Salvage (15 page)

He stood and saw with relief that Karen was alone in the bed. Only the top of her head was visible above the duvet.

He took off his ski mask and stood and listened to her breathing for a moment before he called her name.

She sat up with a start, switched on the bedside lamp, and gaped at him. She was wearing a loose white T-shirt.

“Phillip?” she said. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Shh,” he said “It's me. I just need to talk to you for a few minutes then I'll leave.”

She looked around. “How the fuck did you get in here?”

“I came in through the hatch in the floor,” he said. “I needed to talk to you and I don't know what kind of secur­ity you have. I didn't want to knock in case Bobby was in here with you.”

“Bobby's not here,” she said. “I don't know where he is. You could have knocked.”

She threw off the covers and got out of bed and looked out the window up at the house. Scarnum looked at her long, pale legs.

“Jesus, for that matter, you could have just called. Crazy motherfucker.”

They both laughed then.

“Well, I didn't know.”

“You scared the fucking shit out of me,” said Karen. “Jesus.” She still looked dazed.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I find myself in a bit of a tight spot and I needed to talk to you. If you want me to go, I will.”

“What are you gonna do?” she said. “Call up the Batcopter and get it to pick you up? Jesus H. Christ. What are you wearing?”

“A wetsuit,” he said. “I paddled over in a canoe — Bobby's canoe, as a matter of fact. I'm trying to avoid some Mexican chaps who wish me ill. I shouldn't like to run into them just now.”

“I know,” she said. “I saw them here. Tuesday night.”

She walked across the room and picked up a bottle of Laphroaig. “Want some of Bobby's whisky?” she asked.

“Jesus, do I ever,” he said. “I'm fucking chilled to the bone.”

She rinsed some glasses. “That water must be as cold as a witch's tit,” she said.

“Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey,” he said.

“As cold as a whore's heart,” she said.

“As cold as charity,” he said, and they both smiled at their old routine.

“See if the fire's still burning,” she said. “Stoke it up and we'll have a little chat.”

Scarnum stirred the embers and added some kindling and a couple of hardwood splits. He crouched in front of the open wood stove, warming his hands and shivering.

Karen came over with the whisky. She put the bottle and two glasses down on the coffee table and went over and pulled a heavy wool blanket off the foot of her bed.

“Here,” she said. “Take off your wet, uh, wetsuit, and wrap yourself in this.”

She sat on the rug in front of the wood stove and watched him peel off his wetsuit, with some effort, until he stood naked in the firelight.

She sat cross-legged, and he could see that she wasn't wearing panties. He looked down at her and felt the heat from the fire on his naked flesh. He started to harden. “Jesus, Karen,” he said.

He reached out, his hand shaking, and took a lock of her hair in his hand.

She reached out and stroked his thigh with her fingertips. Then she took his penis in her hand.

“Oh Jesus,” he said, and he ran his fingers through her hair. “How I've missed you.”

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

And she stood up and wrapped her arms around his neck. He buried his face in her hair and held her tight and they both cried.

Then they made love on the rug in front of the fire, first with him on top of her, moving very slowly inside her, then with her on top of him, until she came, grinding down on him, the fire lighting up her pale, naked body and her golden-red hair. Then they moved to the bed and he took her from behind, gripping her hips and pounding at her fiercely, both of them panting, sweating, and red-faced, until he came with a violent shudder.

He pulled her to him then, and smooshed her face into his chest.

“I never stopped loving you,” he whispered in her ear. “It's a bit fucking pathetic, actually.”

She held him tightly.

“
So, me and Bobby were having a drink in the big living room, up at the house, on Tuesday night,” she said. “We watched a movie on TV —
Captains Courageous
, actually — after he came back from the yacht club.”

She looked at Scarnum. “You ever see it?” she asked. “
Captains Courageous
?”

“No,” he said.

“It's really good,” she said. “Black and white. About this spoiled rich kid who falls off the deck of a steamship and gets rescued by Spencer Tracy, who's the captain of a Grand Banks schooner.”

“I read it,” said Scarnum “Kipling. One of my father's favour­ite books.”

She mimicked an upper-class English accent. “Oh, I read it, actually,” she said. “Kipling. Didn't realize it had been filmed.”

He tickled her then and she giggled and kicked at him. They were wrapped in blankets in front of the fire, with whisky and cigarettes.

“So, it was right at the end, when the kid gets back to his family, and he's a changed man and all that, when there's a bang on the door. Bobby gets up to see who it is, and who is it but Villa and Zapata.

“Bobby's like, ‘Gentlemen, I'm busy right now. Why don't we talk business tomorrow?' And then he, like, looks at them and stops himself.

“They're both wet, and they look, uh, I'd say very, very unhappy.” She laughed.

“The big one, with the scar on his cheek, has a very angry face. And he's holding his neck, where there's this wicked-looking fresh scar, like he had been hung.”

“Hanged,” said Scarnum.

“What?” said Karen.

“Hanged,” he said. “When you hang someone, like by the neck until dead, they are hanged, not hung. Look it up in the dictionary.”

Karen stuck out her tongue at him. “I don't give a fuck,” she said. “Anyway, when Bobby really sees them, absorbs their psychological and physical state, he's like, ‘All right. I'll be right out.' Then he comes back in, grabs his keys and coat, kisses me on the cheek. Says, ‘Babe, I got to go out, deal with some business. Might not be back today. Tell me how the movie ends.'

“As soon as he left, I realized that everything you had told me was true, and he had fed me a complete line of shit. I bought it, too, or mostly did, even though he had a big fucking purple bruise on his back, right where you told me it would be.”

