The Taken

15

Her alarm went off at 5 a.m. Someone had reprogrammed the LED clock beside the bed to flash HAPPY BIRTHDAY OLD GIRL. She was sixty-two.

She brushed and washed up and in the time between getting out of bed and coming out of the bathroom, a glint of red dawn had appeared in the corner of the window. For the rest of Wednesday, she’d waited by her phone in her office like some disappointed prom queen, but no one of interest had called. She’d spent part of the afternoon obsessing over how much blood, exactly, it would take to paint the message they’d seen. Surely, it was too much blood? For the rest of the day, the site had shown the vile sequence over and over. By the time the night shift came in, Bail and Renald and Wilton had figured that the quantity of blood required to make such an image was at least two pints. That was a fifth of a normal person’s blood. They were killing him. And she was waiting for news that wasn’t coming. She felt that she was being played for a fool and for the first time on this case, it began to feel personal.

She’d taken her cruiser home and planned to make a drive-through breakfast at the Timmie’s on 41, a birthday breakfast, perhaps, a double-double and an actual donut. Yes, a Boston Cream for her birthday, even if it was going to be 6 a.m.

You catch more flies with honey. She’d sugar herself up and go to meet Chip Willan and be super-sweet. That never worked with Ian Mason, but Mason had been spiritually diabetic: niceness never worked with the man. Maybe the new commander could be charmed.

Just the same, a pill to pave the way, she thought. She dressed – full uniform – and opened the sidetable drawer, but she realized she’d left them in a jacket pocket. Or she thought she had: they weren’t in the jacket either. Strange. She got down on all fours (not so bad, she thought, an impossible pose even a week earlier) and searched under the bed, but it was dark, and even with all the lights on, she couldn’t see into the middle of the space. She checked the other side. Nothing. Well, there was still the loose stash of Percs and Ativans and sleeping pills piled in a little pyramid inside the bathroom medicine cabinet. But when she opened the mirror, instead of the jumble of welcoming blue and white and yellow pills, there was a little bottle of extra-strength Tylenol and a note taped to it. “Fuck,” she said, snatching it down.

The note, in her mother’s hand, said, “Happy birthday old girl. It’s a brand new day. See you at dinner.”

She gripped the red-and-white Tylenol bottle in her hands, squeezing it to keep from shouting, and then she threw it against the wall behind her. She pulled a muscle in her middle back doing it, and found herself on one knee on the bathroom floor. “Goddamnit, Mother.” The top of the bottle had burst off and a spray of white, useless pills was rolling around on the cold tiles. “Goddamnit.” She reached forward carefully, grabbed a small handful of them, and stood. The space between her shoulderblades was cramping and uncramping. She popped three of the pills and washed them down with a handful of water. Just for that, she was going to have a greasy breakfast sandwich, too.

The sun was fully up as she pulled onto Highway 41 and headed south. She had to drive with her arms locked out straight in front of her to keep her back pressed against the seat. She was seething. What right did anyone have to take away her comforts? By acting on her own, her mother had ruined Hazel’s plans to wean herself off, and she was ready to wean herself off, she’d even thought she’d begin on her birthday. But Emily had taken the choice out of her hands. She’d be getting a mouthful at dinner, that was for sure.

She pulled into the Timmie’s below Kehoe Glenn, but she no longer had a taste for anything solid, all she wanted was a coffee. She’d have to manufacture her own sweetness with Willan. She was out of practice talking to others, she knew this, she didn’t even need yesterday’s experience at the Record as proof. Or her shortness with Wingate afterwards.

She wasn’t entirely sure why she’d behaved the way she did. Threatening that girl. Partly because she was on Gord Sunderland’s turf and that naturally made her lip curl, and of course there was the building stress associated with the case. But if she was being honest with herself, it was Becca Portman alone who’d triggered her anger. She was Martha’s age, and shiftless and stupid. Martha hadn’t found her way in the world yet, and girls of Martha’s age, perceiving diminishing returns, are as likely to cut their hair badly and go work for idiots as they are to dig in and try harder. She saw the possibility, in Martha, of a future of accepting second best just to have something and it terrified her. Emilia, the elder, was fully formed, even if she didn’t realize it, even if, like all first children, she felt like she’d been sent out into the world without a complete set of tools. But Emilia always landed on her feet; she was like her namesake, unflappable, possessed of solid common sense, and skeptical enough to avoid being taken in by dreamers and fools. Not so Martha, whose life had, thus far, been stocked by a rotating cast of lightweights, druggies, actors, depressives, and charlatans. She’d taken one look at Becca Portman and wanted to pound some sense into her. At least she hadn’t done that.

