there alone with him.”
“She’s lying, I didn’t do it,” Speeder said, his words becoming strangled, losing force.
“Of course you didn’t.” From Sweet’s throat issued an oddly gentle and comforting laugh. “Did you think I’d fall for her bullshit? Speeder, Speeder, when do you think I was born, yesterday? The lady made a nice try, I give her credit. Gag her again, Shadow.”
Carrie tried to twist away. The tape again went over her mouth, stifling her scream.
“Okay, Speed, beam onto her head, so we can see exactly what we are doing.”
Speeder’s flashlight went on, blinding her momentarily.
The whump, whump of the silenced revolver in Billy Sweet’s hand.
She could see blood spurting from two wounds to Cacciati’s heart. He crashed against the wall and slipped down it into a heap, and the flashlight bounced and rolled, then held his face within its cold white beam, his gap-toothed ghostly grin, his pinned, staring eyes.
“What was your price, Speeder? I hope you didn’t come cheap.” Sweet knelt and clicked off the flashlight and they were in blackness again. “Shadow, dispose of the lawyer, and let’s go.”
But another light came on just then, a powerful beam from the direction of the entrance to the hall, and Carrie could suddenly see them in grim detail, Sweet and Shadow in synchronized movement, guns turned to that source of light. And just as suddenly that light went out.
The men backed toward safe positions against the walls, ignoring Carrie for the moment. Then she felt a familiar, smoky breath close to her nostrils, and quickly she was floating upwards, scooped from the floor by muscular arms, carried away.
Lachance whipped the tape from her mouth and stuffed her unceremoniously into the hall closet amid the coats and jackets. She fell with a rattle of clothes-hangers, and a beam of light pierced the darkness of the hall.
Without shutting the door, Lachance whirled around and dropped to the floor, and Carrie could hear a soft fusillade, bullets fired through silencers, and she saw Shadow stumbling, wounded, dropping his flashlight, retreating into the kitchen.
Lachance fired once again, his bullet sending the flashlight spinning, and darkness was upon her again.
***
“It’s stopped raining,” Constable Ann Wilcox said. “Let’s do our walkabout.”
“Soon as I finish this chapter,” said Fogerty. He was still glued to his book.
Wilcox, again peering through the rear window, thought she saw a flicker of light from a downstairs window of the Barr house — but she realized it was probably a reflection from the streetlights, which were blinking into life. Power had just been restored, but the house they were watching remained dark and peaceful.
***
Lachance had simply vanished, leaving her tied up in the closet. But not hidden, because the door was open at right angles from the wall. Now the house was drowned in silence — even the muffled patter of rain had ceased and the wind had died.
Lachance must have been here for some time, had heard everything, had played a reckless game with her life.
A soft thud. Silence again.
She tried to wiggle farther back into the closet, felt precarious there, standing on tightly bound ankles. If she could just balance herself, reach down behind her, feel for the knots, free her legs . . . the front door was only five feet away.
A tinkle of breaking glass, a dish, maybe her crystal — someone was in the kitchen.
Then: whump, whump.
A clatter as if someone had fallen over a stool or chair.
Then not a whisper of sound for several minutes, maybe more. Slowly, Carrie lowered herself into a squat, balancing herself, and felt for the knots behind her ankles.
A soft squeak from the hallway floor. Carrie knew exactly where it came from, a loose floorboard only six feet from the closet. Then she heard a quick intake of breath — someone was heading quickly for the front entrance.
Wobbling, she tried to stand, but the man crashed into the closet door, and this brought Carrie falling forward, helplessly, onto his back. She knew it was Billy Sweet, knew it from the smell of him, fear and cologne.
He was furiously trying to wriggle out from under her as a ceiling light snapped on — the power was back. Sweet suddenly pulled Carrie closer to him and stuck the barrel of his revolver under her chin.
Then she saw Michel Lachance standing near the kitchen door, his gun in his hand. He was wearing a flak jacket, and over that a leather bandolier with ammunition pouches. Like Sweet, he was wearing gloves. Unlike Sweet, he was smiling.
Sweet’s voice was raspy, raw. “I’ll kill her.”
Lachance strolled slowly forward. His laughter was guttural, demonic.
“Do it.”
“I have nothing to lose! I will!”
“You’re alone now. Your soldiers are dead. I sent your driver away, too. He won’t be coming back. Ever.”
“I said I’d kill her and I will!”
“Merde. Do it, Billy. I dare you to do it.”
In speechless fear, she stared into Lachance’s fiery black eyes, and she knew Sweet was seeing something lethal in them, too, inhuman and unhealthy. Perspiration dripped from Sweet, and slowly he withdrew the gun from her chin. He spoke rapidly.
“Listen, André, I’m beginning to understand things here. We were just looking for information, and I think you gained the wrong impression what we were doing. We can work things out. You have a grievance, I’m aware of it. Little misunderstanding, that’s all.”
“Put the gun on the floor.”
“I’ve been thinking, we should come together. I have the assets, you have the skills. Hey, what a team! Here, my gun’s going onto the floor. We’ll work it out, whatever. You need me, I can use you. Fifty-fifty, or anything you think is honourable.”
