Black Fly Season (17 page)

‘Are you telling me you didn’t kill this guy?’

‘I don’t murder people, Alan. It’s not my way. The most likely thing is he’s been punished by his colleagues for failing the organization so dramatically. I don’t see how that’s a problem for you.’

‘All right. Okay. That makes sense.’ Clegg seemed to relax a little. ‘How’d your crew react to the takeover? They had to be pretty impressed.’

‘Yes, I think so. Even Kevin, and he’s very skeptical about my magic’

‘He’s not going to be trouble, is he?’

‘Kevin?’ Red Bear looked out across the lake, the tiny white pennants of surf. ‘Kevin won’t be a problem.’

‘Because I’ll tell you who could be a problem, and that’s your little Toofus-Doofus friend.’

‘Toof is a harmless pothead. How could he be a problem?’

Clegg looked at his watch. ‘I gotta hit the road. I gotta be back at the detachment by six.’

‘How would Toof be a problem?’

‘I’m not saying he is a problem. I’m saying he might be. Informant of mine gave me a little morsel of info the other day. One Nelson Tyndall. Not the most reliable asshole in the world, but not the worst either - for a junkie. Old Nelson tells me Toof told him his crew was going to be doing something big in a couple of days. That was before your little trip across the lake.’

Something big?”’ Red Bear said.’ “Something

big” is not a problem. “Something big” could be anything.’

‘How about something big with the Viking Riders?’

‘The Viking Riders? Your informant told you this before?’

‘No, he told me Toof told him before.’

‘That is not possible. None of them knew we were going near the Riders until we were on the lake and heading for the French River.’

‘Like I say, Nelson’s not the most reliable asshole in the world.’

Red Bear cursed. He took off his Wayfarers and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

The sun broke through the clouds above the western shore. Clegg lowered his visor and started the Blazer.

‘Keep an eye on the guy,’ Clegg said. ‘That’s all I’m saying.’

Kevin stretched, and closed his eyes. He had spent the entire morning in Red Bear’s cabin under the watchful eye of Red Bear himself, stepping on the dope and packing it into ever-smaller packages. It was torment to be so close to ecstasy and yet forbidden to taste. He thought long and hard about shoving some into his pocket, but Red Bear was never more than a few feet away, talking quietly into the telephone, making deals.

Now he was lying on his bunk, trying to write a poem about Karen, his last girlfriend in Vancouver. So far, he hadn’t had any luck with the females of Algonquin Bay, so he thought about Karen quite often. Strictly speaking, Karen had been someone else’s girlfriend, and despite her one-night adventure with Kevin, she had chosen to stay that way. Kevin summoned her image in his mind. That mouth, those sweet blue eyes, that silky blonde hair. Unfortunately, his thoughts had a tendency to turn lustful and lust Was not conducive to good verse. He had crossed

out a dozen opening lines, each one worse than the last.

The door opened, and Leon stepped inside, a dark silhouette against the sunlight.

‘Don’t you ever, like, go outdoors, man?’

‘I’m working.’

‘Working?’

‘Yes, Leon. I’m working. Writing. Some people do actually consider it work, you know.’

‘Oh, excuse me. What are you, like, William Asshole Shakespeare? Ernest Asshole Hemingway?’

‘You’re letting the flies in, Leon. I just got rid of the last one, and you’re letting them in again.’

Leon came in and shut the door behind him. ‘I hope you’re writing a screenplay. That’s where the money is.’

‘Never,’ Kevin said, and snapped his notebook shut. He felt under the bed for his shoes. ‘I wanted to ask you something, Leon. The day Terri left, you drove her to the train station, right?’

‘What are you going on about that again for? I told you. I’d been back from Toronto like thirty seconds and Red Bear says, “Hey. This is Kevin’s sister. She needs a ride to the station.” She was in a hurry.’

‘Yeah, I know she was pissed-off at me. But I called her place in Vancouver, and her roommates haven’t heard from her.’

‘I got no answer for that. She didn’t give me an

itinerary, man. I only just met her. Far as I know, she was catching the train to Toronto. After that, I got no idea.’

‘I’m getting kind of worried. She didn’t have much money. I don’t know where she can be.’

‘She’s probably with friends in Toronto. Why not? Anyways, we got other things to worry about. Red Bear’s got a little job for us.’

‘Shit. What now?’

