Deadline (42 page)

Jack slowed to keep pace with them, straining to hear their conversation, but the wind was too strong. He caught his breath, then skated up beside them.

“Sophie,” he said.

She started when she turned and spied him.

“Jack,” she cried. “Oh my God. What are you doing here?”

She stopped, and so did Jack and Marie-Hélène, the two women looking at him with surprise as the wind and snow whirled around them.

“I need to talk to you,” said Jack. “I need to talk to you about Ed.”

Sophie’s eyes darted back and forth. The wind pulled at the wisps of her hair peeking out from under her hat. “I can’t,” she said. “Jack. I’m sorry, but my lawyer says I can’t talk to anybody about it.”

Marie-Hélène pushed herself between the two of them, trying to keep Jack away from Sophie with her stout body. She was unsteady on her skates.

“You’d better go,” she said. “Sophie doesn’t want to talk to you. Leave her alone.”

Jack ignored her. “Do you know a big scary guy with a scar on his eyebrow?”

Sophie just stared at him.

“They tried to kill me, Sophie,” he said.

Marie-Hélène pulled Sophie away and they started to skate. Sophie looked over her shoulder at Jack.

“I’ll talk to my lawyer and call you,” she said.

He skated beside them. “He’ll tell you not to talk to me,” he said. “We need to talk. They will kill me.”

Marie-Hélène started to speak to Sophie rapidly in French. Jack couldn’t understand what she was saying. She skated faster, her legs pumping, trying to pull Sophie away. Jack easily kept pace with them. Ahead of them, there were four young people skating together – two young black men teetering unsteadily on their skates, their legs straight, first-time skaters, each clutching a white girl. Students, Jack assumed. They were all laughing. Jack and Sophie and Marie-Hélène had to slow down to avoid running into them.

Jack skated around Marie-Hélène and approached Sophie from the other side.

“You need to tell me what you know,” he said, grabbing her arm. “They are going to fucking kill me like they tried to kill Ed. What’s wrong with you? You don’t give a fuck?”

Marie-Hélène launched herself at him then, putting her mittened hands on his arm and shoving him away from Sophie. “Va chier!” she said. “Get the fuck away from her! Leave us alone.”

Caught off balance, Jack tried to pull away from Marie-Hélène. His skate caught in a hole in the uneven ice and he fell hard, banging his knee and sprawling forward. At the same moment, one of the black students in front of him crashed to the ice, clutching his arm.

As Jack pulled himself to his feet, he saw blood on the snow under the black student. His friends saw it too, and froze in their tracks, their laughter dying. One of the girls screamed. The man’s eyes bulged out and he gritted his teeth as he twisted onto his backside to try to get to his feet. He noticed the stain on the snow, then looked down in horror at his hand, which was covered in blood dripping down from inside his coat sleeve.

Marie-Hélène and Sophie turned when the girl cried out. They took in the fallen student, Jack scrambling back to his feet and a third figure – wearing a black parka and balaclava – standing behind the fallen men on his skates. His hand was straight in front of him, holding a pistol with a long black silencer on the end. It was pointed at Jack.

Sophie screamed, a high, piercing cry of fear and alarm, and it startled the man as he fired again, so the shot went just wide of Jack, hitting the snowy ice beside him. Jack turned at Sophie’s scream, and saw the man aiming at him, and saw the muzzle jerk as he fired. He thought he’d been hit in the shoulder, but quickly realized it was only an ice splinter sent flying by the bullet.

Jack launched himself upright, clawing at the ice, his heart pounding with fear, willing himself away from the masked man. In his desperation, he knocked over one of the girls standing over the bleeding student, and then he took off, skating as fast as he could, furiously working his arms and legs, bent at the waist.

He snatched a look over his shoulder and saw that the masked man was pursuing him, skating fluidly, swinging his arms elegantly, like a speed skater.