She paid for the coffee and pulled around the corner to buy a Record from one of the boxes. Maybe Portman had disobeyed her, or Sunderland had overruled her, and Wingate would get his chance to see things unfold in a more measured fashion. But she opened the paper and the story wasn’t there. There was no mention of its returning, nor a reason given why it hadn’t appeared. So, whether Hazel liked it or not, the next phase of the game was afoot.

She pulled back into traffic, the paper tossed into the back seat. There was no traffic at 5:45 in the morning, and she could have bombed down to Barrie in an hour, but she decided to drive at the limit and give herself some time to think, to go over her points. She found her mind too busy with the details of the mannequin and the man in the chair to focus. But she would have to put all of it aside if she wanted to get her message across to Willan.

She pulled into OPSC headquarters at ten after seven. Twenty minutes early might look desperate, she thought, and she sat in the car for another ten minutes before going in through the front doors. The middle of her back had relaxed, finally, and she was grateful she wouldn’t have to look like a hunched old woman in front of her new boss. She had to be buzzed in by Willan’s assistant: the building didn’t open until eight. “Chip’s been here since six,” said the assistant, whose name was Jeremy. He calls his boss Chip? thought Hazel.

At seven-thirty on the button, Commander Willan came to get her from the waiting area. He offered her a hearty handshake, and she took his hand and shook it distractedly, taking in the man who had come down the hallway to meet her. Willan was no older than thirty-five, tall and lean, with a glossy head of long black hair tied back into a ponytail. He wore a dark blue powersuit instead of a uniform, and he had brilliant white dress sneakers on his feet. He looked like the head of an animation studio, not a police commander. He put a light hand on her back and led her into his office. She’d only seen Mason’s office twice in all his reign, and it had been cluttered with official regalia, including the force’s colours on a staff behind the desk. All of his awards and medals had been framed on the walls to the left and right. Nothing about Mason’s office let you forget that he had it over you in rank, experience, and decoration. It had been an office to cow all opposition.

Willan’s office, on the other hand, was almost bare. Gone was the dark furniture, the leather chairs, replaced by a thick glass desktop supported by heavy silver legs. The only decoration in the room was a marble pillar with a sleek black ball on top of it, turning endlessly on a jet of water. A cord from the back of it ran discreetly along the side wall to a plug.

The commander’s chair was a strange, ergonomic device that he kneeled on, tucking his feet beneath him, the seat itself tilted forward at about sixty degrees. When he sat in it, it gave the impression that he might spring out of it, over the glass table, and into your lap.

Willan gestured to her to sit down and then he opened a wooden coffer on the desktop, taking a silver object from it, and pushed it over toward her. Were they going to smoke bloody cigars at seven-thirty in the morning? “Chocolate sardine?” he asked. She waved them off. “I’m an avid fisherman. And I have a sweet-tooth,” he said. “So I can’t resist them.” He unwrapped the fish and snapped it in half between his perfect teeth. “So, what a pleasure.”

“Is it?” she said.

“Absolutely. To meet the famous DI Micallef. I’m honoured.”

“Well, thank you,” she said. There hadn’t been a trace of irony in his voice. “I’m glad we’re getting a chance to talk.”

“Terrific,” he said. “So tell me what I can do for you.”

Maybe she wouldn’t have to charm this Chip Willan; he had enough charm for both of them. “Well, Commander Willan -”

“Good Lord,” he said, “it’s Chip, or you’re outta here.”

“Okay, then. Chip.”

“Hazel.”

“I’ve come to talk about the future of policing in Westmuir County.”

“Sweet.”

She rubbed her palms against the tops of her legs. “Chip… I know that there are fiscal issues the OPS needs to tackle, and of course, every detachment in this province needs to find efficiencies” – she cringed inwardly to use the word – “but I’m here today to say that I hope Central understands that it can use its voice within the provincial federation to protect its communities. Places like Westmuir, with its rural and small-town populations, can’t be policed the same way a big city is policed, and I’m a little anxious about the things I hear, about some of the changes being discussed.”

“Give me some specifics, Hazel. Specifics will help me see your issues more clearly.”

