Finders Keepers (4 page)

“Dad?” Kate said, surprised at how weak her voice sounded; she’d intended to shout. “Dad,” she said again, more forcefully this time, but Keith didn’t move. She looked in the front seat and saw Bernie’s legs dangling in through the shattered windshield.

Panic reared like a dark stallion. She turned to her father again, calling his name, getting no response. She’d never seen him so still, even in sleep, and where was his coat? He was going to freeze to death out there…if he wasn’t already dead.

Kate began to struggle against the mangled seats, grunting and heaving, trying to collect enough breath to scream her father’s name. But it was pointless, and when a flock of red dots swarmed through her vision, signaling a blackout, she stopped. Her breath came in painful little jabs now, her racing heart seeming lodged in her throat.

A fleeting hope came to her then. Hadn’t someone just been here? Talking to her? Yes, she was sure of it.

But her head was so foggy…

She held her breath and listened, five seconds, ten, hearing only the low moan of the wind and more faintly, the roar and crackle of flames.

Maybe he’s gone for help
, she thought. If he lived around here he’d know exactly where they were. He must have gone for help.

Kate’s mind reeled. Her father was alone out there and she couldn’t remember…

The phone.

The idea struck her with an almost physical force. Her left arm was free and she sent it out blindly across the plush upholstery, numb fingers picking over jewels of glass, one of her dad’s new Isotoner gloves—and there it was, dangling from its cord at the limit of her reach. She hooked her baby finger around the last coil before the handset, fished it in close enough to grab and raised it to the level of her eyes. In the dark she couldn’t make out the details of the keypad, but with a little trial and error she found the power button, pressed it and the keys lit up dully. Kate thought she’d never seen a more beautiful sight.

Clumsily, using her thumb, she punched in 911.

It rang. Kate pressed it to her ear, already stinging from the cold.

“Nine-one-one emergency,” the dispatcher said.

Tears welled in Kate’s eyes. “We’ve had an accident…”

“Is anyone seriously hurt?”

“Yes…” She could feel herself fading and bit down hard on her lip.

“Ma’am, what is your location?”

“I’m not sure. We were on our way to Toronto…”

“Can you think of any landmarks you might have passed?”

“A restaurant…five or ten minutes back. There was a neon sign. A duck, I think…a big pink duck…”

“Ducky’s,” the dispatcher said. “I know it. Hold tight…”

The dispatcher’s voice broke up and disappeared. Kate looked at the handset; the keypad was black again. She found the power button and pressed it. The keys flickered with green light and then died. She tried it again and got nothing.

Shivering, she set the phone on the seat beside her and huddled into Big Bird’s feathery breast, wishing she’d left her coat on. She was afraid they were both going to die out here.

There was a voice then, a ghostly whisper…

“Katie?”

“Dad? Are you all right?”

“I dreamt I was with your mom…” Kate had to strain to hear him. “Are you okay, sweetheart?”

“Yeah, I think so, but I’m stuck. Can you move?”

She heard him grunt softly, then sigh. “Nope. Old legs don’t want to work.”

“That’s okay,” Kate said, flashing on an image of him strapped in a wheelchair. She shook it off, saying, “I called nine-one-one, the lady said she knows where we are. She’s sending help; it shouldn’t be long now. Are you in pain?”

“Not so bad…” His voice fading. “Just…cold…”

“Tell me about the dream,” Kate said, wanting to keep him talking.

“It was about when we met…your mom and I. Nothing really. Stuff you already know.”

“Tell me anyway. To pass the time. Pretend I don’t know.”

There was a silence, Kate ready to break it, when Keith said, “Pretend you don’t know?”

“Sure, it’ll be fun.”

Keith said, “Okay,” and Kate craned her neck to see him, lying motionless out there in the snow, his words coming out on faint puffs of frost. “I was nineteen that year, summer of fifty-seven…fresh out of Garson High and I was gonna be a star.” He gave a pained little chuckle. “There were five of us: Dave Danylchuk, Pete Aube—you met Pete once, remember?”—Kate said she did—“Mike O’Connor, Dan Ring and I. Called ourselves the Eighty-Eights, after Dan’s old Rocket Eighty-Eight. Dan sang bass, which was funny, considering he weighed about ninety pounds, that big voice coming out of him. We’d worked up a real sizzler, ‘I Wonder Why’ by Dion and the Belmonts, and we were nervous as hell. So far we’d only sung in the stairwells at school. Sounded great in there with the echo…”

“Dad?”

