Buffalo jump

CHAPTER 41

The Queen Elizabeth Way: Friday, June 30

I f you could fly as the crow flies, you could get from Toronto to Buffalo in no time. Thirty-some miles across Lake Ontario and a short run south. Confined to land as we were, the truck barely managing sixty miles an hour, we faced a drive of at least two hours, not counting border delays. Along the curving shore of Lake Ontario we went, passing through Mississauga and Oakville and the Hamilton steelworks sprawled along the harbour, flame coming out of one stack and dark smoke out of the others. Swarms of gulls wheeled through the infernal sky, their bellies grey with soot. Wind buffeted the car as we climbed the steep rise of the Burlington Skyway and left the hellish landscape behind.

At least following a truck on a highway was relatively easy. We could hang back a good number of cars and keep its tall white box in sight.

When my cellphone rang, I checked the caller ID and groaned.

“What?”

“My boss,” I said and pressed Talk.

“Jonah!” Graham McClintock barked. “What the hell is going on? You blew out of here yesterday with barely a word and you skip out today of all days?”

“I’m onto something, Clint. To do with Franny.”

“Not that you’ve seen fit to share with me. Or Homicide.”

“I’m chasing it down now. By tomorrow I should know the whole story. Who killed Franny, everything.”

“Forget tomorrow,” Clint said. “Get down here now.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes you can, if you want to keep your job.”

“Clint, I-”

“You and I need to talk, Jonah. You get to my office now, look me in the goddamn eye and tell me what’s going on!”

I had to buy time. I resorted to an old trick I’ve used on my mother when she gets into one of her “Why isn’t Jonah a doctor/lawyer/husband/father/chief rabbi of Toronto” rants. I turned the radio on and moved the dial between stations, then turned up the volume so the interior of the car was filled with static. I held the phone close to one of the speakers and shouted, “What’s that? I couldn’t hear that last part.”

“Get down here now!” he bellowed.

“Clint? Clint? Are you still there? You’re breaking up.”

“To the office!”

“Clint? Damn this phone! Clint? Can you hear me?”

“Yes, I can hear you perfectly.”

“Clint?”

“You can’t hear me?”

“Are you there?” I asked.

“Ah, fuck!” I heard him say.

I had to face it: there would be no happy ending to this. If I didn’t get killed I’d almost certainly be fired. What then? Hook up with another firm? Strike out on my own? Work for-God forbid-my brother’s law firm? I stared out the window at nothing in particular. The little devil on one shoulder suggested asking Dante Ryan for a cigarette. The angel on the other said, Who’d blame you if you did?

Some little angel.

While I had my phone out, I called Information and got the number for Beth Israel. I asked the receptionist for Ed Johnston’s room but the call was transferred to a woman with a pronounced Caribbean accent who told me I’d reached the nursing station on his floor.

“Can you tell me how Mr. Johnston is doing?” I asked.

“Are you family?” she asked.

I should have said yes. Instead I said, “I’m his neighbour.”

“You’ll have to speak to a family member then. His daughter’s in his room. Should I transfer you?”

I remembered how Elizabeth Johnston had glared at me, blaming me, this investigator who’d brought trouble to her father’s door. “Could you just tell me if he’s alive?” I asked. “Please. Let me rest easy.”

“He’s doin’ well as could be expected, precious,” she said. “Now do you want his daughter or not?”

I said I’d try again later, thanked her and hung up.

“He hanging in?” Ryan asked.

“From the way the nurse sounded, just barely, I guess.”

For a while I watched wooly grey clouds the size of destroyers stack above each other over the middle of the lake. Then Dante Ryan said, “Want to hear something funny?”

“Please.”

“Or maybe ironic is the right word.”

“What?”

“First time we met, you were driving a truckload of contraband and I was riding shotgun behind. Now these goons are driving a truck half the size, worth five times the profit, and you and me are the ones riding behind.”

“That’s not funny or ironic. It’s plain fucking weird.”

“So I have two questions about that caper,” he said.

“I don’t know, Ryan.”

“What?”

“I can’t tell you company tales. When this thing is resolved, we go back to our respective sides of the fence.”

