Up in Smoke (30 page)

“Dennis Joseph Badger,” she said in a clear, loud voice, “I'm arresting you for the murder of Dr. Tammy Holt. You do not need to say anything, but anything you do say may be used as evidence.”

She dipped into her jacket pocket and held out a clear plastic bag that had
OPP: CRIME EVIDENCE
written across a seal at the top. Badger glanced at it and looked quickly away. Inside was what appeared to be a beaded star on a disk attached to a strip of leather. Was it a necklace? Whatever it was, it had the well-worn look of a keepsake or a Native artifact — and the detective looked triumphant to have it in her possession.

“You have the right to retain and instruct a lawyer right away,” the detective said, returning the bag to her pocket. “Do you understand?”

Dennis looked too stunned to answer. He flashed Chief Falcon a look of utter confusion that morphed into revulsion as he stumbled toward the unmarked police car at the hands of the officers.

No one in the group said a word. The bodyguards gawked at the departing unmarked police car like bewildered sheep who'd lost their shepherd. Now that he looked at them, Zol saw that they were identical twins. One had a big ugly sore on his lip.

Zol's phone beeped in his pocket. An incoming text. He flipped it open and read the message from Colleen:
NICE WORK WITH HIS TIM'S CUP. POLICE SAMPLE ALSO PERFECT MATCH. JUDGE GRANTED SEARCH WARRANT FOR BADGER'S HOUSE. BERGMAN MUST'VE FOUND EVERYTHING SHE NEEDED. XO

He looked up from the screen. A silver Mercedes had joined the huddle of cars parked across the street. Colleen gave a wave from behind the wheel. Al Mesic, smiling beside her, raised his notepad and his camera, then gave an appreciative thumbs up. Clearly, he was delighted with this scoop. His story of the Badger's arrest, complete with photos, would be huge for him. But hell, he better never discover that the firefighters' destruction of the factories was premeditated.

The Native chief was the first to stir. He turned to Zol. His dark, deep-set eyes were glistening, on the verge of tears. He cocked his head toward Dennis's
SUV
, not so gorgeous now with mud smearing its alloy rims and cinnamon side panels. “Doc?”

“You want to talk?”

Falcon nodded and without a further word led Zol to the suv. He swung open a rear door and motioned Zol in, then climbed in beside him from the opposite side.

Seated in the back seat, staring at his hands, Robert Falcon looked like a man filled to bursting with a lifetime of bottled up opinions and no idea how to let them out. After a long silence, he said, “Donna Holt,” and let her name hang in the space between them. And then he began. “She died 'bout an hour ago, eh?”

Zol didn't know what to say.
I'm sorry
wouldn't begin to cover it. For a long moment, he said nothing and hoped reciprocating the chief's initial silence conveyed the depth of his own regret. Finally, he ventured, “Donna's death is going to be very hard on Matt. Both his sisters were so —”

“Her mother called me. From Toronto. She's my sister, eh?”

“Sorry?”

“Tammy and Donna, they were my nieces. My sister's kids.”

“Oh Chief, I'm so sorry. I had no idea.”

“Looks like Dennis killed them both.” Falcon turned and stared through the window at the charred remains of the cigarette factory. After a while, he dropped his gaze to his hands and studied them intently, as if contemplating his own culpability.

The elected chief of Grand Basin Reserve raised his head and, for the first time, looked into Zol's eyes. “Us guys were blind, eh? On the rez, Dennis's greed was like an infection. You know, contagious, eh? Like the White Man's smallpox that killed so many of us in the old days.”

Talking like this was tearing the chief apart. But it was clear that an inner strength was compelling him to continue. He smudged the tears on his cheeks with the back of his hand. “It took me far too long to see that. I shoulda listened to my sister and her husband. We knew that Dennis brought bad people to the reserve — gangsters, gamblers, loan sharks, and, yes, even hit men. And my sister knew her daughter's death had everything to do with Dennis Badger's trade in pirate smoke. But all those dollars Dennis was throwin' around, they blinded me.”

The chief put his hand in his pocket and pulled out what looked like a wad of newspaper. “I can't keep this any longer, Dr. Szabo. Dennis was showin' it off in Toronto last night. Told me to put it back somewheres safe in my office. I figure you know what to do with it. Give it to the right people. I heard you're the one that found it in the first place.”

Zol didn't need to unwrap the paper to know what the chief had passed him. But when he saw those garnet eyes, his own stung. He caressed the smooth stone and remembered the autumn day when he'd got all excited after finding buried treasure with his dad's metal detector.

He passed the pipe back to the chief and said, “Hold him for a sec, will you.”

Zol reached into his own pocket and pulled out the black-eyed mate. She hadn't left his side since Thursday night.

He'd expected the chief to be stunned at the sight of the pair of legendary birds sitting beak to beak. But the chief simply nodded, as if all along he'd known Zol was the custodian of the second loon.

“Do you have any pipe tobacco with you?” Zol asked. “Mine's at home, but I think we could both do with a smoke.”

The chief swept the leather-and-maple interior of the Porsche with his discerning gaze. “Dennis doesn't let no one smoke in here.”

“That's okay,” Zol said. “He won't ever know.”

Recently retired from medical practice, Ross Pennie has been a jungle surgeon, an intensive-care pediatrician, a specialist in infectious diseases, a university professor, and a prize-winning author. His first novel,
Tainted
, won the Arts Hamilton Literary Award for Fiction and has readers cleaning out their fridges, fearful of artisanal sausages.
Tampered
, his second novel, also won the award and has readers fearing for Grandma's safety in her retirement home. Ross is the father of two grown children and lives with his wife in southern Ontario.

Copyright © Ross Pennie,
2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published by ECW Press

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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Pennie, Ross,
1952
–, author

Up in smoke / Ross Pennie.

“A Dr. Zol Szabo medical mystery”.

ISBN
978
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1
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55022
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967
-
7
(bound) /
978
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1
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77041
-
185
-
2
(pbk.)

ALSO ISSUED AS:
978
-
1
-
77090
-
465
-
1
(PDF)
978
-
1
-
77090
-
466
-
8
(
e
P
ub
)

I.
Title.

PS
8631
.
E
565
U
6
2013
C
813
'.
6
C
2013
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902496
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4

Cover and text design: Tania Craan

Cover image: Adam Hirons/Millennium Images UK

Author photo: John Pegram

The publication of
Up in Smoke
has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $
157
million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and by the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded
1
,
681
individual artists and
1
,
125
organizations in
216
communities across Ontario for a total of $
52
.
8
million. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.