Up in Smoke (28 page)

CHAPTER
45

Zol drew the minivan into the garage and popped the back open. It was going to be fun putting a meal together with the two bags full of treats from Four Corners. They had the best hummus, which he'd have on the sourdough baguette while he prepared the pork tenderloin for roasting: garlic, onion, Herbes de Provence, and his secret ingredient, Tap
357
rye whisky flavoured with real maple syrup. Delicious.

He hit the garage-door button and braced for the screeching of the closing door. He walked into the mudroom and cursed himself for forgetting to set the alarm on his way out this afternoon. How dumb to be that distracted over a meeting that never happened. He threw on the lights and went to drop the groceries on the kitchen counter, but . . . what the hell? The place looked like San Francisco after the earthquake. Every drawer was hanging open, the contents dumped on the floor. Every cupboard had been ransacked. Even the fridge and dishwasher had been gone through. He grabbed a baseball bat from the garage and ran from room to room, throwing on the lights as he went. It was the same everywhere. Their entire life thrown to the floor. The computer room was particularly bad. Every one of Max's
DVD
s had been cleared from the shelf and tossed onto the carpet. The computer monitor had been upended, but not smashed.

When he thought about it, this wasn't vandalism. Nothing had been trashed. And neither was it wanton theft. None of the valuable electronics had been stolen. Even his collection of watches — some elegant, some fun, but none over the top in price — was still in the dresser in the bedroom. The boxes had been opened and tossed every which way, but the timepieces were still there.

Whoever had done this had been looking for something specific. Had they known what they were looking for or making an educated guess? Shit. He ran down to the basement, sweat pouring down the back of his neck. Had they found her? Oh, please, no. Please, let her be safe in the dryer.

When he got to the laundry room, he saw the clothes from the drying rack scattered on the floor along with a box of laundry detergent, a bottle of bleach, and another of fabric softener. The place had be turned over meticulously. The detergent box was upright, not a single granule spilled from it. Cursing at his stupidity, he forced himself to look in the dryer.

The door was closed. Had he left it that way? He couldn't remember. He pulled it open, knelt down, put his hand in. Nothing. Shit. He felt further up, brushed against the metal fin, found the smooth cotton of his boxer briefs, then yes, the box underneath. When he lifted it out, the weight of it told him the little bird was still there. Unless . . . would they be cruel enough to replace her with a rock?

He held his breath and removed the lid. She winked at him as if to say
It's about time you showed up.
Thank God.

He removed her from the box and slipped her into his jacket pocket, then went upstairs to call the cops. Colleen would be pleased. Finally, he was calling the police.

CHAPTER
46

“Hi, Dad,” Max said the next morning, through the
7
-Eleven phone.

Zol was standing in his Simcoe office, gathering the notes he needed to fax to Elliott York in Toronto. He didn't trust the landlines here, though the security company promised the bugs had been dealt with. He was going to use the fax machine at the mailbox store on Norfolk Avenue, just to be sure.

“Is it true, Dad? Colleen says the bad guys aren't following us anymore?”

How could he phrase it so it approached the truth yet sounded reassuring? “They're not actually bad, Max. They don't happen to agree with some of the things I have to do at work.”

“I thought they had guns.”

“I haven't seen any weapons.” Which was true, remarkably enough, considering what had been happening these past few days. “They promised me they'd leave you alone as long as you stayed in Toronto for a little while longer. Are you having fun there?”

“I guess. Allie is a good sewer. She makes her own clothes and sells them at a store. She's making me a Halloween costume.”

“Fantastic, bud. What are you going to be?”

“A zombie pirate.”

“You mean with an eye patch and a wooden leg?”

“No, a real zombie. Wicked hair, grey skin that will make me look like a corpse, striped legs, and blood oozing from everywhere.”

A corpse? Great. “Allie sounds pretty talented.”

“She's really nice,” Max said. “But Dad . . .” He'd lowered his voice. “Soksang is kinda different.”

Sok-sang? Who was she? Did Allie have a maid? Or maybe it was a he? It would be no surprise if a friend of Francine's had a gardener on a day pass from a halfway house.

“Who?” Zol asked, trying not to sound anxious.

“You know. Francine, remember? She changed her name when she became a nun. And that's what I'm supposed to call her, Soksang.”

“Sorry. I remember now.” Soksang, Cambodian for peace. Zol cleared his throat. “Do you mean different in a nice way? She's not being mean, is she?”

“No. But she doesn't watch movies and she can't buy me anything. She's not supposed to touch money. Not even a credit card.”

“So is Colleen paying for what she needs?”