Jack knew the masked man couldn’t fire the pistol accurately without stopping to steady his aim, so he tried to make himself a difficult target, veering from side to side. He skated past a slow-moving family group, and then cut in front of them. He bent at the waist and accelerated as hard as he could, thinking hard about what he knew about skating, trying to find the magical balance between gliding and propulsion that made you move fastest. Jack had played hockey all winter for years, on frozen ponds and in rinks, and he’d even taken power skating courses, but stopped during university and was out of shape. His lungs burned as he moved, weaving among the slow-moving skaters. He brushed past an unsteady couple and they fell to the ice, and some people called out to him to be careful.

He glanced quickly behind him again but couldn’t see the masked man among the throngs skating along in the falling snow, but he felt him, felt the danger as if he had a target painted on his back, expecting at any moment the hot impact of a bullet.

Ahead loomed the bridge, where the rink ended, just before the locks, where a stage was set up. There, Jack thought, I will be cornered and shot. He’ll put a couple of bullets in my body to stop me and bring me down, then finish me with one through the head.

He glanced over his shoulder again and spotted his pursuer well behind him, skating with languid grace, his left hand behind him, the long pistol swinging in his right hand. He knows, thought Jack, that he doesn’t have to catch me, because I’ll run out of ice soon enough. Ahead were the skate shack and the Beaver Tail hut, where dozens of people stood in line.

Jack veered to the other side of the canal and as he passed the end of the Beaver Tail line, he saw the masked man gliding quickly toward him, standing ramrod straight, his legs spread and his arms out, his left hand bracing his right, the pistol pointing straight at Jack.

Jack dodged around the line and made a hard right, heading for the concrete steps up to the bridge. The slippery stairway was clogged with people, skates hanging round their necks.

“Look out,” Jack bellowed as he launched himself at the steps. Some of the people on the stairs turned, startled, and saw him hurl himself into the air, vaulting the first four steps with his legs pulled up under him, like a barrel jumper. He hit the fifth step hard, smacking his right shin and knocking over a woman and her daughter, but he kept upright and forced himself up to the landing halfway up the steps. He could see the people ahead of him look at him in surprise, and then look to the bottom of the stairs and dive for cover.

Jack’s skates clattered as he launched himself up the second flight. He bent double and scrambled up these steps. In his shooter’s stance at the bottom of the stairs, the gunman had a clear shot at him, but Jack was bent low enough that he was protected by the concrete railing. The skaters huddled in terror on the stairs watched as the gunman lowered his pistol and raced up the steps himself, taking them two at a time.

Jack was exhausted when he reached the top of the stairs and fell onto the sidewalk. Across the street, at the Chateau Laurier, two porters in wool coats and fur hats were ushering guests into taxis. One of them caught sight of Jack as he ran out into the traffic on Wellington, forcing cars to stop, skidding in the snow, the drivers gaping at the madman running across four lanes.

Both porters were staring, open-mouthed, when the second man on skates came up and assumed his shooter’s stance at the top of the stairs, legs spread, both hands on the pistol, and levelled it at Jack’s back. He fired, but he was breathing hard himself after his long skate, and his hands and arms were freezing, and his aim was badly off, and the bullet went well over Jack’s head, smacking into one of the stone pillars in front of the Chateau.

He held his stance, lowered his arms, drew a deep breath, released half of it, and focused, willing his arms to stop shaking, and drew a bead on Jack, who was running in front of a city bus. The bus driver, seeing a lunatic on skates running in front of him, hit the brakes and the bus went into a skid. The masked man held his arms steady, closed one eye, pulled the trigger and saw Jack run out of sight behind the bus. The bullet smacked into the engine block of the bus.

The porters watched, mouths agape, as the man in the mask unscrewed the silencer, put the gun in one parka pocket, the silencer in the other and clattered back down the stairs to the canal.

Jack ran past the startled porters, through the Chateau’s beautiful wooden revolving doors and into the lobby, where his skates skidded on the waxed stone floor, and he fell on his hands and knees, chest heaving, eyes wild with fear. Everyone stared at the apparition. A valet started towards him, calling out: “Sir! Sir! Please! Your skates will damage the floor.”

