Corkscrew (25 page)

The boy stumbled through the conversation while we listened. Everything he said first he had already told me, but at one point he started to blush. "That's not something I want to talk about," he said. "No, I just kind of met them when I was out in Vancouver." He was staring at the wall blindly, shutting us all out as he spoke, and at last he said, "All right," and handed me the phone. "He wants to speak to you again."

"Bennett here."

"How far from you is this cottage?"

I turned to the boy. "How far is this place?"

"Just up and across the highway, about a mile altogether. Less if you go through the bush."

"About a mile, he says. How soon can you get there?"

Positano sniffed. "That's the swine of it. I've got guys lined up ready to go, but they're in Gravenhurst. It's gonna take half an hour at least."

"That could be stretching it," I said carefully. "Can't you call in some troops up here?"

"That would take just as long, and they wouldn't be trained men, just highway officers." He paused again, and at last he put the question I'd been expecting, going around it gently. "What we need is a diversion, something to take their minds off Andy for half an hour, maybe forty minutes. Any ideas?"

"Only one and I'm not sure it's a good one. Like I told you, I've been suspended by your Inspector Anderson."

"Just doing his job," Positano said quickly. "The thing is, I know your record. You're a trained man; you could cook up enough noise there to keep them worried." Another pause. "I don't want you rushing the place; just make them think there's a mob outside."

"You think that would do it? Hell, that might just get them suspicious enough to kill the poor bastard."

"I couldn't ask you to do anything more." There, the big question. Did I owe Andy enough to go in after him?

"He took care of the two women hostages, and he gave me his bike to get away on. That's enough for me. Don't say anything else."

"Dammit, I'll see you get a medal."

Sure, I thought. And how about seeing my girl didn't leave for Toronto without saying good-bye. "I'll settle for a bottle of Black Velvet when this is over. In the meantime, the officer here will give you the location of the place. I'll get the kid to stay here and explain it to him."

"We're on our way. Thirty minutes," he promised. "Put the officer back on."

I handed the phone back and took the boy by the shoulder. "All right, where are they?"

"It's a big old cottage, a house, really. On the river. You get to it down the side road opposite the turning on the highway that leads in here."

I walked through the counter and checked the shotgun. It was chained into the rack again, but before I could ask for the key, the OPP man turned, still talking into the phone, and wriggled it out of his pocket and tossed it to me. I unsnapped the lock and took the gun down. Fred gave a little gasp, but I ignored her, checking the load. Full magazine. That meant five rounds. I opened the drawer under the guns and took out the box of SSG shells. It was almost full, another twenty spares. Good, that gave me enough firepower to stay safe from a medium distance.

"Who owns the cottage?" I asked the boy.

"Mr. Bardell," he said, licking his lips nervously.

"Good. I know the place you mean. How many rooms are there?"

Fred came through the counter and took my arm.

"Reid, you can't be serious." She wasn't angry anymore, just scared.

I hugged her clumsily with one arm. "It's safe as a church. I just have to go outside and blaze away. That'll take their minds off hurting the guy who protected you."

She burst into tears. "Don't go. You'll get hurt. Please don't."

"Be back in an hour, just stay here with the officer." I squeezed her quickly with my left arm and then let go and touched the OPP man on the shoulder. "It's the first house on the right down the side road opposite the south turning into Murphy's Harbour. Big clapboard place, painted green. I'll leave my car a hundred yards this side of it. License 392 ADC, Chev. Got that?"

"Yeah." He nodded and repeated the instruction into the phone. I hissed at Sam, and he fell into position, just behind my heel. "And keep these two people here. That's crucial."

I winked at Fred, but she turned her face away, her back rigid. The OPP man said, "Will do."

It seemed cooler outside. There was a light mist rising from the lake, leaking over the beach behind the station and up to the door, making a thin haze in front of my headlights as I started the car with Sam beside me. I paused to cock the shotgun, putting a round up the spout, then loaded one last round. Six in all, plus the others in the box. If I got a chance to load them. I wished I had my old M16 with its changeable magazines. That was the kind of firepower that held people's heads down.

