The Last Witness (19 page)

It meant there was an opening.

Coal jammed his knee into the unprotected groin and the man went limp, but before he hit the mat, Coal hit him again. Twice. He delivered a one-two exchange, first with his right fist
flush in the face, and then the follow-through with his left into the abdomen.
Boom! Boom!
One knee, two blows, and it was all over. But no. As Coal backed away to a corner, the man ordered his body to climb up off the mat, and he staggered to his feet. That was the trouble with big men. They didn’t know when to stay down. You had to destroy them physically and if that wasn’t enough then destroy their will. Coal looked at him. He was reeling, his head teetering, his arms hanging weak at his sides. A simple jab would put him away now, but all these people had paid good money to watch the match and it was going to be over quickly. Too quickly. Coal the showman decided to give them what they wanted.

He sniffed. Heavy. A bull ready to charge. Pushing off the ropes in the corner, he was three steps into his run when he leapt from his left foot and then led with his right shoulder into a 360-degree turn. His ripped body twirling backwards in mid-air. Coming out of the turn, he unleashed a ferocious, flying kick at precisely the right moment. His naked foot was a guided missile and it struck its target. The side of the head. There was a wicked smack and the air sapped from the man’s lungs like a balloon just pricked. He went down. A pool of blood and fragments of teeth were on the floor beside him.

“Winner of the match. Colton ‘Coal’ Brock!”

It was a good night’s take, but to Coal the money wasn’t for a few minutes of action. It was for two years of fighting without a single loss. It was for all those scrapes in the street where he earned his mettle. It was for forty weeks as a Navy Seal, which taught him everything there was to learn about underwater demolition, close-quarters combat, land warfare and firearms. Coal was a natural swimmer and this was the perfect career for him. It was the first time he had ever found anything that satisfied him physically as well as mentally.

He had left school early only to get into trouble with the law. Nothing major. Petty thefts, a few fights. He was young and couldn’t get his mind wrapped around anything useful, at least, not until the Navy Seals. They made him complete. They made him a force. But two months short of completing the program, he had killed a man with a kick to the head in training. He wasn’t supposed to hit him that hard, but he did and the man, just a kid really, went into a coma and never recovered. It was an accident. To make matters worse, his victim was black – a boy of eighteen. Coal was red-flagged as a crazy who couldn’t control himself. He was released and no charges were laid. Now what to do? He was a fighting machine and the options were few.

Only once did he ever get hurt on the street – hurt bad – and it was a kick to the head, but it wasn’t so much the force of the blow as the boot. The man who helped him off the pavement that day was a runt named Cobra Creeley. Cobra wasn’t his real name, but that’s what he went by. He was about a foot shorter than Coal and a hundred pounds lighter.

But more dangerous.

He had a tattoo on both his arms just above the elbow. The same tattoo on each. It was the body of a snake, at the front its mouth wide open with fangs exposed, ready to consume the tip of its own tail. On his back between his shoulder blades was another tattoo, a bigger one – King Cobra – with the forked tongue of the snake painted a bright blood-red.

“You got beat by an inferior,” he told Coal. “You’re wearing shoes with a soft heel and he had jackboots. That was the difference. If you want I can get you a pair.”

The boots were made of tough, black leather and went up the leg over the calf. They were pliant, offering freedom of movement, and looked good. Why this Creeley character took such an interest in him, Coal didn’t know, but just like he said he got him the boots and they worked. After that, Coal always wore them on the street.

Coal was a man of few words, but when you were his size and of his cut, you didn’t need many. Creeley was different. Small and nothing to look at, he was a fast talker with lots of ideas who made up for his lack of brawn with his street-smart ways. He knew what made people tick. He knew that if you dig deep and liberated whatever it was that drove them, they would be indebted to you. In Creeley’s mind, the core of every man was frustration at not being able to deal with life’s basic instincts, which were programmed into our DNA from the beginning. All he had to do was unlock it, and his key was a blog that he wrote called The Cobra. He built up a following, and over time it grew into an ezine with thousands of subscribers who paid to hear what he had to say.

