Crime Machine (22 page)

“Maybe it was a freak of timing. A good-Samaritan thing,” Delorme said. Her voice sounded loud in the quiet of the empty room. “Happens to be going by and sees a woman in trouble, chases the kid into the alley. Kid pulls the gun and
boom
—the guy drops him first.”

“But your witness didn’t see anybody else. Didn’t hear anybody else.”

“You’re right.” Delorme picked up the remote, pressed a button, and the monitor went dark. “Also, the way he was shot in the face, it looks more like he was stopped head-on. Like the person was coming the other way down the alley. Or waiting for him.”

The fluorescent lights went out and Delorme and Cardinal both yelled out, “Hey!” The lights came back on and someone down the hall yelled back, “Sorry!”

“If the killer was waiting for him,” Cardinal said, “that would seem to indicate someone who works with him. Maybe they had a falling-out.”

“Except none of the victims has mentioned an accomplice, and there’s no other evidence of one. It would help if we had some idea who the kid
was. We don’t even know if he was local. Pretty hard to make any sense of it. What? Why are you looking like that?”

“Nothing,” Cardinal said. “I was just remembering what the Russian lady said—about not having to understand people.”

“That Russian lady,” Delorme said, “has Sparky Noone’s problem.”

F
OR THE FIRST TIME IN HER YOUNG LIFE
, Nikki was experiencing silence. This brand new house out in the Canadian woods didn’t creak or rattle like older houses. And no cars, no trucks, no boats, no trains or planes going by. Almost no wildlife. The other night a squirrel or something had scrabbled across the roof of her bedroom and woken her up wide-eyed and scared. She liked the quiet during the day, but at night it put her on edge. Every now and then the furnace would make a muffled
whump
, then a mild hiss from the air vent, then nothing. How could you relax when you could hear every little thing—the scratch of your fingernail on the pillow, a strand of hair falling across your forehead?

And the darkness. She had never known what darkness was before now. When she turned off the light in her bedroom, it was as if she had gone blind. She wanted one of those little lights you stick in a socket, but she didn’t want to ask Papa and sound like too much of a wuss. Tonight at least there was a moon, bright enough to cast shadows. She held a hand straight up and turned it, bone white in the air above the bed, and admired the shadow it cast—elegant and slim, the arm of a ballerina, the neck of a swan.

She sat up cross-legged and bunched the pillows behind her back. Smells of lavender and lemon wafted up from her feet. She held each one
and rubbed with her thumbs, the soles softer and smoother than usual. Papa’s washing them had thrummed a chord deep in her chest, as if there was an instrument inside her—not harp, not organ, no instrument she had ever heard—that had been yearning to be played since the day she was born.

She picked up her watch and tilted it in the moonlight. Two a.m. She got off the bed and stood before the mirror, backed away from it until she was lit by the moon. Her silly pyjamas, blue and white striped and utterly sexless. The first gift Papa had given her, telling her how modesty was the most underrated virtue in the world, the one thing maybe the Muslims could teach us something about, whatever that meant. The pyjamas had felt stupid and clumsy and ugly at first—Nikki had been sleeping naked as long as she could remember—but she had come to love them. There was something consoling about dressing for bed, as if you were going somewhere special, somewhere private, someplace no one would bother you.

She lifted up the striped top, gathering the material with both hands. So cool and clean, the metallic glow of moonlight on her skin, the dime-sized spot of her navel. She pulled the bottoms down a little, exposing the ridge of her hips. I’m hot, she said. I’m a hottie. The ridges and planes of her face, alternately glowing and shadowed, made her look aloof, ethereal—
alluring
, that aching word she came across so often in the vampire novels that were her only reading. The night made her features regular and even, her eyes deep and black.

She went to the door and opened it and listened. Silence. A glow beneath the door of Papa’s room. The feel of carpet under her bare feet as she covered the short distance to the door. She raised a hand and held it an inch from the wood. For some reason it was a moment like on the diving board at the juvenile centre, knowing it wouldn’t hurt but afraid anyway.

She tapped on the door with her fingertips.

Silence.

Nikki raised her fingers to tap again, when Papa’s voice, no louder than conversational level, said to come in.