I drove quickly out to the highway and across and down the side road beside the narrow finger lake that the kid had called a river. It was a continuation of our waterway, leading out all the way to Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. By day it looked like a river, a hundred yards wide with cruisers heading up and down toward the highway bridge and under it to Murphy's Harbour Lock. I wondered if there would be a boat there. Probably. But there was a tricky patch of rocks at the mouth of the lake. Unless the bikers knew the area, they couldn't escape that way. And anyway, my job was not to keep them. Andy would have their names and descriptions. I just had to get in and stop them from working him over. I drove slowly, with my lights off, keeping my presence as secret as I could.

I stopped the car where I'd promised, at a bend in the road a hundred yards short of the big old house. I could see lights inside but couldn't hear any noise except for the night noises of the bush. There was a narrow shoulder to the road, just a drainage ditch, then a fifty-yard-wide patch of trees between the road and the lake. I took to the shoulder, gun held ready, low across my body, Sam pacing at my heel.

About thirty yards from the house I edged into the trees and moved quietly, stooping to feel for sticks that might crack under my feet. I was scared. This was as bad as patrol in enemy-held territory. There wouldn't be any booby traps, any trip wires connected to grenades, any pits filled with pungee sticks dipped in human excrement, but I was alone without the silent strength of the other guys in my old platoon. And there were a dozen thugs in that house. My breath was shallow, and I paused and sucked in a couple of deep gulps of air to calm me, then went on to the clearing that surrounded the old house.

Bingo! There were bikes lined up beside it, all pointing out toward the roadway where the riders could run out and jump on and away at the first sign of trouble. Only I didn't think they would run. Not from one man, and there was no way of fooling them that I was part of a crowd. Or was there?

I stopped among the trees, scanning the area carefully. If they were organized, they would have sentries posted. My eyes were accustomed to the darkness by now, and I couldn't see anyone close to the bikes. That's where a trained man would have been, low to the ground. But these weren't trained men. They were only cunning.

Then I saw the giveaway. The tiny red glow of a cigarette as a man smoked carefully, shielding the butt inside the palm of his downturned hand, the way sailors smoke on watch when they think they can get away with it. He was at the base of the steps that led up to the veranda of the house. Bored, probably, wishing he could be inside, just going through the motions of guarding the house. I sniffed and caught the faint whiff of marijuana. Good. He would be slow.

To reach him I had to cross twenty open yards. But I didn't think he had company. That left me clear to move to my left, keeping in the trees until I was level with the rear of the house. Then I whispered to Sam to stay and crouched and ran on tiptoe to the wall of the house. Nobody stirred. I edged along the wall and came to the edge of the veranda, staying low.

The marijuana smell was heavy. He had been smoking for a while, I figured. Then I heard him suck in a deep breath of smoke, saw the shielded glow of the butt brighten, lighting up the palm of his hand.

I propped the gun against the step and waited fifteen seconds until the biker was concentrating on his joint, oblivious to anything else. Then I stepped out and chopped him solidly on the back of the neck. He grunted and lurched forward, and I grabbed him before he could fall and laid him face-up while I pressed my thumbs into the pulses on each side of his neck, up under the ear.

It took only a few seconds. He stopped struggling and went limp. I stepped away from him, picking up the gun again and running softly to the motorbikes. I held the gun in the crook of my arm while I drew my pocketknife and went down the line of the bikes, slashing the rear tire on each one. Then I felt over the tops of the gas tanks, looking for one that wasn't locked. Most of them were, but at last I found one. I unscrewed it and put my knife away, digging in my pocket for matches. I came up with a book of them and then scraped around over the dry ground until I had a handful of dry grass. It filled the opening of the gas tank, and I shoved it down as far as I could without pushing it right inside, then lit a match, lit the grass, and set the open matchbook on top.

It flared and I rolled away, nursing the shotgun and hissing to Sam. He bounded to me, and I stood up and ran for the back of the house as the flames burned away the plug of grass and flashed to the vapor from the tank. It blew up like a bomb as I dived behind the house. Shards of metal spanged against the wall closest to the bikes, and the inside of the house erupted in noise as men fell over one another to rush out, shouting and swearing.

