Culprits Page 10

  A half-dozen men, Americans from the look of them, sat around the fireplace apron, slumped in low leather chairs and sharing a fifth of something brown. The hunters, he supposed.

  One of them got up and ambled over, bringing with him the bottle and an empty glass. He had a wind-burned face, rough blond hair, and several days’ stubble.

  “Welcome to the middle of Bumfuck.” He held up the bottle. On closer inspection: bourbon. Wild Turkey. “Dry as a nun’s cunt up here. Wanna drink, gotta bring your own. Where y’all call home?”

  Neck hairs bristled at the sound of that accent. Texas. Could that really be mere coincidence?

  “Ottawa.” A brisk handshake. “Ontario, specifically.”

  “Come up to hunt?”

  “No, no. I’ll be sledding up the coast toward Eglington Fjord.” Inwardly, he chastised himself: Don’t talk so much, broadcast your plans. “Just see the sites. Take some pictures.”

  “Pictures. Huh. Well, we’ve been out just one day, but already bagged two caribou and tagged a few wolves too, just to scare the others off. Fucking scavengers. But that’s not what we came up for. Spring hunt’s begun. Polar bear. Then this damn storm.”

  “Yes. I hear we’ll be doubling up. In the rooms, I mean.”

  Finally, the man poured some of the whiskey, and offered the glass. “Yeah, we all got bunkmates now. Like good little scouts. Pain, ain’t it?”

  . . .

  When he reached his room, one of the two narrow beds already lay cluttered with gear. No signs of any weapons, which only begged the question: Were they hidden? Stored elsewhere?

  He told himself not to overreact, but there lay the problem, he’d never had to react at all before. The crime had always taken place so far away, the risk an abstraction, so remote as to be negligible. Now? Several men already had died, and they were mere prelude. Clovis Harrington would not stop until every man, woman, and child who’d dared to cross him learned that insolence had a price. And the price would be paid.

  But how could that mean he somehow knew about this spot, this trip? Was he really so all-knowing—or capable of near instant phone, internet, personal surveillance?

  Maybe that wasn’t the issue. What if Culhane let slip information before the heist went south? He was definitely stupid and careless enough. What if inquiries into who else was involved were already being made? If that were the case, it wouldn’t take much for a man like Clovis Harrington to assemble a group of killers, kit them out as hunters, and send them at a moment’s notice to the frozen edge of the continent.

  Or was that just the paranoia talking?

  It did seem a bit drastic, even a special kind of madness, to think such a thing, and yet that was exactly what Harrington would do if given the chance. Send men to collect him, truss him up, bring him back like bagged game. Or maybe they’d drag him out onto the snowpack, gut him, field dress him like a buck, then take a snapshot for Harrington’s trophy wall.

  He studied his absent, nameless roommate’s gear, looking for some clear sign of evil or innocent intent. Snow gear, a knapsack, goggles. The fear began to roll in waves, he felt a need to vomit, trembling so bad neither hand could restrain the other. Like the phony you are, he thought. The money man.

  A knock came at the door. It creaked open. The baked apple face appeared. “We need to go to the market,” Miki said. “To get food. Before, you know, the storm.”

  The wind had picked up, whipping between the houses and the smoke-blackened snowdrifts. The market lay only three blocks away, but with the ice that had formed beneath the snow the walk felt like climbing a hill of powdered glass.

  Once there, he found the shelves stocked with nothing but canned goods—Spam, ravioli, kippers, chili. No liquor, or even beer or wine—alcoholism, he thought, no doubt a plague up here, and he remembered what the Texan had said, they’d brought their own. From wherever.

  He bought food enough to last two days, in case the storm lasted. Miki said they’d restock before hitting the sled and heading out. That prospect, a future, if only a day or two ahead, heartened him. There still was a plan.

  Back at the lodge, he opened one of the cans of chili and dug in with a spoon borrowed from the pantry, eating it cold, chasing it down with tap water as he switched back and forth between the two TV channels available, both so uninteresting the boredom could have served as a narcotic if not for his banjo nerves.