‘What are you talking about man? We got the easiest gig anybody ever dreamed up. He makes the big contacts, sets up the big scores. All we gotta do is mule the stuff around once in a while.’

That was true. Mostly all Kevin had to do for his money was occasionally meet one of Red Bear’s mysterious contacts downtown and put him together with some product at an agreed-upon location. Easy as pie.

‘Man, you must be the laziest bastard in the world,’ Leon went on.

‘I just told you, man, I’m working on my poetry. Anyway, what’s he want us to do?’

‘Toof’s been shooting his mouth off to the wrong people. Got to have a little talk with Canada’s favourite pothead.’

‘Nobody listens to Toof. He’s a harmless goof.’ God, Kevin thought, I’ve been thinking about rhyme too long.

I

Leon snatched at a fly. ‘I didn’t say we have to beat him to death. We just got to have a talk with him.’

Later, when they were in the car, Kevin said, ‘So what’s the deal? Why have we got to talk to him?’

Leon attacked the gear shift and the TransAm roared on to the dirt road. ‘Red Bear wants us to convince him to stop blabbing our business to the entire world.’

‘So, why doesn’t Red Bear talk to him? He’d be a lot more convincing than you or me.’

‘It’s called delegating responsibility, Kevin. Red Bear actually wants us to do some work, you know what I mean? And he don’t mean writing.’

‘So what are we supposed to do?’

‘Just get him to stop, that’s all. How we do it is our business. But if he doesn’t stop, that’ll be Red Bear’s business, and you know what? I don’t want Red Bear mad at me, do you?’

A Toyota Echo cut them off as they turned on to the highway, and Leon leaned on the horn. ‘Asshole. I oughta run him into a rock cut.’

‘So who’s Toof supposed to have been talking to?’

‘Apparently, the little jerk let slip that we had some business with the Viking Riders, and somehow it got back to Red Bear. Is that bad enough for you or do you need like a detailed transcript? You wanna go back to camp and cross-examine Red Bear on the subject?’

‘I don’t think so.’

The either.’

They didn’t speak the rest of the way into town.

Toof was an easy person to find most afternoons, because Algonquin Bay has only two pool rooms: Duane’s Billiard Emporium and the Corner Pocket. He wasn’t at Duane’s, but someone said they’d seen him earlier and he was heading over to the Pocket.

They drove up Sumner and made a left on to O’Riley. The Pocket was a couple of blocks up, handily located near Ojibwa High, which was why Toof liked to hang out there. He’d hustle the after-school crowd of boys and make himself a few bucks.

Unlike Duane’s, which was run by a closet thug with a head shaped like an anvil, the Corner Pocket was run by an old couple. They were constantly in a bad mood, and no one knew if that was their normal demeanour or if catering to successive squadrons of teenage boys had soured them.

The old man glared at Kevin and Leon over the cash register as they entered.

They found Toof at the bar, drinking a Cherry Coke and scarfing down a Turkish Delight chocolate bar.

‘Hey guys, what’s up?’ Bits of chocolate clung to his snaggle tooth. He pointed to Leon’s feet. ‘You’re wearing your fancy hiking boots again. You going mountain climbing?’

‘Gotta go for a drive,’ Leon said.

‘Gimme twenty minutes, eh? I wanna take this guy out.’ He pointed with his Coke at a beanpole

of a youth who was clearing a table with one decisive thunk after another. Leon took Toof’s Coke and placed it on the

counter. ‘Now.’

The memories were coming thick and fast now; she couldn’t stop them. One moment she was yearning to remember more, the next moment she wanted nothing but oblivion. The nurses would give her Tylenol, but no more of the heavy-duty painkillers. She wanted to sleep, but it was the middle of the day and she was wide awake.

The patient lounge was noisy. Sophie, one of the suicide wannabes, had three blonde witches visiting her and they were all giggling maniacally. Terri huddled in a corner with a Glamour magazine, but she couldn’t concentrate. The memories dropped into her mind in no order, unbidden, with stomach-flipping changes in intensity and obsessive repetitions.

For example, the flies. For the hundredth time she was remembering the flies. Not just the ones that bit her, although she certainly remembered the itch and sting of bites on her forehead and ankles. Those flies were small, silent. But she could also hear the buzzing, thick and multilayered, of other, fatter flies. Great

clouds of them in the sunlight. Where had that been?