“Soksang never goes shopping. She showed us her robe. She doesn't have any other clothes. It has to be orange, no other colour. And it has three different parts. She says it's so comfortable she doesn't need anything else. Not even jeans. Her suitcase is very small. She let me carry it for her. It wasn't heavy.”

“That was good of you. I'm sure she was thrilled to see you at the airport.”

“You know, Dad, it never gets cold in Cambodia. Kids there have never seen snow.”

“I guess they wouldn't, would they?”

“Soksang doesn't eat dessert and she doesn't know anything about computers. Or how to use a cellphone. And she doesn't know who Hermione is in
Harry Potter
.”

“But you're having a good time?”

“Sort of. Soksang sits by herself and prays a lot. She says I watch too much
TV
.” It was sounding like Max had discovered for himself that Francine made a better pen pal than a mother figure. Music to Zol's ears. “Dad, when can Colleen and I come home? I miss Travis and my other friends.”

Zol pictured the chaos in the house. No kid should have to see his room pulled apart by professional thugs. Max would have bad dreams for a month.

“It won't be long,” Zol told him, not sure how normal their life was ever going to be again.

“I won't have to go trick-or-treating here on Halloween, will I? I don't know any of the kids.”

“I hope not, Max. I hope everything will be settled before then.”

“Promise? You mean I can go to school on Monday? Wear my costume, go to the Halloween assembly, and everything? Promise, Dad?”

Zol crossed his fingers and thought about the plans that were taking shape. Everything was hanging on Sunday morning. If things ran off the rails, Monday would have to take care of itself.

“I'm doing my best, Max. All I can do is my best.”

CHAPTER
47

At five on Sunday morning, Matt Holt turned right off Bay and right again onto Murray, using his
GPS
for guidance. He'd only been down here once before, when a grateful client had taken him out in his sailboat. Sailing on Lake Ontario was okay, but he would have preferred something faster, with a nice throaty engine you could tinker with.

Dylan with the Irish accent had said to look for a two-storey detached brick with a large front porch, and he'd leave the lights on.

“You can't miss it,” he'd added. “In my corner of North Hamilton, a detached house is as rare as an honest Yugoslav general. Look for the Sicilian Fratellanza Racalmutese, a social club that's basically a floodlit sign sitting atop a few blocks of Lego. Nice people and good neighbours, if you like garlic. We're half a block further on.”

Matt parked at the curb in front of the house and knocked on the door. The living room curtains parted briefly before the door opened, and a presence filled the doorway. It introduced itself as Dylan and said what a pleasure it was to meet face to face after spending much of yesterday talking to each other on the phone. He looked about thirty-five, bushy beard, black shirt and jeans over an athletic build. It was amazing how hairy some White people could be, but what was most impressive was the guy's height, about six-six. His eyes were grey, like a wolf's, and he flashed one of those big smiles White people use when they're anxious. Though on this guy, the smile seemed sincere. Perhaps that was because he was some sort of priest. At least, that's what Dr. Szabo had called him when he'd set them up. Or maybe that was his code name, Dylan the Priest. A real priest wouldn't have a Fisher-Price trike in his front hall beside a pair of women's boots.

“Good morning to you, my good man,” said Dylan the Priest. “Come in. I've everything ready. Twenty boxes of fun.” His eyes strayed to the massive scar running from Matt's left eye, through his cheek, down his neck to his collar bone.

“I see you like my scar,” Matt said.

The smile vanished from the big guy's face. “Sorry, I shouldn't have —”

“It's a beauty, eh?” Matt said, touching it. “But it's fake. A friend did it for me last night. He works in the movies.”

Dylan the Priest relaxed and let out a chuckle. “You certainly played me for a fool. It's going to make quite the fine impression on the guards.”

That was the idea. They'd remember the scar and nothing else. His movie friend had lent him a Detroit Tigers baseball cap with a realistic fringe of blond hair sticking out from under it. The black work shirt and matching pants he'd bought at the Brantford Mall, where they'd embroidered
Upper Canada Security
above the shirt pocket. The woman had done it while he waited, without batting an eyelash. It was amazing what people let you get away with. Especially around Halloween.

The cardboard boxes stacked in Dylan's living room were each the size and weight of a two-four of Molson's. They'd been dabbed with green, grey, and brown paint. The camouflage looked pretty cool. It didn't take long to load them into the van Matt had prepared for the job. As per usual on a Saturday, he'd sent his staff home at noon, and then he'd spent the afternoon alone in his shop spray-painting the made-up name on the van's side panels:
UPPER CANADA SECURITY
. He'd added a fake but operational phone number to make everything legit. He was pleased with the paint job, although it didn't have to be perfect. This little charade didn't have to last long. The plan was to get the set-ups done before sun-up.

