The Devil's Dust (15 page)

H
aving anticipated the moment she would slip inside and close the door to this confined and anonymous space, find herself easing into a deep tub of hot water, Finn Madsen is beyond disappointed when she sees her room at the Station Hotel. In fact, she stands there at the threshold of the doorway for a long minute.
Crap
, she thinks. She is reminded of western movies, and can't help but conjure images of scenes played out in this very space. Lonesome nights of desperate acts. She closes the door, sets her briefcase on the bureau, and hangs the garment bag in the small closet. The room smells as though it has been sealed shut for months.

She sits on the edge of the bed and sinks deep enough to feel the metal from the coiled bedsprings. It has been a twenty-hour day. Up long before dawn for one final argument with her husband, not speaking to one another on the drive to the airport, the flight in the Dash-8 that bounced and burped all the way from Orillia to that field in the middle of the thickest woods she has ever seen. Flying in low, the regional airport appeared like a concentration camp tucked away from civilization. A long day of enduring the cold and the male jackassery of this silver-haired cowboy, Chief Gallagher. Treating her like she is his granddaughter. Miss this, dear that. She knows she will tell him to piss off pretty soon. She thinks she could detect a lingering smell of booze on the man, and that would be just par for the course for these small-town coppers. The old man is a living, breathing cliché.

She moves to the bathroom, runs a hand in the darkness across the wall. She finds and flicks the light switch. A sixty-watt bulb flickers, hesitates, and then glows steady. The weak lighting does nothing for the room or her mood. There is a toilet, a sink stained brown at the drain from brackish water, and a shallow tub with a shower spout that is crusted with calcium and lime. The tub is also stained and scratched, dark gouges pocked like scars against white enamel. A bath is out of the question. As is room service, she imagines. She is starving, but the hunger has moved from growls and pangs to that place where she can focus again and ride it out, so hungry she is no longer hungry. The body is strange, she thinks, how we get used to pain or discomfort, how we learn to adapt to changing environments and conditions. She knows, for example, in a day or two the sight of this room will summon feelings of rest and privacy. It will become hers, for better or for worse. This is the greatest trait of humanity, she thinks:
we adapt and we survive
.

There are reports to file, and so she moves to the bureau and flicks on the small desk lamp. She opens the briefcase and pulls out a laptop and her notepad. She has a slim digital voice recorder, too, which she used when she and Gallagher spoke briefly with Mark Watson's father, David Watson, on the phone from the hospital in Timmins. The father was grief-stricken and exhausted, but managed to confirm that his son's behaviour had changed drastically in the past couple of months. Mark had experimented with marijuana, David was sure of that, and had skipped classes here and there. But there was a marked change after Christmas. The boy seemed to withdraw, became defiant, spent entire days away from school, and his behaviour grew increasingly erratic, staying up all night playing video games in the basement, irritable, no appetite.

She hits the play button and David Watson's voice fills the spare room, weary and hoarse from lack of sleep:

“We thought it was normal teenage stuff at first. But I see it now. The difference. We had no idea, no clue. We're both working, we're one of the lucky families, both my wife and I still have jobs. For now anyway. We assumed he would pull out of it. I guess we were just too busy. Now he's dead …”

“Who is his best friend?”
she hears herself asking, all of their voices disembodied across the telephone lines.
“The one person he would trust?”

The recording picks up movements and voices in the background at the hospital. She closes her eyes. She pictures the room where he is calling from, a respite area for families. Soothing paintings on the walls, benign landscapes of Canadiana. She has never met the man, but she pictures his face, eyes closed, holding back the tears.

“Scott,”
he almost whispers.
“The boy who stabbed him.”

She stops the recorder and jots a few notes down. This will be her first interview. The murder suspect. She reviews her other notes from the day. The scene at the trailer was a disaster. The locals traipsed back and forth as though it were a fairground. The coroner is correct, however, in that the bones he discovered are most certainly not human. There have been no reported sightings of Wade Garson. In the morning she will request a ride to the correctional centre to interview the boy, Scotty Cooper. And she will attempt to interview the young officer wounded in the explosion, Constable Younger.