“I told you plenty about my business. More than I ever told anyone outside the life, my wife included.”

“True.”

“So?”

“Tell me the two questions first.”

“One: how you cracked our gang. And two: how you… how should I say it…”

“Blew the case?”

“Blew the living shit out of it, I was going to say.”

“It’s a long story.”

“We’re an hour from the border.”

“It’s not a bad story,” I allowed.

“Then tell it, brother,” Ryan said. “Let it unfold with the miles.”

I let a minute tick by while I thought about where to begin. “All right. About a year ago, the federal finance minister pushed through a huge tax hike on cigarettes.”

“Six bucks a carton,” Ryan snorted. “I was pissed off and I don’t even pay for mine.”

“He said it would protect the youth of the nation by making smoking hard to afford.”

“Bullshit. The youth of the nation just steal more out of their parents’ wallets.”

“Plus smokers of all ages instinctively started looking for ways around the tax. It’s the Canadian way,” I said. “Tax us if you can.”

“And naturally your criminal element stepped in to provide courteous black-market service,” Ryan grinned. “Christ, everyone and their mother got involved. Natives, bikers, Asians and of course your

… ah, traditional organized crime types.”

“Of course. The problem was that smokers didn’t just want cheap cigarettes. They wanted cheap Canadian cigarettes.”

“You blame them? You ever smoke an American brand?”

I nodded. “I used to be a smoker. I tried Camels once.”

“And?”

“Didn’t even taste like the best part of a camel.”

“There you go.”

“Anyway, getting the product into the U.S. was easy. The manufacturers ramped up production for the export market, supposedly because more Americans suddenly wanted to enjoy their products. Truckloads-convoys-were lined up at every land border crossing from the Thousand Islands bridge to the Windsor Tunnel. But packages destined for export have a seal that says they can’t be sold in Canada. So they had to be smuggled back.”

“Which is where the Akwesasne Reserve proved so convenient.”

“It was practically designed for smuggling,” I said. “Only one narrow stretch of the St. Lawrence River separates the Canadian and American sides at Cornwall. Every Mohawk with a boat was bringing cartons across the river.”

“And wholesaling them to us.”

“And buying bigger, faster boats with the profits. The OPP and RCMP together couldn’t stop more than one in ten.”

“Ten?” Ryan said. “That’s what they told the media. They were lucky if it was one in twenty.”

“The government finally had to roll back the tax because the only people profiting from it were you criminals.”

“A sad day for us because cigarettes were an attractive product. Big markup, steady market, and they don’t break if a truck rolls. But,” he said, “there’s always other commodities. Booze, guns, people, perfume, knock-offs, dope and now, as we know, basic drugstore crap.”

“The tobacco companies would have gotten away with it too,” I said.

“But?”

“An investigative journalist uncovered documents that left them with a lot of ‘splainin’ to do. To the RCMP in particular.”

“That’s what you get for writing shit down.”

“An investigator told me one executive from Ensign Tobacco couldn’t take a crap without leaving a paper trail.”

“But Ensign turned out to be your client.”

“And you know why.”

“That stupid court order. Thirty million cigarettes, consigned to an incinerator. Going up in smoke for nothing.”

“They were marked for export, with no export market to send them to. And the feds looked at it as a way to punish the companies and take the heat off the finance minister for the flip-flop.”

“But all thirty million? No. We couldn’t let it happen. Too much to resist. We knew our guys could sell them in less time than they took to burn.”

“Which is why I was undercover,” I said. “Ensign knew someone was after the load.”

“How?”

“The guy who hired me was Vic Ryder, their director of security. He’d installed a magnetic card system throughout the plant. Anywhere employees went-offices, storage areas, the manufacturing line-they had to swipe their way in. Ryder could track who went where and when, make sure the guards were patrolling where they were supposed to and not napping in a warehouse. One day he saw two people entering the sealed area where the export cigarettes were being stored prior to incineration.”

“McNulty and Tice,” Ryan said.

“Yup.” Gene McNulty was a shift supervisor in warehouse security; Christopher Tice a security guard.