One thing led to another and Creeley introduced the big man to his friends. Some of them were physical types, who like Coal came from the military, while others had done time behind bars. The common ilk was that all of them were white and diehard nationalists. At first it was a social thing, a chance to mix and exchange stories. Coal’s story was that he was a Navy Seal and got tossed out because he was too mean.

“If it was a white kid you killed nothing would have happened to you,” said Creeley. “There are lots of accidents. Same thing with the marines. It happens all the time and they try to hush it up but you killed someone who was black. That was your mistake.”

Coal started going to the meetings. They weren’t all skinheads, but some were and like Creeley most of them had tattoos. Coal wasn’t into that. He always treated his body with respect. No disfigurations for him and, aside from the crucifix around his neck, no jewellery either and when they told him why he was no longer a Seal, he bought it. Why else would they dismiss the best fighting man in the unit?

“You got shafted,” Creeley said. “The military isn’t for you and you know why? It’s too organized. There are too many limits. Too many restrictions. That’s not for a man like you. You have potential but you have to be free to realize it. What you need is a path with some structure. But not too much structure.”

It was through them that Coal discovered the pro fighting circuit and he liked that. He was good at it and could even make money, more money than he ever had before, and money had always been a problem for him. He would have time to train and Creeley would be his manager of sorts. Ex officio. Structure but not too much structure.

They said the white race was the superior race and history has shown this to be true. History has made that abundantly clear. Everything America accomplished that was great was on account of white Christian men and women, God-fearing people who knew their place in the bigger scheme of things. This is not to denigrate anyone else. We are not racists. We just look at the facts and the facts are plain to see. A better world is a world where the ones who pull the strings are those who are most able. Some will lead and more will follow. That has been true with every civilization. Those who are born to lead shall lead and any other way is a road to certain disaster. It was all there in The Cobra.

Coal bought it all.

“Now you’re the champion,” Creeley said. “You beat them. Every one of them. No matter what happens to you for the rest of your life they can never take that away from you. At this point at this time you are the best.”

Creeley made Coal feel good about himself and not many people did that before. So on the night of his victory, Coal offered to buy drinks with his winnings. There was a group present and their women were on hand, too. One of the girls mentioned a show that went viral around the
world. It was called Talk Back, and there was something about an old Jewish man who talked about extermination. Coal hadn’t seen it, but Creeley had.

“He says he was a witness,” Creeley said.

“To what?”

“He talked about death camps and bodies burning in ovens. He called everyone on the program a liar and they were all experts. Educated people. Politicians. They had a man from the United Nations on it and hell he tore a strip off him too and called them a bunch of liars because they didn’t believe his story.”

Coal listened.

“Now this is the sort of thing that causes trouble,” Creeley said. “A lot of trouble.”

23

Cathy Trachter was an investigator with the Waterloo Regional Police. She had risen quickly through the ranks since joining the department fresh out of police college, beginning as a fourth-class constable who patrolled the quieter areas of Wellington County. That was all they would give her. But she soon got to see the seedy side of life – a domestic that went wrong, a robbery that erupted into a knifing, or even the occasional shooting. But shootings were rare and homicides rarer still. Not in these parts. However, Waterloo Region was a huge area to patrol and sometimes there were missing persons. The Missing Persons Report for Christine Fisher was nothing out of the ordinary.

Christine Fisher was last seen on December 3
^rd
, 2039 at approximately 4:30 p.m. She was leaving Williamsburg Public School where she was a teacher through a side-door exit that led to the parking lot
.

The Missing Persons Report also had other crucial information.

Date of birth – April 11
^th
, 2014
.

Age when last seen – 25
.

Gender – Female
.

Race – Caucasian
.

Height (Metric) – 170 cm
.

Height (Imperial) – 5 ft. 7 in
.

Weight (Metric) – 65 kg
.

Weight (Imperial) – 145 lbs
.

