Buffalo Jump (34 page)

“I don’t like paying full price for anything,” Marty said.

“But you could if you had to. I can’t. I went to a presentation on the Medicare guidelines last week, and I didn’t understand half of what the guy was saying. And neither did he. Every question I asked him, he’d say, ‘Well, I’ll have to check that and get back to you.’ I taught high school mathematics for thirty-two years, my friend, and the guidelines might as well have been in Greek.”

“Hey, Harv,” a voice called out behind me.

Harv’s eyes widened and his face broke into a grin. I turned to see the grey-haired man in the Jerry Garcia shirt. He had a carton in his arms. He said, “Want me to take this straight out to the car for you?”

“Barry!” Harv said. “You’re an angel.”

“Just the one carton?”

“That was all the cash I could raise on short notice. If there’s anything left on Monday, I’ll see what I can do.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Barry said. “Amy wants everything out of here as fast as possible.” Then his eyes settled on me. Settled and narrowed to suspicious-looking slits. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Do I know you?”

“He’s new,” Harv said.

“I can see that.”

“My name is Joel,” I said.

Barry set the box down and walked over to me. He was about my height and heavier. I hoped it wouldn’t lead him to start something. Busting up his place—or him—wouldn’t help any.

“If I don’t know you,” Barry said, “what are you doing in my house?”

“Can I speak to you privately?” I asked him.

“No.”

“It will only take a few minutes,” I said.

“What are you, a cop? A narc or something?” People were
stopping their conversations, looking our way, moving toward us. Marty in particular was glaring at me.

“I’m not a cop,” I told Barry.

“Then get out,” he said. “This is a private party.”

“As soon as we’ve had our conversation.”

Marty walked over to Barry’s side, about Barry’s size but in better shape. “Why don’t you get out like he asked?” he demanded. A man used to getting his way.

“If you’re a police officer, you have to tell me, right?” Barry asked.

“I’m not a police officer, so I wouldn’t know.”

“FDA?”

“What?”

“Food and Drug Administration.”

“No. I’m from Toronto.”

He looked at me for a long moment, making up his mind. Maybe he was picturing the damage that might occur if his friend Marty and I got into it. “Okay,” he said, nodding toward the back of the house. “In the kitchen.” He asked Marty to help Harv out with his carton.

Marty looked disappointed, like he’d missed his chance to impress someone. Maybe himself. “You sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

“I can handle it,” Barry said and led me back to a large eat-in kitchen with a round oak table on ornate ball-and-claw legs. A woman sat at the table, surrounded by dozens of pill vials and boxes of all sizes. About a dozen cartons were stacked near the rear door behind her. I looked out the door; no sign of Ryan through its glass panes.

The woman, whom I presumed to be Amy, looked about fifty, with long grey hair pulled into a loose braid and striking grey-green eyes. She wore her clothes baggy and loose: wine-coloured harem pants and a billowing white linen blouse. If she was trying to hide her body, it wasn’t working. Her curves
were apparent and sweetly placed. “Who’s your friend?” she asked Barry.

I took out my wallet and showed her my identification. The warmth in her eyes was replaced by a flinty glare. I let Barry look at it too. Amy’s mouth tightened as she looked at her husband. “You walk an investigator right into our kitchen?”

“I’m strictly private,” I assured her. “I’m not connected to the police or the FDA or any law enforcement agency in the U.S.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Information.”

“What kind?”

“This venture of yours has had ramifications you may not know about. At least I hope you don’t.”

“Go on,” Amy said.

“A pharmacist was murdered in Toronto last month. He had been supplying Canadian medications to people here in Buffalo.”

Their voices chimed in together: “What! Who?”

“Kenneth Page.”

Neither showed any sign they knew the name.

“Now another has been targeted,” I said. “A man named Jay Silver.”

“Oh my God,” Amy said.

She knew him. The possibility of his murder was clearly a personal horror, not abstract. Barry motioned her not to say anything but she cut him off with a downward slash of her hand.

“And it’s not just him,” I said. “His entire family will be killed. His wife and five-year-old son too. Jay, Laura and Lucas, all of them.”
Listen to their names,
I thought.
Know them.