“Ensign brought me in as a security guard and put me on the same shift as Tice. One day I followed him out when he went for a smoke and caught a whiff of weed. Guy was getting high at ten in the morning. I called a friend in Toronto and had him courier me an ounce of top-line B.C. bud. My boss shit a brick when I expensed it.”

“A friend with weed is a friend indeed,” Ryan quoted.

“You bet. I got Tice high a few times. Took him out for drinks after work. Hinted I was hard up for cash. Told him I’d once held a Class A trucker’s licence.”

“Did you?”

“No. I’d driven plenty of trucks but nothing over Class D. Late one night, we’d had some beer, a joint, and Tice, as you know, was a pathetic, insecure shit who needed to impress people. Talk tough. He let a few things slip. Including the big name.”

“Marco.”

“None other. I passed it on to Ryder and my boss next morning and they called in the Task Force on Traditional Organized Crime.”

“Tough Talk? How’d they come riding in?” he asked. “On white horses with their thumbs up their butts?”

“Hey, they were good at getting warrants,” I said. “McNulty’s home phone… Tice’s… they listened in on calls to Marco.”

“So you knew everything?” he said with a smile.

“Up yours, Ryan.”

“What?”

“Don’t give me that innocent look. Did we know everything… you know goddamn well we didn’t. We only thought we did.”

“You knew the plan,” he teased.

“We knew three trucks were going to the incinerator but only two would unload. The third would go to Marco’s.”

“How’d you get on as his driver?”

“The OPP wanted eyewitness testimony all the way, but Tice was slated to guard the load. Driver’s seat was my only way in. Only McNulty had already hired someone.”

“The big guy with the glasses, Arthur Read. Him, Tice, McNulty, they all knew each other from Hamilton.”

“Our plan was to have Read picked up just before the incineration regarding a supposed theft from the Ensign warehouse. They’d keep him long enough to force McNulty and Tice to find another driver.”

“You.”

“Me.”

“But the Class A thing was bullshit.”

“Ryder set me up at the Road Scholar Institute near Belleville. I crammed sixteen weeks of material into six hours at the wheel.”

“That’s it?”

“I told the instructor I didn’t need to learn maintenance, freight handling, fuel economics, weight restrictions, first aid or the subtleties of the Motor Carrier Act. I just needed to know how to take a tractor-trailer on one haul and manoeuvre it backwards and forwards at a loading dock.”

“Lucky he didn’t think you were a terrorist. Like the guy who wanted to fly the plane but not land it.”

“He might have but Ryder vouched for me. I learned how to handle a ten-gear transmission, use air brakes and get through an obstacle course. My ability to back up left a little to be desired, but I was only going to have to do it twice. Everything was golden until the weekend before the incineration.”

“What happened?”

“What always happens?”

Ryan took his eyes off the road-a rare thing for him to do-and looked at me, an impish spark in his dark eyes. “What was her name?” he asked.

“Camilla Lauder. The lovely Camilla. I won’t go into our relationship, which at that point was dying faster than a fruit fly. We hadn’t been seeing each other much while I was undercover. I’d work in Belleville all week and go home weekends, usually to a frosty welcome. She didn’t care anymore whether I was around. With one exception. Saturday the 22nd, we were invited to her boss’s house for dinner.”

“What’d she do?”

“Financial analyst at a brokerage firm.”

“And you expected warm and fuzzy?”

“I’m not taking relationship advice from a guy living in the Aerosuites Hotel.”

“Ow. Touche.”

“Her boss lived out in Etobicoke. It was the first time he’d invited spouses and significant others and we had to be there six o’clock sharp for drinks. I told her no problem, because the incineration was scheduled for Monday. I would work a swing shift Friday and drive in first thing Saturday morning. Be home by noon at the latest. Be showered, shaved and on my best behaviour in time for dinner. It would have worked out perfectly, but you gaping assholes changed the date.”

“We didn’t, actually,” Ryan said. “Monday was a smokescreen. It was always going to be Saturday, ’cause the incinerator only had one shift, eight a.m. to noon, and it was never that busy after eleven-thirty. The Ensign trucks were supposed to roll in at five to twelve when there was no one around but the intake guy, and we had him bought and paid for.”

