Death On a No 8 Hook (A Willows and Parker Mystery) (18 page)

Chapter 33

Junior got into the car, slammed the door shut. He put the key in the ignition and turned it part-way, so the dashboard lights came on, phosphorescent and green. The quartz clock said fifteen minutes to ten. Five hours ago he’d driven Misha out to the airport, and he could still smell the scent of her perfume, musky and warm. At the terminal she’d treated him like a fucking taxi-driver. Got out of the car without a word and just walked away, hips swinging. Not waving or even bothering to turn at the wide glass doors to take a last, lingering look.

Well, fuck it.

Junior punched the orange button on the remote and the garage door swung open. He put the remote device back in the glove compartment, wedging it under his Colt revolver. Started the engine, drove slowly down the slope of the driveway, turned right on Greenbriar and goosed it.

The city lay far below him, millions of individual lights conspiring to turn the night sky a sickly whitish colour, like the underbelly of a dead fish. Junior had no time for the view, however. He was driving hard, with all the skill and nerve he could muster, his eyes on the blur of asphalt and the red needle of the tachometer. At Southborough he made a left without signalling, taking the corner in a controlled drift that left curving black smears of rubber on the road. It was crazy, driving like this with murder on the agenda and an unregistered and totally illegal handgun in the car. But Junior was frustrated, in a real bad mood, and he knew it was crucial that he get everything out of his system and cool right down before he took on Mannie Katz. The guy had at least a couple of notches on his belt; Junior had to take him seriously.

He passed under the Trans Canada Highway, sound of the twin exhausts bouncing off tons of dull grey pre-form concrete.

Why had Felix wanted Misha back in California? What was the big rush? The man had a nose on him like a bloodhound, was there something in the air Junior didn’t get a whiff of? No, probably all that happened was Felix took a little nap and woke up and rolled over, found there was nobody in bed but him. He was lonely, that was all. His bones were cold. If anything serious had gone wrong, Junior’d have been the first to know about it. At least that’s what he told himself, and believed, as he turned left off Taylor Way on to Marine Drive and the approach to the Lions Gate bridge.

In the middle of the bridge, stalled in traffic, he thought about how he was going to kill Mannie. Park on the street right in front of the house, so the guy wouldn’t get the idea Junior was sneaking up on him. Use the car telephone, tell him what? That Felix was worried and wanted to know what the hell was going on. Did he take care of Carly, grab the videotape? Mow him down with questions, confuse him, keep him off-balance.

No, fuck that. Keep it simple. Just park and walk right up to the house, get inside. Then what? Pull the Colt and let him have it. Fast. No speeches, no getting cute, no fooling around. Mannie was quick as a snake with those knives of his. Fucking cutlery department on wheels. Don’t give him a chance. Just stick the front sight in his stomach and bang away. Knock some low-grade hamburger patties off him.

Junior smiled, seeing the look of shock in Mannie’s watery blue eyes, feeling the kick of the gun, hearing the explosions, watching him go down.

The traffic started moving again, a slow crawl. He pushed a Lionel Ritchie tape into the deck, turned the sound right up and leant back in his seat. His rear view mirror was full of lights. He had no way of seeing the chocolate-brown Ford Fairlane keeping pace three cars behind him.

Chapter 34

It was two minutes to ten when Willows heard the faint drone of the garage door motor. He saw the backup lights of the Trans Am flash on, and sprinted for the Fairlane. The starter was grinding away, Parker muttering under her breath as she twisted the key. He jumped inside the car and slammed shut the door. The engine caught, faltered, steadied. They pulled out of the driveway and started down Greenbriar. Two blocks below them, the Trans Am’s brake lights vanished around a corner.

Parker turned on her headlights.

“He turned left,” said Willows. He fastened his seat-belt.

“Wherever he’s going, he sure is in a hurry.”

“Let’s not lose him.”

“Do you want to drive?” said Parker.

“No, you’re doing fine.”

“Thank you.”

The close-set eyes of an animal standing by the side of the road glared bright red. A German Shepherd, black and tan. Parker’d had a Shepherd once, when she was a kid. Sheba. The dog had bitten the milkman when he’d yelled at her mother about an overdue bill, and from then on they’d bought their dairy products at the local Safeway. Parker remembered missing the glass bottles.

“Did you get a look at him?” Willows said.

Parker shook her head, no. The darkness, the Trans Am’s tinted windows. She hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of whoever was behind the wheel.

Southborough Drive. Vast expanses of manicured lawn, flowering shrubs that masked the stink of chlorine from the big Olympic-sized pools. The Capilano Golf and Country Club over on the left, the greens and fairways dark and deserted.

They followed Junior down the asphalt-encrusted slope of the mountain, over the Lions Gate bridge and its necklace of lights, along the winding three-lane causeway that bisected the thousand acres of Stanley Park. Past Lost Lagoon and its gaudy illuminated fountain. Parker stayed on Junior’s tail as he made his way through the downtown core, down the Mall and over the Granville Street Bridge and straight up Granville to King Edward, east past Cambie, south on Ontario. Willows looked at his watch. It was twenty-five minutes to eleven. They’d been driving for a little over half an hour. Junior had averaged about forty miles an hour, but had hit seventy and eighty in the stretches, weaving in and out of traffic like a madman. At first they thought he knew he was being followed, but after a little while they began to realize it was just the way he liked to drive, with reckless abandon.