“But all he’s done is help people like us get prescriptions without going broke. Why would someone kill him?”

“Because he knows who murdered Kenneth Page and they can’t trust him not to talk. And because the drugs in his store were worth millions. The truck that just left here—that entire
load—was from his store. They basically looted it. They weren’t afraid to, Amy, because they don’t expect Silver or his family to live long enough to do anything about it.”

“He’s bullshitting us, Ames. Next he’s going to tell us he should take the product off our hands. Get the fuck out of my house, man. I don’t want to tell you again.”

“You’re going to get yourselves killed.”

“Only if we talk,” Amy cut in.

“Whether you talk or not.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“Because the killing has started. Not just Kenneth Page, not just Silver and his family, but also a guy I worked with, another investigator. He was killed Monday. A witness—a retired old man—was beaten half to death on Wednesday. Someone has to stop them and it seems to have fallen to me. So help me. Please. Tell me who you work for.”

The two of them stayed silent, looking at each other. Then Barry walked over to the table and put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. She covered it with her own. “I’m sorry, Mr. Geller,” Amy said. “I like Jay Silver. I hope nothing bad happens to his family, I really do. But it would be best if you left now.”

I looked at her when I said, “You’ll stand by while a family is killed?”

“He’ll kill us if we talk.”

“Who will?” I asked. “Ricky Messina?”

The fear in her eyes was palpable. “You
do
know him …”

“Yes,” I said. “But I am not on his side. I can help take him off your backs.”

“You and what army?” Barry scoffed. He drew himself up to his full height and stepped between me and Amy. “That’s enough,” he said. “Get out now.”

“Barry—”

“We have to look out for ourselves. Now for the last fucking time, get out!”

I heard footsteps coming down the hall. A dozen men and women crowded into the doorway, Marty at the front of the pack. I moved toward the back door so none of them could get behind me.

“Everything okay?” Marty asked.

“Fine,” Barry said. “He was just leaving.”

I didn’t move. The room became eerily quiet. Not a word was spoken; there was just the hiss of a candle in a cylindrical glass holder on the window sill.

“I can’t go,” I said.

“You heard Barry,” Marty said. “Out of here, now.”

He put a hand on my left shoulder, squeezed it and said, “I’ll bounce you down the steps if you’re not out by the time I count three.”

Counting three. What did he think this was, a schoolyard? I drove my fist up into his armpit. There’s a cluster of nerves in there that doesn’t much like getting hit. It numbs the arm completely. Marty’s grip loosened and he sank to the floor, his face as pale as marble. Then came the sound of breaking glass behind us. Amy’s head snapped around. The kitchen door had nine glass panes in three rows of three. The pane closest to the doorknob had been shattered and a gloved hand was reaching in through the broken pane and turning the deadbolt.

Amy’s eyes grew as wide as those of a horse in a barn fire. She stood up so fast the heavy oak table went up onto two legs, sending vials of pills of all colours rolling to the floor.

“Oh God,” she gasped. “It’s Ricky. Barry, it’s Ricky. Don’t let him in. Don’t let him touch me. You promised, Barry. You swore.”

Barry started toward the door but it banged open before he was halfway there and Dante Ryan stepped into the kitchen. His right hand was inside his jacket. Barry stopped where he was. Amy’s breathing still came fast and shallow, but the fear in her eyes began to ebb. A strange, threatening man had just broken
into her kitchen, but it wasn’t Ricky. I wondered what he had done to get so far under her skin.

“It’s okay,” I said to Ryan. “One guy just got excited.”

“Asshole,” Marty rasped, his forehead beaded with sweat.

“You’ll be all right,” I told him. Then I went to Amy and said quietly, “I told you I wasn’t with Ricky. This man and I are very much against him, in fact. I think he killed all the people I mentioned and tried to kill me. So talk to me. Help us get Ricky out of your life.”