“Our wiretaps didn’t pick up the change until Friday night. Ryder called me at midnight. I should have called Camilla right then but she had chronic insomnia and if I woke her she’d never get back to sleep and blame me and be pissed off, as usual.”

“Christ, did she sleep in a coffin?”

“Maybe she should have tried. So I didn’t call. Read was arrested at dawn Saturday and by eight o’clock, Tice was banging on my door, asking if I wanted to make a quick thousand to drive a truck to Woodbridge.”

“A thousand? The cheap fuck. Him and Read were splitting ten.”

“I never collected anyway. By eleven o’clock, we were loaded up and on the road. We followed the other trucks to the incinerator. I managed to dock mine without maiming anyone. We had fifteen minutes to kill to make it look like we were unloading. Tice made a call on his cellphone-to you.”

“I remember. We were pulled over on the highway just past the on-ramp, waiting to escort you to Marco’s.”

“Tice finished the call and went for a smoke,” I said. “I took the plunge and called Camilla on his phone. Saturday mornings she usually went to Pilates, so I figured I’d get the voice mail and leave a quick message. I never dreamed she’d answer.”

“How manly of you.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew her. Turns out she’d skipped Pilates because of a headache. She was in a pissy mood to begin with and when I told her I might be late, she flipped. Absolutely flipped. A longshoreman would blush at the names she called me. I was trying to calm her down when I saw Tice coming. So I hung up on her. Like throwing gas on the fire, right, but what could I do? Tice got in and told me to roll. When we were a half-mile from the 401 on-ramp, he called you with a heads-up. Being a lazy sonofabitch, he hit redial.”

“Because his last call had been to me.”

“Only now he gets Camilla. He’s not expecting a woman, so he says, ‘Who the fuck is this?’ And she gives it right back: ‘Who the fuck are you?’ I could hear it right through his other ear. She must have seen the 613 area code on her caller ID, because she asks, ‘Are you with Jonah?’ He goes, ‘Yeah.’ And she blows me out of the water. Like a killer whale. Like a depth charge. She says, ‘Are you undercover too? If you are, or even if you’re not, tell Jonah if he’s not home by five o’clock he can go fuck himself because he’ll never fuck me again as long as he lives.’”

“Nice mouth.”

“So Tice is on to me, right? He has to be. Just to make sure I ask him what the call was and he says, wrong number. Then he starts dialling you. Five digits in, I hit him with the best straight right I can manage while driving this beast of a truck. Catch him in the jaw, his head bangs against the window, he’s out. The tractor starts going one way and the trailer the other but I somehow get control and make it onto the 401.”

“Blew right the fuck past us,” Ryan said. “Much to our surprise. You were supposed to come along nice and slow, let us fall in behind.”

“Now I’m barrelling down the 401 with no backup and no way to contact anyone, because the phone fell under Tice’s seat. Then I see the Trenton exit, with the little sign saying there’s an OPP detachment.”

“So that’s why you got off there.”

“You remember that off-ramp?”

“The cloverleaf. You were going round on nine wheels, not eighteen,” Ryan grinned. “We were freaking out, thinking you were gonna roll it over and we’d have to stuff ten million cigarettes into an Escalade.”

“But I made the turn. Then the road finally straightened out, remember, and you guys came tearing up behind me trying to pass.”

“With the back of the truck swinging like a hooker in pumps. Almost drove us off the goddamn road.”

“Sorry. My six lessons didn’t include evasive action. And that’s when the OPP cruiser showed.”

“We almost hit him head-on,” Ryan said. “We swerved out to pass you and boom, there he was. We ducked back in just in time and then we could see him in the rear-view, braking, turning around, coming after us with the siren, the lights, the whole package.”

“And you had to leave empty-handed.”

“Hey, you don’t know how much that hurt.”

“Marco made it pretty clear the other night.”

“Never mind. Get to the part about getting shot.”

“You like that part? Okay. Now I have the cop behind me and it looks safe to pull over. Takes me a couple of football fields to slow the truck down but finally I stop and get out, start walking back to the cruiser with my hands in plain sight. The cop gets out with his holster unsnapped and his hand on his gun butt, asks me what the hell’s going on.”

