Crime Machine (17 page)

Randall reached into the glove compartment and handed her a small package of Kleenex. “Come on, now. Take it easy. There’s nothing to cry about. They’ll catch the guy and it’ll all be over and things’ll be fine. You’ll see.” He kissed the top of her head through her hood. “And then I’ll get to kiss you all over your beautiful body again. Because I love you,
Sam. Call me crazy, but I honestly, honestly love you. Listen, did you replace your cellphone yet?”

“I’m borrowing my mother’s on the nights I go to work. She likes to check up on me before she goes to bed.”

“Give me the number. I’ll try to find a way to call you—not from home, obviously, and not tonight. But I’ll call. I promise.”

—

The bus made a million stops, ensuring Sam was late getting to Champlain’s. Ken, the manager, gave her hell, as did Jerry, the chef, but she didn’t let it bother her for too long. She felt so much better after seeing Randall. Her fears seemed to be shrinking down to some manageable size. She focused on her work and turned the dishes out efficiently without sacrificing presentation. When there was an unexpected slack period, she cooked up a couple of days’ worth of the cranberry glaze she knew they’d be serving with practically everything now that the Christmas holidays were approaching.

She didn’t let it get to her when Ali brought back a steak saying it was overcooked.

“It’s not overcooked,” she said. “You asked for medium, that’s medium.”

“You want to go out there and argue with them?”

Sam put another steak on the grill. She kept a close eye on it, but all she could think about was that Randall still cared about her—cared so much, he was worried
she
didn’t love
him
. When Ali came back, the new steak was on the plate, practically bleeding.

“It’s medium?”

“The last one was medium. Tell Geoff to pick up his sole almondine—it’s been sitting here for five minutes.”

At ten o’clock, her mother called. “Can’t you get a ride home? I don’t like you having to take the bus late at night.”

“It’s okay. I have the timing down, so I don’t have to wait long.”

“What exactly is wrong with your car, anyway?”

“It’s got asthma or something. It won’t start. I gotta go, Mom, it’s really busy.”

“Okay, hon. Good night, then.”

Jerry Wing came over, wearing his parka. “I need you to make the cranberry glaze.”

“It’s done.” Sam pointed at the two bowls on her chopping board. “I’ll put them in the fridge before I go.”

“You already made them?” Jerry put his hood up, even though it must’ve been eighty-five degrees in the kitchen, Chinese eyes blinking out at her from the fur.

“Think you’ll be warm enough?” she said. “You’re dressed for Inuvik.”

“I evolved for a different climate.” He raised a mitten in farewell. Sam was glad he wasn’t mad at her anymore. Relieved, anyway.

The trouble with having a passionate nature, she reflected as she was shutting down her station, is that you can’t win either way. Even when you’re happy, it’s more like a kind of relief—relief that you’re not feeling the alternative. The sting of Jerry’s anger. The agony that would take over her life if Randall dumped her. It’s the happiness of not falling off a cliff. Is Loreena Moon happy? No. Because Loreena Moon doesn’t love anybody. Loreena doesn’t worry about falling off any cliffs either.

Sam looked at the kitchen clock. Eleven-fifteen. She had exactly three minutes to make the bus. She ducked into the supply closet and changed out of her cook’s outfit, threw on her coat, and ran out the door and across the parking lot, reaching the bus stop with less than a minute to spare. It was not as cold as before. The earlier snow had melted, leaving the parking lot and the highway gleaming blackly in the street lights.

The bus was overheated. Sam sat near the middle exit, sweating after the kitchen and her run. She wiped an arc of clarity on the fogged windowpane and rested her head against the cool glass. The fast-food joints and the shopping malls slid by, impossibly bright oases along the slick, dark road. There were only three other passengers and they got off one by one along the route through town, long before the bus passed the Fur Harvesters’ warehouse and approached the Nipissing reserve.

She got out at the turnoff. The intersection was brightly lit, but after that the street lights along the access road were spaced far apart until you actually got into the residential area. Sam had never in her life worried about walking along this road, even late at night, but she worried now.