“Yeah, I’m here, sweetie. Just remembering. We had that whole J.D. look going. Pompadours slick with Brylcreem, white T-shirts with the deck of smokes rolled into the sleeve, you know. Black jeans, those big old engineer boots. We came on after the pig calling contest at the Saint Michael’s church social. Talk about a tough act to follow.”

Kate snickered. Her father could always make her laugh.

“Your mom confessed to me later she’d had her eye on me the whole evening. Thank God we didn’t meet ’til after the song or I’d’ve never got through it, knowing she was watching…so beautiful…”

He groaned then, a sound of deep pain, and when he spoke again his voice was dead serious, a tone Kate had never heard him use before.

“Kate, I want you to know how much I love you. What a privilege it’s been to be your father.”

“Dad, please, you’re scaring me.”

“I’ve thanked God every day since you were born for giving me the job. I only wish I could’ve done better. Given you more…”

Kate’s eyes stung with tears that ran cold on her face. “Dad, I love you, too, but why don’t we talk about this later, okay? Tell me more about mom. Dad?

“Dad.”

* * *

Kate’s 911 call was dispatched to Ontario Provincial Police cruiser 301, the closest unit to the presumed scene. The senior officer in the cruiser, O.P.P. Sergeant Mitch Buchanan, took the call from the driver’s seat. The dispatcher played back the garbled message for him and after hearing it, Mitch agreed with her estimation of the caller’s location.

Mitch’s partner and trainee, Constable Steve Seger, shrank inside when he heard the dispatch. He’d been hoping they were done for the night. They were already an hour and a half into overtime and he was exhausted. They’d just left the scene of the young rookie’s first fatal accident, and Steve had performed miserably. It left him wondering whether he was cut out for the job, despite his life-long ambition to take the oath.

Mitch replaced the radio handset, switched on the roof lights and pulled a U-ie. Glancing at Steve, he said, “That’s about a ten minute ride from here, chum. This might be a good time to talk about it.”

“There’s not much to say,” Steve said. “I lost it.”

“Well, if it’s any consolation, I know how you feel.”

Steve said nothing. Mitch was a twelve year veteran of the force and Steve’s supervising officer during his probationary year, now almost half over. Steve felt about two inches tall sitting next to the man.

“Look,” Mitch said, “all I’m saying is, go easy on yourself. After tonight you’ve got what, two weeks off? So go home, get drunk a few times. Let it go.”

“I appreciate what you’re saying, Mitch, and it makes sense. I just don’t feel up to talking about it right now.”

“That’s fine. And if you decide you want to sit this one out…”

“I’m not sitting anything out.”

“Fair enough,” Mitch said.

They drove in silence for a while after that, Steve grateful to Mitch for not pushing it. It’d be a brief reprieve at best, he knew, only a matter of time before the customary ribbing began. He’d seen it around the locker rooms already, the more experienced guys riding the rookies—and God help him when his mother, a decorated eighteen-year veteran of the Toronto Metro force, got wind of it. He knew he could take it when the time came…but right now he just needed a breather.

He hunched forward in his seat and covered his eyes with his hands, trying to erase images he knew were indelible. Three hours earlier those images hadn’t existed. Three hours earlier they’d been sitting in the Taco Bell in Barrie, arguing hockey, when a call came in on Mitch’s repeater: a major accident on Route 7, a rural road twenty minutes north of their location. Somehow in the five months Steve had been partnered with Mitch they’d managed to miss all of the really bad ones, either off-duty at the time or involved in something else and unable to respond. Steve had heard some of the horror stories, though, told in hushed tones over coffee in the common room, and at the back of his mind that whole time had been the nagging question: When the time comes, am I gonna be able to hack it? Tonight he had found out.

Mitch had taken the call, responding with a coolness Steve now wondered if he’d ever possess, and a minute later they were in the game, Mitch pushing the beefed-up Caprice as hard as the road conditions would allow.

“Relax, chum,” Mitch had told him. “We’ve talked about this a dozen times, both knew it was coming. I’ve done a hundred of these. Nobody likes ’em, but when you’re in the middle of it the training kicks in. You’ll do what needs to be done.”

“I just wish I hadn’t eaten that burrito,” Steve said, pressing a thumb into his solar plexus. “It’s sitting in there like a hot coal.”

Mitch chuckled. “Told you to go with the soup.”

