Slow Recoil (27 page)

“So this Chapman guy had personal motives where Donia was concerned. Do you think Donia was brought over here as a sex worker?” Hattie said. “Maybe Chapman was using the support centre as his base for recruiting girls then covering their expenses behind the guise of a non-profit. Jesus, that'd be a pretty good idea.”

“I don't know,” McKelvey said. “It could be anything. But he's the direct link to Donia Kruzik. My gut says he's involved in her murder and Tim's framing. As for motive, I'm coming up empty at this point.”

Hattie said, “Well, your gut has never been wrong before, has it?”

“Once or twice,” McKelvey said. “But not this time.”

“I'll see if I can tack his name onto some other stuff we're looking at, slip it through,” she said. “But I'm also going to share any details of relevance with Kennedy. That's my deal, and it ain't open to negotiation.”

“As long as you call me first,” he said.

Maxime had lost track of the white Corolla after it had pulled away from the factory, but now he came back to it again by driving with one eye on these foreign roads and one eye on the GPS receiver. It wasn't the traffic here—for anyone who had driven a car in downtown Paris was forever desensitized to the concept of snarl and chaos—but the fact that he was still adjusting to this orderly ebb and flow of things. He wanted to honk his horn and steer around those waiting to make a turn, do what was necessary to move things along. Canadians were polite to the point of frustration. The triangulation of the GPS brought him to within a block of the vehicle. He slowed and passed along Front Street, and sure enough, there it was, parked at the curb. The vehicle was empty. Maxime found a spot on the other side of the road, having pulled a quick u-turn in front of this old building that looked like the Flatirons in those iconic pictures of New York City.

He watched the Corolla from across the street for a few minutes, and the area around the vehicle. His mind clicked through the links in this long chain. Bojan Kordic, whom Maxime had been sent to collect with his red notice, was now dead—of that he was certain. How unfortunate that he had been too late to both save the man and bring him to justice in a proper court of higher authority—this was the line he was preparing for his eventual final report on the matter. In truth, Maxime felt Bojan Kordic had received precisely what he deserved. He would focus now on the second ticket for one Goran Mitovik. He would need to make contact with the local authorities before long and have them put some eyes on Mitovik's house. But this tailing of the Corolla, or more to the point, of the man driving the Corolla, was of paramount importance. It was through this link that Maxime was certain he would make the connection to the Colonel.

The jet lag was settling in now. His body had moved beyond the initial stage of exhilaration, adrenalin-induced alertness— those first glorious hours in which you were as close to full-blown mania as was possible without drugs—and he now put his head back against the headrest, and he yawned until a tear squeezed from the corner
of his eye and rolled down his cheek. A coffee, that's what he needed. But not a cheap North American coffee from a drive-thru, weak as piss and ruined with excess cream and sugar. An espresso, dark, strong and deadly effective.
Ah, je m'ennuie de la France!

TWENTY-TWO

T
im Fielding's body—like that of all humans—was comprised of sixty to seventy per cent water. It was water that was the common denominator of all major bodily functions: from absorption at the cellular level, to circulation via the turgidity of veins and arteries, to digestion and excretion—most everything depended on water to make it work. Tied to a post and blindfolded, Tim Fielding was slowly dying from dehydration.

After eight hours, his head began to pound, and his lips grew dry. He managed, for a few hours at least, to manufacture sufficient saliva by turning and rolling his tongue, and this helped keep his mouth moist. He even took small, but not insignificant pleasure in swallowing tiny sips of this self-produced saliva, his mind running through favorite beverages like some sort of desert island game—Dr. Pepper, how he'd discovered its sickly sweetness as a child while on holiday in Florida, or no, how about Canadian Dry Ginger Ale, truly “the champagne of gingers ales” or what about that rare Rusty Nail he allowed himself on special occasions, the rich marriage of single-malt scotch and a shot of honey-sweet Drambuie… At the twelve-hour mark, even this self-generated hydration became nearly impossible, and Tim realized his best chances were in conservation. He tried to sleep with his chin on his chest, and when he could not sleep, he breathed through his nose rather than his mouth to reduce the drying effect.

At eighteen hours, his mind began to play tricks. His thinking process was muddled. He woke with a start several times, his world plunged to darkness, shivering and likely feverish, and he couldn't produce tears any more.

The dirt-throat thirst was nothing compared to the excruciating pain, then the numbness that spread from his bound arms to his shoulder blades. There was the indignity, too, in those first confused hours. Sitting there on the cold concrete floor, he had tried to hold it at first. The cramps had made it impossible. He sat there in the dampness of his own making, and he wondered what he had done in this or a previous life to deserve such a fate.

The things a man thought about in these long hours. The small worries that had occupied his life, the guilt or the hard feelings, the grudges held, the hours lost sitting waiting at red lights. It occurred to him he had never been to Las Vegas. He wasn't a gambler, but still. He had never been to New York City, either, for that matter. Wasn't there something inherently wrong with a man who approached his fortieth year without ever having been to a strip joint? He had never accepted that rolled joint at a house party, never really thrown caution to the wind for a night. Perhaps it was his parents, teachers both, and their moral and ethical guidelines, but he suspected it was something else. It was
him. It's me,
he thought.
I've been afraid my entire life.
And not just since the death of my wife. No, it was long before that.
Since I was a boy. Always content to take a back seat and watch the
world roll by.

