A Door in the River (27 page)

“Shut up!
” she called out in Russian to the girls in their cubicles, and silence fell. Larysa stood, listening to the dark. No one else was out there.

The spent cartridge had ejected from the mouth of the weapon. A new cartridge had chunked into place. Gene lay on his back at her feet, but he was breathing.
Nice weapon
, she thought.
Not lethal but effective
.

She stepped over the man’s insensate form and looked back at Bobby’s. He wasn’t dead yet, but to judge from the bubbles subsiding against the dark earth, it wouldn’t be long before he died with his sins on him.

From there, it was easy to find her way out of the house. The front rooms were completely vacant. Bochko must have purchased the property and left it empty except for the spaces they needed for their activities. She had to break a couple of locked doors on her way to the front hallway, but then she simply unlocked the front door from inside and stepped out into the night.

It had been two months and nine days since she’d last stood alone and free in the night air. Their meeting place, according to Henry’s map, was six kilometres away. At a good walking pace, it would take her just over an hour to make it. She stepped away from the house and began walking with long, strong strides south from where she stood. It was dark enough to walk between the fields of soy. Even at night, the peace of the deep green fields overwhelmed her with their beauty and the secret they held. She dropped to her knees and wept. But only for a minute. Then she stood straight and high and continued walking. Henry’s map showed her how to avoid the main road on the way to where they would meet. She kept to the inside of the treelines along various sideroads that led in a disconnected, jagged line to her destination. A sign announced that she was entering Queesik Bay Reserve, a native territory. She heard the traffic for the first time.

Henry had told her to keep her eye out for a big red neon sign –
THE EAGLE –
that would be close to the main road. Now she saw it, and she crept toward it, still staying within cover, and keeping her eye out for her supposed saviour. He was at the back of the parking lot, standing beside a red pickup, waiting just as he said he would be. She emerged from the woods and he immediately dropped his arms and came toward her.

“Oh god! You made it … do they know you’re gone?’

“I am sure everything is going as you have planned,” she said, and the expression on his face changed.

“I don’t know what you mean –”

“When you wake up,” she said, and now he stepped away from her, seeing the gun raised before him, “tell Bochko I am not such a good girl as he was hoping. No, in the truth, I am very bad.”

She fired at his face and he crumpled to the ground beside his truck.

“Am not stupid,” she said to his quaking form. She was still holding the trigger down. Larysa yanked the leads out of his face and crumpled them up around the spent cartridge and stuck it all into her pocket. He had brought her a change of clothes, as he’d promised. It was all in a plastic bag on the front seat. Nothing too fancy. What did he care, when he was planning on having her out of them for most of the time anyway?

She dug in his pocket for his wallet. She rifled through his ID. One of the cards had the name of
Doug-Ray Finch
, but the rest gave his name as
Henry Wiest
. So he had told her his real name. Not worried, since she was never going to be able to use it against him, if he’d gotten his way. Sly fox. His home address was on one of the cards. She memorized it. She would have to see what he really was.

Now Mr. Sugar was sitting on a couch just a few feet away from her, utterly unprepared for what was about to happen to him. She took a deep breath. Then she turned into the room and faced Carl Duffy.

Bochko was sitting at the other end of the couch. He
was wearing a suit jacket with a white silk T-shirt under it. She could see a wall of muscle beneath the shirt.

“Hello, Kitty,” he said. “You almost missed pizza.”

She realized that Duffy’s head was smoking.

“Say hello, Carl.” He waited and then leaned over and knocked on the man’s forehead. Larysa saw the tidy black hole there. That’s where the smoke was coming from. “You didn’t hear the shot?”

“No,” she said.

“That’s amazing. I bought a new silencer and they say you can’t hear it past six feet. I guess it works.” He rose and she took a step back. “Don’t worry about Carl. You didn’t need him in any case.”

“No?”

“Of course not. I’ll take care of you, Kitty.”

“I bet,” she said. “Anyway, is good. Saves time.”

“See? You have an excellent attitude. Come and sit.”

She hesitated and he raised the front of his shirt over his muscled stomach and showed her the butt of a gun that was tucked into his waistband. She had the urge to throw her hand out and pull the trigger on that gun. But she sat instead, across from him in an upholstered chair.

“I know what you are looking for, Kitty. And I am going to give it to you.”

“Why would you do that?”