They stopped at an all-night Tim's on Barton Street for a couple of large double-doubles, but the caffeine didn't touch his partner. Instead of riding shotgun, Dylan the Priest snored all the way to Grand Basin.

Five hundred metres from their first destination, Matt stopped on the gravel shoulder of the rural side road running through the bush. He shook Dylan the Priest by the arm. “Wake up, Goldilocks, it's showtime.”

“What? Oh, are we here? On the rez already?”

“You got it. Indian territory.” Matt winked and pointed ahead through the windshield. “The first Rollies factory is just ahead. Target number one. You ready?”

“Most certainly,” he said, sounding more confident than the look on his face. If he'd grown that bushy beard to hide behind, it wasn't working. “But would you be so kind as to run through the steps again.”

“Good idea, partner.” It was kind of fun having a White guy playing Tonto to his Lone Ranger. Although the real Lone Ranger was Dr. Szabo.

They ran through the details of the plan they'd worked out yesterday over the phone. Dr. Szabo had bought them pay-as-you-go cells from
7
-Eleven to minimize the chance that Dennis and his boys could listen in. The Badger was a superior mastermind who controlled an impressive empire, but he wasn't a magician. The phones were secure. Weren't they?

Matt put on the Tigers' ball cap and a pair of safety goggles with yellow lenses, and drove the final half kilometre. Until now, this had felt like an adventure. It had been fun dreaming up the disguise and painting the van. But when the headlights caught the first glimpse of barbed wire through the trees, the double-double began to churn in his stomach.

He ignored the ruckus in his guts and stopped the van at the unmarked gate. Of course it was unmarked. Regular folk weren't supposed to know that this was one of the two major Rollies factories on Grand Basin Reserve. Factory seemed too fancy a word for the single, plain building enclosed in a ten-foot perimeter of barbed wire. One storey high, the placed looked like a long, narrow warehouse with an A-line roof, aluminum siding, and security cameras at the gate and above the front door. Colleen had said there were four more cameras mounted on the eaves — one on each corner. She'd also said there was only one guard on duty after midnight and on Sundays, and the shift changed at eight-thirty in the morning. The machines that made the cigarettes ran Monday through Saturday. The large gravel parking lot was bordered on three sides by dense bush. And all that barbed wire, of course. In the far corner were two cube vans — white, no special markings. A two-litre Acura
CSX
was parked close to the front door. It looked well taken care of, though you never knew the state of the shocks, the brakes, and the exhaust until you put a vehicle on the hoist and made a thorough inspection.

Matt put his window down and pressed the button on the intercom.

“Can't you see the sign?” said a voice through the speaker. “No trespassing?”

“Upper Canada Security, sir.”

“We're closed.”

“We're answering an alarm situation.”

“I didn't hear no alarm.”

“It's a silent one. Signalling a problem with your security cameras.”

“Nobody called me.”

“It's company policy to respond in person, sir. To be sure you're not experiencing a personal emergency situation and nobody's tampering with your equipment.”

“I'm fine.”

“I have orders to see that the guard on duty is not in danger and to check the security cameras immediately.”

“I can't let you in here.”

Shit. This was more difficult than he'd expected. “I do not need to enter the premises, sir, only the grounds of the compound. The situation in question is an exterior problem. If necessary, I can adjust the cameras with my handheld device. You can observe everything I do on your interior monitors.” Sometimes it helped to use big words. What you said sounded good, so people felt your authority without admitting to themselves they weren't entirely certain what you'd said.

“You'd have to sign in.”

“Certainly, sir. I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm sure you take security as seriously as we do.”

The gate opened, and by the time they'd drawn next to the Acura the guard was standing outside holding a clipboard.

“Just two o' yous?” the guard said through the window of the van. His eyes widened at the sight of Matt's scar and stared at it longer than was polite. Good, he wouldn't forget it.

If the scar wasn't fake, and this was a normal encounter, the guy would have pissed him off. He was young, Asian, Canadian accent, and about twenty-two, though with Asians you could hardly tell whether they were twenty or forty. He had the bloodshot eyes of someone who'd been up all night and was desperate to get home to bed. Still, there was a tough-guy edge to his attitude, probably supported by the handgun clipped to his belt.

Matt reached for the clipboard, signed it, passed it to Dylan the Priest in the passenger seat, and handed it back to the guard along with one of the Upper Canada Security business cards he'd printed yesterday. The phone number on the card matched the one he'd painted on the van.

“Can you do me a favour?” Matt asked.

