Buffalo Jump (24 page)

She started to bleed. And bleed. They told us afterwards her femoral artery had been severed. Even if we had had phone service, even if we had had electricity, even if the roads had not been blocked by damaged cars, even if most of the people who could have helped had not already been evacuated, she never would have made it to a transfusion site. She would have bled out no matter what.

We should have left, but Dalia had not wanted to leave the animals, the chickens, the crops. They were our livelihood.

So only one person died during the bombardment. Some fucking miracle.

About five weeks later, I reported to the IDF recruitment centre in Jerusalem and volunteered for the army as part of a program called Mahal, under which non-Israeli Jews could sign up for a fourteen-month tour as long as they had not yet turned twenty-four. I made it by just a few months and began training for the Bar Kochba Infantry.

And that’s as much as I told Ryan on the drive back.

The rest is between me and my dreams.

W
hen Ryan dropped me at the office, I made straight for the parking lot and stowed the gun and ammunition in the trunk of my car, inside a storage tub that held jumper cables, candles, matches, a blanket and other necessities of life on Canadian roads.

The office was a hive of activity, with most of the worker bees beating a path to and from Clint’s office, accepting or reporting on assignments relating to Franny’s murder. Just as Darrel Mitchell came out with a thick sheaf of pink file folders under one arm, one of two other investigators standing outside the door went in immediately; the other moved closer to the doorway to keep his spot.

Clint paged me at my desk about ten minutes later. Unlike the other bees, I was asked to shut the door to his office and sit.

“So,” he said. “Sergeant Hollinger thinks it’s you they wanted, not Franny.”

“That’s what she thinks.”

“And you? The truth this time: have the Di Pietras made contact with you?”

“No. Why would they? The Ensign case is over and they’ve left me alone so far.”

“The bruise on your face, Jonah.”

“I’m telling you, Marco Di Pietra did not leave these marks on my face.”

“And I’m telling you this is not the time to go off-grid on me. You’ve been a team player from day one. And I need a team now like I never have before, not even when I was a cop.”

“Clint—”

“At least all the cops under me acted like professionals. They never left unannounced or showed up looking like a john who got rolled.” The look on his face started moving past disappointment, headed toward disgust. “All right,” he said without making eye contact. “If you’re through leaving me in the lurch for today, get busy on this.” He handed me five bright yellow folders thick with documents. “These are Franny’s cases for the last year. Cross-reference any and every location he mentions, no matter what the circumstances, and note what company owns it. See if you can find any link at all to the crime scene.”

“I’m on it,” I said.

“I’ll be working late,” he said. “In case a sudden urge to tell the truth comes over you.”

Heading home that evening, I was reasonably certain no one followed. There were plenty of dark SUVs on the road, but none seemed to contain gunmen of any size or shape. The greatest threat they posed was the drifting attention spans of drivers trying to juggle cellphones, cigarettes, lattes, CDs, makeup, road maps and, every once in a while, a function actually related to staying in one lane.

I parked in my garage and sat with the windows down, my mind numbed by arcane details of real estate transactions. I knew a lot more about how companies could make money by flipping properties but was no closer to knowing why the Erie Storage warehouse had been chosen as the place to kill Franny—or me, as it were.

I listened for the scrape of a sole on concrete, the intake of breath through an oft-broken nose. Nothing. I knew I should take the Beretta upstairs—load it, rack it, keep it handy—but I wasn’t ready to admit it to my home. The garage seemed empty, but there were alcoves and doorways on the way to the elevators, places a gunman could hide with a pistol held down along his leg. The curse of Jewish imagination, where enemies lurk behind every pillar and post. I left the gun in the trunk, waited until a van was exiting the garage, and walked out beside it, looking around as I made my way up and around to the front lobby. There was an ambulance pulling out of the circular drive: not an unusual sight in a heat wave, with so many older tenants afflicted by heart trouble and other ailments.

I was walking down the hall to my apartment when I saw Ed Johnston’s door was open. I could hear a man’s voice and it wasn’t Ed. I slowed down and stayed close to the wall. I stopped outside his door and listened. Heard the man’s voice again. One of Marco’s men? The voice was neither angry nor threatening. Then I heard a woman’s voice, soft and low, and knew Ed was okay. He just had company.