“What was his name again?”

“Colin MacAdam. I tell him it was an attempted hijack and he should call for backup in case you guys come back. He’s about to call it in when Tice swings open the passenger door with a gun in his hand and opens fire. MacAdam goes down. I’d forgotten about Tice. I should have remembered he wouldn’t stay out that long-I’d only hit him with my fist, not my elbow-but in the heat of the moment, I just forgot.”

“Did you know he had a gun?”

“No. They weren’t standard issue for Ensign security. But I still should have been more aware.”

“Strictly hindsight. So?”

“So MacAdam went down. I scrambled over there, tried to get his gun out of the holster. I almost had it out when Tice shot me in the arm. Then he came walking over with the gun in his hand and a shit-eating grin on his face. He was going to kill us both, the mangy prick. When he was two feet away he pointed the gun at my head. I closed my eyes, kicking myself for calling Camilla. She didn’t care about me anymore. She only wanted me at the party so she wouldn’t be the only one alone. For that one mistake, calling her on his phone, I was going to die, a cop was going to die, and all you fuckers were going to walk. When the gun went off, I didn’t feel a thing. I figured it was the difference between the speeds of light and sound.”

“Like when you see a batter hit the ball, then hear the crack of the bat.”

“Right. I’m waiting for my head to blow apart. Bracing myself for darkness, stars, whatever you see in your last second alive. And nothing happened. I opened my eyes and Tice was down on the ground, spread-eagled on his back with a good-sized hole in his forehead. MacAdam had his gun out. Got it free while Tice was bearing down on me and shot him dead. And that was pretty much that.”

“How’d he make out?” Ryan asked.

“MacAdam? Paraplegic. The bullet hit his armpit where his body armour couldn’t stop it. Ripped his spinal cord on the way out. He’ll be in a chair the rest of his life.”

“That bothers you?”

I took a long look at the man beside me. “Of course it does. If you had been in my place, it wouldn’t bother you?”

“No,” Ryan said.

“Why the hell not?”

“You didn’t shoot him,” Ryan said.

“He wouldn’t have got shot if-”

“If what? If you hadn’t called your girlfriend? If you had hit Tice harder, knocked him out longer? If you’d known he had a gun? If MacAdam had slept in or caught a cold or had a flat or was on the night shift? Had his body armour on right? The man knew the risks when he took the job.”

“I can’t just-”

“It’s behind you, Jonah. Walk away. That’s what I do. And I keep walking.”

“Well, I can’t. Not if I want to stay human.”

“Human, my hard hairy ass. What if someone comes bearing down on you with a piece? Or on me? You gonna have the jam to shoot your way out? Or you gonna be weighed down by all this what if shit? ‘Gee, if I pull the trigger it might do this, it might do that, it might ricochet off Ricky the Clit’s bowling ball head and hit some old lady on the sidewalk.’”

“So if you were in my place, you wouldn’t feel guilty about MacAdam?”

“I didn’t say that. Jews don’t own the market on guilt. I’m Catholic, man, I was guilty before I was born. Sure, I’d help the guy out if I was in a position to. Lay out for a nurse or a wheelchair or whatnot. But I wouldn’t carry it around my neck the rest of my life. Because staying human, as you put it, isn’t my priority.”

“What is?”

“Staying alive.”

When my phone rang again, I was relieved to see it wasn’t Clint calling back. Then not so relieved when I remembered that the 808 exchange in Toronto is reserved for its police service. I answered anyway.

“Hey, Geller,” Katherine Hollinger said.

“Morning, sarge,” I said. Ryan shot me a look. I shrugged.

“I thought maybe you’d like to have coffee.”

“I would,” I said. “Sometime next week?”

“I was thinking more like now. In my office.”

“Is this a social coffee or a business coffee?”

“We’ll discuss that over the coffee. Fifteen minutes?”

“Can’t,” I said. “I’m on the road.”

“All roads lead back to Homicide,” she said.

“Not this one.”

“Why?”

“I’m taking a drive.”

“Turn around.”

“Okay, Kate,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“Ballistics, Jonah,” she said.

She had my full attention.

