Reluctant Detective (11 page)

23

Anne felt a bit guilty, but she enjoyed watching Sean in pain when
she ripped the duct tape from his mouth. He sucked in a few deep
breaths and licked at his dry mouth. After that, he walked Anne
through every step he had taken since leaving Smoke Signals with Carson White.

Sean began with admitting that he had made a deal with Carson.
He'd agreed to launder Carson's money but had said he needed help from Mike Underhay to do it. So he and Carson had gone to the biker club. After they'd arrived, Sean and Cutter had turned on Carson and
roughed him up until he told them where he had hidden the rest of
the cash. Then they'd tied him up until Sean could recover it.

Carson told them that he'd moved the suitcase from where he'd first hidden it and concealed it under the back stoop of an empty
house near the high school. Carson had been afraid his father
might find it in the family garage. Sean had retrieved the valise and
brought it back to Cutter. Both had planned to begin the process of exchanging the currency into Canadian money tomorrow and, over the next week or so, the two of them would launder the bills
across New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. They believed that, if they split up and spread the money over 150 or 200 bank branches, they could convert most of it without suspicion.

“What about Carson?” asked Anne.

“We scared him half to death already. We figured that we could
slip him a few bucks every now and then. That would keep him
happy and quiet. If not… well… who knows?”

“And exactly where is the suitcase now?”

“Exactly? I don't know. I gave it to Cutter. He could keep it safe. It's in the club somewhere.”

“Where likely?”

“Not downstairs. There's too much traffic, and he couldn't keep an
eye on it. Upstairs there's a couple of offices for meetings and stuff.
There's a storeroom. Maybe there.”

“Who else knows about the money besides you and Cutter?

“No one… just Carson.”

“And where is he?”

“Upstairs. Tied up in the storeroom… last I saw him. That's it. That's all I know.”

“Not quite. I want details on the layout of the place. Start with the main floor.”

Anne sketched the layout of both floors according to Sean's
description and stuffed the paper into her pocket. Before she left Sean's apartment, she re-taped his mouth so he couldn't raise an alarm, but she took off his blindfold.

“Where's that big guy?” asked Sean looking around.

“Like I said… downstairs… outside… and he'll be stickin' around
for quite a while. So don't wander off.”

Anne had lied about Tim Perkins. He wasn't downstairs, and he
wasn't outside. After he'd broken down the door and she'd knocked
Sean out, she'd slipped him a hundred dollars. Then he headed for
home. He'd earned his money. Besides, she didn't think she needed him any more tonight.

Now she regretted letting him go. She had been convinced that Sean had the suitcase with him or had stashed it nearby. She was
wrong about that. And Cutter Underhay's involvement. She was
wrong about that, too. Things were getting complicated. One thing hadn't changed, though. Anne had to recover the money tonight, or
it would be scattered all over eastern Canada tomorrow, and she
dared not contemplate what failure might mean to her and to her family.

She tried to conjure up a picture of her mysterious client, the man at the heart of all her troubles and all her fears, but not even
a silhouette outline held its shape in her mind. Every attempt
dissolved in a wash of grey flickering noise like a TV tuned to a dead channel. No shape. No personality. No inkling of his goals. No test of his will. No measure of his character. No estimate of his power. Just a dozen curt words, a twisted cartoon, and a bullet.

How do you battle nothing?
she asked herself.

Anne drove past the Hillsborough Bridge, which separates Charlottetown from the community of Stratford, across the bay. It was
too dark to see Dit's house on the far shore, but she wondered if he were still awake.

She had been
thinking
more about Dit lately, and she didn't know why. In fact, she was not even sure that thinking was the
right word, not in its true sense. He would just walk into her mind unannounced, do this or that, and then disappear, interrupted by
some intrusion of reality. At first, these imaginary drop-ins seemed
incongruous, if not somewhat startling. After a while, though, she
found that she enjoyed having him in her mind. It was a warm
feeling, and there was often disappointment when the real world
shoved him to one side. She thought of him now, bent over his
workbench, labouring over some piece of electronics, his curly hair, chestnut brown, with a hint of red when the sun struck it. He hated
his curls, just as much as Anne loved them. It gave him a boyish charm. Dit was surprisingly strong, too. Despite his handicap or maybe because of it, Dit worked out daily – weights at the gym and
swimming at the pool. He considered himself an athlete, wheelchair or no.