  As he was spooning out the last slithery beans from the can, his bunkmate appeared: one of the hunters—heavyset, almost soft compared to the others, wheezing from lack of breath and eyes in a perpetual, baffled squint. He staggered, clearly drunk, and wordlessly swept his gear to the floor, then collapsed facedown on the bed.

  He lay like that, not moving, for hours.

  . . .

  As night progressed, the wind intensified, battering the lodge with howling gusts. Sleep was impossible, so he gathered his coat and went outside.

  Three of the hunters stood there in shirtsleeves braving the storm, laughing against the wind, knee-deep in newly drifted snow. They gestured him over, offered some more bourbon, straight from the bottle this time.

  How easy, he thought, to die out here—a snapped neck, or pushed facedown into the snow, suffocated. Blame it on exposure. How far were they from the nearest police station, clinic, jail?

  Unable to bring himself to accept the bottle, he instead gestured feebly he was going back in. They stared for a moment, as though trying to weigh this lack of grace, then nodded to each other and turned back to the whirling sheets of snow, like drunken sailors on the deck of a pitching icebreaker.

  Back in the room, the chubby roommate lay exactly in the same position, like a tuna ready for flailing, still fully dressed, down to the boots, but snoring now. A ruse? Was he simply waiting for this weakling, this tourist, this phony Canadian—the target—to fall asleep, the better to beat him or gut him or strangle him where he lay?

  Texas. Christ. Of all the places on earth…

  He sat up in bed all night, listening to every rattle and shudder as the wind and snow hammered the roof and outer walls, watching the man across the room, studying his every twitch as he lay there, a shadow in the darkness.

  . . .

  Come noon the next day the storm had yet to lift, but its force was clearly spent. He found himself excruciatingly anxious to leave, his lack of sleep not helping. Walls seemed to sigh as he passed, the floors bucked under his feet as though trying to shake him off.

  At one point the stubble-faced, wind-burned Texan sidled up and once again tried to kick-start a conversation. Luckily the door to the room was only a few steps away, and thus easy to back toward, with an agreeable expression in response to whatever it was the man was saying.

  Reaching behind, he collected the doorknob, tried to turn it—locked, of course. I’m acting like a coed getting cornered at a party, he thought. He was searching his pocket, trying to dig out his room key, when the door opened suddenly behind him.

  He nearly tumbled backward into the room.

  It was the roommate. “Thought I heard somebody out here.” His voice was a mumble dragged out of his chest. An awkward exchange of nods all around. Then he stepped back, an invitation to enter, and shortly the door closed again, just the two of them. Roomies. Alone.

  It took a moment before he noticed the pistol on the bed. Was it too late to turn around and get out? Was the first man, the blond, still outside, guarding the door, making sure no one interrupted whatever was coming next?

  The fleshy roommate picked up the weapon, plopped down on the bed, and glanced up sheepishly.

  “I wonder if you could do me a favor.” He held the pistol like a paperweight. “I wasn’t expecting the extra nights up here, the hotel, lodge, whatever the fuck you call this place. I didn’t bring enough cash. Don’t know why I bought this thing in Montreal, not like I needed it to hunt, but I did, buy it I mean, and now I could use the money back. I know it’s a
lot to ask—Christ, I don’t even know your name—but I was wondering…”

  He held the pistol out—a .38 from the looks of it, revolver.

  “Why not sell it to your friends?”

  “They’re not my friends.” The man swallowed. “And I look like enough of an asshole to them already. Seriously, I’ll let it go for a hundred. Cost me more than twice that.”

  The offer felt beyond strange. So now I’d have a gun, he thought, I’d be armed. And all I’d need to do is pull it out, no matter how innocently, maybe even because I was asked—and then someone, anyone could claim I’d drawn on them. I was a threat. Killing me would be self-defense.

  “I don’t really need it for where I’m going. What I came up here for.”

  “I’m not asking you to use it. I’m asking you to buy it.”

  The man’s soft face seemed even less forbidding from humiliation, the bloodshot eyes his most noteworthy feature. He really didn’t fit with the others. And what to make of that?

  “I’ll tell you what. Give me the pistol and whatever ammunition you have, I’ll pay for your half of the room. Last night and tonight both.”

