A Door in the River (21 page)

“Good girl.”

“She’s looking for something.”

Cherry laughed softly. “We all look for something. Sometime, it make for trouble.”

“Do you know where she’s going? Who she’ll try to see?”

“Mr. Sugar,” she said. “She will kill Mr. Sugar, too.”

“Who is Mr. – ”

“Time’s up,” said Plaskett, throwing open the door. He strode toward the bed before either of them had a chance to adjust and ripped the covers off of them. Wingate leaped up and stood beside the bed, his police instincts telling him to have his weapon in his hand, and he stood with his hands apart and slightly bent forward, ready for anything. Plaskett laughed roughly. “Get enough, soldier?”

Cherry was calmly dressing and he patted her on the rump.

“Old Reliable,” he said. “Gene’ll take you back to your suite, dollface.”

Wingate wanted to pull the man’s eyes out of his head.

Cherry left without saying another word. Plaskett was facing him, his hands on his hips. “Well? She the goods?”

“She’s … yes, very good. Expert. Are all the girls like her?”

“The other girls are young and firm and taste like peaches, pal. Not like this beef jerky. And there’s more coming in all the time. Lots of turnover. Mind you, if
you
like
Cherry, you can have her for the rest of the week. Make sure you like the service. But next time, you pay your bid like everyone else.”

“When can I bring the rest of the money?” he asked, moving around the man to get his pants. He couldn’t find his underwear and remembered that he’d stepped out of them beside the bed. This was overtime, danger pay, and a bonus all rolled up into one.

“You come back when you got it.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll take you up.”

He led him to the stairs that led down to the laundry room just off the river. He went back out into the riverbed. He was René Arsenault now. This new card would work in the reader. It would open the door to the river. Somehow, you made your reservation, then you showed your ID at the smoke shop, and you showed it again in the taxi. They would all know you were coming. He’d been lucky the security was so tight they could have faith in it. Or perhaps Thurlow would have thrown him to Plaskett. Because, certainly, when someone needed correction, Plaskett delivered it.

He walked back to the casino area, which then led up and out through the door in the river. He walked it out, pacing it and estimating the compass directions as the tunnel curved and then turned back to the hole with the stairs embedded in it.

Thurlow was waiting for him when he emerged, and without a word being exchanged, he drove Wingate back to the Eagle. Wingate transferred from the cab to the rental car he’d picked up in Mayfair, and which was parked in the same space Wiest’s pickup had been left in. If the space was a signal, he’d wanted to trigger it. But Kitty did not step out of the woods looking for something she thought he had on her. She was still at large, and the OPS had a much bigger, darker case on its hands than anyone had imagined. He got into the car and then dialled in.

The signal had flickered back on where it had vanished. Two minutes later, it moved fluidly back to Queesik Bay, and she and Forbes held their breath as it stopped and then resumed its movement at a slower pace, back behind the Eagle. The blue dot on the computer screen reversed, then made a little turn, and then headed back out to the Queesik Bay Road. The phone rang. Hazel picked it up and heard his voice saying her name.

“I know who Kitty is,” he said.

] 25 [

Mr. Sugar had been the first client to have her delivered. Terry Brennan was the second. But Mr. Sugar had been the worse of the two, and only serious deviants needed girls delivered. There in the privacy of their own homes, they could do whatever they wanted. She’d been told to call him Mr. Sugar – he was the owner of a profitable energy drink company – but she avoided speaking to him at all. He liked three things: Eating, gambling, and torturing girls. It got him off.

Anything could be an excuse for punishment. She was given cans and cans of caffeine-fortified power drinks but nothing to eat. They made her feel like an electrified wire had been run through her. He obviously drank quite a few himself: he was more than three hundred pounds. The first few times she’d seen him, in the underground bedroom, he’d been more or less gentle with her, although
every inch of him disgusted her. He was a man of indeterminate age, somewhere between forty and sixty, but so ruined it was impossible to tell. Clearly an alcoholic, a smoker, and definitely a bad man. She’d been brought to him and Earl introduced him as their “favourite bachelor.” There was no mystery to that. Some people took no care of themselves, but they had money and so they could do as they wished. Mr. Sugar was rich and he was a nine-year-old in the body of a debauched middle-aged man, greedily playing with his toys.