She opened the door a little and stuck her head in. Papa looked at her over the paperback he was reading, a crescent moon in flames on the cover.

“What is it, Nikki? You should be asleep.”

“I need to be with you for a little while.”

“You do? Why? What’s up?”

Nikki closed the door and crossed the room and got on the bed beside him. She curled up and laid an arm across his belly and hugged him, pressing her forehead into his ribs.

He didn’t say anything. He adjusted his elbows, but he was still holding the book up over his chest.

Nikki sent her hand straying up over his chest and belly and down between his legs. She felt the soft outline of his penis beneath her palm and rubbed it.

“Don’t.”

“I want to. Just lay still. You don’t have to say anything or do anything. I just want to suck you off.”

He dropped the book over the side of the bed and grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her hand away. She tried to put it back, but he was fast and strong.

“No.”

She looked up at him, the blue eyes frowning at her. “Please,” she said. “I want to. I want to make you feel good.”

“No.”

She used the voice that had worked fine with her tricks. “I’ll make you come like you’ve never come before, honey. You just lay back and let me suck your huge cock and blow your mind.”

“God, Nikki, you’re going to make me cry. That is the saddest thing I have ever heard.”

“You made me feel good. I want to make you feel good. Why can’t I?”

“Because you already make me feel good. Just by being part of this family.”

“You had sex with Lemur.”

“I went through an exercise with Lemur. It was something he needed and the family needed.”

She rolled away from him. “You think I’m ugly.”

“That’s exactly wrong, Nikki. The reason I don’t want to have sex with you is because you are beautiful and perfect just the way you are. I curse the world that taught you the only way you can be nice to someone is to have sex with them. Sit up, now. Pull that cushion up off the floor and get under the covers, but you keep a good foot between us. Respect my space the way I respect yours.”

She did as he said.

“People have harmed you all your life with sex, Nikki. Remember what I told you the first night I brought you home? That I would never harm you? I never will. Not even if you ask me to.” He let a little silence go by. “What? What are you thinking? I can see thoughts crossing that perfect little face of yours.”

“I’ve never been in bed with a man who didn’t want sex. I wasn’t trying to be bad. I just wanted to pay you back. For what you did this afternoon.”

“You let me wash your feet. It gave me a lot of pleasure, so you can consider me pre-thanked. You owe me nothing. What’s this, now? Are you crying?”

She shook her head and folded her arms and couldn’t speak. He asked her again what was wrong and she started to bawl and turned away. He put a box of Kleenex on her lap and lay back and waited for her to settle down.

When she spoke, her voice sounded strange to her. Deeper and more mature. “You don’t know how good you made me feel. No one ever made me feel that good.”

She cried a little more and he waited, in the patient way he had. Not ignoring, just waiting. She turned on her side to face him and said, “Are you Jesus?”

The smallest of smiles played over his features. “What do you think?”

“I think you might be. You wouldn’t even have to know it, necessarily. You could be like a reincarnation or something.”

They didn’t speak for a time. Outside, the sound of the Range Rover pulling up and the door slamming. A minute later, Jack’s big footsteps crossing the kitchen. He went to the bathroom and ran the water and brushed his teeth, and then the sound of his bedroom door opening and closing.

“That’s Jack,” Nikki said. “Lemur still isn’t back?”

“No.”

“What’s so special about the bunkhouse? The other day I was just on the porch over there and Lemur yelled at me to get away. Actually yelled at me. I wasn’t even looking inside.”

“There’s material in the bunkhouse that doesn’t concern you. It’s better for you not to know about it. I want you to trust me on this and keep away.”

“I will. I’d do anything for you, Papa. I honestly believe I’d do anything you asked me to.”

“None of what we do is about me. It’s about the family. Our survival. You know, I was lucky. I had a good family, growing up. Unfortunately, they died when I was very young—not much older than you—and I vowed that one day I would try to re-create the happy family I had known. It’s become something much bigger than that, of course, something much more important, but it’s still my family. Our family. And it makes me happier than I can say to have you with us, Nikki. Happier than I can say.”