“Move away from him, Carrington.”
She wriggled back toward the closet.
Sweet gulped. “And her, too, because I understand you’re in it together. Half for you guys. We blast out of here right away, nobody will know we was here or what happened.”
“How about a third for you and two for us?” Lachance said, still smiling that manic smile.
“A deal.” Sweet started to get up and began brushing himself off. “Hey, we’ll go to my place, I’ll show you the files. We’re big, André, twenty million turnover each of the last three years.”
“So you trust me, Billy.”
“You have to believe it, André. Okay, let’s go.”
“Okay, Billy, I’ll follow you.”
Sweet hesitated, then turned and started walking toward the kitchen door.
Lachance shot him in the back, a single bullet through the heart that sent him sprawling onto the kitchen tiles.
As Carrie looked on, horrified, Lachance glanced at the body with an almost supreme indifference, then pulled a gleaming six-inch blade from his boot. She flinched as he came toward her, but he merely began to slit her bindings.
“I came in the same way the enemy did. In the dark. It was almost too easy.”
Now anger displaced the immense relief she felt.
“You son of a bitch, you set me up as a target.”
“Now you know, Carrington, what it is like on the edge.” His laughter seemed black, brutal. “Now that you know the taste, the t’rill of it, you can never go back.”
“You . . . shot him in the back.”
“In war, people die. I ’ave save some trouble for the state.” He packed awa
y his gun and the silencer. “I t’ink those lazy cops are still outside, so we’ll go out the back way.”
He took her hand and tugged with a force that propelled her past Sweet’s prostrate body, pulling her into the kitchen, where he stopped and gripped her arms fiercely with both hands. “Don’t let me down, Carrington. Because we are together. There is no choice.”
She couldn’t hold the gaze of his burning eyes, and looked away — and then saw an overturned chair, Shadow’s body, two ragged bullet holes in his back. She gasped and turned away, fought the dizziness that was overwhelming her. She had to clear her head, to devise a way to appeal to what was left of this man’s reason. Lie, stall, cajole, offer him some way out.
“Run, Michel, get out of here. Save yourself. Those police will be coming.”
She tried to release her arms but he held them in an iron lock.
“I’ll wait until you’re gone before I call them.”
“And what will you tell them, the police?”
“Michel, let go.”
“That I ’ave murder some people?” A raised, demanding voice: “I saved your life. Now you owe it to me.” Then softer: “Come with me.”
This was not some fool of love — the man was obsessed, unreasoning. Carrie summoned a calmness she didn’t feel, and spoke with firmness. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You ’ave no choice!” He was practically shouting, surely someone could hear. How to appease him?
“I . . . I’ll meet you after.”
“Don’t lie!” He slapped her hard with the flat of his gloved hand, and she almost fell onto the overturned chair.
“You bastard!”
But he only smiled, and twisted her arm and yanked her toward him in a two-armed grip that forced the air from her lungs. “You like a strong man, admit it.”
He pulled her toward him and kissed her. She bit him on the lower lip, drawing blood.
Still holding her wrist, he drew back and slapped her again with even more force, snapping her head sideways.
“So you are like the others, just a slut.”
And he began to laugh in a low, cruel voice that sent a shudder up her spine.
“You will not talk to any police, Carrington. But I will.” He nodded, as if affirming something to himself. “When they ask what ’appen, I will explain I tried to save your life. But I was too late. You were already dead.”
29
Traffic downtown was jammed up, just emergency lights on at intersections, stalled streetcars, confused drivers piling into each other. Chuck could have kicked himself for not taking the Gardiner Expressway out to Parkdale — he and Leon had been half an hour getting from Jarvis to Bathurst. But it looked as if they were finally tunnelling through, and here were the lights back on again, just in time to run a red.
“Jesus,” said Leon. “Don’t get us killed. You’re sure Carrie’s house is under guard?”
“McAnthony said not to worry, a car’s sitting outside, and they’ve got orders to prowl around on foot.”
“She couldn’t have been asleep when I phoned. She was waiting for a call at midnight. From that guy Lachance. He’s dangerous, Chuck.”
“Stop fussing, Leon, Carrie’s in her bed dreaming of tripping through fields of daisies.”
Chuck finally slowed to a safe speed as he entered the maze of streets that was Carrie’s neighbourhood: tall elms and neat lawns, a law-abiding street, Chuck had always thought, well-mannered and crimeless. The sky was suddenly clear and the night warm, mists dancing upon the grass.
They parked on the intersecting avenue, and as they rounded the corner on foot, Chuck’s reaction was relief: no ambulances, no cruisers with flashing wig-wags. Where were Carrie’s watchers? Then Chuck spotted them, two uniformed cops in a parked car, a light on inside. “Find a place to park and check on Carrie,” he said. “I’ll see what these harness bulls have been up to.”
He alighted and approached the police cruiser. The woman at the wheel had been listening to the police radio, and jumped as he appeared at her window, her hand going to her holster.
“Easy,” Chuck said, “I’m one of the good guys. Chuck Tchobanian, Carrie’s partner.” The male cop was closing a book. Chuck recognized him from court, a lip mover, dumb as cowflop. At least he could read. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing,” said the woman. “Peaceful as a country graveyard around here.”