This town, it seems to her, is an icon. A dying way of life. A place carved from a single resource, and now the resource is in decline, and there is no backup plan. This nation was born and raised rural, she thinks, our tradition is in farming and exploiting the land, and yet today that connection is lost. We live in cities, or more accurately, we live in sprawling suburbs, we work in cities, and we buy our food in anonymous warehouses. She has been here a dozen hours and already she can tell there is no hope, there is only a sense of quiet acquiescence to this evolution. For now, there is nothing she can do. She is exhausted. And hungry again. She pulls her parka on and leaves in search of potato chips or jujubes, anything to fill the empty space.

He is dreaming that he is trapped in a large house, running a maze of hallways, and there is a phone ringing and ringing, and each door he opens only leads to another door and the sound of the phone ringing seems always to be coming from the next room down the hall.

When McKelvey opens his eyes and holds his breath, he hears the jangle of the telephone in the kitchen downstairs. It sounds like a dentist's drill, and he jumps out of bed and scrambles.
Caroline has found him
. She is on the line, he knows, and she has set up a conference call with Dr. Shannon and probably a team of psychiatrists. He takes the stairs two at a time, slides on the tile into the kitchen, snatching the receiver in mid-ring.

“Yes,” he says. His heart hammers in his chest and he is winded.

“This McKeller?”

The man's voice is gruff, rough from cigarettes. McKelvey gets his bearings and realizes it is the middle of the night. Dark outside.

“McKelvey, yeah. Who is this?”

McKelvey hears sounds in the background, engines, big rigs gearing down, whining in the distance.

“Wade Garson.”

McKelvey is still breathing hard. The sudden waking and the flight down the stairs have his T-shirt visibly undulating over his heart. He is sweating again, too, his face suddenly slick. The snake is back, curling through his lower intestines, forcing its evil into his belly, up to the back of his throat. He could puke.
Will
puke.

“How did you get my number?” he asks, and swallows the bile.

There is the sound of a lighter sparking, the caller drawing air.

“Fucking hard, that's how,” Garson says. “Had to call the goddamned operator for new listings. Three times. Starting with your name, Mc-Something, and then down to who got a phone hooked up.”

McKelvey can hear the mechanics of the man's smoking. The lips, the draw of air, the exhalation. The distant sound of an engine gearing down. Calling from a phone booth out on the highway somewhere. The truck stop. The only real possibility. Open around the clock.

“Where are you now?” McKelvey says. He eyes the sink and the faucet and wants to stick his head beneath a flow of cool water that smells and tastes of the earth, burn the fever to a steam.

“I don't trust no fucking cops, but you're the only one of the bunch not from here. So I got no choice, see. You're not
from
here and you don't know me and maybe that means I stand a fucking chance.”

“What do you want from me?”

“I been set up. This is
bullshit
. I heard what they're saying, and it's a lie, a fucking lie. But who's gonna believe Wade Garson, right? The Garsons can't hardly spell their own names, bunch of fucking redneck losers. Well you know what, asshole, I sell pot and hash and pills when I can get them, that's right, and I'll get you parts for your car, no problem. But you think I'm cooking goddamned
meth
out there? I never even smoked that shit myself.”

McKelvey clears his throat and he blinks. The kitchen is still and quiet, and then the fridge clicks on and begins to hum with electrical current. The new sound is strangely soothing, and his fever ebbs. He takes a deep breath and feels well again.

“I can help you, Wade. Let me come to you and we can get this figured out. You're going to get picked up sooner or later. They've got a bulletin out on you.”

“How the hell are you going to help me with Sheriff Smiley and that dipshit Nolan? That rookie Younger thought he'd be a hero, jumping in like that. I saw it, you know. I was coming through the woods. I almost got myself blown to shit. Lucky for me I was off jacking a whitetail. Everything I got was in that place, mister. I hauled ass after I seen Younger fall over from the smoke, Mr. Hero gonna save the day. And I cut through the woods and caught a ride out on the highway a few miles south of my lane.”