  The man tried to smile. “Could you front me a little cash as well? I’m sorry, I sound like a whiny little bitch, I don’t mean to beg, but…”

  “Sure.” He took out his wallet, counted out forty Canadian dollars, the bills colorful and crisp and blazoned with faces that meant nothing to him, handed them over. “That do?”

  The man couldn’t meet his eyes, just folded the money over quickly, shoved it in his pocket. “Yeah. Thanks. I really appreciate it. I mean that.”

  By mid-afternoon the snow had stopped, the wind had died. A two-engine Kodiak bearing the RCMP insignia—that distinctive heraldic badge, the crown, the bison head, the garland of maple leaves, Maintiens Le Droit—flew in from the southwest, landing as twilight gathered.

  So that was the plan, he thought. Sell me an illegal weapon, God only knows where it came from, how it was used, for what, then snitch me off. How could I be so stupid?

  As nonchalantly as possible, he went to the lodge’s front desk and inquired of the clerk standing there, “Any idea what the Mounties are coming for?”

  The clerk, a tiny, round-faced Inuit woman in an oversized red-and-blue Canadiens hoodie, shrugged. “Just one Mountie. The others are lawyers, a judge. They come once a month. Have court.”

  He’d heard about this—prosecutors and defense counsel fly in with a bailiff to hear whatever cases are pending, drunk and disorderly beefs mostly, the occasional assault or theft. Once in a while, a murder. If need be, they heard civil cases as well, minor stuff. That can’t be all there is to it, he thought, still wondering if or how the gun played into the situation.

  On top of which: more bodies. Where would they sleep, he wondered.

  The matter resolved itself with the hunters packing up as night fell and heading south in darkness toward their initial campground. So the lumpy roommate won’t be around to drop the dime, he thought, tell the Mountie and prosecutor I have a loaded pistol.

  He almost relaxed.

  For reconnaissance purposes, he chatted them up as they signed in at the desk.

  The Mountie was in his sixties, lantern-jawed, taciturn, fit as a lumberjack, his hair close-cropped and white.

  The prosecutor, a birdlike, bespectacled man in a long fur coat, coughed nonstop into a phlegm-spattered kerchief.

  The other lawyer, an aide juridique, the equivalent of a public defender, was a shambling, middle-aged woman in a fur-collared snow jacket, her hair pushed up clumsily beneath a wool watch cap, the renegade strands giving her an air of mindless distraction.

  The last member of the party appeared to be something of a tagalong. Her name was Adelaide Cote, attractive, mid-twenties, barely five feet tall, even in boots, with porcelain skin and opalescent green eyes, her hair a short brown bob.

  “I’m here to help out, if need be,” she said, nodding toward the distracted defense attorney, her supervisor. “Though it all seems pretty straightforward, and the docket’s hardly jam-packed.”

  Exactly, he thought. There’s no real reason for you to be here, his paranoia still simmering just below the surface despite the departure of the Texans.

  The simmer reached a full boil a short time later when Miki, his Inuit guide, knocked on his door.

  “Would you mind,” he said, his breath smelling of tinned fish, “if someone joined us on the trip to Eglington Fjord?”

  Mind? Fucking right I’d mind. “Who, exactly?”

  “The young lawyer who came up today. For court.”

  He felt a trembling sensation in his arms—lack of sleep again. And fear.

  “Why isn’t she staying behind with the others? Going back once they’re done?”

  “I didn’t ask. She just wondered, is it possible. If she pays, we don’t refuse. As easy to take two as one.”

  Of course. How rude and unfair and thoughtless could this snotty rich American be, forcing Miki and his partner to turn down the money?

  “Can I think about it?”

  Miki simply stared with a dull, practiced smile, not even bothering to shrug.

  Alone in his room, he loaded the pistol, making sure extra bullets were readily at hand in his pocket. Just tell them you’ve changed your mind, he thought. You’ll pay but stay behind, let the lawyer, Adelaide, if that was really her name, go on alone. Feign illness if need be, a sudden bad back from a slip on the ice, arse over tea kettle as they so colorfully say.