“The gun that killed your friend Franny?”

“Yes?”

“Same one killed Kenneth Page. The very man you were asking about. So why don’t you stop whatever you’re doing and get down here. Coffee’s on me this time.”

“As soon as I get back.”

“From where?”

I heard a loud, abrasive voice say “Gimme that phone,” and then McDonough was on the line. “We’re not asking, Geller,” he snarled. “We’re telling you to get your useless butt down here now.”

“What do you need a useless butt for? Or should I say another one?”

“Come on, cupcake. Come put your bullshit story on the record.”

“Lighten up, McDonough. We’re on the same side.”

“Same side? We’re not even on the same field,” he rasped. “You’re a waterboy, Geller, a hanger-on. You couldn’t make the real grade, so you grab on to coats like mine. Don’t give me crap about being on my side. You’re more like something stuck to my shoe.”

“And yet you request the pleasure of my company.”

“I’m not requesting shit. I’m telling you to get down here.”

I sighed, then fiddled with the radio again and brought the static back up. “What’s that, McDonough? I couldn’t hear that last part.”

“Get down here now!” I heard him bellow.

“Are you still there?” I called. “What’s that you said? Damn this connection. I’m afraid we’re breaking up.”

The Niagara Peninsula lay ahead of us, a dark outline in the haze over the water. We were in wine country now, passing vineyards where bright strands of wire were intertwined with vines to keep them in neat rows. I told Ryan what Hollinger had said about the same gun killing Page and Franny.

“You know what I’d like to know?” he asked.

“What?”

“Where Ricky Messina was when they were getting killed.”

“Why him?”

“Because people are dying and it isn’t me killing them. And because there’s a Buffalo connection.”

“Maybe we’ll get a chance to ask him.”

“Fine with me,” he said. “Once I get my guns out of the trunk.”

We went through Grimsby, Beamsville and Jordan, bypassed Niagara-on-the-Lake, and headed southeast toward Fort Erie. Traffic thinned out once we were past the exit to the Niagara Parkway and the Falls, so Ryan stayed farther back from the truck than before. Away from the escarpment, the land was entirely flat. We drove past copses of poplars trembling in the warm wind.

I said, “You said something about your stepfather before.”

“Yeah?”

“That he beat you. For sport, you said.”

“So?”

“What was his problem?”

“His problem? I was his problem. Me, Dante Ryan, only son of Sid and the former Mrs. Ryan. My mother was still young and good-looking when she married Dominic. Everyone figured there’d be more kids, but nothing happened. Usually they blame the woman, call her barren, but my mother already had a baby so everyone knew the problem was him, not her. I was living proof he didn’t have the goods. So every chance he got he made me pay. Christ, if I was breathing too loud I got smacked.”

The highway narrowed from three lanes down to two. Ryan moved to the right and slowed slightly, letting a few more cars fall in between us and the truck but always keeping it in sight.

“I tried to kill him once,” Ryan said. “I was maybe seventeen and he had given me a royal beating because he thought I was stealing cigarettes from him. Which I was but fuck him anyway. The next night I go out on a B and E with my friends and I find a gun in the house, in the guy’s bedside table in one of those purple Crown Royal bags. A. 38 snubbie. The next time Dom tried to lay a beating on me, I put the gun on him. Told him what a useless lazy ugly fucker he was and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The ammo was so old it wouldn’t fire. Just my luck, I break into a house where the guy keeps a limp-dick gun in a bag. He really gave it to me that time, Dom, I mean with all the trimmings. I couldn’t walk right for a month. That’s when I started teaching myself about guns. Never bought or stole another cheapie. To this day I arm myself only with the best.”

“Is he still with your mother?”

“Dom? Nope.”

“Still alive?”

“Definite nope.”

“What happened?”

“I left home soon as I could. Once I was established and could support my mother, she had no more use for him. I’m pretty sure he was beating her too. So she kicked the bum out.”

“And?”

“He must have been overcome with grief. Maybe burdened with remorse over the way he treated her. Fuck, the way he treated me. Either way, a few weeks later, sadly, he took his own life.”

“How?”

“Shot himself in the head.”

“How many times?” I asked.