The back door was locked, but I beat the glass out with the butt of the gun and opened it, certain they hadn't heard me above the noise they were all making. Sam was with me, and I told him, "Seek," and pushed forward down a corridor that led into the kitchen. There was nobody there, but Sam bounded past me and across the front hall into the big sitting room on the other side of the staircase. I followed him, gun at the ready.

He was barking at a man who lay there on the floor. A fair-haired man with nothing on his feet. I saw that much in a snap glance before I recognized him. Only it wasn't the man I was expecting to see. It was Russ, the leader of the gang, and his feet, when I looked again, were swollen to almost twice their size.

He raised his head and struggled to focus on me. When he saw me, he gave a weak grin. "Good t' see a friendly face."

I pointed Sam to the door and told him, "Keep," then bent over Russ. "Can you walk?"

He struggled to sit up, screwing up his face in pain as he moved. "The bones are broken. They wen' over me good. Sonsabitches seen that movie 'bout jail in Egypt." He touched his feet very gently and winced and shook his head. "Can't walk." I noticed that his voice had lost its former huskiness. He was talking normally except for the strain. His gang had beaten the affectations out of him.

My mind was racing. Was this the undercover man? I'd expected to find Andy, the guy who had given me his bike. Was he already dead or missing? Had I stumbled in on the night of the long knives, biker fashion? It was too late to do anything about it now. I had a gang of savage bikers mad at me and no way to get out even if I'd found the right man and he could have run with me.

A door clattered at the front of the house, and then Sam started barking. I shushed him and smashed the light out with the barrel of the shotgun. A man appeared in the doorway, framed against the light from the kitchen. Sam snarled, and the man backed up and swore, turning to run out again, shouting, "That cop's here, with the dog."

Russ chuckled. "Ever think you'd be baby-sittin' a guy like me?"

The shouting outside grew closer. Then the window shattered, and a rock slammed against the wall behind me. "Get behind that couch," I hissed at Russ. I craned up an inch from where I was crouching and looked out, over the windowsill and the rail of the veranda. In the flames from the burning bike I could see half a dozen men, arms cocked to throw rocks. It was all they had at the moment, but they wouldn't take long to find better weapons, plucking up the courage to come back in and grab them from inside if they had to. I did what had to be done. Aiming high, over their heads, I let fly with the shotgun. The charge went up into the trees, chopping down a mess of tiny branches that I could hear fluttering down, over the redoubled shouting of the gang members.

Russ said, "They'll torch the house 'less we can stop them. You got any backup?"

"Fifteen minutes away at least," I said. I was debating whether to turn Sam loose outside to keep the perimeter clear, but he wouldn't know what to do unless I walked him around it, and if I went out there, they might hit me with a rock, and that would be the end of all of us, me, Sam, Russ, and Andy, if he was still alive.

I ran out to the door I had broken into and fired again. I didn't think they would believe there was more than one person here, but it might help. Sam came with me, and I told him, "Keep," and took him quickly through the ground floor, opening the other doors, one to the dining room, one to a storeroom with an outside window. Now we were as secure as we could be without outside help.

Back in the dark living room I ran to the side of the window and crouched low as more rocks came in. I fired again and, in the instant of the crash of shot among the trees, looked out. I could see one man standing against a tree trunk, twenty yards from the house. He had a lighted match in one hand and something I couldn't see clearly in the other. It figured to be a bottle of gasoline, so I didn't hesitate. I lowered the aim on my shotgun and put a round into the tree directly over his head, hoping that the spread of the shot wouldn't include him. I wanted him scared, not dead. I had enough problems already.

It worked. He dropped the bottle and bolted, the light in his hand blowing out as he dived away. But I didn't gloat. They were on to us. Probably they would be more careful with the next Molotov cocktail, pitching it on the roof of the veranda or against the house, keeping clear of my line of fire. And it would work just as well. The house was clapboard, old pine planks that would go up like tinder.