City of Ice (52 page)

“They could,” Jean-Guy pointed out, and shrugged.

“Can we go now?” Arthur asked, making life difficult for everyone.

“Shut his yap,” Jean-Guy suggested. “I got to think.”

Arthur preferred that he not do that. “It’s a nice day,” he said. “I’m going for a walk.”

“Daddy!”

“Stop him!”

“Daddy!”

“It’s a nice day.”

Below them, the Crown Vic pulled out into traffic and headed in their direction.

Jean-Guy started the car with his free hand. He turned out onto Atwater, wheels spinning. “Hold him!” he ordered. Julia was clutching her supposed father, but she wasn’t sure what to do, to keep him with her or let him go. If he escaped, she could run after him. But surely Jean-Guy would shoot them or something. Or maybe not with those cops nearby. She was confused about what he was doing and why and how she should respond, and Jean-Guy reached back and helped her corral her father, which limited her choices.

“Jean-Guy, four guys!” Desperate now. “You can’t whack four guys!”

“Watch me. Hit the button, Heather.
Now!
”

She held the remote device, and looked at Arthur Davidson, who ceased to be in character. “No,” he said, and reached across to take it from her. Jean-Guy spun the car in a half circle and jammed the brakes to block their half of the road. His two passengers were thrown across the backseat, and Julia saw that Jean-Guy held a remote device of his own. He carried a backup. She tried to reach for it. He pressed the button.

She turned.

It wasn’t the car that blew, the car kept coming, it was the tractor-trailer parked by the side of the road that lifted off the pavement. The explosion convulsed the street and her mind and made her heart stammer
and the air go out of her lungs. As it passed by, the Crown Vic was lifted high off the road. Its back end flew up and the car crashed straight down, its front grille striking the pavement, and the car tumbled end over end over end, then settled on its four wheels, the tires blown out, the windows shattered, and bounced onto the median.

“Gimme that!” Jean-Guy snarled, and he grabbed the remote device out of Julia’s hands. He was pressing the button. She looked. The car did not blow up. “You didn’t plant it! You didn’t plant it!” he was screaming at her.

She heard herself respond. “I did. I planted it.”

He hit her across the face with the device, and she fell back and Arthur made a grab for Jean-Guy, only he punched him off and leveled his pistol at them.

“I planted it,” she maintained quietly, resolutely, shocked.

Debris was falling out of the sky and some pieces smacked the roof.

Jean-Guy put his foot to the floor and peeled uphill. They saw the SWAT team, distinguished by their flak jackets and rifles, coming on the run from their roadblock high on the hill, and Jean-Guy cut left, onto a small street that he found out seconds later led nowhere. Dead end.

“Out of the car!”

She could hardly move. She couldn’t sense her legs. She was tangled akimbo, and her brain felt ruptured, blown.

“Out now!”

Somehow she obeyed and sensed Arthur supporting her, and looking up Julia saw college students on the stairs to their campus above an escarpment, ascending and descending like angelic beings, and she should be one of them she knew, but she was not, she was not.

Jean-Guy aimed his pistol at her again.

“I planted the bomb,” Julia maintained through her fog. “I did.”

“Who’s got the most to say?” Jean-Guy asked, and answered his own question. “The computer prick. Him I’ll bring back alive.” He aimed the pistol between Julia’s eyes.

“No!”
Arthur said. He jumped between the gun and Julia, and Jean-Guy fired and Arthur went down, he crumpled, and Julia was screaming silently now and looking at her hands and the brain matter on them and the blood on them and Jean-Guy was shoving her up the stairs.

“You’ll do,” he snarled. “Get up! Up the stairs! Now! Go!”

The college students were ducking on the stairs, but there were too many of them for the police to risk a shot. Jean-Guy and Julia climbed, and she bumped against the students, who cried out, and she found her legs again, and she was running from all this, running, and she would run until her heart burst and the sun blew her head apart, and at the top Jean-Guy turned her and she ran that way and he held her and then turned her downward along a path through the trees and over rocks and through snow and they fought their way down through an urban woods and at the bottom of the bank came out on a row of mansions and Jean-Guy led her up the walk of one. He held her partially in front of him.

Julia wiped the fluids off her face and stared down at her hands.

