Black Fly Season (11 page)

The man sank to his knees, struggled to rise, and Red Bear clouted him again. The man toppled and stayed down. Red Bear tossed the gun to Leon, slipped the rope off his shoulder,

and tied the man’s hands with a complicated knot.

Leon pulled at Kevin’s sleeve. ‘Come on.’

He followed Leon through the doorway into the kitchen.

‘Anybody home?’ Leon yelled, then giggled. ‘I love this thing,’ he said, waving the gun. ‘I could get used to this. Let’s do a circuit, I feel like making a withdrawal.’

They went from room to room, looking for the cash Red Bear had said would be there. The place had an unused look, definitely under furnished Kevin threw open a few closets, finding nothing.

Then Leon shouted from another room, ‘Found it!’

Leon was in a small bedroom, empty except for a narrow cot. He had already pulled the briefcase from the closet. It was the kind that had little combination locks on the latches, but the Riders hadn’t bothered to use them. He snapped them open, and then they were looking at the most cash either of them had ever seen, stacks of it bound in tight bundles.

‘Oh, boy,’ Kevin said. ‘Why do I have a desperate urge to pee?’

“Cause you’re wettin’ yourself, man. We’re rich.’

‘Now maybe you believe in magic, hey?’ Red Bear had come in behind them.

‘I always did,’ Leon said. ‘But now I’m a magic evangelist. I’m a magic missionary. I want to convert people to magic’

‘Back to the boat,’ Red Bear said. ‘We don’t want to be here when the rest of the Vikings get back.’

When they were outside again, Red Bear slapped their biker hostage into partial consciousness. He got to his knees, swayed, and threw up. It took a while, and some prodding with the knife, to get him down to the dock.

Kevin didn’t like seeing so much of the knife. Nothing Red Bear had said before this adventure had prepared him for violence.

Toof started the motor as they stepped into the boat. He touched the briefcase as if it were a holy relic. ‘Are we on top, or what?’

‘We’re on Mount Everest, man,’ Leon said.

Red Bear pushed the groggy Viking, now reeking of vomit, on to the boat.

‘Keep him below. Clean him up and put this on his mouth.’ He tossed Leon a roll of duct tape. ‘But make sure he can breathe. I don’t want him to die on us.’

Leon shoved the biker down the steps ahead of him and disappeared below.

‘What are we going to do with him?’ Kevin said. A tumour of anxiety was growing in his belly.

‘We’ll just hold him until this little transaction is over, then we’ll let him go.’

‘The Vikings will kill us, you realize. I mean, really kill us. Kanga disappeared from the face of the earth.’

Red Bear stepped so close to Kevin he could feel the heat from his face. The look in Red Bear’s

eyes was so tender, he was suddenly afraid he was going to be kissed.

‘You don’t have to worry about anything any more, Kevin. I am looking after you now. And as you can see -‘ he gestured toward the shore, the sky, the lake ‘- there are others looking after me. All you have to do is trust me.’

‘I’m just scared, that’s all. We just ripped off a biker gang.’

‘I understand. But don’t you trust me?’

‘I trust you.’

Red Bear sat in the seat beside Toof, who had cast off. He put his face right up to Toof so that Toof drew back surprised. ‘Do you trust me?’

‘Yeah, sure, I trust you,’ Toof said. “Course I trust you. You’re my Red Bear!’

Red Bear laid a hand on his shoulder.

‘Good. Sit back and let me take the wheel.’

‘Oh, come on. Lemme drive.’

‘Another time.’

Toof looked disappointed, but he got up and moved to the back of the boat.

Red Bear steered them toward the south side of the Manitous. The lights of Algonquin Bay brightened for a few minutes, then disappeared behind the black shoulders of the islands. The temperature had dropped, and Kevin hugged himself to keep warm. His arms were stippled with goose bumps

After a while, Red Bear cut the motor and allowed the boat to drift, waves smacking the hull.

The buzz of a small airplane became audible. Kevin scanned the horizon, but all he could see were the outlines of moonlit clouds. The buzz grew louder. The plane dipped beneath the clouds, a four-seater at most. It came up behind them with a roar and then wafted down toward the water, wings see-sawing a little.

The pontoons skimmed the surface, then plowed up twin white furrows in the black water. Red Bear started the inboard and cruised up to the plane.There were numbers and letters on the side, but Kevin had no idea what they meant. It could be a local plane, it could be fresh in from Chicago or the Caribbean for all he knew. The tiny door opened, and Kevin caught a glimpse of a face framed in shoulder-length dark hair, but not before he saw the shotgun.

