18 Lines - cont'd

Chapters 43-45

Chapter 43

“Why aren’t you getting undressed?” Sophie asked, stepping out of the washroom in her suite. She was wrapped in a housecoat, but I guessed she wasn’t completely stripped for action, the way she used to be, for one of these sessions. It was always her way, and she was used to getting her way, or else.

“Circumstances have changed,” I said.

Before, I’d already have been kneeling by the side of the bed, with Sophie’s legs draped over my shoulders. She’d have had a pillow under her bottom to assist while I conducted a detailed and lengthy interview with her most private parts. That was her idea of a debriefing, in the old days.

I sat down on the sofa, and kept my distance from the bed, physically at least.

“Tell me again about the Farwells,” Sophie said, sitting down at her coffee table. She crossed her legs; no underwear. Not giving up without a fight, then.

I looked away. Mostly.

“Tell me about Farwells.,” she repeated.

“Two sons – Ennis Farwell, Tyler Farwell. Father is Lukas Farwell. Plus, various extended family, cousins, and uncles.” I felt a little short of breath. I think she only ever used debriefing to distract and prolong the sex, but it’s always amazing, what you could remember later.

“Locations?”

“Woodstock, Windsor, Tilsonburg, Owen Sound,” I said, “primarily. But they’ve turned up in places ranging from Vancouver to Saint John.”

After several hours of tedious repetition, Sophie walked into her bathroom to pee, but she kept the door open so she could talk.

“You’re not giving in this time, are you Jack?” she asked, as she re-emerged from the washroom.

“No.”

“Not even a little bit?”

“Nope.”

“Good. Just wanted to be sure. Are you debriefed?”

“Thoroughly,” I said.

“Excellent. Why don’t we go down for breakfast, then? Or brunch. Leroy’s probably waiting for us.”

“Probably not,” I said, and she grinned.

“No. You’re right – he won’t have waited. But he’ll still be there, drinking coffee,” she said.

And he was.

Chapter 44

Sophie left right after we’d eaten, which freed me up to talk with Leroy.

“I’d kind of like to talk with Dominic,” I said to Leroy, “if it can be arranged. Is he in play, right now? Is he part of your current team?”

“Yeah,” said Leroy. “We kept his same cover ID and just built it that Julius had fired him for skimming, which would have been the plan, anyway.”

“And that explains… I wondered why a good UC guy would have drawn attention to himself that way.”

“Calculated risk, is the official file.” Leroy said. “You believe that?”

“Nope. It’s bullshit. Dominic ran that fiddle on his own, and he was lucky not to get clipped for it.”

“True.”

“So, let me talk to him.”

“Saving his life won’t count for much, if you get him killed this time,” Leroy said.

“Who’s he with?”

“Ennis Farwell. Driving a gravel truck.”

“He can do that?”

“He grew up doing that – his old man had a haulage and construction business. He got so sick of it, he joined the cops to get away from it. So, of course, that’s what we sent him to do. Deeply ironic, don’t you think?”

“Life is strange,” I said. “But look, I don’t need to meet him so bad, right now, that I’d take chances with his cover. But I want to know, what’s Farwell planning? And what do the Farwells know about that Woodstock thing?”

“Puzzled, is what I heard,” Leroy said.

“Puzzled?”

“They don’t know how they missed you. And they’re pissed – they lost some good friends, and some real muscle, all at once,” Leroy said. “But they’re worried, too, cause of the way it was done.”

“Worried?”

“Say… concerned, then,” Leroy said. “Media’s got nothing, because their usual sources got nothing. I still can’t figure out how they would have picked you up, on your way home, no less. It’s a truck stop – guys can’t camp there for a week, just waiting for somebody to come by. And no guarantee that you’d stop there in the first place.”

“I can think of a way.”

“A tracker?”

“My car’s pretty easy to identify,” I said. “Easy to slip up on it, some night while I’m working, do what you gotta do, then just sit back and keep the computer running.”

“It’d be dead easy to set up an intercept, if you could track where somebody was going to be,” Leroy said.

“Battery life could be an issue, longer term, I suppose. Got no clue how long those things will last, these days. But long enough, is what I remember.”

“Should probably get that checked,” Leroy said. “Then, there’s your phone.”

“Bugged?”

“Don’t need to,” Leroy said. “Lot of phones, smart phones, they got apps on them that keep GPS tracking – nearest donut shop, dry cleaners, like that. But you’d have to be pretty connected -- like… federally—to run a trace on anybody’s cell traffic.”