“How?” she whispered. She was trying hard to find some kind of centred calm, but the faint billowing of her blouse showed how shaky she was. “By reporting him to the police? Even if he got life in prison, he’d kill me the day he got out. Slowly, with his knife. He told me. He showed me.” Her hands went to her belly and stayed there as if they were the only thing preventing her insides from spilling out onto the floor.

“Who said anything about prison?”

She looked into my eyes for a long moment. She was searching now to find what could live inside me that could take Ricky down.

“You think you can kill him?” she asked.

It wasn’t a question I could answer out loud. I could only hold her gaze and hope she would see in Ryan the tacit but unspoken fact that it would be his professional
and
personal pleasure to clip Ricky Messina.

“Then do it,” she said. “When he’s dead I’ll tell you every last thing. Until then I have nothing to say.”

Ryan and I didn’t want to be seen leaving the house together, so he stayed in a dark corner behind the garage. I told him I’d wait for him at the car.

I would have too if it weren’t for the woman leaning against the passenger door of the Dadmobile, arms folded tightly across her chest. About forty in a light mauve suit, with
blue eyes and shoulder-length red hair that had been straightened. It looked as dry and stiff as an old paintbrush.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

She said, “That depends.”

“On what?”

“How badly you want to stay out of jail.”

H
er name was Christine Staples and she had the credentials to prove it, professionally presented in a genuine leather case. “I’m with the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Criminal Investigation. We’re the investigative arm of the agency. The FBI of the FDA, if you will.”

“A woman of letters,” I said. She suppressed any sign of finding it funny. No Katherine Hollinger, this one. All business, down to her square-toed loafers.

She asked for ID and I showed her my licence. If it provided any credibility, she didn’t show that either.

“I’ve been watching that house,” she said. “Only today I’ve been watching you watching the house. What’s your interest?”

“I’m house hunting,” I said.

“From Ontario?”

“Society is tilting too far left there,” I said.

Some people appreciate a little humour to help break the ice before intense discussions or negotiations. And some, like Christine Staples, look at you like they’re fitting you for a dunce cap. “Do you know where our office is, Mr. Geller?”

“I’m looking for residential space, not commercial.”

“We share a building downtown with the Buffalo field office of the FBI. Should we continue our discussion there?”

“You have powers of arrest?”

“No, the police and border enforcement folks do that for us. But I can have someone here real quick.”

I could have told her to go to hell. But that would likely have meant exposing Ryan to the local feds, something he wouldn’t care for in the least. I was about to ask Staples if we could talk somewhere else—give Ryan a chance to lose himself—when she surprised me by suggesting it first.

“Here’s my best offer,” she said. “We go to a Starbucks a few blocks from here and you tell me what you saw inside that house, or we go to the Federal Building and I lose your paperwork.”

“The first one sounded better.”

“Which is not to say the second won’t follow if you don’t come up with a better story than house hunting.”

“I’ll try.”

“Are you armed?” she asked.

“No.”

“Mind?”

“No.”

She ran a hand around my waist. I lifted my pant legs so she could see there was no throwaway tucked in down there. “All right,” she said. “We’ll take my car.”

It was a brown Crown Victoria with no markings on it. Not that a brown Crown needed any to scream government car.

At Starbucks we both ordered tall dark roasts. No foam, no flavours, no bullshit, each trying to show the other we were straight talkers.

“I’m going to start by giving you the benefit of the doubt,” Staples said. “I’m going to concede that you are probably—
probably
—not involved in a criminal way with whatever is going on in that house. I won’t say it in front of a lawyer, but that’s what I think.”

“Thank you. That’s a good start.”

She took out a small spiral notebook. “You’re here in an investigative capacity?”

“Yes.”

“On whose behalf?”

“My employer. Beacon Security of Toronto.”

“More specific, please. Who hired Beacon to look into what?”

“That’s two questions in one.”

“So answer the first one first. Who hired you?”

“That’s confidential.”

“Not in New York State, it’s not, because you’re not licensed to operate here. You want to get home any time today?”

I looked at Christine Staples with her pale suit and eyes and helmet hair. “Without divulging the client’s name,” I said, “I can tell you what’s been happening on the Canadian end. Then you tell me how it connects to Buffalo.”