The Trans Am turned left on East 30th. The street was flat and narrow, hemmed in on both sides by modest one-storey stucco houses. Nat Bailey stadium was less than a block away; there was a baseball game on and the streets were jammed with cars.

Parker tapped the brake pedal. The Fairlane crept slowly through the intersection. “If I get too close, he’s going to spot us. But if I stay too far back, we could lose him.”

“Use the lane,” said Willows.

Parker drove past 30th and turned down a gravel lane. She turned off the Fairlane’s headlights. The car bounced from one pothole to the next, past crumbling garages, abandoned appliances, shapeless piles of junk, rotting mattresses.

“He’s slowing down.”

Willows nodded. In the narrow gaps between the houses he was able to follow the progress of the Trans Am as it cruised along on a course parallel to their own.

“He stopped.”

“Circle around and move in on him,” said Willows. He picked up the Phillips microphone and called 312 Main for a back-up.

Parker accelerated through the potholes towards the far end of the block. She swung left on James Street and then left again on 30th. The Trans Am was parked in front of a small brown house with a scruffy front yard and a white picket fence that had been smashed flat. Parker waited until they were about fifty feet away and then turned on her brights, washing the interior of the Trans Am in light.

Junior had the air-conditioner on full. The blast of processed air across the dashboard made the jumble of paper animals vibrate frantically. He squinted and shielded his eyes with his hand as the car moving slowly towards him suddenly crossed to the wrong side of the road and flashed its brights. It occurred to him that Mannie might have been waiting for him, expecting him, that the sneaky son of a bitch had set him up. He flipped open the glove compartment, grabbed his big Colt .357 Magnum.

Parker stopped the Fairlane thirty feet away from the Trans Am. She put the transmission in Park.

Willows saw the Trans Am’s door swing open, a man step out of the car. He was at least six foot tall, muscular, heavily tanned. There was no resemblance at all to the description given by the elderly Chinese woman from the grocery store. He reached for the mike to call off the back-up.

Junior thumbed back the hammer of the Colt. He brought his right arm up, bisected Parker’s forehead with the blade front sight and calmly squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked in his hand and the rear window of the Fairlane blew out. Both doors swung open. Junior got off a second shot. He had an idea he was shooting wild, but how the hell was he supposed to correct when he didn’t know where the fuck his rounds were going? Night shooting was a bitch. He’d have to look into it, see if he could get his hands on some tracers.

Willows fired three times as quickly as he could pull the trigger, not taking the time to aim properly, simply returning fire. All three shots hit the Trans Am’s radiator, the standard-issue 358 grain wadcutters fragmenting on impact. A triangular chunk of copper jacketing sliced through the Trans Am’s fuel line an inch from the pump. High octane gasoline spurted across the engine block, dribbled down on the manifold.

Parker had bailed out of the Fairlane, using her open door for cover. “Police!” she shouted. “Drop your weapon and put your hands on your head!”

Junior aimed at the car door and fired twice. The Fairlane’s windscreen turned frosty white. He cocked the gun and turned his attention back to the other cop, the shooter.

The gasoline puddling on the manifold finally ignited. There was a searing flare of orange, an explosion that rattled windows up and down the block. The bonnet of the Trans Am spiralled straight up into the air on a column of smoke and flame.

Parker, lying on her stomach on the road, aimed and fired.

The bullet sent Junior spinning sideways into the car. The sleeve of his shirt caught fire. There was blood on his chest. He dropped the Colt and fell to his knees. He could smell something burning. His hair.

Willows sensed a movement to his left. A man wearing tan slacks and a pale green or blue polo shirt was standing uncertainly on the front porch of the house with the ruined picket fence. Willows had never seen the man before, but he recognized him instantly. He started across the road towards the sidewalk and Mannie ran for it, scooting around the side of the house into darkness. Willows glanced behind him. Parker was moving cautiously in on Junior, a fire-extinguisher in her left hand, her revolver in her right. Junior was rolling around on the asphalt, screaming.

Willows went after Mannie.

Mannie had run into darkness and now he was running towards the lights and noise of the stadium. He reached the end of the lane and cut diagonally across Ontario towards the gravel parking lot at the rear of the stadium. His first thought had been to slip inside, do some mingling. Buy himself a hot dog and a paper cup of beer and kind of blend in with the fans. But as he trotted towards the empty turnstiles he realized that the stadium, brightly lit and easily sealed off, was a trap. Veering away from the entrance, he made his way through the ranks of parked cars on a zig-zag route that would take him into the deep shadow of the right field fence, cover him all the way to centre field, where he could cross Midlothian Avenue into Queen Elizabeth Park

The park was a hundred acres, more or less, and it was shaped roughly like a huge ear. There was a lot of open, grassy area, and a network of access roads. But there was also plenty of natural cover — broken ground, stands of deciduous trees, dense thickets of shrubbery.