Then I heard the woman begin to cry. I reached the threshold and looked in. Two men and a woman: Ed’s daughter, Elizabeth, whom I recognized from photos in the apartment, and two men in sport jackets. There was blood on the parquet floor and bloody footprints leading out the door. The prints hadn’t shown up in the dirty grey hallway carpet. The men looked like plainclothes cops.

“Can I help you?” one of them asked me. He was heavy-set, with the mournful face of a basset hound.

“I’m a neighbour,” I said quietly. An ugly thought hit me then: it had been Ed in the ambulance leaving the building. “What happened? Is your father okay?” I asked Elizabeth. She was older than me with dry blonde hair cut in an unflattering
bob and pale blue eyes that were red-rimmed from crying. She looked like she wanted to say something but couldn’t.

“Someone beat him up,” the basset said.

“How bad?” I asked.

“To a pulp.” Ed’s daughter sobbed as she heard this. “Sorry,” the cop muttered. “He has head injuries, possibly a fractured skull. Broken fingers. Broken ribs. Broken jaw.”

The daughter fished a tissue out of her purse.

“Can we get your name, sir?” the cop asked.

“Geller,” I said. “Jonah Geller.”

Elizabeth stopped wiping her eyes and looked at me coldly. “You’re the investigator.”

“Yes.”

“Dad talks about you all the time,” she said sourly. “He said you made life around here more exciting. So what was this? Some excitement you brought home with you.”

“What kind of investigator are you?” the basset asked.

“The licensed kind.”

“Got it on you?”

I got my ID out of my wallet and handed it to him.

“Beacon Security, eh? That’s Graham McClintock’s outfit, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“They’re legit,” he told his partner, who looked East Indian but not Sikh: no turban or beard. “Clint was on the job thirty years, all of them good. You know who would want to hurt Mr. Johnston?” he asked me.

“No.”

“The only thing they stole was his camera. Plenty of other stuff around. A laptop right there on the dining room table. His wallet, his watch. Even the tripod, I’m told, is worth money. But one camera’s all they took. Know why that would be?”

Sooner or later, someone would tell him about the fight in the park and how Ed had taken photos of it. His hound dog ears
would pick up my name soon after that. Between the ballplayers, sunset watchers and other onlookers, there had been dozens of witnesses. More than enough would know me, if not by name, as that guy who lives in that building—Ed’s building.

For now, I said nothing. Giving up Marco’s name wouldn’t help Ed. The goons who beat him wouldn’t have left anything behind to incriminate the bastard.

I was also starting to hatch a plan of my own to deal with Marco Di Pietra and the police would have no part to play.

I
n a film canister in one of my kitchen cupboards was a tight bud of British Columbia’s finest pot, curled around its own stem like a serpent around a caduceus. Kenny Aber had left it the last time he’d visited, his way of trying to excavate me from my down mood. “When the going gets tough,” Kenny said, “the tough get ripped.” I toyed with the idea of rolling a little joint but abandoned it quickly. I needed a clear head to decide what to do about Marco—at least as clear as I could be on Percocet.

I sat in front of the TV a while. The heat wave was still the top story, because Torontonians love nothing better than complaining about our weather, which is generally too hot or too cold; it’s all too rarely just right. I watched footage of hardy swimmers cooling themselves in the foul waters of the eastern beaches; two men squabbling over the last upright fan in an appliance store; people crowded around a refrigerated truck in Kensington Market, relishing the cold air wafting out of it.

Then my mind stopped drifting. It stopped somewhere very specific. I switched off the TV and called Dante Ryan’s cell. When he answered, I asked if he had plans for dinner.

“You haven’t seen enough of me today?” I could hear loud cartoon voices in the background, and a boy’s high-pitched voice saying, Daddy, look what SpongeBob’s eyes just did.

“You’re at home?” I asked.

“Yup. All this shit going down with the Silvers, I needed to get rid of the creeps I feel. Spend a little time with my kid. After I dropped you off I phoned Cara, asked if I could help put him to bed.”