“Well, one specific is the questionnaire you – your office – sent my personnel recently. Asking them for, among other things, their redeployment choices. As in, should there come a time when they might be redeployed, what would their preferences be and so on. Before any kind of mission statement has even been issued by the OPS, to ask people where they want to go in case of clawbacks… well, I find that, with all due respect, to be a little underhanded.”

“It was, wasn’t it?” said Chip Willan. “I apologize for that. You have to understand, Hazel, I’m still cutting my teeth here.”

She felt herself relaxing into the chair. Thank God for new blood. Was this generation one that would actually allow itself to reason? “Okay, I’m glad you said that. Because I really feel we really need to sit down, all levels, and talk about what we need, and of course, keeping all of the fiscal issues in focus. But I think it would be educational, it would open your eyes, to see what we do with our resources, Chip. How well Westmuir’s detachments and community policing offices work and who they serve. And how, even though our police-to-population ratios seem high, they’re right for the places we work in. Hell, you know, we’re working on a case right now that couldn’t possibly be handled correctly if our detachments were centralized, or if there were fewer people to work on it. People’s lives depend on us being able to do the work we were trained to do, with the resources we need to do it with. It could be very bad for people if budget formulas invented for cities were applied willy-nilly to places like Westmuir County.”

He was holding his hand up, warding her off comically, as if she’d overwhelmed him. “You really need a chocolate sardine, Hazel!” He held the box to her, and now she gratefully took one and unwrapped it. It was excellent, toothsome chocolate. He watched her eat it. After a moment, he said, “Do you ever think about the dinosaurs?”

“The dinosaurs?”

“Yeah,” he said, and he leaned forward, that position that made it look like he might sail over the desk. “I mean, they were so successful. They had flying dinosaurs and dinosaurs that could eat the little leaves at the tops of ancient redwoods and dinosaurs the size of your pinkie. I just think about them sometimes, wonder who they were. Because they were everywhere and they, like, ruled the earth. But success has its costs, right? Too many dinosaur mouths, not enough trees or meat. Now, if only they’d had some smart dinosaur to tell them they had to change their ways before they screwed up all the good stuff, maybe this would still be a dinosaur planet instead of a people planet. But they didn’t have that smart dinosaur so instead the universe sent a meteorite to blow all their scaly behinds to kingdom come so the planet could start over.” Hazel chewed more slowly. He was smiling at her. “Dinosaur days are over. All the dinosaurs are gone. But we’re not going to wait for a meteor to sort us out, are we? Hell, no. We’re going to sort ourselves out. And – this is the thing, this is the hard thing even – though we want it to be about people, it isn’t. It’s about money. It’s always about money. You know that and I know that. So first we show the dinosaurs in charge that we can handle the money side of things. We take the meteor hit, you know? And after that, we make it work.”

She felt about as heavy as a brontosaurus. “Jesus,” she said. “You had me for a minute back there. I thought everything might be okay.”

“It’s all good,” he said.

“You’ll still be paid your salary, is what you mean.”

His eyes sparkled, as if he’d just fallen in love. “We need people like you, Hazel, people with a strong connection to the way we do things, so there’s continuity, you know?” He put both his palms down on his desk. His body language said they’d just solved all the world’s problems. “Change goes badly when systems fail to negotiate the transitions sensitively. We’re not going to make that mistake here. No meteorites, you know what I mean? It’s going to be more like a fine sandpaper, moving slowly over the rough patches.” He was practically beaming. “I have to say, I’m so glad we had a chance to meet, Hazel. I want you to know my door is open to you, any time, for any reason.”

She stood. “When’s it going to happen? Can you tell me that?”

“When’s what going to happen?”

“Amalgamation. Redeployments. Clawbacks.” She gripped the back of the seat she’d been sitting in, where she presumed she’d looked like a complete fool. “When are you going to start fucking us?”

“That’s salty,” he said. He stood up behind his desk, and his ergonomic little chair rolled back silently. “The needs and views of all our partners in policing will be solicited before anything happens.”

She went to the door and turned around. “I wonder how soon after policing standards go to hell up here you’ll be telling your bosses in Toronto that we’re not ‘managing our resources’ well. Because the blame for a fucked-up system always lands on the ones who have to live in it, not the ones who invent it.”

“Don’t fall for that kind of thinking,” said Willan. “You invent your own reality, Detective Inspector Micallef. And if you want it to be one in which your higher-ups are trying to suffocate you, you will wither away.”

“God, you sound like someone I know. She doesn’t live in the real world, either.”

“Happy birthday, by the way.”

“Yeah, thanks,” she said.