***
Carrie tried to scream, and Lachance hit her not in the face but the throat, a jab of a middle finger, and she choked and gagged, felt herself passing out, wanting desperately not to, fighting against oblivion.
Lachance, still holding her wrist, knelt toward Shadow’s body and reached for his revolver, which was still equipped with a silencer.
“It is this old man, Shadow, who murders you. It is perfect, yes, Carrington? No ’idden camera this time. They will believe a hero.”
As he bent, he went slightly off balance. Flailing, she yanked his arm hard, and they fell to the floor, his limbs tangling among the legs of the fallen chair. Her arm now free, she scrambled to her feet, and propelled herself toward the kitchen door as Lachance rose.
Out past the French doors, hanging loose on their hinges, onto the porch. Three long strides to the back door.
Lachance was five strides behind her.
Outside. Down the steps to the grass. A bare yard, lawn and roses. Nowhere to hide.
She stopped, confused. She suddenly didn’t understand why she’d been running or what she feared — the many terrors she had endured this night had abruptly ignited, consuming her, and she felt something snap, and she descended into a kind of giddy empty choking madness.
She turned and saw him ten feet behind her, standing at the bottom of the porch stairs, bracing the gun, aiming it at her head.
Yet she no longer felt fear, just a strange soothing calmness. She didn’t want to move. She felt rooted here, finally at peace, the mindless bliss of madness — or was this death?
But the angel of death — if that was who was emerging from the shadows — was embracing not her but Lachance: a massive dark shape that seemed to surround him like a tent.
She watched as the dark form carried Lachance high into the air, then headlong onto the grass, covering him, swallowing him up.
“I got his gun, Mrs. Barr.”
She couldn’t make sense of this. It wasn’t real. Nothing was.
“I didn’t want to bother you. I only came to drop off some of my poems.”
***
Leon rang the doorbell. No response. But there were lights on inside. Then he heard voices from the back, and he sprinted down the walk between the houses, and suddenly stopped. The scene seemed surreal to Leon: Carrie sitting on the back steps, her chin cupped in her hands; Edwin Moodie squatting on top of Michel Lachance in a pool of rain water. He was reciting poetry.
A reading. A literary event.
Moodie’s voice was soft and thin.
“I think of that lonely rose
Scarlet in the silver starlit night,
A blink of gold.
And I see green eyes and crimson hair,
And her golden-ringèd finger bare.”
He looked up at Carrie. “I’m not sure about that last line. It’s kind of . . . ponderous — is that the right word?”
Leon saw Moodie was holding a sheaf of papers in his hands. No bandages, no bite marks on those hands.
“Continue, Mr. Moodie,” Carrie said. “That’s very good.”
“I just don’t know if this is the right time,” Moodie said.
“It’s the right time.”
Lachance groaned and Moodie shifted a little. Now Chuck came trotting around from beside the house. He stopped, stared, mouth agape.
“Carrie . . . ,” Leon began.
“D
on’t interrupt, Leon,” Carrie said.
“Don’t interrupt?” Leon said. “For God’s sake, what’s going on here?”
“Well, um, I came over to leave these poems in her mailbox,” Moodie said, “because I just moved into the neighbourhood, a real nice basement room where it’s quiet to write, and anyway I been meaning to ask Mrs. Barr to look at them, and maybe help my spelling . . . Well, it’s a good thing I came, I guess, and found her in all this trouble.”
“Let’s hear more, Mr. Moodie,” Carrie said with an eerie calmness.
Something was definitely wrong with the picture of Carrie: she was unnaturally serene.
Something was very wrong with her.
“Now, Mrs. Barr? It don’t feel right, not now. Anyway, I’m not very good yet, I’m kind of learning. I get poetry books from the library, John Milton and, um, Byron, and a lot of poets you never heard of, too. I know lots of stuff by heart.”
“Read the poem you mailed to me.”
“I . . . can’t. Not right now.”
“I think I remember part of it,” Carrie said. “‘A dream of you, a dream of inescapable impossibility.’ Where did you come up with that?”
“Oh, I just liked those words together, Mrs. Barr. I get some of my words in a book called a thesaurus.”
“Call me Carrie, please.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
Leon looked at Chuck, who was blinking, reacting as if he’d just awakened from a strange dream.
“I’m going to get those cops,” Chuck said. He raced off.
“Why have you been hiding, Edwin?” Leon asked.
Moodie frowned and his little moustache twitched. “I wasn’t hiding. I moved, and then I got sick with a flu.”
“And so you didn’t report for work.”
“I’m only part-time.”
“No, Edwin,” Leon said. “You should have phoned to tell them you were sick.”
“Oh, I didn’t know.”
He went to his pocket and displayed a small gold ring on the palm of his huge paw. “I got your ring for you, which I kind of found, um, one day out under the window there.” He began speaking quickly. “I never wanted to bother you, I just . . . I been embarrassed to let you see my poems, I been trying to get up the courage . . .” He was stammering now. “They’re all dedicated to you, Mrs. Barr.”
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