Jack ignored him and launched himself to his feet again, driven by terror and adrenalin, and dashed across the lobby. He turned right down a hallway, running past a bank of elevators and down to the side entrance. The valet pursued him. He left a trail of scars behind him on the burnished stone floor.

He burst out the side door that led onto MacKenzie Avenue, and sat down heavily, his back against the wall. He tore off his gloves, and with frozen, trembling fingers set to work on his skate laces. As he struggled, someone stepped out through the door. Jack started, fearing it was the masked man, but it was a heavyset man in a blazer. “Sir,” he said. “I’m Daniel Davis, hotel security, and I’m going to have to ask you to wait for the police. You may have been having fun, but you’ve done a lot of damage and the police need to talk to you about that.”

Jack looked up at him as he tore off the first skate.

“Do you have a gun?” he asked him and bent to work on his second skate.

“Sir, I’m not allowed to discuss the hotel’s security arrangements,” said the man. “Would you mind telling me your name please?”

Jack pulled off his second skate and got to his feet. “If you don’t have a gun, I’m not sticking around, because the guy chasing me has one.”

He left the skates on the sidewalk and ran across the street in his socks, through the slush, toward the Rideau Centre Mall.

Marie-Hélène had first aid training, so as soon as Jack and the masked man disappeared, she dropped to her knees and went to work on the injured student. She unzipped his parka and yanked his injured arm out of it so she could examine the wound. He had been hit from behind, halfway between his elbow and his shoulder. There was a tiny entrance wound on the back of his arm and a much bigger exit wound through his bicep. His arm was sticky with blood and more was oozing out of the wound. She clamped her gloved hand on it and the man yelped in pain.

“You’re going to be okay,” she said to the guy. “What’s your name?”

He stared up at her, his face contorted with pain. “Miko,” he said.

“Miko, you’re going to be fine, but we have to stop this bleeding. You’re going to have to be brave for a minute, okay?” She turned to Sophie, who was staring toward the bridge. “Sophie! Colis! Sophie!”

Her friend started and turned to her.

“Donne-moi ton foulard!” she yelled, and Sophie skated over and gave her her scarf. Marie-Hélène folded it into a square and pressed it against the oozing wound. She tied her own scarf around the guy’s arm, tightening it with an efficient knot.

“Sophie,” she said again. “Appele 911!”

Sophie yanked out her BlackBerry and got set to dial, then stopped. She stopped turned to one of the girls standing there staring at Marie-Hélène and Miko.

“Hey,” she said. She tapped the girl on the arm. “Call 911.”

The girl, who was in a daze, started and looked at Sophie. Then she dug her phone out of her purse and jabbed at it.

“Why don’t you do it?” she asked Sophie.

Sophie looked down at Marie-Hélène. “Marie-Hélène, Il faut que j’y ailleaie. Désolé, mais je dois partir avant que les police arriver. Je dois immédiatement parlez avec mon avocat, immediatement. Désolé.”

Marie-Hélène looked up at her, her face suddenly hard.

“Marie-Hélène,” said Sophie, who was starting to cry. “Je dois partir tout de suite. Je vais tout t’expliquer plus tard.”

Marie-Hélène nodded. She looked very angry. “Oui,” she said. “Allez-y. Attention, hein.”

Sophie skated towards the steps where she had left her boots. Her neck was cold without the scarf.

She tried calling Jack, but there was no answer. She dialled another number.

“Hello,” said the man on the other end. “I can’t really talk right now. I’m in a meeting.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “Did you tell anyone that Jack was trying to get in touch with me?”

“What?” said the man.

“Listen,” she said. “I need an answer. Who did you tell? Did you tell anyone that Jack was looking for me?”

“I’m sorry,” the man said. “I really can’t talk right now.”

“Just tell me who you told,” she said. “It’s important.”

“I didn’t tell anyone,” he said, lowering his voice. “Why? Did you see him? Did he harm you? What’s going on?”