Primal Scream (5 page)

Totem Lake

"Let's get a look at you. See if anything's broken inside."

The bullet hole in Spann's parka was directly over her heart, exposing the lightweight body armor beneath. The order was all Members flying to the lake had to fly sheathed, the rebels having shown a penchant for taking potshots at planes, so Spann had worn a vest during the flight with Dodd. It amused her that Bush, like most men, had ogled her chest, which protected by the vest was as shapely as Queen Victoria's bust.

"Ughh," Spann gasped as she reached up to undo her parka. Sharp pain like that of a heart attack shot down her left arm.

"Allow me," said the Mad Dog, gallantly easing off the coat and stripping her body armor. "I can trust you not to cry sex harassment, Kathy? Could be a broken rib stabbing your heart."

He unbuttoned her shirt and spread it wide to bare her bra. "That's an ugly bruise," he said, while poking her rising and falling breasts where they sloped out of the cups.

"Now's your chance for a good long look," she said dryly. "You've stripped me with your eyes since the day we met."

That day was years ago during the Headhunter case, when they'd squared off in the locker room of the Tudor building that
now housed Special X, the Mount
ies around them betting whether he or she could arm the better ERT team, and this macha woman had whipped this macho man's cockiness.

The Force had first recruited women in 1974, and Spann had topped the original troop trained at Depot Division in Regina. Most men back then were hostile to her being in the ranks, so when her barracks trunk was sent ahead to her first posting, detachment Members held a lottery to guess her bra size. When she arrived, a suitable pair of plastic breasts were waiting on her desk, regimental number penned around both nipples. The way Spann viewed life, breasts were the battlefield of feminism. Whether it was fashion flaunting them for ages, or Hefner launching
Playboy
with Monroe's pair, or bra burning hi the sixties, or Barbie implants, or Madonna's side show, or Hooters restaurants—tits were it. The Mounted's first uniform for women had been designed to show them off. Unlike men, who wore cotton shirts with pockets, she was issued a silky top without pockets that clung like Handi-Wrap, so all could see "her high beams" when she was chilled.
Women's trousers were also pock
etless, so notebooks and other equipment were tucked in her belt. The hat looked like an inverted flower pot.

Spann had fomented a vote among women to have that changed, prompting a reprimand for "aggression" from an inspector who, the only time she phoned in sick, marked her file with a circle colored red. The passing of that vote quashed the sexist uniform, and now women wore the same working dress and Red Serge as men, forage cap and Stetson included.

In 1992 women finally reached the select ranks of commissioned officers who ran the Force. Since she came in laterally, the deputy commissioner didn't count, but that same year saw women rise to the rank of inspector, and if—as Spann was confident—De-Clercq promoted her the head of Administration at Special X, then she, too, would soon be among the Brass. With zero tolerance the rule for sexual harassment, the only all-male bastions left were the ERT teams.

How Kathy yearned to crash them!

A brawny loner with a heavy-browed scowl, Mad Dog Rabidowski was the meanest-looking Member in the Force. He was the sort of sexist who believed "harass" was two words. There had been a tune when people said h
e looked like Charles Bronson (
I
was too rough on Hollywood
, thought Spann), a likeness he welcomed until Bronson went soft, so now he echoed the screen moves of Harvey Keitel. The Mad Dog made a point of dating only whores, for—as he put it—"Why mess with amateurs if you can blow with a pro?" Alone with him in the ERT command trailer at Zulu base, Katherine Spann could smell testosterone awaft in the air.

"I'm hurt," said the Mad Dog, "that you find me so crass. I'm engaged to Brit, and was gonna ask you to be my best man."

"You! Getting married?"

"Sure. Why not? You're a not-bad-looking broad. So why aren't you hitched?"

"Never found the man who was man enough for me."

"Must break your heart that I'm outta circulation, huh? And speaking of broken hearts, your rib cage seems okay." He buttoned up her shirt and said, "If you're so hung up on tits, you oughta see Brit's."