  Oh, stop your sniveling, he thought. It’s simply beyond the realm of possibilities that this woman has any connection to Harrington. The Texans, yes, fear was at least understandable, if a reach. But how could Harrington identify and locate a lawyer in the French legal assistance program capable of insinuating herself into a team due to come up here at just the right time, not to mention recruit her as an assassin? It was insane. And that just underscored how out of his depth he was, always had been, flirting with crime.

  Midlife crisis? Shorthand for juvenile, reckless, and stupid. The idea it would never come back on him, let alone this hard, seemed such a blatant miscalculation he felt his insides boiling with shame. The continuing hangover from his lack of sleep didn’t help—a dull current of tension jagged continuously along every nerve in his body. He needed to rest, needed to think, needed to calm down.

  God, how I could use a drink.

  Again, sleep failed him. Once, as he almost drifted off, his heart began to thrash so erratically inside his ribcage he thought he was having a seizure of some kind, even a coronary, and he couldn’t draw a breath for what felt like several minutes. The onset of death. Or simply a panic attack—what if you have one out there, on the ice, middle of nowhere? They’ll leave you to die. Harrington’s desire for revenge will prove irrelevant. You’ll do the job yourself by being such a blubbering coward.

  He hadn’t felt this helpless against his terror since the very first job, before O’Conner entered his life. A Russian client, one of those extravagantly charismatic wildings with a thundering voice and a crushing handshake and the inescapable whiff of corruption—Murat Nazarov, his name—had suggested fronting a casino scheme. His connections in St. Petersburg had reverse-engineered some of the older machines still in use across the U.S., identifying their algorithms. The operatives would play the slots, hold a cell phone to the tumbler to display the cycle to a scanner in Russia, and once the proper algorithm was identified, a signal would be sent to the phone when it was time to hit the spin button. In a single hour, working several machines in succession, a man could turn a sixty-dollar play into winnings of over twenty thousand dollars. Multiply the number of men to five, extend their play to several hours, you were clearing a million a day, undetected.

  Of course, in time, it all fell through. The gang of Russians working the casino floors got rounded up. To their credit, though, they held their mud, lawyered up, ponied up bail, th
en fled the country. This coincided with six straight weeks of insomnia. He’d never felt so scared.

  It should have taught him a lesson, and would have if not for his introduction to O’Conner. The man had a certain kind of power, a reassuring calm and simplicity that let you know it’s okay. The bases are covered. I’m thorough and smart and disciplined.

  And that’s how it had been for the length of their partnership. Until now. For all he knew, O’Conner was dead—how was that for simple and powerful? And if O’Conner could be eliminated…

  It took over an hour, but his heart settled down, his breathing went from labored to ragged to fitfully steady. He closed his eyes and waited for the sound of footsteps in the hall, a signal that day had begun, even though darkness would linger for several more hours given the latitude. He would rise from bed and pretend he was ready to go. He would do nothing to arouse suspicion. He would watch everyone with excruciating care.

  Miki’s sidekick was a seemingly ancient Inuit named Anik who spoke no English. He laid out the traces for the dogs, ten in all, while Miki loaded gear onto the sled and a snowmobile they called a Skidoo: tents, sleeping bags, fishing rods, waterproof mats, a hotplate with butane tanks, food—human, mostly. The dogs would not get fed every day—“Slow them down,” Miki explained—and when they did eat, they’d get strictly protein, seal meat and fish.

  For their part, the dogs took in all the activity with languid indifference, looking on while sitting or lying in the freshly drifted snow, blinking against the first real sunlight in days.

  Adelaide got kitted out in sealskin—a hooded coat, short-legged britches, knee-high boots, all with the luxurious fur outside, not against the skin. The stiffness of the underlying hide made her arms stick out at doll-like angles. She did a pirouette in the icy air, her breath an immaculate cloud, then danced over, childlike in her happiness.

  “I really, really want to thank you for allowing me to come along. I’ve dreamed of this since I was a little girl in Montreal. We went to the jail last night and found out all but one of the defendants wanted to plead out, which pretty much meant I was free.”