Sea to Sky (24 page)

“No problem.”  Hunter brushed past him to dislodge Tom’s hand, then pivoted to face him. “I’ll pack up right now. You going to be upstairs for a while? I’ll talk to you before I go.” He watched Tom walk away. On the stairs, Tom turned to look at him and Hunter smiled, not without difficulty.

Hunter looked around the room. He’d known Tom for years, but that didn’t mean they were good friends. Had Tom been going through his things? He tried to remember exactly where everything was when he’d left that morning. Had his ski clothes been moved? If so, why? Was Tom working for the RCMP, or was it something else?

Hunter packed all his belongings into his duffle bag, double checking the cramped bathroom and shower for items he might have left behind. When he was sure he had everything except his skis and boots, which were in the Halsey’s garage, he climbed the stairs and left his bag beside the back door. He’d decided that he was being too suspicious about Tom. Suspicion was a career habit that was hard to break.

Tom offered him a coffee. “So what’s happening?” he asked, his back to Hunter as he fiddled with the coffee maker. “I see the police are publicly looking for witnesses to the chairlift murder.”

“Right. They’ve already had several calls.”

“You’ve talked to them again?”

Hunter nodded. “Haven’t you?”

“Of course,” said Tom. “Are you going home to North Van?”

“Yes. For now.” Hunter thought about his promise to Helen to bring her son home. He might soon be on the highway to Calgary.

The two of them sat in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes, each with a section of the Vancouver Province newspaper on the table in front of them, until gurgles from the coffee maker signaled the brewing was complete.

“What’s your take on the murder, chief?” Hunter asked as he stirred milk and sugar into his coffee.

“I don’t know. Why would I know?”

“You must have heard something. Aren’t you in tight with the detachment here?”

“Yeah, we talk sometimes. Mostly cases of theft, sometimes drunk and disorderly, only to do with my hotel, though.” Tom put the milk back in the fridge and paused, holding the fridge door open. “Want some banana bread?”

“Some of the conference goers are staying at your hotel, right?”

“So?”

“They must be talking about the murder. Overheard any theories?”

Tom pulled out a loaf wrapped in aluminum foil and set it on the counter. “Only one,” he said.

Hunter took a cautious sip of coffee. It was already cool enough to drink. “What’s that?”

Tom smiled wryly, holding up a knife he’d pulled out of a knife block on the counter. “Seems there’s a rumor going around that the Chairlift Killer is you.”

“So what did he say?” asked El. Sorry didn’t have his own cell phone and she’d been on pins and needles waiting for him to call. Now he was at a pay phone in a noisy McDonald’s just off the San Bernardino freeway.

She heard him yell, “Don’t touch that!” then he said, “Hang on” and all she heard was background babble for twenty seconds. “Chick just about threw out my Big Mac,” he said, coming back on the line. “You can’t leave your stuff on a table here or they throw it away.”

“What did the guy say? Just tell me what happened and you can get back to your lunch.”

“First he jumped out of his rig ready to fight me. This little black dude weighs — what? maybe a hundred and forty pounds soaking wet — and he wants to take me on.”

“Why?”

“Duh. ‘Cause I was following him, right back to his neighborhood. Guess he thought I was planning to beat him up for what he did to that other joker’s truck.” A pause, then Sorry’s voice turned blurry.

El couldn’t make out what he was saying so she interrupted him. “Have you got your mouth full, you asshole?”

She heard a gulp, and then, “So I was saying. I followed him to this lot beside a little park, and the guy comes out of his truck with blood in his eye and a tire iron in his hands. Me, I got nothin’ to fight back with. Probably a good thing I didn’t have my knife or it could’ve got ugly. ‘What you want?’ he says. I tell him I just want to talk about what happened back there at Blue Hills. ‘The hell you do,’ he says and takes a swing at my head. I grab the tire iron before it hits me and lift it as high as I can to get it away from him, but damned if he doesn’t hang on, and next thing you know I got this little black dude swingin’ around me like I got a fuckin’ cat by the tail, you know?”