Why, he wondered? What was there to be afraid of?

Especially now, Tim, now that you are tied and blindfolded.

Now that you are going to die…

TWENTY-THREE

O
ne down, one to go.
This is what Kad was thinking as he walked along the street with the sunshine on his face. He wished the woman were alive to see the look in Bojan Kordic's eyes in that final moment.
Donia.
She had played her role, however, and it had helped extricate them from the mess of this school teacher and his meddling police officer friend.
Donia.
Yes, he tried now to recall her real name, her birth name, but it was gone. He stopped walking. He stood there on the sidewalk and tried to remember his own name. It was there, yes, but it did not come forth immediately. It required a moment to pause and reach back.

He resumed walking. He had employed Turner's assistance in tracing the home number on the police officer's business card. It was right here, just up ahead. Unit number four. He moved a hand to the inside jacket and felt for the case with the syringe. At his back, tucked into his pants, was the handgun. And lastly, snug alongside his ankle and held in place with his sock and a Velcro strap, was the four-inch jackknife. He felt he was ready for anything.

He walked past the condo building and stopped a few doors down. He turned, and with his hands in his pockets, leaned against the bricks, looking back towards the building, just to get his eyes on it. It was no different than when he and the boys had cased a particular building in a nameless town, having on good authority that either Serb troops or paramilitaries were housed there. You wanted to mitigate the risk to the greatest extent possible. Note all possible exits, areas where a lookout or a scout might hide. To determine clear lines of fire that any sniper worth his salt would have previously mapped out. Operations were two thirds planning, one third action. The devil, as they said, was always in the details.

Satisfied and ready, he took a couple of deep breaths and walked back to the condo. He opened the front door and stepped inside the small foyer. It smelled fresh, the scent of flowers, as though they sprayed the place with potpourri fragrance. There was a bank of chrome-plated mailboxes to the left. The names were etched onto the front of the mailboxes, giving a sense of expected permanency. Kad scanned the names. The last one.

McKELVEY C—#4

The second inner door, he noted to his surprise and good fortune, was propped open with a stone. His old trick. The oldest trick of thieves in the night. He marvelled at the laziness. He smiled and opened the door, moving the stone aside with the toe of his shoe.

He climbed the stairs.

McKelvey was deep in thought as he made his way east on Front Street. He looked over his shoulder, half expecting to see Leyden skulking back there. What this thing
was,
he was unsure—it was too convoluted to make sense of just yet—but whether love triangle, sex traffic, organized crime, it hardly mattered. He had to get to Fielding before the cops found him and he was charged with murder. It seemed likely, given the scant facts and his professional experience with the human animal, that sex or drugs, or perhaps both, were at play here. It was quite possible, he surmised, that Fielding had simply fallen for the wrong woman. Perhaps Hattie was right: Donia was a sex worker or a sex slave or otherwise “owned” by bad men with Eastern European accents. McKelvey knew half the strip joints around town were infused with a revolving bevy of women from Russia and Hungary and Croatia, these women working with so-called “entertainment visas”. Fielding had unknowingly stumbled into this dark new world, and now the woman was dead and Fielding was either dead himself or being held.

Held
why,
though? There had been no ransom demand, no contact at all.

They're using Fielding as a red herring,
he thought. Holding him somewhere long enough to give them time to wrap up their business and make a clean cut.

He stopped walking. It was possible. Every Metro cop was looking for Tim Fielding. It was a good plan. And, quite frankly, the only plan to which McKelvey could realistically prescribe. The alternative was not worth considering. In the alternative, Fielding was dead, had been dead two days now. In the alternative, McKelvey was responsible for his young friend's murder.

He continued on. As he approached the condo, he caught sight of the old Italian from the first floor unit. Giuseppe was hobbling up the street with a plastic bag that McKelvey was certain contained links of Italian sausage infused with garlic. Giuseppe had explained in one of their brief and rare conversations how he had survived the war on bread, cheese, and a little bit of sausage, so why tempt the fates by changing his diet now? The only new element Giuseppe had added to his regimen was a single daily prune taken to coax some consistency from his weathered bowels. The St. Lawrence Market was closed, so the old man had gone across to the twenty-four hour grocery.
McKelvey waited, holding the door open.

“You should get delivery,” McKelvey said.

Giuseppe squinted, and his face folded in against a sea of deep wrinkles. His hair was bone white and swept back, and his eyebrows were unruly, thick as jungle caterpillars.

“Those l'il buggers always holding their hand out for a
teepa
,” he said, and because his accent was so thick, McKelvey didn't get the gist right away. “I give them a
teepa
for free. I say, cut your goddamned hair and smarten you up.”

McKelvey held the door while Giuseppe grunted and lifted his ruined legs across the threshold. The old man went to pull the second door, and he grunted again when it did not give as expected.