Jean-Guy rang the doorbell.

A woman answered. He aimed his pistol at her, his hand just forward of Julia’s face, his elbow resting on her shoulder. He had the presence of mind to speak English. “Car keys. Right now.” They weren’t far away, on a little hook above a shelf near the door. Julia saw the woman’s face drain of color, she saw that and
noticed it, and when the woman looked at her a hand went to her mouth, a gasp, as though the sight made her want to vomit.

Jean-Guy dragged her down to the driveway and stuffed her in the Jeep. He started it up and drove. “Keep your head down or I’ll blow it off,” he warned, and Julia did what she was told. She held on to her seat with her knees on the floor and her face shoved down into the cloth. Blood that was not her own seeped off her face. She didn’t want to open her eyes again.
I’m going to die,
she promised herself.
I’m going to die soon. Arthur, Arthur, I’m so sorry, Arthur. Daddy!

He lay on his back on snow and told himself to hang on. He didn’t know how bad it was. He wiggled his toes, he could feel those. He wiggled his fingers, he could feel those. Some old cop said, “Can you hear me, sir?” and he thought that he had heard himself answer yes, which meant he could hear and he could speak, unless he had dreamed that part. The blast had turned Cinq-Mars end over end and pitched him out of the car, and all he knew for certain as he passed in and out of consciousness was that he could still wiggle his toes, he was wiggling them every chance he got.

He heard the sirens at a distance. They were coming from both directions, from down the hill and up. His view was of the sky, of a few leafless trees, of the penthouse suites of the high-rise that clung to the cliff halfway up the block, the boots and men’s chins. Some cops were leaning over, talking to him, but he wanted them out of his way, he was trying to talk to his wife, to Sandra, trying to get a message through and the cops were in his way and he listened to the sirens, they were closer now, they were right up to his ears it sounded like and he was telling himself to hang on,
hang on, and wiggle your toes.

He was telling Sandra how much he loved her and she was listening.

“Émile. Émile.”

Mathers was leaning over him and his face was all bloody and smashed up and he didn’t need to look at that sight, it could make a grown man weep. Mathers was already weeping himself. Somebody pulled Mathers away and made him lie down in the snow so that they lay side by side and they turned their necks, both of them—
I can turn my neck
—and looked at each other and more sirens were wailing.

Boots surrounded him. Men with guns. He closed his eyes.

He felt himself swooning, spinning. He fought that. He listened to a siren way off, among many sirens, way off, way distant, and he concentrated with his eyes closed and he dismissed the bedlam around him and felt a blanket being placed upon him and he didn’t know if that was death’s shroud but he listened to that siren that was coming his way, drawing near, and even as he felt himself lifted, and a voice next to him say, “On my count! One! Two! Three!” and he was lifted up, then raised, rigid, in the air and he opened his eyes and they were moving him, paramedics and cops, into an ambulance. He kept listening. He needed to follow the sound of that one wail. It wasn’t coming for him but he needed that one siren to peal all the way into his heart and into this place because that siren he could count on, he didn’t know why, it was real, that siren kept him alive.

“Émile. Émile!”

They’d put Mathers in beside him.

“Émile. Can you move your toes?” Mathers whispered.

It hurt to breathe. It hurt to turn his head. He looked over at Bill Mathers all bloodied up. “There’s nothing wrong with my fucking toes,” he said. “But I’m missing a shoe. You?”

“I walked over to you, didn’t I?” Mathers whispered. “Didn’t I?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Cinq-Mars whispered back.

He closed his eyes. He found his siren. It was close. So close that when the ambulance started up the hill with him aboard, it passed the next ambulance coming in. He heard that siren wind down and stop. He smiled. His pains felt good enough. Pain was a good thing to feel. Pain was meaningful enough. That siren wound down and he could hear Sandra say,
I love you, too, Émile, hang on.

I will.

Then the siren on the ambulance in which he was riding began to wail.