He’d come at the end of that first awful week in the rooms.

After six days in the motel, Earl had appeared and led her to the car he’d brought her from the airport in. She knew from talking carefully to Tania during their lessons that her destination was a place that was called “the rooms” and that she would stay there a long time. No effort now was made to hide her in the car or prevent her from seeing where she was going. Clearly, they never intended her to reappear in the world again.

She hadn’t seen the outside world since she’d arrived in Canada a week before. Then Earl pushed her head down and put her back into the car. As he was pulling away, she saw the name of the motel. Forty Winks. Forty lashes was more like it. She hoped she’d never lay eyes on it again. Forty minutes south of the motel, he changed to narrower, rural roads and eventually into farmland.
He continued on to a house at the end of a long straight road. It was an older house, a nice brick country farmhouse set back from the road and surrounded by fields and other farmhouses. He brought her out, holding her wrists behind her, and unlocked a set of doors. There were two men inside, guards, she quickly realized, men she heard called Gene and Bobby. Bobby took her from Earl and led her downstairs. A door at the bottom of a set of steep steps opened onto the basement. There were rooms here, some with closed doors. There was a living room with two couches and a television attached to one of the walls. Two girls, one of whom was the girl called Timmy, were sitting on one of the couches. Evidently, Timmy’s English, and perhaps her obedience, had permitted her re-entry into the general population. She looked beautiful now, and she had a new dress.

Bobby snapped his fingers and both girls rose. He made Timmy sit back down and passed Larysa to the other. “Show her to her room,” he said, and the girl took Larysa gently by the arm.

“Come,” she said.

“I am Cherry,” she said.

“Kitty,” she replied, knowing doing anything but playing strictly by the rules at this point would be suicide.

“Your English is good.”

“I learn to speak in high school, and I take … I was take courses in English. French also.”

“I wish I can speak like you.” She led Larysa to a door that went into a hallway off the living room.

“How long have you been here?”

Cherry laughed softly. “My life. How it feels. But half-year now.” She led Larysa down another set of steep stairs. The air became cold and musty.

“Here we are.” Cherry opened a door and showed Larysa into a room made of dirt. There was nothing here but a row of doors standing in a wall that went from the floor to the ceiling of the earthen space. Someone had dug this room out. In the wall to their right, there was a concrete frame in which a heavy steel door had been mounted. “This was Gina’s room,” Cherry said, showing Larysa to a door. “Now is yours.”

“Gina got out?”

Cherry just looked at her, and Larysa finally realized what happened to the girls here. Perhaps some of them, like Tania/Timmy, were pulled back from the brink by good luck, but now she didn’t want to know what had happened to Gina. What happened to her was something Cherry knew, but it wasn’t time to tell the new girl that. She would have a long time to live with the truth. Her heart sank farther as Cherry let her into the room. There was a filthy mattress on the floor, a steel rod that had some other girl’s clothes still hanging on it, and a small side table with two drawers in it up against the wall. Here, the walls were made of earth, too.

“What do I do?” she asked.

“Wait. Wait until someone wants you.”

“When?”

“Any time,” said Cherry. Then, safe in the clay-walled room, she switched to Russian: “
If you cooperate, you eat. If you don’t, you starve. This place is for men who do whatever they want to a woman. Hard or soft, gentle or vicious, you will meet them all. Outside, they are other people. In here, they do whatever they want. They come from all over. One day, there were Germans here. If someone likes you, they will deliver you to them. Hotels, warehouses, homes. Wherever they want you, you go. No one knows you are here. You may choose not to live, many girls have chosen not to live. But if you want to live, you must do your best and avoid pain and suffering
.”

“
How do they get away with it?
”

“
Nothing like this would ever happen in Canada …
”

She gave Larysa some threadbare sheets. “
Try to keep a part of yourself safe, Kitty. One day, they may find us, and it would be better to be alive then
.”

“My name is Larysa,” she said in English, holding her hand out in thanks, but her gesture was cut short by a slap.

“My name Cherry. Your name Kitty. You never say name again. Your Larysa is dead.” She turned smartly and walked back to the door. “
I wish you luck
,” she said in their mother tongue, “
and if you do not have luck, I wish you a speedy release
.”