There were details about Build, Hair Color, Hair Description, Facial Hair, Eye Color, Eyewear, Features, Clothing, Personal Effects and Location Description. According to the Personal Effects, when last seen she was carrying her bag and at least one book. A hardcover book.

Whenever a person went missing, the first few days were the most critical, especially the first forty-eight hours. After a week, police would hedge their bets that the person either disappeared willingly – maybe to leave a bad relationship or escape from financial problems – or was the victim of foul play. It was rarely the latter. Not in Wellington County. But this has been going on for two weeks now.

In this case, the missing person was a schoolteacher who was only three years older than Cathy. Being a teacher meant that she was well educated with a position of responsibility in the community. She had a stable place of work, and judging by the preliminary investigation, no financial troubles. She didn’t take drugs, was a light drinker at best and didn’t mix with unsavoury types, so off the top there was no reason to assume she met with foul play. At least, not from someone she knew. The chances of meeting with foul play at the hands of a stranger always existed, but they were slim and in Wellington County very slim indeed.

It was Sunday and there had been a light dusting of snow overnight, just enough to cover the ground in a thin, white blanket. Cathy was looking for a missing dog, of all things. The dog was a full-grown Collie last seen in Elora, in the park immediately west of Church Street. It had been missing for almost twenty-four hours and the family was frantic. Cathy stopped by the house and talked to the two despondent children. They said they had looked everywhere and couldn’t find their beloved Ranger, a medium-sized dog with the pointed snout typical of Collies and white fur around the shoulders.

“Did you look by the gorge?” Cathy asked them, but they said the dog never went near there.

“I’ll check it out.”

She parked her car in the clearing by the bush and strolled to the edge. Lover’s Leap Lookout. It was a fancy name, but Cathy didn’t know of any lovers who ever jumped. In fact, over the past fifty years there had been only two suicides at the gorge. The first one was a middle-aged man who had been taking depressants after a medical condition. He got his things in order, wrote a letter to his best friend, stopped by the gorge, scaled the barrier and jumped. It had happened at the turn of the century. The second one was many years later. A young woman had just split with her husband after a quarrel and took her life. Just like that. It was more spur-of-the-moment than the first one, but neither incident demanded much of an investigation because both times it was obvious what had happened.

There was no sign of the dog in the park. No sign of anything. When Cathy got to the edge, she looked down. It was a cold December morning and the snow made everything pretty, but it would be gone before the day was over since the forecast called for mild temperatures that afternoon. Cathy peered over the railing and thought she saw something at the bottom. An article of clothing? Maybe a scarf? She wasn’t sure, but it was red. That was easy to see because of the snow.

She took the path along the edge to the wooden stairway that led down the steep slope to the river. When she got to the bottom, she came back the other way by the water. There it was again. A red scarf. That didn’t mean much. Not by itself. Anyone could have dropped a scarf or had it blown away if it wasn’t tied securely, but a little further along was something else. A shoe.
She picked it up. Size 8. Navy blue with a fashionable bow imbedded in the leather. It was a woman’s shoe.

Woof. Woof
.

The barking wasn’t from a dog marking territory or asserting authority. It was a soft unassuming bark just to let you know it was there. The dog was downriver back by the Irvine Street bridge. Cathy put the shoe down and followed the sound, and then she saw it. A Collie. Not too big. Not too small. White fur on the shoulders.

Woof. Woof
.

She got closer and the barking grew more intense. Cathy put her hands up in front of her. “Easy boy. Easy boy. I bet you’re Ranger, aren’t you?” She dug her hand into her pocket and fished out a biscuit. When looking for dogs, biscuits were always good things to have. “Here boy. I got something for you.” The dog sniffed and approached her cautiously. Cathy went down on one knee with the biscuit in her hand. “Here boy. C’mon.”

The Collie took the last few steps, sniffed the biscuit again, leaned in quickly and lapped it up. Cathy patted its soft fur and checked the collar. It said Ranger. She took out another biscuit. The dog lapped that one up, too, and started licking her hand. Then he barked.