"As I recall,
everyone
saw her tits after the bomb blew at the Red Serge Ball."

"So with such beauts at home, what makes you think I wanna gawk at yours?"

Trust the Mad Dog to take a hooker to the regimental ball, and boast to one and all about the fortuitous way they met:

"I'm on the Lougheed a few years back, driving up valley to an ERT meet, when I see the car ahead weaving down the road, crossing the center line and then veering toward the shoulder, back and forth, this way and that, gotta be the best impaired I ever snagged, so on go the wigwags to pull the drunk over."

The Mad Dog offered Spann a cigar to accompany her glass of port. "Don't stop now," she said. "I'm hanging in suspense."

"Sitting behind the wheel is a naked babe, jutting the best set you ever did see, not a stitch to hide the buff before my eyes except a flimsy G-string around one ankle."

"You ask her to blow?" said Spann, feeding him the breathalyzer double entendre.

"No, she told me to give her the ticket fast Said she had a job stripping in a local bar, and having been late three times that week, she'd been warned once more and she was out the door. Due onstage in five minutes, that's why she was changing in the car. Asked me if I'd ever tried swapping undies for a G-string with my foot on the gas."

"Have you?" Spann asked.

"Funny girl."

"Give 'er the blue?"

"Didn't have the heart. I drove her to work code three while she changed in my car."

Spann looked at the next ballroom table, where Nick Craven was conversing with the Mad Dog's date, a bleach blonde in a low-cut, skin-tight gown. Yes, Brittany Starr did jut the best set she'd ever seen, so Kathy took the offered cigar, bit off the end, and lit up.

"That's what I like about you, Spann. No bullshit. Hit in the heart by a slug, yet still you hold onto the Smith."

The Mad Dog held her gun up in one hand, comparing it to the SIG/Sauer he carried. Since 1954 the side-arm of the Force had been the Smith & Wesson .38 Special, a six-shot revolver long outgunned on the street. The ERT teams
were the first to get semiauto
matics, but now the Force in general was switching to the Smith & Wesson 9-millimeter in two models. The larger Series 5946 held a double stack, fifteen rounds staggered zigzag hi the mag and one in the spout. The smaller Series 3953 held a single stack, eight rounds piled high and one in the spout, with a lighter trigger pull for dainty fingers. Cop mentality is such that no sane male would dare pack the "woman's gun."

"No 3953 for you, eh? Spann sports a double stack, like real guys. I always said the day a broad makes the team, my bet was it'd be you."

"That's what I don't like about you, Ed. Bullshit, by the shovel. We both know the rules are fixed to keep me out. The ERT team operates like a fraternity. Leader is elected by the group, so rank is irrelevant to who's in command, and a single blackball is enough to prevent undesirables joining. But you don't need a ding session to keep us out, since no woman has bulk enough to bench-press the physical."

The Mad Dog poked her breast. "Get working on your pecs."

The ERT command trailer marked the center of Zulu base, which looked more like a set from M*A*S*H than it did a police action. Encircling the trailer were canvas tents dusted with snow, served by blue portable toilets lined in a row, and an icy parking lot beside a chopper clearing. One of the tents was a field hospital staffed by paramedics, but shortly before the snowmobile had roared in with George holding Spann, they'd been called out to an accident on the Kispiox road. The Mad Dog filled the gap by playing doctor in the trailer, and that done, the two cops bundled up and opened the door and stepped out into the vortex of action prompted by the MVA and rebel shot at her.

Dubbed "the big red tomato," a Bell 212 hovered in ground effect, rotors swirling up twisters of snow like whirling dervishes.

Vehicles rumbled in and out of the parking lot, an ambulance approaching from the Kispiox road, while four Bison APCs on loan from the Canadian army churned away, each armored personnel carrier, tailgate up and turret closed, marked with the crest of the RCMP. Caged inside were ERT cops and "Members without badges," all German shepherds except for one Labrador to sniff for bombs. A convoy of cube vans trailed behind.