“Holy …”

“Dude finally lets go and goes staggerin’ off into the curb and trips and falls on the grass. Good thing he let go when he did, or he coulda stuck his head through the windshield of a silver Toyota.”

“Got it. Let’s move on. Did he tell you anything about Blue Hills? What did the guy say?” Wally walked into the office from the warehouse but she waved him away before he could open his mouth.

She heard Sorry sigh. “He was promised a good paying load outa there and turned down another job to take it, then when he gets there this other guy’s scooped it. Jerome needs all the cash he can get right now, because his parents have spent all their retirement savings on hospital bills to keep his old man from dying of cancer, but he’s gonna die anyway — any day now the doctor says — and then his mom is gonna have to move in with Jerome and his family.”

“Boo hoo. Look, I don’t need his life story. What did he say about the other guy?”

“Says he dresses like the Maytag repairman, but he thinks he’s some kind of gang-banger. The guy in the warehouse knew that Jerome had been promised the load but the fucker didn’t back him up, he says. Probably scared shitless.”

“Got a name? The guy’s name or who he drives for or whatever?”

“I told you. Jerome Jefferson. He’s an owner-operator.”

“Not him, shithead. The gang-banger.”

Another sigh. “He said but I can’t remember exactly. Something like Juan Valdez.”

“What? That’s the coffee guy with the donkey.”

“Oh, yeah.” He was mumbling again, no doubt with his mouth full of Big Mac.

“Think.” El waited through a series of swallowing and smacking sounds and was about to lose her cool when Sorry started to speak again.

“Wait. It’s coming to me. Juan Var… no, José Ves… José Vasquez. Does that sound right? Vasquez?”

“How should I know?”

“I think that’s it. José Vasquez.”

“And was there a company name?”

“C’mon, El. I wasn’t close enough to read the name on the truck, and Dude there didn’t tell me.”

“Did you ask him?”

Silence.

“Go back and ask him, Sorenson.” She heard another sigh, but this time it verged on a growl, so she decided it was time to change her tack. “Please, Sorry. I can’t go back to Hunter with useless information. Can you imagine how many José Vasquezes there are in the state of California? There must be thousands. We need more than just the driver’s name. Please?”

“Gimme a break. How am I supposed to find Dude again? He left the parking lot right when I did.”

“Is there a phone book at the payphone?”

“Well, yeah.”

“So look him up.”

Another sigh.

“And, Sorry…”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t forget to call me back.”

“Found him, Hunter. Him and his friend.” It was Joe Solomon.

Hunter was on the Sea to Sky highway, just outside of Squamish. “You’ve got them with you?” he asked. He was following a big green bus that was belching black smoke.

“No, but I just heard from a buddy who has seen the two of them hanging around at a pizza joint near the Waterfront Skytrain station. He says he thinks they’re the same two kids he saw panhandling in the area a couple days ago.”

“How long ago did your buddy see them?” Hunter could see the red and white of a Petro Canada station up ahead and decided to pull in for gas.

“Last night, just before he caught the Skytrain home.”

“What time was that?”

“Probably six thirty, sevenish. He works late most nights, but he usually tries to get home for dinner.”

“They could be almost anywhere now.” Hunter pulled into the Petro Canada lot and came to a stop beside a self-serve pump. “I’m on my way to Vancouver, Joe. I’m going to stop at home, maybe grab some lunch and make a few phone calls. Then I’ll be in touch to see if you’ve heard anything else before I leave.”

“Leave for downtown?”

“Yes. Might as well give it a shot.”

“You could be lucky. I noticed that someone’s been pulling down my posters from here in Gastown to Granville Mall. If it’s them — and I can’t see why anyone else would — they’ve probably been hanging out in the area.” Joe said, “See ya later,” and hung up.

