Buffalo Jump (36 page)

“No.”

Staples made some notations in her book. “Where’s the rest?”

“What?”

“Only part of today’s delivery came here,” Staples said. “Where’s the rest?”

“I don’t know,” Amy said. “We just took what was ours and they went on their way.”

“You’ll have to do better than that if you want to stay out of jail.”

Amy glared at her. “I have no idea. They could have gone to Mars for all I know.”

I said, “Maybe I can help.”

Staples looked at me expectantly.

“There’s a warehouse on the west side,” I said. “We followed them there and saw them unload the rest of the goods.”

“We?”

Shit. Dumb mistake. “I did. I followed them.”

“Then why did you say—”

I had to get her back on track. “They’re probably still there as we speak.”

“You should have told me this before,” Staples snapped. “You might have cost us a chance to catch them in the act.”

“I needed to know you were being frank with me,” I said, throwing her own words back at her.

“Where exactly is this warehouse?”

“Everything square with Ms. Aiken?”

“Yes, yes,” she said.

“And me?”

“The address, please?”

I gave her the address. She wrote it down, then opened her briefcase and stowed away the yellow pad and pen.

“What happens now?” Amy asked. “Am I going to be charged?”

“No,” Staples said. “I can personally guarantee it.”

She reached into her briefcase, pulled out a pistol with a silencer threaded onto the barrel and shot Amy twice in the chest.

“
I
wish you could see the look on your face,” Staples said. “It’s priceless.”

Amy Farber lay dead on her kitchen floor, the front of her white blouse soaked in blood. Her eyes stared lifelessly at the ceiling.

Staples sat in her chair, aiming the pistol at my chest. “You were right about one thing,” she said. “You were never going to get within a mile of the Federal Building. Not where anyone could place us together.”

“You knew you were going to kill me.”

“Once I saw how much you knew, yes. Or did you think I invited you out for the pleasure of your company?”

“It’s been known to happen.”

“Not this time.”

“Are you really an FDA agent? Or is the real Christine Staples lying dead somewhere too?”

“I’m the real Christine Staples,” she said.

“The one nobody knows.”

“You got that right,” she said, nowhere near prim now, her smile ugly, almost lascivious. “Let’s face it. A girl can only go so far on what the FDA pays. Steven was able to take me a whole lot farther.”

“So you’d look the other way when the shipments came through.”

“Which is what you should have done. You should have stayed in Canada. You’re in the U.S. of A. now and we do things different here.”

The gun looked like a 9-millimetre. Now—finally, Ryan might have said—I wanted a gun in my hand, my own Beretta Cougar with the slide racked and safety off. But as Ryan had predicted, I was caught empty-handed.

The silencer on the end of her gun was about three feet from my chest. I wondered if I could grab the end of it and twist before she fired.

“You going to shoot me here?” I asked.

“Yes. Then I’ll wait until Hubby gets home from the movies and shoot him too.”

How had this hellish piece of work passed any kind of employment screening?

“When the police find me here, it’ll all blow open. Too many people in Toronto know what I’m working on.”

“But they won’t find you here,” she said. “Frank and Claudio will collect you and dump you elsewhere. Nothing will connect you to the Aikens or their house.”

“Except my blood, my fingerprints and the thirty people who saw me here tonight.”

For a moment she looked less sure of herself. I made my move, lunging across the table to grab the gun barrel. But she pushed her chair back and jumped out of reach. She stood well back of the table, her thin lips stretched in a sick-looking smile. “Nice try, Geller. Quick and decisive. I like that in a man.”

She levelled the gun at me, gripping it in both hands. She looked like she was ready to fire so I kept talking.

“It’s quite an act you put on,” I said.

“You bought it,” she said. “So does everyone at the FDA.
I’m the wallflower who jumps if someone says boo. That’s why no one will ever connect me to this.”

“Don’t be so sure. The Toronto Homicide Squad knows about Stone and Bader. How do you know they won’t talk?”

“I know Steven won’t.”

“And Bader?”

“Not a problem.”

“You’re going to kill him too.”

“Me personally? No. Someone else will handle it.”

“Ricky Messina?”

“Oh, you
are
industrious,” she said.