“Are Farwells that connected?”

“Big enough to get Sophie after them,” Leroy said. “So, maybe. But I’d guess there’s a simpler solution. Maybe the simplest of all.”

“What?”

“You told them yourself.”

“Explain, please?”

“Could be an illegal wiretap on the Clam.”

“Gene’s people sweep it. No chance.”

“Inside, though. Looking for bugs.”

“They’d still pick up on it, wouldn’t they?”

“Did you call anyone, tell anyone when you’d be home?” Leroy asked.

“Told Julius,” I said. “He’d have been making up the work schedule.”

“Which gets posted somewhere?”

“People need to know when they’re working.”

“Say, there’s somebody at the Clam,” Leroy said, “keeping a close eye on the schedule. They see your name pencilled in for a shift, work backward from there, call and tell somebody. It’d be dead easy to arrange.” He grimaced.

“Jack, your coffee’s cold. Can’t stand to watch you drink it. Flag the waitress down, get her to warm it up.”

“No need,” I said. “You’ve watched me drink cold coffee for years.”

“Yeah, but this one had a bug in it.”

“Really?” I looked into the cup, and while I did so, Leroy filched my last slice of toast.

“Sucker,” he said.

I paid the cheque, for his breakfast, Sophie’s, and mine, and we were wandering out to the parking lot, waiting for a couple long-haul transports to crawl past.

“There is another possibility,” I said.

“What?”

“A lot of trucking companies these days use a GPS tracker, to help with fleet management,” I said.

“Farwells are in the trucking business,” Leroy said. “Might have had a spare GPS unit lying around.”

“Mmm,” I said, looking across the lot toward my old chariot. “That’d make me dead easy to find, if they were trying again. And that car’s been sitting out here all night.”

“While you were inside being debriefed by the ferocious Sophie.”

“Think I should file a harassment complaint?”

Leroy ignored me.

“You got a remote starter for that car?” he asked.

“Yup.”

“Might want to wait till that woman gets her kids loaded up and gone, in the van just beside.”

“Uh-huh.”

There was a weary young woman trying to corral three little kids and get them wrestled into her van; I didn’t see if she had car-seats, or straight-jackets, but finally she got them settled and drove away.

“You ready?” I asked.

Leroy nodded, grinned, and stuck his fingers in his ears. Bit theatrical, I thought. I pressed the start button, the Caddy started, purred, and we relaxed.

“Phew,” Leroy said. “That’s a rel-”

And the Caddy blew up. Then it burned, and burned, and burned.

Chapter 45

The local police sent the B-team, I thought, at first, but changed my mind when the lead investigator – who looked as though he’d escaped from some kind of a 50-year nap – turned out to be a former colleague of Leroy’s and greeted him warmly. Then he went back to directing his team.

“Don’t mind him,” Leroy said to me. “Colm looks like a corpse now, but he’ll scare the living shit out of you by supper time.”

“He does that right now,” I said. “He does look like a corpse. What is he, 80 years old? They can’t retire him?”

“He’s 56,” Leroy said, “and he does triathalons.”

“They let you drag an oxygen tank on those things? Maybe a wheelchair?”

“Looks can be very deceiving,” Leroy said. “You look smart, for instance, but there you are, standing beside your burned-out car, and not a roasting marshmallow in sight.”

“In the back seat,” I said. “Reach in and get them while I look for some pointy sticks, maybe get the fire going again.”

“Ha, ha,” he said. “How come, if the Russians cleaned up for you so diligently in Woodstock, how come they didn’t save your car from blowing up?”

“Could be, they didn’t like the car? It had a bullet hole in it, after all, not to mention about a thousand hail-sized dents. But nobody stopped me from trying to get into it, except you. Maybe somebody would have stopped me if I’d got closer?”

“You see them around? Maybe they’re just being gloriously inconsistent,” Leroy said. “Or did you somehow fail to satisfy Sophie? With your debriefing, I mean. Maybe she planted the bomb?”

I had a sudden, horrible thought.

“Have they checked the trunk?” I asked.

“Doing that now,” Leroy said, and we both turned to look. The key hadn’t worked – they’d resorted to a wrecking bar, or some other kind of tool. There was a commotion, and one of the officers turned away to be sick.

There was a body in the trunk. I could have walked over to look – should have, I suppose, because whoever it was, they’d probably died on my account, but if it was someone I knew, whatever was in that trunk was not the mental picture I wanted to keep. The soul was gone, and the rest, like, who killed them, well… there would be a reckoning.