“To reward you. For all your effort. And, anyway, what am I going to do with it? I have to get rid of it. You might
as well have it back.” He tilted his head at her, but nothing in his two tiny eyes showed the least hint of compassion. “Come here. Come to me, Kitty. Look, here it is.”

In his hand was the dark blue booklet with the crest of her country on it.

“Why didn’t you just go to the police, poor little Kitty? They would have taken you in, they would have brought you right to your warm cozy consulate in Toronto and they would have worked it all out for you. Now, instead, you are back with me,” he said, smiling. “And I am a little upset with you, you know.”

“Do you want to know why I do not go to police?”

“I do. I do
very
much,” he said, smiling warmly at her, as if he were proud of her.

“Because I get myself in this,” she said. “I get myself out.”

“I don’t see that happening” – he opened the passport and looked at the photo page – “Larysa Kirilenko. I almost –”

At the sound of her name in his mouth, she lunged without thinking and knocked him sideways off the couch and onto the floor. But he merely lifted her off of him. He had not defended himself or even gone for his gun. He just stood and straightened himself. He held the passport out again. “Do you want it or not?” he asked.

“I want it.”

She stretched her arm out and snatched it. She flipped through it quickly and saw that it was complete. Complete, but useless to her now. He would not have given it to her
if there was any hope of her using it again. But she had it in her hands, this document that said she belonged somewhere, existed somewhere, had rights somewhere. She knew this would be the last victory she would ever have.

Bochko was studying the hole in Carl Duffy’s forehead. “Bullet’s still in there,” he said. “These things break apart like the instant they meet any resistance.” He looked back at her. “You’d think Carl Duffy’s head wouldn’t offer much resistance but –” He held his fists together in front of him and then pulled his arms apart, spreading his fingers wide. “You know?
Boooomm!
I bet it looks like pizza in there now.” He laughed and leaned down to kiss the top of Duffy’s head. A thin rill of red glugged out of the hole. Standing behind the dead man, Bochko looked over at her.

“So, Kitty. Where should we do this?”

She knew what he meant.

“It is up to you. Where you wish to die.”

He smiled at her again, a wide-open, devouring smile. And he was about to say something else when they both heard a woman’s voice coming from the street. It was small and tinny, but it was clearly saying a name. It was saying, “Lee Travers.” He retreated carefully to the window, walking backwards, and lifted a curtain a little. Then he crossed the room again and grabbed Larysa by the wrist. “We have some company,” he said. “Let’s go.”

] 32 [

Late afternoon

The burning in her cheeks and neck had subsided, and Hazel had suppressed the urge to smash the steering wheel with her fist. They’d been stupid; thorough but stupid, and the whole investigation had been tainted from the start. She tried to identify the point at which she could have seen the devil on her shoulder, but the case had been so opaque in places, and her life beyond the case so nerve-wracking … Had she been distracted? Had she dismissed a warning sign anywhere that might have drawn her attention back to the leak? Of course it had never occurred to her that Lydia Bellecourt had simply slotted Hazel into place in
their
plan, but that is exactly what had happened. It was shameful and horrifying. She had asked the questions
What is the girl running from?
and
What is the girl searching for?
, and these questions had been so worthy that at no point did she ever wonder if there was a fatal flaw in her point of view.

The sideroads swept past as she came closer to the Ninth Line.

What would she do now? Bellecourt had congratulated herself for staying one step ahead of them the whole way.

But now, finally,
they
were ahead. She knew where both the girl and Lee Travers were headed. She’d already dispatched cars. It had taken LeJeune less than five minutes to decipher the name Mr. Sugar. Everyone in high stakes knew him. He was a whale, not just to the casino, but in stature as well. He was allowed to eat at the tables because he bet a minimum of a thousand dollars a hand. He tipped well, too, especially the waitresses, who found him disgusting. He told them to call him Mr. Sugar. He’d made his fortune in energy drinks.

His name was Carl Duffy.

Now she didn’t have to fake having a plan. She could gun for Bellecourt and let the woman find out for herself what kind of rage Hazel was capable of. Nobody put a hand on anyone she cared for.

Bellecourt planned to keep Hazel occupied with the fate of her lieutenant; she was going to keep Bellecourt occupied with the fate of her fiancé. This was their endgame. Bellecourt would have to get to Lee, or wait for him in those fields. Hazel wasn’t about to let her choose, though.