—

Nikki woke early. There wasn’t even a hint of sunrise outside her bedroom window. Nothing out there but darkness lit by scattered stars. Darkness and forest, the boughs of the trees weighed down with snow so that they almost touched the ground. A radio muttered from the kitchen. Nikki closed the curtain again and got out of her pyjamas and into her clothes.

She opened her door, listened to the radio for a moment—it was going on about hockey—and closed the door behind her. She went down the three stairs to the dining area. Papa was sitting at the head of the table with a shotgun across his lap and his hands resting on it.

“Good morning,” he said. His voice sounded strange, detached somehow, as if it worked independently of Papa himself. “You’re up early, considering.”

“I couldn’t sleep. Something woke me up.”

“Fix yourself some breakfast. Stuff’s on the counter.”

Nikki poured herself a bowl of cornflakes and skim milk. She got a glass out of the cupboard and a pitcher of orange juice and poured a glass and put the pitcher back in the fridge. Then she took the cereal bowl in one hand and the glass of juice in the other and sat at the end of the table opposite Papa.

He watched her eat.

“What’s up?” Nikki said. “What’s with the gun?”

Papa looked down at his lap then back at Nikki. “Your brother is dead.”

Nikki went still, her spoon in mid-air, milk dripping from it and splashing into the bowl below.

“Lemur is dead. He was shot last night. While he was working.”

Nikki lowered her spoon to the bowl. She stirred her cereal a little. An unexpected emotion was gathering inside her chest and she felt the prickle of tears. “How did it happen?”

A bedroom door opened and shut. There were footsteps and then Jack was in the kitchen.

Papa stood up and levelled the shotgun at him. Jack was pouring himself coffee and wasn’t even aware of it until he turned around and faced the dining area. He took a sip from his coffee and his eyes went to the shotgun. “What’s that for?”

“Did you kill Lemur?”

“What?”

“Did you kill Lemur? Yes or no.”

“No. What happened to him?” Jack started toward the table, casual about it, taking another sip from his coffee.

Papa pumped the shotgun, pointed it again at Jack’s chest. “Where were you last night?”

“I went into town. To a bar. Had a few beers. Listened to a band couldn’t even play in tune. Came back.”

“Prove it.”

“How am I supposed to do that? Subpoena witnesses? Stop pointing that thing.”

“I could end your life right now.”

“If the family just lost a man, it’s probably not real smart to lose another.”

“Getting rid of a traitor is pure gain.”

“I’m not a traitor.” Jack set his coffee mug down on the table. “Put it down, Papa.”

“What time did you get back?”

“I don’t know. Two-thirty. Three. What difference does it make?”

“Lemur was killed around nine.”

“I can’t do nothing about that, Papa. You neither.”

“I could blow your head off.”

“Well, you’d best do it, then. Because if you don’t, I’m gonna rip that shotgun out of your hands and bust your skull in with it.”

Papa took three quick steps and hit Jack one sharp blow in the head with the butt of the shotgun. Jack fell sideways out of his chair. His mug twirled to the floor in the opposite direction, and the aroma of coffee blossomed around them.

F
RIDAY MORNING
, D
ELORME ASKED
Staff Sergeant Flower to check if any tickets had been handed out in the neighbourhood of Roxwell and Clement. The boy would almost certainly have driven there, and yet there had been no suspicious cars parked in the strip mall lot, or on the street. He had gone into the alley, presumably to get to his car, which should therefore have been parked on Clement Street. So he must have parked somewhere else and they just hadn’t found the car. Twenty minutes later Sergeant Flower came back with the answer: Yes, one car had been towed. An irate citizen had called about some idiot parked in his driveway. Right in his driveway, for Pete’s sake. For this he pays taxes? Location: third house from the mall.

Delorme put in a call to the city towing service. The man who answered chose to liven up a boring job by speaking in the manner of a Marine on a vital mission.

“Clement Street?” he said when Delorme asked. “That’s an affirmative.”

“What number on Clement Street?”

“Hold on a second …” A distant clicking of a keyboard as a log was consulted. “Number twelve. That’s one-two. Number twelve Clement.”

“Could you give me the VIN number and plates on that?”