Anne glanced at her watch as she continued down Water Street. It was getting late. Only a few residential lights squinted behind
the dark screen of trees along the banks of Stratford. Then the
commercial wharves of Charlottetown blocked her view, and their orange security lights blazed along the docks and turned the ripples
of the falling tide into a darkly glowing washer board. A cluster of
large bulk oil storage tanks appeared ghostly white in her rearview
mirror. The solitary remnant of the old railway, a walking trail,
flanked the street she travelled. The biker club was just ahead.

What locals referred to as the biker club or the Harley club was actually a licensed bar registered with the Liquor Control Commission under the ownership of a Mr. Michael P. Underhay and named “Cutter's Hole in the Wall.” A rather modest neon sign on the front of the building carried those words. It sputtered a red glow. Above it were the club's colours – a winged motorcycle wheel couched in flames. On the hub was “1 %,” the mark of an outlaw pack.

Cutter was proud of the name he'd given his bar. It copied an
outlaw hideaway in Wyoming, once home to half a dozen notorious
gangs: Jesse and Frank James, Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch, the
Currys, and the Logan brothers. For fifty years, sheriffs' posses had tried to cross the pass into the Hole, but none of them succeeded. It was impregnable. Cutter hoped that Island police would catch the comparison and believe the same of his Hole in the Wall.

That allusion had not escaped Anne as she drove past the place,
though the connection would have gone over the heads of most local
cops. It looked like a fortress, and maybe it was impregnable,
but that remains to be seen
, she thought.

Cutter's Hole in the Wall was a formidable structure. It was stone
and brick construction, an old building, and once a maintenance
shop for the Canadian National Railway. When railroad maintenance
shifted to the mainland in the 30s, many of these repair depots
were sold off and used as commercial warehouses. Cutter's uncle had turned it into a dance hall and bar in the late 50s. Cutter had inherited the property forty years later.

Windows in the one-time maintenance shop were small, and they
were steel-barred to prevent theft. They'd been that way when Cutter acquired the property. They remained that way. Barred
windows suited his purposes, too. He'd made other changes, though.
He'd replaced the heavy wood doors at the main entrance and
loading dock with steel ones. Both new doors locked automatically when closing. An extra-high chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire strands, cordoned three sides of the property. This discouraged
anyone approaching from anywhere except the front door, and
that was down an alley formed by one of the fences. A surveillance
camera covered the alley and revealed anyone approaching the
main entrance. Visitors and patrons rang a buzzer to get inside, and a bouncer monitoring the camera opened the door if he liked what he saw.

Anne spotted only one possible weakness in Cutter's Hole in the Wall – the steel door along the receiving dock. It was located near
the street for easy delivery truck access, but it was not covered by a camera. If she were able to get inside, it would be through that door.

Anne circled the block slowly one more time, passed Cutter's flickering neon sign, and parked on the street just past the Hole in the Wall. Anne popped the trunk latch, got out, and rummaged through a box of professional junk Uncle Billy'd always kept there: tools – some standard, some specialized; rolls of tape; coils of rope and wire; latex and work gloves; a couple of knives and scissors; spare notebooks; harnesses; a grappling hook; pry bars; blocks and tackle; glues and fasteners; lengths of chain; batteries and
flashlights; flares, suction cups, glass cutter, and spare clothes. She'd
always marvelled at the variety, but had sometimes questioned
the utility of some of the stuff in Billy's treasure chest. When asked
about them, sometimes Billy had told her; other times he'd just
winked and smiled and said “Ya never know.”

Anne pushed aside a container of cherry bombs and a knot of bungee cords and pulled out a cheap, three-hole plastic binder, a pair of scissors, and a roll of packing tape. She cut a three-inch
square section out of the binder and put it in her jacket pocket with
the scissors and tape. In a vacant lot up the street she'd found a
hefty rock and a small chunk of wood. With that, she thought she had everything she needed.