‘You Red Bear?’

‘That’s me.’

‘Show me your status card.’

‘My what?’

‘Your status card. Make it quick.’

Red Bear extracted the card from his wallet and handed it up. ‘Don’t take my word for anything.’ he said. ‘You can check with Chief Whiteflint up at …’

‘Up at Red Lake. Yeah, I already did that. He says you’re okay.’

‘Just don’t ask me to speak any Ojibwa.’

‘Doesn’t mean shit to me, either.’

There were some delicate manoeuvres while

Red Bear and the man in the plane exchanged briefcases. Leon opened the briefcase, revealing stacks of six-ounce baggies filled with white powder.

‘Test it,’ Red Bear said.

Kevin pulled out one of the lower bags and poked a tiny hole in it. He took a deep breath and held it, trying to get his hands to stop shaking. He lifted a miniature heap of powder on the tip of his knife and dropped it on his tongue. The bitter taste of heroin filled his entire being. He opened up his ‘chemistry set’ and tipped a speck of powder into a small flask. Then he broke an ampoule of clear liquid into it and swirled the mixture around for about thirty seconds. Traces of red and green appeared, then faded. He broke a second ampoule, added it to the flask, and swirled again for five seconds.

Red Bear aimed the beam of a large flashlight at the flask. The liquid had settled down to one colour.

‘Deep purple,’ Kevin said. ‘We’re looking at something around eighty per cent purity. Virtually step-free.’

‘You finished counting?’ Red Bear called up to the plane.

The face reappeared in the window.

‘I just got one question.’

‘Go ahead,’ Red Bear said.

‘How’d you manage to take over the Viking Riders’ milk-run?’

‘We persuaded them that it was just better business to go along with us.’

‘Uh-huh. And how’d you do that?’

‘Magic.’ Red Bear said.

A moment later, the plane took off, a shadow slipping across the moonlit clouds.

Red Bear piloted the boat across the bay and back to the private dock they had borrowed it from. Kevin had no idea if they had really borrowed it or if they had ripped off the boat as well as the money. Well, he supposed he could live with a rip off, provided there was a little something in the spoon when you were done.

Red Bear got off the boat first. Then he turned to them and spread his hands like a priest giving a blessing. ‘Thank you, everyone. This little venture went like clockwork, and you will all be well paid. Tomorrow night we’ll have a major celebration. Really, you behaved like professionals, and I’m very proud of you all.’

‘What about our Viking friend?’ Kevin said.

‘I can see you are still frightened, Kevin. But I have knowledge that you lack in this matter. You don’t have to worry about our Viking friend. I am going to introduce him to the wonders of the spirit world, and the Vikings won’t cause us the slightest trouble.’

‘But as soon as he goes back to them he’s going to tell them everything. He’ll have to. They’ll kill him, otherwise.’

‘He isn’t going back to them.’ Red Bear smiled

benevolently into their disbelief. ‘After tonight, he will be working for us.’

Red Bear led the groggy Viking to his waiting car and toppled him into the trunk.

A couple of weeks went by, and they didn’t hear anything more of Wombat Guthrie. Whether or not he was actually working for Red Bear, Kevin had no idea. The thing was, he was now part owner of more grade-A heroin than he’d ever seen in his life, and he was not about to separate himself from it by getting too nosy.

Kevin smacked at a fly with the swatter. It made a big noise, but the fly just zig-zagged over to the cabin window. He wondered once again where Terri was, if she really had gone all the way back to Vancouver. He thought about calling her up and apologizing, but then figured what the hell.

‘She says she was just trying to help you,’ Letterman pointed out, chin on hand.

‘I know, I know.’

‘And she could be right about Red Bear. He’s not exactly the boy next door.’

‘I realize that, Dave. I’m not eight years old. I don’t need anyone playing mommy for me. She had to be told.’

Letterman leaned forward.

‘You said you got off the dope,’ he said. ‘Why are you still hanging around a mountain of it? You’re a skier, is that it?’

‘Oh, I’m definitely over the dope thing, Dave. It was just something I needed to go through, and I think I’ve grown tremendously. But I don’t need it any more. I’m strictly in this for the money and then I’m out that door.’