Hunter used his credit card to fuel up, and he couldn’t help wondering when he’d be back on the road earning the money to pay it off. He wondered if Sorry was still in northern California with his truck, and hoped that El had found a paying load to bring The Blue Knight back to BC. If so, he wondered if she could find him a load for Alberta or points east so he could take the kid back home without losing another day of work. That was one of the calls he’d make from home.

He finished fuelling up and was just getting back in the car when he saw one of the airport shuttle busses lumber past on the highway en route to YVR. Alora Magee might be on that bus, he thought. He wasn’t surprised to feel a great sense of relief. She was an attractive, intelligent woman, but the past few days had taught him a lesson. He should have gone with his first instincts and declined her invitation to meet up at Whistler. 

He accelerated his Pontiac out onto the highway behind a string of SUVs sporting ski racks and settled in for the drive from Squamish to North Van. Reflecting on his own rather old-fashioned attitude toward sex, he wondered how it felt to be a Brent Carruthers, a man who felt entitled to seduce a woman — or a series of women — half his age. Even in the freewheeling sixties, Hunter had stayed monogamous. He’d had just two steady girlfriends before he met Christine up in the Yukon Territory and asked her to marry him well over twenty years ago.

Ken and he were both at the Whitehorse detachment at the time. Ken was more of a ladies’ man, and used to kid Hunter about being so serious when it came to women. ‘Lighten up. Have a little fun, man. She’s a babe and she likes you; go for it.’ Hunter used to try to figure it out. Was it out of respect for women, or respect for himself? Had it been his mother’s lectures on being a gentleman, his father’s advice? The influence of early TV shows like Father Knows Best and Roy Rogers? Or was it the almost monastic lifestyle of the years he spent mastering jujitsu? Who or what was it that made him uncomfortable about sex outside of a committed relationship? He didn’t want to revisit that topic now in his early fifties. He was who he was, and he could see no reason to try to change.

South of Squamish there was very little snow, less and less as he approached the Lower Mainland. The view of the Howe Sound fjord was spectacular from several stretches of the Sea to Sky highway on a clear, sunny day. Hunter stopped the car at one of the viewpoints and got out to drink in the sight of the shifting waters of the Sound, the darkly forested mountains top-dusted with white, and the brilliant blue sky. He stretched and took deep breaths of the cold air, and his old sensei’s admonition to be fully aware in the moment came back to him. In the moment. Was that where a man could most vividly appreciate his existence? On a sudden impulse, he executed the first moves of his kata, something he hadn’t done for many years. It had always served him as a moving meditation, helping to ground him during challenging days on the force. Now his moves were sloppy from lack of practice. He took one more deep breath and got back in the car.

As he resumed driving, Hunter was teased by a sense of peace that had been absent for a long time and now seemed just out of his reach. He missed practicing martial arts. He thought about the jujitsu philosophy of yielding to the opponent’s force instead of trying to use your own force against it and wondered if that philosophy had bled into the way he handled — or didn’t handle — relationships. Was he always waiting for the other’s move, preparing to turn it back against them? It certainly influenced the way he approached investigations. Once he zeroed in on the perpetrator, he would try to present the suspect with an opening to reveal himself rather than accuse him — or her — directly.

It had been a long time since he thought about the concept of fudoshin, but he considered it now. During his martial arts training he had worked hard on attaining that ‘immovable mind’, a sense of composure no matter what he was faced with. Outwardly, that ability to remain unperturbed had not deserted him, even after Ken’s death. If he could still convey that image of self-control to others, why had he felt unable to do his job, or even to remain with the RCMP? Maybe once again he was yielding to his opponent’s force, and his opponent was fate. He shook his head. He was tired of trying to figure himself out, so he looked out across the Sound to bring himself back into the moment.

“I
will
find Adam Marsh,” he said aloud, “and I
will
find the one who took Mike Irwin’s life.”