Ice Lake (9 page)

As she reached down and tugged her shirt out from her jeans, Lucy smiled. She loved this part. The moment when there was no turning back.

“Just so you know,” she warned him as her shirt came off.

“Yeah?”

She moved over top of him, straddling him, kissing him from above, reaching behind to unfasten her bra.

“I’m not showing any mercy either.”

Outside Massena, New York, a truck parked at the service entrance to a mall. Two axles. A separate cab. The rear box tall enough for a man to stand up in and just touch the ceiling on his toes, stretching. The vehicle
had driven up from Ogdensburg, as usual, where it had been supplied with cigarettes for the northern communities of the state. At Massena, more than 90 percent of its cargo remained aboard.

A problem that Luc Séguin faced had to do with the education of the driver. In the region where he normally hijacked trucks, drivers were aware of the practice. If they transported cigarettes or liquor they were given hazard pay, and if they were intercepted, they knew enough to hand over the keys when asked to do so by a friendly highwaymen who shouldered an automatic weapon while his partner aimed a grenade-launcher at the cab door. Heavy weapons pacified the victims, and rarely was there any need for violence. Peaceful upper New York State, on the other hand, could be home to truckers who hadn’t been educated. They might become emotional during the experience, or object to being robbed. They might resist. In Luc’s plan, the operation had to be quick, startling, and decisive. The driver of the truck could not be allowed a moment to evaluate his choices.

The trucker stepped down from his vehicle just as Luc came around it from behind. They met at the midway point of the truck’s length.

“Go back, please, to truck,” Luc directed him, and he opened and closed his coat.

“Excuse me?” the man asked.

Already this was going badly. “Go back, please, to truck.” He opened and closed his coat again.

“I don’t follow you,” the man said.

“No, don’t follow me, go first!”

The clean-cut trucker wore a quizzical expression and scratched the side of his neck with one finger. “Sorry, Frenchie, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Thinking fast, Luc decided that he had a problem. When he was nervous he did not speak English well.
Saying “please” was probably a mistake, it sent the wrong signal. And perhaps the deadly force of his pistol had not been apparent during the quick flashes he had given the man.

Luc opened his coat a third time, and held it open. A hand, thrust through the open pocket of his coat, gripped the pistol and pointed it at the other man’s belly. “Get back in truck.”

For the first time, comprehension registered on the driver’s face. Looking down, he couldn’t take his eyes off the gun. A weapon of that heft aimed straight at him had created instant terror.

“Easy, easy,” he said, putting his hands up.

“Put down your hands! Get back in truck!”

The trucker was of medium build but still had fifty pounds on Luc. Around forty, he wore a wedding band on his ring finger. Luc could tell that he was already in shock and might not be able to hold himself together. He stayed right behind him as the trucker returned to the cab and climbed in, and Luc slammed the door on him. He moved quickly, and in a second was climbing up the passenger side. The door was locked. Luc nodded to the driver to lift the lock button.

The man thought it over, but only for two seconds, then leaned across and lifted it up.

“Good decision,” Luc said.

“What do you want?” He was looking around for help but saw none. He kept raising his hands, wanting to hold them over his head, as if that was expected of him, but then he’d remember that he’d been warned not to do that.

“Drive,” Luc commanded him. “Go where I tell you to go. Worry not so much. Don’t think about dying. You won’t die today if you do what I tell you to stay alive.”

“You want the cigarettes,” the driver said. He turned the key in the ignition and the engine started up.

“I want your smokes,” Luc agreed. “I want your truck, too. You, I don’t want. I don’t want trouble. Understand?”

The driver didn’t give him any trouble. They were already on the outskirts of town, and two quick turns put them on a lonely rural road. Luc didn’t want to drop him off close to any farmhouse, but he had that planned. He urged him out of the truck in a wooded area where the man would have to walk at least four miles to the nearest phone, and that was only if he happened to choose the right direction, which was not the way he’d come. The man stood on the shoulder of the road, looking up, still worried that he might be shot.

“You got your coat?” Luc asked him.

“It’s behind my seat.”

Luc fished it out and passed it down. “You want these boots here?”

“Yeah, sure.” Luc threw them down. “Thanks.”

“Anything else you need from here?”

“My gloves are between the seats.”

Luc dropped them into his outstretched hands.

“I wouldn’t mind my house keys. They’re on the same ring as the truck key.”

Leaving the key in the ignition, Luc twisted them off the ring, tossing the collection down to the owner.

“Pictures of my kids, inside the driver’s visor.”

He handed those down carefully, not to soil them on the roadside snow.

“Thanks.”

“No problem. We’re finished now?” The man shrugged. “You’re all right?” The man shrugged again, but fright or relief or tension or the snapshot of his children brought tears to his eyes. “Button your coat up,” Luc directed. “Don’t catch cold.”

Luc drove off. About a mile down the road his own car pulled out from a driveway ahead of him with Andrew Stettler at the wheel and Lucy Gabriel in the
back seat, turned to observe him. The vehicles continued down the country road in tandem, heading for a back entrance into the reserve.

Luc was pleased that nobody would be bleeding on Indian land, that everything had gone well. He didn’t know how many crimes remained for him to commit in his lifetime. Time was becoming precious. He wanted to make the few jobs he had left to him count.

4
HEARTLAND

The same day, Monday, December 20, 1998

Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars drove deep into the hinterland, through towns known to him as a child and across the hills, fields and woods of his youth. He was moving toward his family home, where his father continued to live, in the village where they had both been born, St.-Jacques-le-Majeur-de-Wolfestown. If the winter roads stayed clear, the trip would take less than two hours, driving west and north from Montreal. His heart was heavy, the journey a sad one, for he knew it might be his last trip home with anyone there to greet him. His father was dying.