She took a big drink of whisky and a drag on her cigarette.

“I didn't want to admit that I've been living with someone could do those things. After he left, I had a big think, and I realized that Bobby's been moving coke for years,” she said. “It explains a lot of things. Trips he took, people he knew. The fact that he always had really good coke.” She laughed.

“If I had wanted to see it, I likely would have seen it sooner.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “For the past two or three years, we've been living pretty separate lives. He's away a lot. I'm busy with my art. I started staying down here more often, and now it's like this is my real home. I think that's why we started this thing with Angela and Jimmy, and for a while it kind of worked. Put a little spice back in our relationship.”

She looked at Scarnum, to see how he was taking it all.

“I'm pretty sure that Bobby had Jimmy killed,” he said.

“Why do you think that?”

“You know that scar around the Mexican's neck?”

“Yeah.”

“I put it there.”

He told her how they had machine-gunned his boat, and how he had knocked over the speedboat and strangled the Mexican until he answered Scarnum's questions.

“He said that Falkenham asked them to kill Jimmy,” he said.

Karen stared at him blankly. “Hold on,” she said. “You fucking strangled that Mexican guy until he answered your questions?”

Scarnum nodded at her. “He was trying to kill me,” he said. “Likely still is. He's lucky I didn't kill him. I likely should have.”

“That's cold,” she said.

She threw off the blanket from her shoulders, stood up, and went to the fridge for a bottle of water. The cold light from the fridge fell on her naked body and Scarnum watched her closely.

She sat back down, pulled the blanket up, and stared into the fire. “I think that makes sense,” she said. “Jimmy was getting really pushy and Bobby didn't like it. He'd be calling, wanting to come by for a drink with Bobby. They'd have these conversations downstairs in the bar, and Bobby'd come to bed looking pissed off. Said Jimmy was pushing him too hard.

“Remember how I told you that Jimmy called me and wanted to come see me? Well, I told him no, but he showed up anyway. Bobby was away, and I was alone, and a bit drunk, so I let him in, telling myself it was just for a drink. Course, he ended up fucking the arse off me. I felt guilty about it and told Bobby.”

“You shouldn't have felt guilty,” said Scarnum. “He was fucking Angela behind your back.”

Karen shrugged. “I guessed that he probably was, but I didn't care,” she said. “Still don't. I'm responsible for what I do, and I shouldn't have done that.”

She lit another cigarette and waved her hands in the air to blow away the smoke. The blanket dropped from her shoulders and Scarnum looked at her breasts in the firelight.

“Sooo, anyway, I told Bobby and he flipped out. He said, uh, now that I think of it, he said he was going to, uh, kill Jimmy. That was the end of our little
ménage
à quatre
. Probably Bobby kept fucking Angela anyway, which is what he wanted all along. I had the feeling he didn't like the way I, uh, responded to Jimmy when we were together.”

“When was that?”

“About a month ago, not long after the last time the four of us were together. After that it was like Jimmy had never existed. Bobby never mentioned him again.”

“I went down to Jimmy's funeral yesterday,” said Scarnum. “Jimmy's brother Hughie told me that Falkenham had promised to set Jimmy up to run their operation down there. Said he was going to give him a ‘piece of the action.' You think Bobby ever planned to do that?”

Karen laughed. “Would you want Jimmy to run anything for you? He was a really fun guy, wild to the core, but he was no businessman. He'd be fucking everybody over, trying to be the Godfather of Southwest Nova Scotia.”

She looked into the fire. “Nope,” she said. “I'd say Bobby told him that because he knew it would shut Jimmy up until he had him killed.”

“The Mexican said Bobby asked the boss, the Mexicans' boss, to throw Jimmy in the water, let the boat drift,” said Scarnum. “I think they hoped it would drift ashore, somebody'd find it, everybody would think Jimmy had drowned. Prob'ly drunk, they'd say.”

“But it didn't work,” said Karen.

“No. He told me that Jimmy threw the other Mexican in the water instead and took off. The Mexican shot him, but Jimmy was gone and the Mexicans had to fish their guy out of the water. By the time the guy was on the boat again, Jimmy was long gone.

“When I went aboard the boat, the throttle was wide open and the lights were all off. He musta given 'er, trying to make it to a hospital before he bled out. He was likely headed for Sambro. Got fetched up on the rocks where I found the boat the next day. He fucking swam to shore. In the middle of a fucking storm. Guy didn't give up. Cops found him, he was dead on the beach.”

“Poor fucking dummy,” said Karen. “Poor stupid fucking dummy. He was all cock, no brains. He should have taken whatever Bobby was paying him to bring in the drugs and been happy.”

“That's about it,” said Scarnum.

They sat in silence for a while, staring at the fire. Scarnum reached out and took her hand. “They're going to try to kill me now,” he said.

“I know,” said Karen.

“I'm gonna try not to let them.”

“I know,” she said.

“Where's Bobby at?”

“I don't know,” she said. “He called yesterday, said he had business in Halifax, didn't know when he'd be back, but who knows?”

“Did you tell anyone that I was here?”

“I told him,” she said. “I doubt that he told anyone else, but I don't know for sure.”

“Do you mind not telling anyone that I came here tonight?”

She just looked at him.

“If anything happens to Bobby, the Mounties are going to be asking questions about me,” he said. “I'm going to tell them we argued at the yacht club 'cause I thought he shoulda done something for Angela.” He affected a strong South Shore accent: “I don't know nothing about what happened to 'im. Last time I seen 'im was when I ran into 'im at the yacht club.”

“Does that work?” asked Karen.