She walked quickly, trying to put herself into a Loreena frame of mind. Cool. Brave. Not brave—fearless. She was managing quite well, keeping her
breathing fairly normal and her heart reasonably quiet, until she went up a slight rise and rounded a curve and saw the car parked on the shoulder.

She stopped. Smells of trees and wet road. Sounds of trucks on the highway not far off.

It’s just a car, she said. The lights aren’t on. The motor isn’t running. There’s no one in it. Those are headrests.

Sam crossed the road to be on the far side from it. Courage would be a nice item to list in one’s catalogue of virtues, but if it was not available she would just have to make do with caution. She continued up the road, the lights of her street visible at the top of the rise.

She was nearly even with the car. Glancing toward it. Yes, empty. She made a pact with herself that she would not look over again as she passed by. She would keep it in her peripheral vision, but she would not actually look.

It wasn’t a vow she had to keep long. The driver’s-side door opened and a man got out—a really tall man. He had to have been hunched down for her not to see him. His face was covered in a black woollen thing with holes for mouth and eyes.

“Come here.” There was something long and metal dangling from his hand.

Sam ran.

His steps were right behind her, his stride matching hers. “You didn’t see anything,” he said. “You didn’t see anything. You don’t know anything.”

Something nicked the back of Sam’s coat. She kept running, forcing her legs to move faster. She thought about making a dash for the trees—he might have more trouble keeping up there—but she stayed right in the middle of the road, praying for headlights, a car, people.

He wasn’t behind her anymore. She heard the car start, and his headlights threw her shadow the length of the road to the top of the rise. Then her shadow began to shrink. She feinted left, ran right, the darkness of the trees.

She wasn’t going to make it. He was going to run her down. She stopped and dodged left, the car cutting her off. He was out and after her again.

Legs, lungs, heart, all straining at their physical limits. She simply could not run any faster. Her street came up and she made as if to go by it, then took a sudden right. Her house was the third on the right. She ran past it to the fourth, the fifth, dodged right again, and then she was
in Cal Couchie’s backyard. Sweet old guy, but about two hundred years old and stone deaf.

Sam ran back to her own backyard. Her keys were in her hand. She couldn’t hear the man behind her anymore. She could stay in the darkness of the backyard and scream for help, but that might just bring him right to her. She pulled out her mother’s cellphone and hit 911. It rang three times before someone picked up.

“Emergency services, location please.”

“1712 Commanda Crescent. A man is after me.”

“Can you speak up? I didn’t hear you.”

“Oh, God. 1712 Commanda Crescent. Send someone now. He’s going to kill me.”

She shoved the phone back into her pocket and peered around the corner of the garage. No one.

She made for the side door and he came from around the front, black and featureless. She wouldn’t make it to the house. She veered back to the garage and got her key into the lock and got the door open and inside and turned the lock again as he slammed into it with a noise like thunder that made her scream. It didn’t come out as a scream but like a noise her cat might have made. He wouldn’t be able to bust through that door—that was only in the movies, right? Doors don’t break that easily.

There was a splintering sound, and she remembered that long thing he’d been carrying. A crowbar.

It was dark in the garage, but she was afraid to turn on the light. She felt her way around to the far side of the car. Not locked, thank God. She opened the passenger door and the dome light came on, just enough of a glow to make out her father’s workbench, the shapes of hammers and saws and wrenches.

That splintering sound again.

She shut the car door and moved through the dark to the workbench and got up on it, damaged knee screaming. She felt on the wall and pulled down the crossbow, felt to her right for the leather quiver. She got behind the car and fitted an arrow into the groove, and wound it back until the loud click told her it was cocked. The Vixen had an automatic safety that she now pressed into the Off position.

Sam saw it in her head before it happened. She knew how it would
look—dark silhouette against the glow from the moon and the street lights. After that he would find the light and he would kill her.

The door crashed open. The dark shape. Sam stood up and released the arrow. The man doubled over and made a sound like he was puking. He fell back, got up, staggered, fell against the garage. Then his footsteps—uneven, dragging—moving away.

She waited behind the car. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. She’d seen squirrels breathing like that when Pootkin stalked them.