I felt a surge of pure hatred for this woman, this animal, who could talk about killing people like we were bugs who had made it through her screen door.

“That’s quite a look,” Staples said. “So angry. So vindictive. I think I liked your dumb look better.”

She levelled the gun and I saw the knuckle around the trigger start to pull. I flinched as a sudden roar in my ears made them ring—a noise that came from behind, far too loud for a silenced pistol. Staples’s chest exploded in a cloud of red and she stumbled backward against a butcher-block counter. Another shot and her throat burst open. She made a coarse strangled sound and slumped down to the floor, leaving a thick bloody smear on the cabinets behind her.

I turned around and saw Dante Ryan at the kitchen door, his Glock 20 in hand.

His first rule of a fast exit had been:
make sure there’s no one left alive to chase you.

He’d held up his end. I just had to get my ass out the door without kicking Christine Staples’s dead face.

W
e made it to the Peace Bridge in under ten minutes, melting into the long line of cars inching toward the border. It was getting dark, and not just because the sun was finally starting to set on a long June day. Thunderclouds were building in the northwest, gunmetal blue, stacked high like rearing horses. The heat wave was nearing its end.

Neither Ryan nor I had said a word since leaving the house. My lips and throat felt dry. My eyes were burning, my left ear ringing. I couldn’t get the image of Amy Farber out of my mind. Her body on the floor, one leg draped over her fallen chair, the warmth and life gone out of her.

We cleared Canadian Customs without incident. Ryan’s gun was back in the trunk of his car, locked in its metal case, and I had nothing to declare. Absolutely nothing.

The first raindrops fell as we sped along the flat stretch of land between Fort Erie and Niagara Falls. Ryan switched on the wipers. I lowered my window a few inches and felt splatters on my face and arm and breathed in the smell of ozone. “Thank you,” I said to Ryan. “And don’t make me say what for.”

“Don’t worry. We’re pretty even.”

“How so? I still don’t know who ordered the hit on Silver. You might still have to carry it out for all we know.”

“You gave it everything,” he said. “So for that I owe you. Anything you ever need you can ask me, for the rest of your life. Or the rest of mine, anyway.”

“How long were you outside?” I asked.

“I never left. When I came around front and saw you talking to that fed—”

“How’d you know she was a fed?”

“You kidding? That car? That suit? That hair? I knew something was up but where was I going to go? After you left, I went back to the garage and kept watch. When you got back, I moved up to the kitchen door to listen in. And did what I had to do.”

“The husband’s at the movies,” I said. “That’s the only reason he didn’t get it too. He got the jitters and had to go sit in the dark until he calmed down.”

“Lucky him.”

“Some lucky. He’s going to come home and find his wife lying dead with another dead woman he’s never seen.”

“At least he’s alive.”

“Because he wasn’t man enough to stand by his wife when his nerves got bad.”

“Didn’t like him much?”

I pictured the warm, earthy woman who had let her hair go gray, confident enough in herself not to do anything about it. “I liked her more.”

Rain was slanting through the beams of our headlights. The image of one dead body lying on the floor led to another. “I wonder if Marco and the others have been found yet,” I said.

“This kind of heat, it can’t take too long.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. I’m too tired to know. Tomorrow I’ll make some calls and see what I can find out. Maybe Uncle Looch will give me the lay of the land.”

“It would help if we knew who was pulling the strings in Buffalo. Ricky Messina doesn’t strike me as management.”

Ryan eased a cigarette out of his pack and lit up. I reached for the pack. He covered it with his right hand. “Don’t,” he said. “You’ll hate yourself in the morning.”

“I’m going to anyway.”

He moved his hand and I took out a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked one since Israel. I put it between my lips and lit up and blew a stream of smoke out my window. Some people think the first cigarette you smoke after you’ve quit a long time is the best. They’re wrong. The second one is the best. The first you just have to get through without passing out or throwing up.

The rain started to fall harder, fat drops bouncing off the pavement in front of us. Ryan moved the wiper speed to double time. I took another drag off the cigarette and felt light-headed as nicotine rushed through my blood, tagging familiar receptors that whispered,
Where have you been all this time?

I threw the fucking thing out the window and slept the rest of the way.

