lightning. Then Desmarais dropped two-thousand feet so that Roman and Massenat could risk opening the door to get rid of the body.
‘Never did like paying fucking excess baggage,’ Roman remarked as it sailed out.
Massenat chuckled briefly, but the silence was quickly back. They’d weathered one storm, but there was a tougher one yet ahead. And now they were one man down.
Eight minutes later Jake Kirkham called. They’d seen the plane land, and the car had just left the airfield. ‘Two men and a woman inside. I’ll call again when they’ve reached the safe-house. Let us know what you want us to do then.’
When S-18’s Melanie Fuller phoned back after only seven minutes, Michel thought she had good news. But no, Mundy hadn’t responded to his bleeper message yet.
‘It was something else I thought I should pass on straightaway. One of the guys here with a high clearance pass was able to access a bit more information. He says that it’s a sector 14 operation, three-man monthly rotation guard team. Still pretty basic info, I’m afraid — but it might help.’
‘Sector 14? Where’s that?’
‘Northern Ontario. An oblong block stretching between Hearst, James Bay and Iroquois Falls, sixty miles from the Quebec border.’
‘Okay.’ All Michel wanted to do was race to a map, but it was immaterial: he’d already decided that if they didn’t raise Mundy fast, he was heading out there.
‘I’ll call you back as soon as I’ve got something on Mundy. If he doesn’t phone within the next few minutes, we’ll start trawling his regular haunts.’
Michel said that he’d probably be on the move soon. ‘At least make a start on heading to sector 14.’ He gave his mobile number and signed off.
He’d spent the last seven minutes pacing the floor of his office and the squad room like a caged lion, the door open between the two, and spent only another minute continuing pacing before diving for the phone to make the arrangements to head out there.
Sea King helicopter would be the fastest way. One could be brought up from the RCMP and army air-base on Montreal Island within minutes. ‘All that’s needed is a nearby roof-pad.’
Michel got Christine Hebert to arrange the roof-pad and liaise back with the air-base, and two minutes later she confirmed that she’d laid everything on with the West-Laurent Towers just three blocks away. ‘And the chopper’s already left. Said they should land there in about six minutes.’
Michel managed to get everything together with a minute to spare. Breakneck run along the Dorchester Boulevard corridors and down the three blocks with an ERT* team of four — with him still shouting and filling in details as they went — he was breathless as they rose in the elevator to the roof-pad. His heart pounded hard and heavy. No call back still on Mundy’s whereabouts.
He glanced at his watch. They wouldn’t get there for a good hour and a half after Elena Waldren’s arrival. He shook his head. They’d probably be too late: raising Mundy and phoning the safe-house to warn them was still the best bet.
Art Giacomelli looked at the numbers on the computer screen. They hadn’t moved for the last fifty minutes. Something was wrong, seriously wrong.
He phoned Jean-Paul and said that he had concerns about ‘Santa Dave’. He didn’t explain exactly why, just asked Jean-Paul to phone Roman and find out where they were at that moment, and then ask to speak to Santagata.
‘Maybe it’s nothing. But I’ll know for sure from what Roman tells you. Phone me straight back.'
Jean-Paul made the call. Roman answered after the second ring, and Jean-Paul asked how it was going.
‘Fine. Everything running to plan. We just landed ten minutes back.’ Roman sounded slightly out of breath, agitated.
‘And you found out the location?’
‘Yeah, it’s about a half-hour run away.’
‘Where did you end up? Where are you now?’
‘Some dead and alive place called Cochrane, Northern Ontario.’
It meant nothing to Jean-Paul. ‘One advantage of Canada’s wilds, I suppose.
‘He, uh… He can’t come to the phone right now. He’s taking a leak in the bushes. Long flight and too much coffee.’ Roman chuckled hesitantly.
Apart from the hesitation, Jean-Paul could clearly hear the engine noise and rush of them on the move, not stopped by the roadside. Roman was lying.
‘I really need to speak to him Roman,’ Jean-Paul pressed.
‘As soon as he’s finished taking a leak, I’ll get him to phone you.’ Roman didn’t trouble to mask his annoyance. ‘That is, if he gets a chance with all we’ve got on.’
The line clicked off abruptly.
Jean-Paul dialled straight back to Giacomelli and relayed how the call had gone.
‘Bad news,’ Giacomelli said on the back of a heavy sigh. Giacomelli explained why. Four years ago Santagata had a hit contract on someone he knew. Problem was the guy was always on the move, but Santagata knew him well enough to be able to buy him a present without making him suspicious. ‘So he buys him one of those satellite watches. You know, the one’s where you can move from one country to the next and it always shows the right time ‘cause it’s linked to a satellite. But it also tells you exactly where you are, within ten fucking yards! It’s that accurate. And if you know the watch’s serial number — which Santa Dave did — there’s a web-site where you can find out exactly where it is. So he knew where the mark was, made the hit, then took the watch back.’ Giacomelli drew hard on his cigar. ‘So tonight he arranged to phone me every couple of hours to bring me up to date — which he’s now twenty minutes over in doing — and he wore the watch and gave me its serial number. And for the last fifty minutes it hasn’t moved from near a place called Holtyre, a good hundred and fifty miles from where Roman says he is now. So either Santa Dave’s thrown the watch out the plane window in disgust ‘cause the battery’s flat, or he’s gone with it.’
‘Let us know if you can remember anything?’
The two police officers had left over an hour ago, but still the words bounced around in Mikaya Ryall’s mind.
But those shadows had haunted every other moment of her life since. It all seemed so real, but when she tried to recall she could only remember it happening in her dreams: nothing she could pass on or tell to anyone else. They’d think her mad. But the shadows would leap out and became all so vivid and real again each time a boy touched her or tried to kiss her. She’d shiver and shrink away in panic, terrified. She’d been called frigid and cold and weird, and a couple of times a lesbian. A few of the boys she’d really liked, and she’d reach out to them tearfully and want to explain: but how could she when the images were only in her dreams?
The tears streamed down her face as she cut through the bed-sheet with the scissors, trying to make sure she kept the strip even as she went.
And now young Lorena as well. Mikaya kicked herself that maybe she should have been bolder earlier and said he was molesting her, then try and fill in the gaps later. But each time she ran it all over in her mind, there were always too many questions she wouldn’t be able to answer: Which nights? Where did he touch you? What did he say? Why didn’t you say anything, try and stop him? She shook her head. Even now with the answer to why her and Lorena weren’t able to respond and fight back, they still weren’t able to do anything concrete. They were still trying to get her and Lorena to recall something from being awake, from real life rather than dreams
She wiped at her tears with the back of one hand and started cutting the second strip.