Colm walked over to us.

“Your car, is it, Mister Parry? With a body in the trunk? Was that for spare parts and all?”

“Easy,” said Leroy. “He’s one of my guys. Nothing to do with the body.”

“Alright,” Colm said. “Who’s the body, then? What’s it doing in the boot – the trunk -- of your car?”

“If I look, will I be able to tell… anything?” I asked. “Only, there’s things I’ve seen I’ll never forget, and I don’t really want to add to that list.”

“Rhetorical question, anyway,” Colm said. “It’s a man, I’ve guessed that much, and the rest is for the coroner. And dental records, I’d think. But would you care to guess… who it might be?”

“No idea,” I said. “I was in a meeting all night, upstairs in the hotel. Just came out, talking with Leroy here, hit the remote starter, and poof, up she went.”

“Anybody can vouch for you at that all-night meeting?” Colm asked.

“My boss. Sophie Belfleur.”

“Ah,” said Colm, “her”, and nodded. “Debriefing.” He paused. “So, you’ve no idea, who the body is?”

“None,” I lied. “Could have been some random witness, stumbled into whoever was planting the explosives. Wrong place at the wrong time, kind of thing.”

“Could have been, at that,” Colm said. “We’ll leave that as a possibility, then, till we get results from the forensics. One thing, though, you might think about.”

“What’s that?”

“Whoever it was, I didn’t see any obvious cause of death. At first glance, like. So, it’s possible, just possible, that the poor bastard wasn’t entirely dead, when the fire started. Something to think about, wouldn’t you say?”

It was indeed.

***

Leroy had some place that he had to be, so I called up Julius for a lift. He said sure, half an hour maybe, and I watched the crime scene folks for closer to an hour before Julius came tearing into the parking lot in a little red Mazda. I could see he was taken aback by all the police cars, the crime scene tape, and all that, because he nearly rammed a light standard as he braked to a screeching halt.

“Whoa,” he said, as he pried himself out of the driver’s seat. “What the fuck happened here?”

“My car overheated,” I said, “due to an unhealthy combination of gasoline and explosives. Fortunately, I wasn’t in it. Unfortunately, somebody else was. Don’t know who.”

I looked at his wheels.

“What’s up with the tiny chariot?”

“Mine wouldn’t start – hadda borrow Sandy’s.”

“You may have just got very lucky,” I said. “It’s just… you should get bomb squad to check your car. You know… in case. Look at my car, what I mean by that.”

Julius swallowed.

“Ya think?”

“You know anyone else besides me, might be on Farwells’ Christmas card list?”

“Oh fuck,” he said. “It would appear we’re in the middle of a war.”

“Who’s this we, Kemosabe?” I said. “I’m still just a songwriter, and a part-time bartender, who’s dating a stripper.”

“It’s not me you need to convince,” Julius said. “But judging by your car, they – whoever they are – they’re not convinced either.”

***

So, are you still a cop?” Julius asked.

“You need to ask?” I said.

“I kind of do – you asked me to set you up with the Old Man.”

“I’m still an ex-cop – with a lot of contacts,” I said. “And I’m a working songwriter, and a part-time bartender. And I’m Melody’s boyfriend. Guess which one of those hats I’m wearing today.”

Julius stared at me.

“But you spent the whole night banging some old flame?”

“My old boss,” I said. “Not an old flame. It’s hard to explain. You run a strip bar – you’re a secret moralist?”

“Oh, not me,” Julius grinned. “Just got a low tolerance for bullshit.”

“I’ve got a long history working under that woman,” I said. “And over her. But it ain’t emotional – she just demands a good fuck as part of a business conversation. Kind of like a lap-dance: it ain’t true love. Wasn’t. Anyway, I didn’t come across. This time.”

“Over, under, sideways, I don’t give a fuck,” Julius said. “But I like Melody, too. Don’t want her to get hurt.”

“What Melody and I are,” I said, “remains to be seen. Or what we become. But ever since she and I stopped being just fuck-buddies, she’s been hiding out with her uncles, and I’ve buried my ex-wife. Been a very strange time for both of us.”

“I won’t tell her nothing,” Julius said. “Nothing I could tell her, only… I’ve known Melody for years, like I said before. But hell, none a’ my business-- whatever you did or didn’t do” He grinned again. “So where to?”

“For starters,” I said, “I’m gonna need a new used car.”