She left and closed the door. Larysa heard her walking slowly back down the hallway. When the hallway was silent, she remained standing in the middle of the dirt room where a girl, or any number of girls before her, had once lived.

In the second week, she was visited on almost a daily basis by Mr. Sugar. He had her in one of the rooms on the floor above. Then, in the third week, he had paid enough to have her brought to him. Sugar did not let her out of the house, not that week, nor the next, nor the week after that: for almost a whole month he lay on top of her, tortured her, doing whatever came to his blackened imagination. Every inch of him imparted some awful scent or flavour, and it was all she could do not to vomit on him.

But she had decided she wanted to live. So she did what she was told to do. And she acted as if she liked it because that was the price of avoiding the rest of her fate.

After these three weeks, she was suddenly brought back to the rooms and told that Sugar had been outbid. Outbid? She was baffled by this idea. But with this, the whole depraved order of the place was laid bare to her. They weren’t mere whores here, no. They were prize lots, given to the highest bidder, for a week at a time. Sugar had become complacent and missed out; Terry Brennan had stepped ardently into the fray and claimed her. But he would not have her at the house. For his two weeks, before Mr. Sugar won her back, Brennan came to the rooms, only
once asking for Larysa to come to the house, a day, Larysa now understood, that his wife had been out of town. If not for that visit, she would never have found where Brennan lived.

She had worked hard at figuring out how she was going to find Mr. Sugar’s house. He’d requested that she be blindfolded on the drives out, but he had never taken any care to hide how he made his money. He owned an energy drink company called Power Up Beverages. The motel manager had let her use the office internet and she searched for corporate information on Power Up. His fridge had been full of the products the company made, and he was always guzzling one down. The president’s name was Carl Duffy. There was even a picture of him, the smiling pig. She plugged his name into a directory and found an unlisted number, but another directory turned up an address and Google Maps confirmed the topography she remembered from looking out the windows of the room he’d kept her in. The house had been high on an escarpment overlooking a lake. Gannon Lake. She was even closer than she’d thought: it was less than twenty kilometres from the motel. But to get there, she could not hitchhike, and neither could she dawdle about it. There was only one viable option: she would run there.

She hadn’t run a distance longer than five kilometres since her injuries. A half-marathon, in her best days, would have
taken her an hour forty-five, but she imagined a run like this, cold, would take her three hours if she wanted to have any strength when she got there.

She printed out the map and folded it up. She thanked the manager and told him she’d be back for another night. She didn’t tell him there was little or no chance that he would ever see her again. But if someone was onto her, having someone else who could offer her pursuers a good lead might buy her much-needed time. In her room, she changed into the clothes she’d been wearing the night she left Henry Wiest in the parking lot, clothes he’d brought for her: a pair of sweatpants with the word
CANADA
on them and a T-shirt. She’d wrecked these clothes walking in the woods, but they were the best clothes she had for running. She set out, heading for the smaller roads behind the town, and before she was through the first kilometre, she’d taken off the tennis shoes and thrown them into the scrub. She’d trust her naked feet to get her there. Back when she’d been serious about running, she’d met a lot of barefoot marathoners who swore by it. It felt okay, if she stayed on the paved part of the road. By the time the sun was past its noon height and she was running past farms and fields, she had settled into a rhythm.

As she ran, she began to hear a voice in her head. Not a crazy voice, just her own voice, as if being broadcast directly into her mind from outside of herself. It was saying,
You are good, you are good. You have done nothing wrong. You are an angel
. She saw the killing she’d done in a new light and something inside her, like a weight, went down into her belly and settled and she began to run faster, with more power. The guilt and horror streamed off of her, and she began to understand why Henry Wiest had had to die, why Terry Brennan had to die. Why Carl Duffy, once he had given her what she wanted, would die. All of them had stepped out of the natural order, and removed her from it as well, and now they were all subject to new laws. Laws that did not obtain in the real world, where people had names and relationships. In this other world, the laws said she could eradicate anyone who had witnessed, participated in, or caused her shame. She had known love and obeyed
its
laws, which were trust, openness, abandon when it was called for, generosity, selflessness. The new laws demanded the opposite: secrecy, caution, selfishness, and righteous anger. She was a certain kind of angel. She ran in Larysa’s body, but she felt with Kitty’s soul. And in Kitty’s soul, there was a surfeit of murder.