“You can't run forever. You don't know me from a stranger. All I can do is give you my word. I'll come to you and we can talk. If you don't think we can fix this together, I'll let you take off to wherever you want.”

“Bullshit,” Garson says. And he draws mucous from the depths of his sinus, and he spits. “You'll just let me ride off like that, I bet.”

“I don't have a gun, Wade. I don't even have handcuffs. I'm not interested in being a hero here, riding you back to town. You've got my word on that.”

“I'm at the truck stop. I know the waitress and she'll cover for me if the highway cops come by, but not for long. I'll be in the washrooms at the back of the building. Middle stall. And you better say who you are, 'cause I've got a blade here, man. I'm not doing time like my brother Hank on some trumped-up charges.”

“It'll take me half an hour, but I'll be there.”

McKelvey hangs up the phone and moves to the sink. He turns on the tap and he stoops and scoops water and pours it over the back of his neck, cups it and splashes his face, finally drinks a mouthful. It is the cleanest, coldest water he has ever tasted. Earth, rocks, and minerals.

“Fuck all mighty,” he says, and wipes his face with the bottom of his T-shirt.

The fridge stops, its final hum a reverberation in the empty room. He feels horrible. He is shocked and ashamed. He has underestimated the strength and grip of those seemingly benign pain pills. Once begun, one is obliged to maintain a baseline, a sort of maintenance level. Besides some rare moments of stupefaction when he has unwisely pushed beyond the regular daily amount of four pills —
morning, noon, dinner, and bedtime
— he recalls no jarring or unsettling effect beyond the obviously desired numbness. Once the flow has ceased, and done so with a cold and sudden halt, this is another matter altogether. He understands with a new sense of humility what he has done to himself, how he has meandered to this very place through his cynical philosophies, a belief in his ability to fight anything if given a fair shake. It is difficult to determine, here at the sink, whether he has been trying to kill himself or save himself.

Despite the promise to Wade Garson, he knows he can't meet the man alone. Perhaps in his younger days he wouldn't have thought twice about heading into the night on a mission like this. It was only this past September that he found himself criss-crossing the city in search of Tim Fielding, and he remembers all too well how that came to end. He is not unwilling to admit that he has lost some of the fool's courage he once owned, believing his actions at least partly responsible for the death of Detective Leyden. There; he has admitted it. This lump in the back of his throat has finally got a name:
Leyden
.

He will call Nolan and update the constable, recommend they arrive in separate cruisers. And this is what he does when he raises Nolan on the telephone.

“Give me a fifteen-minute head start,” McKelvey says. “See if I can talk some sense into this guy, get him to come back to town and answer a few questions.”

“I don't know, Charlie. Wade Garson is a loose cannon.”

“I can handle myself. If he figures something is up, we'll lose him for sure. We can stay in touch by radio.”

“Chief won't like this. But I'm in. I'll back you up.”

McKelvey hangs up. And for the first time he regrets not taking Nolan up on the offer of a service pistol. He will be unarmed and without immediate backup as he faces a dangerous man backed into a corner, a man who has nothing left to lose. And that, McKelvey thinks as he heads up the stairs to pull on jeans, might be the only thing he and Garson have in common.

Finn Madsen has a can of Pepsi and a bag of Hickory Sticks open on the bureau when she hears voices bleeding through the thin walls from the room next door. She pauses her crunchy chewing and listens. The voices are not here in person, but coming across a radio, scratched with static. A man's voice. Followed by a woman's voice. Short, declarative exchanges. She gets up and moves to the adjoining wall, presses an ear to the fibreboard. She closes her eyes, as though this somehow enhances her hearing, and she makes out bits and pieces.

“… Garson …”

“Truck stop. Over.”

The conversation comes to a sudden stop. There is movement within the room next door. And then a door opens. She hears footsteps in the hallway. She goes to her door, opens it, and looks out in time to catch the backside of a man descending the stairs. She can't judge the height from this distance, and she instantly searches for a point of reference — the man's head, dark hair cut short, passes at the same height as a light mounted on the wall of the hallway. Dark dress pants. Long black coat. Or dark navy. Probably wool. And he's gone.