“I need to talk to you but not on the phone.”

“You don’t sound so good.”

“A not-so-good thing happened.”

“To you?”

“My neighbour. The photographer.”

“Fuck,” he sighed.

“We really need to talk,” I said.

“Just a minute, honey.”

“Don’t honey me, you rogue.”

“I was talking to my wife, wiseass. Hang on.” He covered his mouthpiece and spoke to someone else, then came back on the line: “We’re putting Carlo to bed in an hour. I’ll come by after that on one condition.”

“What?”

“There a decent pizzeria near your place?”

Ryan arrived with a Barolo—a 1999 Ornato, he said. “Didn’t want to take another chance on the plonk you keep in that closet.”

I had sworn off wine because of the Percocet but that was before a Barolo arrived. I swirled the garnet-coloured wine gently in the glass, inhaling its rich dark cherry aromas. It tasted even better than it smelled.

The pizza I’d ordered had hot Italian sausage, roasted red peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms and onions. “They call this combination Calabrese,” I said. “What do you think?”

“First of all, I’m only half Calabrese, on my mother’s side. Second, I’ve never been there. But from how my mother cooks, I’d say it’s authentic enough.” He dealt with a long string of cheese coming off his pizza and wiped his chin. “Where my
mother was born was some rugged place, what I hear. The people too. No one you want to mess with. A lot like Sicilians. Calabria’s right across the straits from Sicily and the one thing they had in common? The government up in Rome was always screwing them both. Screwing them or ignoring them. That’s why the Mafia wound up running things in Sicily and the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria. Someone had to.”

Ryan finished his first slice and washed it down with wine. “If my dad had come from there too, we wouldn’t be having this discussion,” he said. “I’d be a made man, a lifer, and that would be that.”

“What discussion are we having?” I asked him.

“Hey, you asked me to dinner. Said you needed to talk. How about you tell me what the discussion is, then I’ll tell you if we’re having it.”

“Here goes,” I said. “I don’t care so much that Marco tried to cut me in the park. That he sent goons chasing me around East York. But beating up an old man who couldn’t defend himself … Ryan, they cracked his skull, his ribs, his jaw. At his age, he’ll never be the same. If he lives through the night.”

“So what do you want to do?” he asked.

“Go after him,” I said.

His dark eyes seemed to warm from the inside. “Really.”

“What else can I do? Hide the rest of my life? Hide all the people around me? Look over my shoulder because this freak has it in for me? No. I’m not going to stand around while I or people close to me get shot at or beaten or killed.”

“You’re going to kill Marco Di Pietra.”

I took a deep breath and listened to the words echo inside me. They rang absolutely true. It made me feel like I had lost my moral compass. Like I’d dropped it under my heel and ground it back into sand.

“Yes,” I said. “If it’s me or him, it might as well be him.”

“You’re going to do this alone?”

“Not too many people I can ask for help.”

He put his pizza down and wiped his hands on a paper towel. “Cara made something very clear to me tonight. The only way to get back with my family is to find another line of work. But my thing isn’t something you just walk away from. The kind of exit program we have, you don’t wanna know.”

“No one leaves?”

“Made guys, never. They take an oath that their thing will always come first: before family, before the law, before their own lives. Some old guys are allowed to step down when they get sick—like Vinnie Nickels if he’d hurry the fuck up—as long as they’re not under indictment or active investigation. You know they’re not going to flip.”

“But you’re not made.”

“No, I’m what they call an associate. Like I’m some fucking greeter at Wal-Mart. But even though I never took the oath, I might as well have. I know where bodies are buried. Literally. Any that weren’t burned or dumped, I fucking buried.”

“And if Marco was gone?”

“His brother Vito would take over for sure. I’ve only ever worked for Marco, no one else, so I might be able to work things out with Vito. I got no beefs with him. No loyalties to anyone else. No legal problems hanging over me. Nothing he’d have to worry about. Maybe he’d let me retire.” He pulled out his cigarettes. “Mind?” he asked.

I had eaten enough for the moment. I went and got the ashtray.

“So are you throwing in with me?” I asked.

“Answer one question first. Where’s the gun I gave you?”

“Um …”