“Okay, just keep it holstered is all. What we’re doing isn’t strictly legal, you know, without a warrant.”
Lonnie smiled. “You Mounties do have your limitations.”
They ran from the car up the driveway and huddled under a rare chestnut tree. The rain wasn’t heavy, just cold, like little icy needles against their skin. They could see the limo parked in front of the entrance, which was bathed in light from the foyer.
“I’ll go ’round the right. You take the left,” Garrett said. “Just look in the windows. See what you can see. Meet back at the car in ten minutes. We’ll reconnoiter.”
“Always wanted to add Peeping Tom to my extensive resume,” Lonnie grunted, but he lumbered off.
In fact, the house might have been designed for Peeping Toms. There was plenty of cover, with numerous shrubs delineating carefully mowed lawns and big, twelve-over-twelve windows. Garrett stayed wide of the foyer, in the shadows of the trees, then parked under one of the windows and peered inside. The room was empty, as were the next two that he checked. Finally, he came to a larger space. It was an enormous living room with a stone fireplace, leather loveseats, and dimmed lighting. A Chinese woman and man stood in front of the fire talking. They were quite intent about whatever it was they were discussing.
The man turned and called something toward a hallway that disappeared out of sight. In a moment two more men entered, along with three young Chinese girls.
Garrett stiffened, but the girls seemed entirely at ease. They bounced down onto the leather couches, giggling and talking to one another. The Chinese woman went over and stared at them. She said something and the girls immediately stood up and took off their clothes. The woman looked them over, then turned abruptly and crossed to a desk, where she unlocked a drawer. She handed a wad of bills to the man. He nodded once, gestured with his head to one side, and he and the other men left.
Garrett had seen enough to know what had transpired. The girls had just been sold to Madame Liu. He’d have to figure out what to do about that at some point. But right now what he wanted more than anything was to follow the man who had sold them.
He jogged back across the lawn, cursing when his prosthesis landed in a large, soggy puddle surrounding a flower bed filled with some kind of fertilizer. Probably cow manure with his luck.
Lonnie was already back at the car waiting for him.
“You’re late,” he said.
“Nice to be missed. Get in. We’re tailing the limo when it leaves.”
They sat in the car for about a minute before the big car turned slowly out of the drive. Lonnie said, “Something stinks.”
“I know. The guy in the car just sold three girls inside. But I don’t want to move in now. I’m hoping they’ll lead me to someone—maybe a bad cop.”
“No. I mean something stinks.
You
stink.”
Garrett looked down at his shoe and realized it was covered in manure. “My new cologne,” he said. “Deal with it, and get going. I don’t want to lose those sons of bitches.”
That was unlikely. Lonnie had been a tank driver in Iraq. He could make anything with a cylinder purr like a pussycat. You hadn’t lived till you’d seen him on a Harley. He looked like an elephant riding a motor scooter. It had always amused Garrett to watch his cousin squeeze himself into a tank. It was a very tight fit, but Lonnie had absolutely no problem with claustrophobia.
They kept an easy distance behind the big car. Though there was little traffic this time of night, the rainfall made it unlikely they’d be spotted. They followed Route 2 along the shore of Bedford Basin all the way downtown, hooked up with Barrington Street and funneled onto the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge that took them across the harbor to Dartmouth.
Garrett looked down on the warships of the Canadian Navy parked just off the bridge access, their turrets drifting in and out of a fogbank. The lights of the city twinkled in the mist along both shores. A steady rain made the scene as dismal as could be.
“Typical Halifax weather,” Lonnie groused.
“A wonder Governor Cornwallis didn’t turn around and go home when he got here,” said Garrett. “Hell of a lot better weather in the old world.” But they both knew there was more to it than that. Halifax had one of the best protected ice-free harbors in the world.
They turned left on Victoria Road, right on Woodland Avenue, passed through the rotary, and ended up on the shore of a small body of water called Lake Micmac. The limo pulled into a small private parking lot. Lonnie drove past and pulled over to the side of the road.
By the time they got out of the car and crept back, they discovered what was happening. The occupants of the limo had boarded a small launch at a dock and were motoring out onto the black lake. In a moment, only its running lights could be seen.
“Damn! We’ve lost them.”
“Maybe not,” said Lonnie. “Wait a minute.”