Mannie sank to his hands and knees in the shadow of a rusty Buick station wagon. He was breathing hard through his mouth and there was a stitch in his side, hot and sharp. He rested for a moment and then stood up, crouching, and risked a quick look behind him. The cop was about two hundred feet away, standing on the roof of a pickup truck. His back was to Mannie. He started to turn around and Mannie ducked down, his heart beating against his ribs like a tightly clenched fist. They’d give him twenty-five years for the kid and another quarter-century for the gorilla in the Jockey shorts, who’d tried to kill him with the fridge. It was too much fucking time and Mannie knew he wouldn’t be able to handle it, he’d go crazy. He scuttled towards the fence, gravel crunching under his shoes and digging into the palms of his hands. There were sirens everywhere, faint but unmistakable, converging on him from every point of the compass. If he was going to get out of this mess that Junior had laid on him, he’d to move fast, make no mistakes.

Standing on the roof of the truck, Willows saw Mannie bolt from the cover of the parking lot across thirty feet of open ground, his elongated shadow chasing him into the deeper shadow cast by the stadium fence. Mannie had committed himself. He was heading for the park. Given his limited options, it wasn’t all that bad a choice. Willows wondered how Parker was doing, if she’d thought to call the dog squad. He jumped down from the truck and started to jog through the field of empty cars. As he ran, he studied the general layout of the park. To his left, there was an open, gently sloping grassy area. To the right a narrow strip of thick brush meandered down the hill towards several small ponds, more grass, patches of shrubbery, brush. The park was all hillside. At the top there was a domed arboretum and, if he remembered correctly, a natural depression about fifty feet deep and several hundred feet wide, the bottom planted in grass and flowers.

Willows had just reached the edge of the parking lot when Mannie suddenly bolted from the cover of the fence, across the road and into the park. A dim, indistinct shape, he ran straight up the middle of the open area and then turned sharply right, plunged into the strip of brush and came out the other side, running towards the ponds.

He couldn’t be sure; but Willows thought he knew what Mannie would do next. He followed Mannie across Midlothian Avenue and up the slope. The grass was heavy with dew: it was easy to see where Mannie had gone off to the right. Instead of veering after him, Willows kept going straight up the hill, keeping on a course parallel to the thick strip of brush. As he’d guessed, the brush marked the course of a shallow ravine, a depression formed over the years by rainwater draining down into the ponds. Willows kept low, but made no real attempt at concealment. Either Mannie would see him or he wouldn’t. It was a question of timing, and of luck.

He continued up the slope, pacing himself, going as fast as he could without losing his wind.

Mannie leaned against a stunted cherry tree growing near the bank of a small pond. His legs were trembling with fatigue. His lungs were on fire. Too many nights spent in front of the TV, gobbling junk food and drinking beer. He was going to have to buy one of those designer jogging outfits, start getting up a little earlier, do a few laps around the neighbourhood every morning before hitting the granola.

A car drove slowly past, headlights sweeping across the black surface of the water and beyond, to a wide expanse of mowed grass. Mannie saw he’d made a mistake, taken a wrong turn somewhere. He was exactly where he didn’t want to be, out in the open, exposed and vulnerable. Another car cruised past. A face, pale and inquisitive, peered out the side window. Mannie didn’t know if he’d been seen or not.

He ran back to the cover of the ravine and scrambled blindly upwards, slipped and fell, banged a knee. The floor of the ravine was littered with broken shale, the fragments thin and sharp. With each step he took, he caused a miniature landslide. He knelt and took off his shoes. Much better. In his stockinged feet he was able to move through the darkness in almost absolute silence, a shadow among shadows.

From his vantage point high up on the hill, Willows could see the sparkling red and blue lights of an ambulance, fire trucks, at least half a dozen patrol cars. Plenty of men and equipment down there, but it seemed nobody had thought to come and lend him a hand. He was sure now that Claire Parker hadn’t seen him go after Mannie. He wondered if there was a car from the dog squad down there, how long it would take to follow his scent into the park. Then he heard the tin-whistle screech of a disturbed bird, and knew that wherever Rover was, he wasn’t going to make it in time for the party.

The sides of the ravine had become increasingly shallow, and now, suddenly, the ravine petered out altogether. Mannie found himself standing on a narrow path that ran diagonally across the slope of the hill, up towards the faint glow of the arboretum. There was a stand of scrawny trees to his left, a clump of rocks off to the right. He started up the path and one of the rocks stood up.

“Police,” said Willows softly. “Put your hands up and don’t move.”

“What?” said Mannie. The way the guy was holding his body, Mannie knew he had a gun. He was also very much aware that he was backlit by the powerful arc lights of the ball park. It was a perfect situation, but not for him. He’d provided the cop with the kind of sharp-edged silhouette target he’d normally only expect to find on a firing-range.