They sped east along Route 7 through farm country, coming onto the site at the crest of a steep grade, the cruiser’s high beams illuminating an awesome scene of destruction. Multiple vehicles—three cars, the shredded remains of a minivan and what looked like a five-ton Ryder moving truck—tangled and strung across the highway, one of the cars resting on its roof in a nearby field, another leaning half in and half out of the five-ton’s ruptured box, the third buried deep in the minivan’s rear end.

“First thing,” Mitch said, slowing the cruiser to a crawl, “we gotta get some flares planted around here.” Then he hit the brakes hard, a coatless woman stumbling onto the road in front of them. She glanced at them zombie-like, eyes shock-white through a mask of blood, before wading into the ditch on the opposite side of the road. Mitch slammed the cruiser into PARK and went after her, shouting back to Steve, telling him to get busy with the flares.

Steve got out and did as he was told, a shudder running through him as he lit the first flare and drove it into the snow. He did not want to see what was inside of those twisted vehicles.

“My baby.”

Steve spun toward the woman’s cry and saw Mitch stamping toward her through hip-deep snow. In the twitch of Mitch’s flashbeam Steve saw her reach for something in the snow…a rattle, a pink baby rattle clutched in her fist—

“MY BABY,”
she shrieked again and now Mitch was there, bearing her up like a groom about to carry his bride across the threshold. The rattle slipped from the woman’s grasp and Steve began to shiver. He couldn’t stop himself.

“Steve,” Mitch shouted, already winded. “Check the vehicles.”

Steve sparked another flare and held it out in front of him, rushing red light casting ragged shadows over the wreckage. He ran to the nearest vehicle, the minivan, ruptured like a party favor from its impact with the five-ton, and peered inside. A beer-bellied man sat draped over the wheel, a CB radio handset in his lap. Steve thought:
Must be the guy who called it in.
The man’s face was turned away and at first glance Steve thought he didn’t look all that bad. Then he realized the steering wheel and the driver’s seat were maybe eight inches apart, the man’s chest compressed to half its normal thickness. He looked in back and saw a blond woman impaled on a jag of hard plastic from the front end of the Honda that had plowed through the rear door and come to rest against the back of her seat.

Steve said, “Jesus,” and the woman opened her eyes and screamed. Steve backed away from the vehicle and stumbled over something in the snow; in the light of the flare he saw what it was, a boy of no more than six, ready for bed in his Spiderman pjs…

Steve’s stomach bucked and he shrank away from the child, dropping the flare, the burrito coming up his throat in a gagging bolus. Hunched in his sickness, he damned himself in the vilest terms, cursing his cowardice in the face of duty, vowing to turn in his badge that very night.

Then Mitch was there, leading him away. A team of paramedics rushed past them and Steve thought he’d never been more relieved to see anyone in his life. He hadn’t even heard them arrive.

“It’s okay, partner,” Mitch said, clapping him on the back. “I barfed on my first bad one, too.” He led Steve to the cruiser and helped him inside. “You sit tight. Five minutes there’ll be more cops around here’n you can shake a stick at. I’ll get ’er wrapped up, then we’ll go get some coffee.”

Trembling like a child, Steve had huddled in the cruiser and watched as other teams arrived and the survivors were extracted from the wreckage.

He’d never felt more ashamed…

* * *

But now, heading out on this new dispatch, feeling the adrenaline surge, the knee-jerk notion of giving up his badge was already fading. He’d wanted to be a cop for as long as he could remember. The day the call had come from the academy had been the proudest day of his life. Even now, almost a year later, each time he put on the uniform it felt like that first time, alone in the eight-by-ten dorm room they called a pod, slipping the dark blue shirt with the gold shoulder insignias out of the tailor’s bag, and the matching cargo pants with the pockets for his gear, pulling them on next to his skin. Sinking his feet into those big insulated Prospector work boots, spit shined and snug, making him feel a foot taller than he was. Then the nylon web belt that held his hardware, a working cop’s tools. The repeater radio, a heavy job with a mouthpiece that clipped to his lapel, a big Maglite flashlight that doubled as a club, a twenty-three inch expandable baton and a canister of pepper spray, nasty stuff. And the real deal, a .40 caliber Sig Sauer semi-auto, twelve in the clip, one in the pipe, two extra mags for a total of thirty-seven rounds. What a feeling, like being a kid again but with a clear sense of the responsibility he now carried. And the training, not like work at all, but day after day of challenge and personal enrichment. He’d excelled beyond his expectations, discovering natural talents in marksmanship, pursuit driving and use of force. He’d finished with honors near the top of his class and made friends he believed he’d have for the rest of his life.