After a time she heard a distant siren, and closer, the sound of voices and car doors slamming. The squawk of a radio.

Flashlight beams playing over the surfaces outside, and then a man’s voice, cautious, saying, “Police. Police. Hello?”

A cop’s face and hat flashed in the doorway and disappeared again.

“I’m going to have to ask you to put down that weapon, miss. Now.”

“Did you catch him?”

“We have an individual in custody.”

“Tall bastard with a mask on?”

“He also has an arrow sticking out of his liver. Now put down the weapon and step to the front of that car and place your hands on the hood. I’m not asking.”

Sam looked at the bow. She didn’t even remember doing it, but there was another arrow in the bow and it was cranked all the way back.

C
ARDINAL HAD BEEN IN BED BUT NOT
asleep when the call came. He got out of bed and got dressed and drove up the hill to City Hospital. The shock of moving from the warmth of his bed to the cold of a December night was still reverberating in his bones when he found the patrol officer waiting for him outside a recovery room.

“Girl claims he’s the guy did the murders out at Trout Lake. He denies it up the wazoo, of course.”

“Where’s the girl now?”

“Down in emerge with PC Gifford. Bad cut on her knee, but you know how it is with emerge—if you’re not dying, you’re there for eternity.”

Cardinal had to get by the nurse on duty in the recovery room.

“This man has just come out of surgery,” she said. “You can’t be cross-examining him.”

“Just a couple of questions,” Cardinal said.

She led him past a row of beds, all but two of them empty. “Five minutes,” she said. “I’ll be timing you.”

The man on the bed was hooked up to an IV and a pulse monitor, but other than that, he looked in pretty good shape. His blond hair needed a
wash, but his powerful shoulders, where they emerged from beneath the sheet, looked wider than the pillow he slept on.

“Troy Campbell,” Cardinal said. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you again.”

Campbell opened his eyes and contemplated Cardinal with medicated calm. After a while he said, “I didn’t touch that girl.” His speech was slow but clear. “And she shot me with an arrow. She perforated my spleen. I plan to press charges.”

“Troy, you want to tell me again where you were Thursday night? Keep in mind that we already know where Randalll Wishart was.”

Campbell’s features maintained their contemplative cast. “I was at work that night. Ask my supervisor. We have a time clock that’ll show I clocked in.”

“So you weren’t in fact at home with your buddy Randall.”

Campbell shook his head, making the pillow rustle. “We have a TV at work.” He lifted his hand and encountered the handcuff that secured him to the bed frame. He squinted at it for a good thirty seconds. “You’re kidding, right?”

—

PC Gifford, standing outside Exam Room 3, gave Cardinal the particulars. “Samantha Doucette. Eighteen years old. Art student up at Algonquin. Her mother and brother are in the exam room with her. Mother won’t let her out of her sight. Got a pretty tall tale, if you ask me.”

“The doctor in there with her?”

“Yeah, they must be about done by now.”

The doctor came out and Cardinal identified himself. “How’s she doing?”

“She has a deep laceration to her left knee. Wouldn’t have been so bad except she didn’t get it treated for so long.”

“So it didn’t happen tonight.”

“No, no. Days ago. But she’ll be fine. I stitched her up and gave her a scrip for ampicillin.”

Cardinal went in and identified himself to Sam and her mother. The girl had put on a fresh pair of jeans and was shoving the others into a shopping bag. Her brother was entranced by an iPod or some other cyber-drug.

“I want to stay,” Mrs. Doucette said.

“Your daughter’s eighteen,” Cardinal said. “I need to talk to her in private.”

“She should have a lawyer.”

“Officers at the scene are satisfied that she was responding to an attack. I don’t anticipate charging her with anything—provided she tells me the truth.”

“Of course she’ll tell you the truth. Why would she do anything else? Don’t worry, honey, I’ll be right outside.”

When her mother and brother were gone, the girl sat on the edge of the exam table. “She doesn’t know the real story. She just thinks I was attacked by a complete stranger out of the blue.”

“And that’s not what happened, is it?”

The girl folded her arms across her chest and stared at the floor, shaking her head.

“You were coming home from work, is that right? Where do you work?”