Then there was the train station. Kevin had come to meet her. He had been nervous, shifting from foot to foot as if they were strangers. Terri had known instantly that he was using again. She didn’t confront him about it right away, not there in the station with the crying children, and the drunks wobbling about, and a mad woman yelling incoherently.

Kevin’s cabin. Nothing but a camp bed and a rickety wooden table in a weird little cabin somewhere in the woods by a lake. Sunlight pouring in through the window, making the sweat on Kevin’s brow glisten.

‘I know you’re using again,’ Terri said. It just came out. She couldn’t bear to see him looking so furtive and guilty.

‘I’m just skinpopping,’ he told her.

‘Uh-huh. And where will that go?’

‘It’s just something I have to do right now. I’m under a lot of stress.’

He had a pout on his face as he said it, a child who’s been chastised. A lot of girls found Kevin’s boyishness charming.Terri supposed she could see it. That curly hair - dark, not red like hers. Her brother looked like a guy who was up for a ball game, or a night of poker, sometimes as if he might pull a frog from his pocket. Unfortunately, along with the boyishness came a lot of immaturity. He’d already done two years in a correctional facility

If he got caught trafficking, or even using, he could get sent away for a long, long time. There was no way she could so much as mention his name to the police, no matter how nice they were to her.

The camp. That’s what Kevin had called the place he shared out by the lake. Apparently the collection of cabins had at one time been a summer camp for handicapped kids. Once upon a time the cabins might have been white, but now they were discoloured, sagging, sorry old huts that barely kept out the flies. He dug up a key for the cabin next to his and told Terri she could stay there, but only for a couple of nights. Red Bear didn’t like outsiders hanging around, even family.

‘Isn’t it great?’ Kevin had said, waving his hand at the view of the lake, the overgrown baseball diamond. ‘Isn’t it fantastic? Look at that lake, Ter, it’s huge. We took a boat ride across it last week, and it took like an hour, even going really fast. You should see the stars from out there. Incredible.’

‘You went for a boat ride at night? Why would you do that?’

‘I don’t know. It was fun. Come on, Terri, you have to admit it’s pretty cool to have a whole camp for the summer.’

All Terri discerned in the leaning huts and the rocky little beach was the dispirited air of a place long abandoned. It reminded her of photographs he’d seen of the great depression.

And what a collection of people living in it. Kevin and Red Bear and the dim guy with the funny tooth. Supposedly, there was some other character she’d never met. Kevin had never mentioned any of them in his occasional e-mails, a fact that made her suspicious of his new friends right from the start.

‘Don’t you think it’s a little much for four guys to live in?’ she had said. ‘You could house forty people in all these cabins.’

‘Naw,’ Kevin had said. ‘Most of them are ruined. There’s only maybe six you could live in.’

‘Still. Four guys.’

Kevin had walked her over to the biggest cabin, Red Bear’s. It stood in a copse of birch trees, a miniature house with cedar siding and a broad window overlooking the lake. Fly strips hung from the ceiling where tiny creatures buzzed out their last moments of existence.

Red Bear had been completely charming. Or rather, everything he did and said certainly would have been charming, if it hadn’t also seemed a little too … overstated.

‘Yes, Kevin has told me a lot about you,’ he said. His smile was like a theatre marquee.Those teeth. ‘He told me you were the perfect sister, and now I can see why.’

Well, right there, that didn’t ring true. It didn’t sound like anything Kevin would say about her or anyone else for that matter.

Red Bear’s handshake was dry and firm. He

was not a big man, but he was wide in the shoulders and it gave him a look of strength. His hair was so black it had gleams of blue, like crow feathers, and seemed to flash against his clothes. His shirt was so white you needed sunglasses to look at him.

‘Come, I will read your cards,’ he said. He offered them chairs at a large table of country pine, where he proceeded to set out the cards in interesting patterns.

‘Ace of diamonds,’ he said. ‘This is perfect. A completely sunny outlook for you, Terri.’

Remembering someone’s name was supposed to be a mark of politeness, but Red Bear’s use of it made her uncomfortable.

‘Financial outlook is favourable. Health excellent. No enemies that I can see. You must really be the saint Kevin says you are.’ This with a sidelong glance at Kevin, who smiled on cue, but Terri knew Kevin was not the sort to call his sister a saint. Why would he?