The senior Cinq-Mars, Albert, had argued his way out of hospital, demanding the dignity of death in his own house, in his own bed. Imagining the scene did bring a rise to his son and caused the corners of his lips to curl upward. He sympathized with the doctors and administrators trying to reason with his father, only to be rebuffed in no uncertain terms. Albert Cinq-Mars held no illusions about his circumstances—in a short time he would die—but as a gesture of both courage and dignity, perhaps also as a tribute to his own life, he had insisted on choosing the environment for the great event. It was almost, his son was thinking as he drove—
and this part did not cause him to smile—as though his father wanted to turn his passing into an occasion.

Albert had called his son to let him know that if they were to talk again it was now or never. If they had anything more to say to one another, this would be the moment. “Emile, leave the thieves to count their loot in peace. Let the murderers sleep unmolested for a night, it’ll give them time to reflect. Who’s not worthy of a day’s rest? Come on home, Detective, visit your old man.”

‘‘What’s up, Papa? You know how it goes. I’m kind of busy right now.”

“I’m busy too, Detective. My bags are packed. My passport’s been stamped. I’ve accepted an invitation to knock on St. Peter’s Gate, and apparently there is no time
but
the present. Christmas, you know, Christmas will be hectic. Even for those of us at death’s door. Come before. I don’t want to take chances.”

“Papa—?” He immediately felt burdened, by the impending loss, by his silly excuse to delay a visit.

“One month. Next month. I’m betting on the one after that. If I lose, how does the winner expect to collect? In other words, I can’t lose. For the time being, Emile, I’m home.”

“You’re
home?
The hospital discharged you?”

“I insisted. I have a nurse. I want to die in the house where I was born. You know me, I value symmetry.”

Symmetry. Wasn’t it just like his father to cling to modes and concepts even as his hold on life lapsed.

Driving into St.-Jacques-le-Majeur-de-Wolfestown, Emile Cinq-Mars braced himself. This was not yet the time for grief, he reasoned, that hour lay ahead of him. Obviously his father remained alert, as crafty and as philosophical as always. Tears later. Now, final words. Words from the heart.

Emile Cinq-Mars parked alongside the curb in front of his father’s house. The driveway, which ran along-side
the cottage to a tumbledown garage in the back, had not been shovelled recently, and likely would not be again for the season. Certainly the old man had nowhere to go. Presumably a neighbour was keeping the short walk and the stairs clear. Typical of Quebec architecture, the steps started almost at the curb, for in this climate no one wanted to shovel much. The detective climbed the stairs of his childhood home, invaded by a sense of that distant time, a poignant memory of his father as a young man meandering inside him, and a sense also of their love for one another—patient father, rambunctious child; proud father, world-weary adult son—resting upon his shoulders, his sensibilities, his heart.

The detective went inside without knocking.

His first surprise, although he should have expected it, was that his father had had his bed moved down to the living room, the sunny space just off the small foyer. He would negotiate the stairs to the second landing no more, and here he benefited from heightened stimulus. The broad window onto the street kept him entertained, as did the nearby television, while fragrant aromas emanating from the kitchen were a short drift away. Down here, Albert had no ready access to a toilet, but if a nurse was attending to him full time he had probably been reduced to using a bedpan anyway.

Emile went in quietly, not wanting to wake him.

The old head lay softly upon its pillow, hardly making an impression. The face was thin now, the hair as white as the snow outside. He seemed calmly asleep, despite the clutter of an intravenous bag overhead and the oxygen tanks attached with precious lifelines to his nostrils. A step caused a noisy creak, and Emile stood still. His father’s head lolled to one side and the eyelids fluttered open. Before a word, before, it seemed, recognition, a smile appeared. No matter who had entered his vicinity, Albert would have a smile for the intruder.
If Death arrived this noisily, Emile Cinq-Mars speculated, his dad would greet him with a grin.

His eyes blinked rapidly, as though to dispel a haze, or decipher conflicting information. “That you, Detective?” his father asked. “You’re about the right height.”

“It’s me, Papa. How are you?”

“Sleepy. Well. Come closer, Emile.”

At first, Albert could not lift his arm for a handshake. Emile leaned down and kissed his father’s cheek, then held his father’s hand. After a few minutes he felt the old man’s strength emerging from his sleep. The large, bony hand squeezed his, and they remained in that position for more than ten minutes until Emile stood and finally removed his winter coat.

He went through to the kitchen then and met the nurse, who was playing solitaire. She hadn’t heard him come in. Cards had never been allowed in his father’s house when Cinq-Mars was a boy, and he reflexively thought to object, catching himself in time. Not only would he sound silly voicing the prohibition, but his father would probably storm an objection, for not all the interdictions of his youth had withstood time’s test. Few, in fact. Cinq-Mars poured tea for himself and his father and brought the cups through to the living room on a silver tray, an activity that awakened a sadness of a different order, for it evoked the routine of his mother bringing the tea in to her husband on the same tray. She’d been gone now for almost a decade.

“Papa. Tea.”

“Splendid!”

Cinq-Mars worked the crank that raised the top of the bed, bringing his father up to a sitting position, and pulled up a chair for himself. He poured the tea and the two men drank quietly in the familiar, warm comfort of the house.

“Emile,” Albert Cinq-Mars began. “I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”

The French language had always been vital to Albert. While he was familiar with the local dialect, he had been very particular about proper diction, exact pronunciation, and the correct use of words. That lifelong discipline now stood him in good stead. Although his voice was frail and dry, and he was obliged to pause at length to catch a deeper breath, not once did he slur a word. His lips and tongue found the precise elocution for each sound. His diction alone, Cinq-Mars was thinking to himself, could grease his way into Heaven.