When I woke the car was at a full stop. I jerked upright in my seat, forgetting for a moment where I was. I peered out through the rain-streaked window—we were on Carlaw, north of Lakeshore—and remembered everything that had happened.

Forgetting had been better.

It was after eleven by Ryan’s dashboard clock. The rain was still coming down hard. We drove north on Carlaw, past old warehouses that had been converted into film offices and workshops that created distressed pine neo-antiques. I told Ryan which street to take over to Broadview and we came to it just south of the high-rise I called home. As we neared the front of my building, Ryan asked where he could park without being seen. I pointed to the visitors’ lot on the south side of the building.

“I need to get my guns out of the trunk,” he said. “Since I know yours is probably in a shoebox in the attic.”

“I don’t have an attic.”

“Yeah, you do. Only your steps don’t go up all the way.”

As we were pulling into the lot, I yelled, “Don’t stop!”

A dark green SUV was idling in a parking spot just past the entrance, exhaust snaking around its rear tires. The window of the passenger side was all the way down in the rain.

“Turn around! Go! Go!”

A muzzle flashed on the passenger side and our front windshield shattered, showering us with glass. Ryan didn’t need any further encouragement. He hit the gas and spun the wheel hard with the heel of his hand. The car fishtailed on the wet pavement. He spun the wheel the other way and floored it once we were pointed more or less at the street. We got out to Broadview with the SUV close on our tail.

“Right,” I said.

He turned right and sped up the street. A northbound streetcar was stopped at the next corner, its rear doors open to let passengers off. Streetcars have the right of way in Toronto—when their doors are open, cars are supposed to come to a full stop, like it was a school bus. Ryan just hit his horn and kept going. A man about to step down from the rear exit jumped back up and yelled at us. The driver rang his bell as an admonition. Then the SUV sped through too, drawing another peal of protest.

Ryan gunned it north. “My guns!” he spat. “They’re all in the fucking trunk!”

We blew through the red light at the next intersection. So did our pursuers. I remembered the manoeuvre I had pulled the other day in a similar situation, faking a turn left onto Pottery Road and then juking right through the streets of East York. The SUV didn’t even give me the chance to suggest it. It pulled out into the southbound lane and roared up beside us on our left. We couldn’t match his acceleration. When the SUV was alongside us, the passenger leaned out: Ricky the Clip, his round face wet and shiny with rain. Ryan’s window exploded
and he screamed and clutched his left eye. Blood streamed through his fingers and over his knuckles as the car began to drift toward a line of cars parked on our right. “I can’t fucking see!” he cried.

I grabbed the wheel with my left hand and steered us back into our lane.

We were coming up to the Pottery Road intersection. I snapped off my seatbelt and got my left foot over the centre console and hit the brakes. The SUV driver, still accelerating, couldn’t react fast enough and we slipped in behind him just in time to make a hard left turn down Pottery Road. The other driver hit his brakes, his lights flashing bright red in the darkness, reflecting on the wet road like two smears of blood. His wheelbase was too long to make a U-turn; he had to make a three-point turn instead, which gave us a lead. We swerved through one S curve after another down Pottery Road. I was trying to keep control with my left leg draped over Ryan’s right, my foot jumping from gas to brake, and my left hand spinning the wheel back and forth like a helmsman on a wild sea. The road grew narrower as thick foliage reached out from both sides. The Dadmobile banged off the guardrail on our right. I overcorrected and we veered into the left lane, narrowly missing a northbound cab. Headlights appeared in our rear-view. The SUV was gaining. Bayview wasn’t going to work. Pottery Road ended there. If we caught a red light, we’d have to come to a dead stop. Ducks waiting to be blasted.

An idea came to me. A way to better the odds. We were coming to the bike path where I’d rollerbladed the other day. If we could make them chase us on foot, they’d lose some of their advantage. I knew the path well. Ricky was from Buffalo; no way he’d be familiar with it. And the driver—Vito himself or one of his thugs—was equally unlikely to know it like I did. I hit the brakes and spun the wheel hard, and the car slid sideways into the fenced-off lot where the path
began. I undid the catch on Ryan’s seatbelt, opened his door and shoved him out. I popped the release on the trunk and scrambled out my side.