She had to
not care
. The problem with a threat like the one that had been issued was that if you allowed yourself to be governed by the fear of the outcome, you might end up with nothing but the thing you feared. She had to push past it, keep Bellecourt in her sights. It was probably the only way to save Wingate and get Bellecourt and Travers into custody. She fumbled with her cell and dialled Ray Greene. “I’m not stopping,” she said to him. “In five minutes you’d better have half your hands on deck up near Duffy’s place and the other half on the Ninth Road. You’re going to need a heat sensor to figure out where James is.”

“Where are you going?”

“Straight through,” she said. “I’m going to go get her. Then you move in and get Wingate out, and anyone else who might be under there.”

“I don’t know, Hazel.”

“I don’t know, either, Ray. But the longer she’s roosting on top of them, the greater the chance of an outcome I don’t think either of us can live with.”

“Stay in touch with me. And be careful.”

“I will. Just get James out.” She ended the call as she passed the Eighth Line and continued up Sideroad 1 toward the grove. She might have been driving over the body of her detective constable; she focused herself on the task at hand and powered LeJeune’s dark blue Maxima over the hardtop toward her destination. As she crested a low rise, she saw, in the distance, the black Mercedes
that she’d seen before, coming slowly toward her, and she reached for the radio. “Bellecourt? Come in. We’re alone on this frequency.”

She waited. The black car seemed to be slowing. Then it turned and blocked the road sideways.

“Bellecourt?” she said into the radio. “I’m not stopping on this road.”

“Hazel,” came the constable’s voice. “I thought I gave you my instructions.”

“I know where Lee is.”

“You don’t.”

“There are cars heading to his location as we speak.”

“Please do stop. I don’t want to have unnecessary blood on my hands. That’s Earl Tate up ahead in the car. Do you see him?”

“I do.”

“He has a rifle on him with a range of almost four hundred metres. I lent it to him. He’s a good shot, too.”

“Well,” said Hazel, pulling the car onto the verge, “I’d better avoid him, then. Your commanding officer’s cruiser has got quite a bit of horsepower.” She drove far out into the field, beyond range, she thought, and then cut back in. She kept a wide berth behind the Mercedes as she drove back toward the road, through the vibrant soy.

Gunfire erupted from the passenger window of the Mercedes as she bored down on the road and pulled LeJeune’s cruiser back sharply onto the hardtop. The cruiser hit the
road with a jerk and a heave and fishtailed around a little, or appeared to fishtail – the fact was, Hazel was now pointing south on purpose. She was a hundred and fifty metres above the black Mercedes. The driver was no longer visible in the front of it. Protecting his head from a shot. “Last chance to catch a lift with me,” she said into the radio.

“You put too low a value on life,” came Bellecourt’s voice.

“I have a sliding scale,” said Hazel, and she put the car in first and floored it. That’s when her hunch was confirmed and she saw Bellecourt pop upright in the front seat of the Mercedes.
Yes, my dear
, she thought. She remembered the Mercedes’s driver had had long black hair, and she knew from Forbes’s report that Tate was bald. She was already going forty kilometres an hour when Bellecourt began to hurriedly back the Mercedes up. She wasn’t talking now, was she? Hazel closed the distance between the two cars, angling the cruiser to make contact with the front side of the Mercedes – fifty, sixty kilometres an hour, and she could see the determination on Bellecourt’s face. She was retreating as fast as she could, dust kicking forward from her front tires, and Hazel had the whole front right panel in her sights. She collided hard against the black car and she saw Bellecourt’s body leap up and toward her, but then the world went white and something punched her with incredible force. It took a moment to realize that the impact had triggered the airbag in LeJeune’s steering wheel, and even as Hazel punched it down and coughed out a lungful of
the white powder that now filled the car, she could see the Mercedes rolling slowly away toward the ditch, smoke and steam flowing upwards into the summer air, its rear facing Hazel. The pain in her neck told her she was going to be popping anti-inflammatories later, but job one was getting out of the car. She pushed herself out of LeJeune’s cruiser and drew her weapon. There was no movement inside the black car, and the spent bladders of three airbags were hanging from its dashboard and doors. Hazel moved carefully around the back. The driver’s door was still closed. She wrenched it open and found Bellecourt lying awkwardly against the passenger seat, blood dripping from the side of her head. She had something in her hand – the radio. Bellecourt’s standard-issue Glock was sitting on the floor below the passnger seat. “Do it,” Bellecourt said into it the radio and dropped it. She lifted her head to Hazel and gave her a small, pained smile.