“Depends,” said the guard.

Matt shrugged to give the impression it wasn't a big deal whether the guy did him the favour or not. “Dead simple. You're going to see the outside camera images go white for half a minute, maybe longer, one at a time. I need you to record the camera numbers and the times when the images go on and off. To the nearest five seconds will be fine. Can you manage that?”

The guy lifted the cuff of his nylon jacket to expose the Breitling on his wrist. If the gang was paying him marginally above minimum wage, it was a knock-off. If it was real, he was no rent-a-cop flunky; he was number-one son taking care of Daddy's million-dollar operation. And that made him all the more dangerous.

They waited until Mr. I've-got-a-Breitling returned to the building. Matt could hear him bolt the door. Was he phoning Upper Canada Security to verify the legitimacy of the call? If he did, he'd get another pay-as-you-go cellphone and Dr. Szabo's girlfriend working a shift at the “Upper Canada Security” call centre.

Matt backed the van away from the Acura and parked at the extreme right of the building's face, where they wouldn't be seen by the front-door camera, only the camera at that right corner. Matt got out first, then the priest. While the priest opened the rear doors of the van and got ready to remove three of his boxes, Matt stood in front of the roof-mounted camera, aimed his phone at it, and pretended to punch in a few numbers. He gave a confident salute for the guard's benefit, punched at the phone again, then shone his heavy-duty halogen flashlight straight at the camera lens.

The light was the priest's signal to walk into the shadows parallel to the long, right side of the building hefting three boxes at once. They were heavy, but not too much for him, and they had to make this quick. The guard wouldn't stay patient or duped for long. The priest had taken only four strides away from the van when the entire side of the building erupted in a blaze of light. Shit, motion detectors. They hadn't worked those into the plan. The priest froze, his eyes betraying his panic.

“No worries,” Matt told him, then realized there could be microphones as well as the more obvious lights and cameras. “Halfway along will be fine. I'm nearly done here.”

The priest nodded, then set two boxes on the gravel next to the building, just shy of the halfway point between the front and rear cameras. He adjusted the position of the two boxes. Apparently their orientation was critical to their ultimate function. He brought the third box back. This he set around the corner from the face of the building, where it wouldn't be visible by anyone entering or leaving the factory. He placed the box close enough to the building that it couldn't be seen on the guard's monitor when Matt turned off the blinding halogen flashlight.

The priest stood back and checked the box's position. He made a minor adjustment, then gave two thumbs up.

Matt killed the light and waved encouragingly at the camera. He joined the priest in the van and drove to the other side of the building. He blinded that front-corner camera, and the two of them went through the routine again.

When they had all six boxes in place, he knocked on the front door.

“It's all fixed,” he told the guard. “A minor software issue. Good to go.”

“Don't you want this?” the guard said, looking hurt that Matt was about to leave without asking for the record he'd taken such pains to complete.

“Of course.” He made a show of carefully studying what the guard had written. “I'll take these stats back to the office and include them in my report. Thanks a lot. Do we need to sign out?”

“Oh yeah,” the guard said. “I'll get the sheet.”

Matt turned the van around while the guard fetched his clipboard. God, he could hardly wait to get the hell out of here.

The guard returned with the clipboard, and Matt and the priest signed the sheet. As Matt was handing it back, the guard narrowed his eyes, stared at Matt's face, and reached for his holster.

Matt's heart rate thundered into overdrive as its turbocharger kicked in. Had the guard recognized him from his shop? All he could do now was ignore the galloping in his chest and keep his face neutral. It was amazing how well that tactic worked on White guys. Drove them crazy and gave you the upper hand. Did it work on Asians?

“You're lucky,” the guard continued, his right hand stroking the butt of his handgun. “Your dispatcher knows you pretty damned good.” He was scrutinizing the left side of Matt's face and drawing a finger down his own cheek. “If she hadn't described you so accurate like, you would've been stayin' here till change o' shift.”

Apparently pleased to have had the last word, the guard took the clipboard and strolled back inside. Seconds later, the gate opened.

Matt smiled and waved at the camera.

Shit. Was he going to be able do this twice more before sunrise?

And then he thought about Tammy and Donna. And Mum and Dad. Dennis Badger had taken a huge toll on his family. There was no doubt in Matt's mind that the Badger was responsible for Tammy's murder. And Donna was in a coma thanks to the contaminated cigarettes the bastard had no intention of pulling from the market. Getting the best of him wasn't going to dry Mum's and Dad's tears, but it might make them feel better. Being made to quiver like a helpless victim, again and again, gnawed your bones and sucked out the marrow.