They watched the boat’s lights dwindle and then heard its engines cut back.
“Going to that island,” said Lonnie. “We can always come back in daylight and check it out.”
Garrett nodded. If it was a private home, it was certainly well isolated, the kind of place someone might want if he was up to no good.
“Okay,” he said. “We’ll be back.”
12
I
F LONNIE AND GARRETT WERE
going to get on that island, they’d need transportation. A standard kayak wasn’t feasible for Lonnie. He was wider than the cockpit. At an outfitter Garrett knew on the outskirts of the city, he purchased two solo kayaks, one with an open cockpit for Lonnie. He paid for them with an RCMP voucher. Tuttle was going to love that.
He took the boats straight to Sarah’s. She wasn’t home, so he went out alone for a test run. When he got back an hour later, she was waiting on the pebble beach by the wharf.
“I was thinking about calling the police,” she said, as he pulled up and stepped out of the boat. “But then I remembered you
are
the police and I couldn’t very well report that you were missing to you.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson.” He shook off his life jacket and tossed it and the paddle into the boat. Then he pulled the kayak above the high tide line.
“What happens when you get the bionic foot wet?”
“Never a good thing, but it stands up pretty well under most conditions.”
“Where have you been?”
“Doing a little recon out beyond Heron Rook Island.”
“There’s a storm supposed to be coming in,” she said. “Leftovers of that hurricane that hit down in Florida. One of them anyway. Been a busy season that way. You don’t want to be out when something like that makes landfall.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow. “You’ve done a lot of kayaking then?”
“Long time ago, when I was in my twenties. Fact is I was kind of into it. Kayaked around the entire province of Nova Scotia. Took three years. I got so I could replace a broken rudder cable in a gale.”
She looked suitably impressed. “So what sort of recon were you doing?”
“I’ll tell you in exchange for a scone and a cup of tea.”
Inside, Sarah went about making tea while Garrett put an obscene slab of butter on his scone.
“I’ve actually got two avenues that might require a little boating,” he said. “One is checking out an island on Lake Micmac in Dartmouth, whose owners probably don’t take kindly to trespassers.”
“And the other?”
He stared out at the ocean. “We can’t catch those SOBs in a Coast Guard cutter. They can hear us coming for an hour.”
“So you’re going to sneak up and ram them with your kayak? Good plan.”
“Well, you got the ‘sneak up’ part right. Not so sure about the ramming part.”
“You won’t do that alone, will you?” The concern in her voice was real.
He stopped eating and looked at her. “No, I won’t. Probably Tom and maybe one of my cousins will go along. Anyway, nothing can happen until we get the next tip. Then, we’ll see. But …”
“What?”
“Would you go for a paddle with me this weekend, take along a picnic, maybe check out that whale?”
She brought his tea over and put it on the table. Then she lingered, putting one hand on his shoulder. “Are you asking me out on a date, Garrett, or just wanting company to help you find the whale? It’s been a long time and I can’t really tell.”
He looked into her eyes and studied the set of those thin lips. Then very slowly, he pulled her down and kissed her. She hesitated at first, then relaxed and put the requisite amount of effort into it.
When they separated, she stood up, her hand still on his shoulder, but squeezing a little tighter. “I guess that means it’s a date, huh?”
“Pretty
and
smart is my favorite combination in a woman.”
13
R
OLAND WAS SEETHING AS HE
pulled his boat up to the wharf. God damn Ar-teests were insufferable. They were trying to make a fool out of him, which of course was the result of his efforts to catch them, especially Grace, sunning themselves. Ingrid’s naked body did nothing but anger him. She was actually making fun of him by exposing herself. He felt the anger rise in him like bile.
Ingrid was the worse of the two, hands down. He couldn’t imagine what her husband saw in her. He didn’t find her angular features and large breasts the least bit attractive. But Grace was something different. He couldn’t keep himself from thinking about her. She was just so incredibly beautiful and had been a part of his fantasies from the moment he first laid eyes on her.
He finished tying off the boat, carried the handful of bait fish he’d caught to his cooler, and deposited it inside. He listened to the satisfyingly loud roar of the compressor. Maybe he could tweak it a bit louder still. Trouble was he didn’t want to burn out the motor. He decided to leave it alone for the time being.