With them gone, there were still cops in camp, for fifteen emergency response teams—235 assault troops—had been choppered in from detachments around B.C. and Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ottawa. In whiter camouflage they drifted like spirits through the snow, as if Ghost Dancers had besieged the camp, as Spann and the Mad Dog wound their way to a winter morgue on the edge of white woods.

The corpse cut from the waterfall was still in its shroud of ice, and now lay on a sled for transport east to Dodd's plane. George was about to pack it hi sawdust like ice men of old, then zipper it into a thermal body bag, but on seeing the pair approach, he left the remains exposed. Spann took a long look at what had brought her here, the naked blue body frozen hi blue ice, the genitals shriveled to the size of a baby boy's, the cuts on the bare feet from running through icy bush, the wrists locked together in front with handcuffs, the healed end of the right ring finger missing a phalange, the arrow angling out of the heart, the tubes hi the stump where the head was hacked off.

"You okay?" George asked.

"Yeah," Spann replied. "You see who shot Moses John hi front of me?"

"No," said the Cree. "The shot came from the west. From the sundance circle or farther on. Wind cleared a sightline for the marksman, but snow hid him from view. All I saw was John's head explode."

"Why shoot the holy man?" the Mad Dog asked. "Kill him so Grizzly has no power rival hi camp? Now he's the undisputed leader of the rebels."

"And can say we shot their spiritual leader," said Spann.

"Assuming the target was Moses John," said George. "He stepped toward you a moment before the shot. How do we know the target wasn't you? One in the" doomsday cult striking out at the New World Order."

"Either way, if he's involved, Grizzly just passed the point of no return. The hope for a peaceful outcome exploded with John's head." Spann turned her attention back to the corpse in the ice. "How tall is the stiff?" she asked.

"Five-six to the stump."

"That matches Jed Vanderkop. The hunter from Idaho who vanished near here last month. The stiff is missing the end of the same finger as him. Looks like an archer bow-hunted Jed."

"Stripped him, and cuffed him, and let him run for sport," said the Mad Dog. "Stalking him through the icy woods above the waterfall, where he was finally brought down with a damn good shot. The stream carried him over the falls, and he froze in the pool below."

"A white guy shot with an arrow close to a camp of white haters picking up ancient ways. The archer's M.O. seems to fit the rebels," said Spann.

"Hardly ancient ways," the Mad Dog countered. "The arrow's an Easton XX75 2219." With his glove he tapped the plastic nock of the olive drab camouflaged aluminum shaft. "Cam prevents sun splashing off it as a warning. It's fletched with three soft-yellow plastic vanes, for quieter flight and no moisture flattening out. From the slits around the wound, I'd say Jed's spine was slammed by a Wasp three-bladed broadhead 130-grain chisel-point or similar arrowhead. The archer uses an oversize arrow with a forty- to forty-five-pound bow. Any stronger and the shaft would punch through the spine. I know lots of bow hunters who'd shoot this arrow, and all of them are
white
."

"That jibes with what John told me just before he was shot," Spann agreed. "He said he may have spied the archer hunting in the bush on the bluff above the falls at twilight prior to the freeze. When I asked who, last thing he said was 'The white man . . .'"

"The white man?" echoed George. "Not a lot to work with. But maybe someone knows a Caucasian who bow-hunts near here."

"Unless he meant the White Man," stated Bush Dodd. "In which case you're looking for a native trapper with lines around here."

"A native called the White Man?" wondered Spann.

"He's albino, and whiter than you or me."

"Real name?" George asked.

"Winterman Snow."

"Met him?"

"We crossed paths a few tunes in the woods. When I landed hell and gone in the bush. The guy's a lone wolf who lives off the land. Only comes out now and then to sell furs."

"You know," said Spann, winking at Dodd. "The good old days might not be over yet. We may get to bush-hunt our own Mad Trapper."