Thursday, January 20, evening

Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars entered the cellblock and walked the row from end to end surveying prisoners. His right eye was black but open, the left side of his forehead swollen. A Band-Aid covered an edge of his lower lip, and another strip of bandage had been taped under his right ear. He had missing patches of hair that exposed stitched cuts on his scalp. His left hand and wrist were taped, only the fingers poking out from gauze. What’s more, he possessed a look, a countenance, a disposition that would brook no quarrel, and instinctively the prisoners feared him. They didn’t know him, but he looked like a man who’d been chewed up by a dog and was now raring to chew back.

He returned to the gate. Bill Mathers was there, looking worse than he did, and Alain Déguire accompanied three guards from lockup. “Move the other prisoners out,” Cinq-Mars told the guards.

“We can take your guy to a private room, shackle him down,” a guard suggested.

Cinq-Mars gave him a cold look, and the guard promptly changed his mind. They jumped to his bidding then, and the prisoners were shackled and led
from the cellblock in single file and a tone reflected on the faces of the authorities, a quickening, induced not one prisoner to protest.

The guards departed, and the detectives approached the lone prisoner left behind. His cell was situated twothirds down the row, and the junior detectives walked part of that distance where they could see him and then hung back. Cinq-Mars stood in front of the bars and looked down at the man, who hadn’t moved, who remained immobile on his slab of steel as though his life had been drained out of him. He was smoking a cigarette.

“I should be worried,” André LaPierre testified. “A cop empties out the block, the poor sap left behind doesn’t usually survive.”

“You’ve heard those stories.”

“Word gets around.”

“You believed them?”

LaPierre shifted his eyes, smoked. “I try to keep an open mind. What happened to you, Émile?”

“I got caught in the middle, André. Bill and I got bounced around in a blast.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“They went after Rémi. He made it out alive. We all did.”

LaPierre smoked. “People don’t usually walk away from dynamite.”

“We saw it coming and took the bomb out first. Didn’t count on a second bomb, that’s what got us into trouble. I guess they didn’t trust their bomber. Just like they didn’t trust Lajeunesse when he was sent to bump me off and they sent along a backup sniper. This time, a backup bomb.”

“What’s the world coming to, Émile?”

“I might let you walk through this one, André. Do a few paces.”

He exhaled and brought his feet off his bunk onto
the floor. Crushed his butt under a heel. “Time’s gone by, Émile. Could be too late for that.”

“It’s a risk.”

Cinq-Mars was quiet then, and gradually LaPierre grew more conscious of the finality of that silence. “What do you need?” he asked.

“You’ll remember I gave you the gatekeeper’s logbook, from down at the docks. Before I did I made a copy for myself.”

“I figured. That was my case, Émile. You had no business interfering.”

“Your name doesn’t come up, André. I’ve looked all through it. Kaplonski had to go in by the main gate and come out that way so that he was implicated. That’s how they do things now. But you came and went without signing in.”

LaPierre reached for his smokes. He nodded while lighting up another. “Big place, the docks. More than one way in and out.”

“You know a few of them.”

He shrugged. “Been there. Done that. So what do you want from me?”

Cinq-Mars was staring at him coldly now. “A woman’s gone missing. Last seen in the company of the Angels’ bomber. He stole a car, ditched it, picked up a ride somewhere, I imagine. Nobody’s shown at any of the clubhouses around town.”

“There’s a million holes in the wall, Émile.”

“I want you to check the ship for me, go aboard the Russian freighter.”

LaPierre sputtered, shook his head, ran a hand through his hair. “You don’t ask for much, do you, Émile? Since when do I owe you any favors?”

“You can walk through this. Do a few paces.”

“I’ve been cited, Émile. I’m public.”

“You killed for them. They know you’re not holy.”

“They also know I’m in a susceptible situation.”
LaPierre stood, paced. Smoke flew out from between his lips. “You want me to board the ship?” he wanted clarified. “Wired?”

“Way too risky. Take a cell phone along. Find a quiet moment to report.”

He kept pacing. “I could go down on this, Émile.”

“Your choice. But you don’t want to be an ex-cop in maximum security.”

“You motherfucker,” LaPierre protested. “You sweet motherfucker. You know how bad this is? You got any idea?”

“You’re the one who wanted to dance with the brokenhearted.”

LaPierre tried to calm himself, but he was having trouble. He was excited by the prospect of a way out, but terrified by the consequences. He might die. “Who’s the woman?” he asked.