Whatever else people might say about Paul Arsenault and Bob Collingwood - and their colleagues said a lot - they were always prepared. The two-man ident team arrived on the scene behind Nishinabe Falls in hiking boots, khakis, and bug shirts, which come with a hood and veil too fine for flies to penetrate, and elastic at the cuffs. As they moved about the falls, now reaching up to examine a stain, now kneeling to collect minuscule objects, they looked like a pair of beekeepers.

The young coroner who worked beside them had contented himself with a can of Off. As it turned out, the flies weren’t bad behind the falls. Arsenault collected servings of maggots into several vials, labelling each one. He often thought out loud as he worked, speaking to himself or to anyone who might be interested. Collingwood rarely spoke at all.

‘You know, I’m no entomologist,’ Arsenault said now. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the falling water. ‘But I got to say, there’s way fewer maggots here than I’d expect with a body

this old. Got to be around two weeks, anyways. You’d expect the thing to be swarming with them, but this here could be the work of maybe a dozen flies. Handful.’

Collingwood was attaching a thermometer to a rock nearby, taking an ambient reading. He turned around and said, ‘Place is hard to get to.’

It took Cardinal a second to figure out what he meant: the flies wouldn’t be so likely to come across a body hidden behind a veil of water, or even catch the scent. Also, it was quite chilly amid the damp and the dark.

The coroner stepped back from the body. Arsenault made a sign to Collingwood, and they turned it over. There was a tattoo on the bicep; it had been hidden before: a helmet with horns, and underneath this a banner emblazoned VR. Viking Riders.

‘I don’t know if a tattoo qualifies as a positive ID,’ Delorme said. ‘But me, I’d say Walter Wombat Guthrie has taken his last ride.’

Cardinal nodded. ‘The question is, did the other Riders do this?’

‘Not their usual style, is it? All this mutilation, body out in the open?’

‘No, they’d be more likely to bury him in a barrel or something so we’d never find him. I’m wondering how this is connected to our Jane Doe.’

‘Maybe she saw something she shouldn’t have.’

‘Could be - but what? When?’

The coroner was a physician he’d never worked

with before., a Dr Rayburn, who looked like a schoolboy fairly new to shaving. He was a lot easier on the nerves than the malevolent codger they usually got. Dr Rayburn filled out a form and tore off the top two copies, handing one to Cardinal. ‘No trouble determining foul play, obviously. You can ship it straight to Grenville Street. The pathologist is going to have a field day with this

one.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Well, you no doubt noticed the extremities are all missing.’

‘Yes, Doc. Even I managed to catch that.’

‘Even worse, there’s a big patch of skin missing from the lower back.’

‘The killer tried to skin him?’

‘Alive, unfortunately. I’m not a pathologist, but it’s clear to me that a lot of those injuries were inflicted before death. If not all of them. You’ve got bleeding into the bones.’

‘Can you pin down a cause?’

‘You mean can I tell you which wound finished him off? I can’t, but a pathologist might be able to. Most likely bled to death before he was decapitated.’

‘Bled to death?’ Delorme said. ‘But there’s almost no blood.’

Dr Rayburn looked at the corpse and shook his head, a student giving up on a problem. ‘I can’t explain that.’

‘Sometimes murderers will spread plastic over a

floor’ Cardinal said. ‘But I’ve never heard of it being done outside. Hey, Szelagy!’

The face of Ken Szelagy, a great wide Hungarian bear of a man, appeared around a sharp edge of granite wall.

‘Make sure you do the ViCLAS booklet on this one. ‘ViCLAS was a nationwide database of violent crime. The OPP had an analysis office in Orillia.

Szelagy let out a theatrical groan. ‘Oh, man. Do you know how many questions those ViCLAS things expect you to answer?’

‘Two hundred and sixty-two,’ Cardinal said. ‘So, the sooner the better, right?’

‘Of course. As always.’

‘Ask them to run it with the hieroglyphics as part of the MO, and also without. Those could be unrelated, or they could be a one-time thing.’

They began filling many bags with evidence, although evidence is too precise a term for the ragtag items they collected. It’s a problem common with outdoor crime scenes that there are many stray objects, very few of which, if any, will end up as evidence. Matchbooks, cigarette butts, soft drink cans, footprints, hairs, fibres, and there’s no way of telling which items may prove to be utterly unrelated to the crime and which may prove to be crucial in securing a conviction. So it all has to be painstakingly photographed, bagged, and labelled. And it takes time.