As soon as he entered the house, Rose called from her room. “Whad’ya catch?” she said.
“Nothin’ but bait fish, Ma. There’s nothin’ left out there. If it wa’nt fer the scallops, we’d be eatin’ seaweed all winter long.”
“It’s the seals,” said Rose. “Critters eat all the fish. Them and the oil rigs fouling the water.”
It was a long-standing belief that seals were responsible for the declining fish industry. In recent years, fishermen had taken to shooting the creatures on sight. It was nonsense, of course. The local industry had simply fished out the banks, in consort with the big factory ships from Japan and Russia. Seals had nothing to do with it—except to suffer along with everyone else.
“Did I tell ya,” Rose said, “I saw Grace out on her deck. I swear all she had on was a pair o’ Kleenexes shaped like a bikini. I don’t know what we done ta deserve havin’ ta live next ta a house full’a perverts.” Her voice petered out and Roland knew she’d lost the energy necessary to continue her conversation yelling from the other room.
Good thing. He didn’t want to hear about it. He cursed his luck at having missed Grace. He limped up the stairs and down the tiny, narrow hall to the room at the back of the house. This was where he had the best view of his neighbors. Rose never came upstairs. She was too fat and crippled.
He had a chair set up where he could sit and just stare at the house next door. There was a set of binoculars on a table next to him. At night, he’d sit in the dark waiting for a light to go on in any of their windows. He’d only gotten a glimpse or two, though. It was as if they knew what he was doing and avoided activity at the rear of the house. Which only served to make him even more frustrated.
He heard a car coming round the cove but didn’t get up. No one ever visited them. It might be a delivery, of course. He ordered fishing equipment through parcel post and Rose was always getting stuff for her crafts.
When the car turned into their driveway and he heard the engine stop, he hoisted himself out of the chair, took one more look at the neighbors’ house, and went to see who it was.
“There’s som’un at the door,” Rose yelled needlessly.
Roland opened the door and stared at Garrett. He was so surprised at the visit, he was nearly speechless. He hadn’t really expected Gar to stop by as he’d asked. No one ever did.
“Hi Roland,” Garrett said. “Glad I caught you home. Can I come in?”
“Can I do somethin’ for ya, Gar?”
“Been wanting to talk to you is all. Thanks for the roofing repair on the old house. It’s a real nice job. Hundred dollars cover it?”
“Sure.” Roland took the money in Garrett’s hand.
“Can I say hello to your mother?”
Roland led the way into his mother’s room where she sat like an immense Buddha behind piles of wood, fabric, and paints. The rest of the room was filled with stacks of various craft supplies, old magazines, and discarded boxes of chocolates. The strong odor of her presence hung over everything. She was so heavy and immobile that she rarely bathed.
“Hello Rose,” Garrett said. “How are you getting along?”
“Had better days,” she grunted. No one offered him a chair, which were all piled high with debris anyway. “Glad you’re here, though. Mebbe you can do somethin’ ‘bout those disgustin’ Ar-teests next door. A’w’ys prancin’ about wit’ no clothes on. Me and Roland is tired of it.”
“Uh-huh,” Garrett said, not believing a word of it. Roland would be the last one to protest any girl going naked within his line of sight. But it gave him an opening. “Well, I’ll certainly talk to them about that, Rose. We want to keep the peace amongst neighbors.”
“Neighbors, horseshit!” Rose said. “All their druggy friends from the city hang out here. Ya need ta git a warrant and search the place. It’s full’a illegal stuff.”
“Well, I’m here to make sure no one breaks the law, and I’ll keep an eye on them, you can count on it.” He took a deep breath. “But while we’re on the subject, Roland, I’ve come to tell you you’ve got to either fix or turn that compressor off. Hell, I couldn’t hear myself think when I got out of the car. It’s way beyond any legal decibel level.”
Roland’s face turned red. “I got a legal right ta keep my bait from spoilin’.”
“Come on, Roland. You and I both know why you’re doing this. It’s simply to aggravate your neighbors. You don’t even need bait this time of year and when you do, you can store it at the fisherman’s co-op. Now you have a right to keep a cooler here if you want. But the only way I’ll allow it is if you get a new compressor and insulate it so there’s no sound coming from it that will bother people.”