Her first job was to extinguish the light above the loading dock. It was close to the street, and traffic was steady. So she bided her time
until pedestrians had passed and no cars approached. Then she
tossed the scrap of wood at the overhanging light. It took four tries
before the bulb shattered and that corner of the building fell into
darkness.

She hurried into the shadows along the side of the building. With her leather jacket zipped up she was almost invisible against the
aging brick and stone wall of Cutter's bar. She climbed onto the
loading dock and surveyed the service door. It was large and solid. Anne measured up the side of the door to where the latch would be, about a third of the way up. She took the clear square of plastic from
her pocket and positioned it on the outside of the door frame at latch
level. A strip of clear packing tape held it firmly in place. An inch and
a half of flexible plastic overlapped the door so that when the door
opened and closed, the plastic would catch between door and frame and bend inward, preventing the latch from catching but allowing the door to close over it.

Anne fingered the plastic and tape, making sure it was firmly
in place and retreated half a dozen steps back from the door. She
retrieved the rock she had picked out, wound up, and slung it as hard as she could against the door. The metal reverberated with a great clang in the dampness of the night and the rock bounced
dully onto the concrete loading platform. Anne used the handful of
seconds after she hurled the rock to sprint into the shadows of a
nearby building. She crouched there and watched the door angrily
pushed out. The tall thick silhouette of a man stood backlit in the
doorway. His arms stretched out, holding door wide open with one
hand and the other braced against the frame.

Anne prayed that his hand wouldn't slip down the frame and graze
the plastic she had taped there. Another man came behind him. The
two silhouettes gawked toward the street, back along the fence, and around the dim perimeter of the loading dock. The first man spotted the rock and kicked it off the platform.

“Fuckin' kids again,” muttered the second.

Then the two silhouettes disappeared. The door closed behind them, and the corner turned dark once again. It wasn't until then
that Anne realized that she had been holding her breath all the
while. So she gathered a few lungsful of air and gave herself a few
minutes to gather her thoughts and calm her nerves. Then she
walked toward the club, eased into the shadows, and mounted the loading platform. Her hand slid along the edge of the door until it felt the smooth touch of plastic and the curve of it vanish – trapped between the door and the frame.

Thank god it held
.

Then she grasped the cold metal handle and pulled, increasing
pressure ever so gradually until the door lifted a fraction of an inch and she felt the latch slip under the plastic shim.

A sudden wave of doubt overcame her just before the service door
cleared the jamb. Her hand stalled. Every thought fled. Her blood
pulsed in her throat. And her eyes went half-blind.

2
4

Time hung heavily on Sean's mind, or maybe it was the pain that
made it seem that way. It came upon him in pulsations, like an ocean
wave but with the unpredictability of a failing heart, and that made
each stab of pain a tortuous surprise, and every moment of that hurt he attributed to… whom….

Who was she… she knew about the money… said it was hers… but how could she track it down so quick? Less than a day. We were long gone before anybody could ID us. And nobody knew but Carson and me. Maybe she's a cop,
he thought, but dismissed that idea almost
as speedily as it occurred to him.
No, she didn't flash a badge… and she would have arrested me… for spite, if nothing else. Besides she's too small to be a cop… and that big guy didn't look like a cop either… hired muscle.

I hafta get outta here and talk to Cutter.

Sean knew that Cutter would be furious about this. No way around
it. But he would be savage if he were blind-sided and lost all that money. Sean wouldn't want to face him after that. And then there
was the embarrassment. Sean wondered if he would ever live down
that… the story that some scrawny girl had taken him down. She… whoever she was… had made a fool of him. He wouldn't forget it.
Sometime soon she was going to pay… he'd beat her so ugly that no man would look at her again… no man would even poke her with a stick. That'd teach her a lesson.

Revenge seemed an efficacious remedy for his pain. The longer
Sean mulled over the humiliation he endured, the more rage he kindled. For a while he scarcely noticed his aching head or his burning eyes. He tugged at his bindings in a vicious bid to break free, but it was awkward being tied from behind. He jerked and
twisted until he grew weary. Then he jerked and twisted some more
until he felt a muscle pull in his shoulder. Only that crisp, new hurt
finally convinced him that struggling was futile. The plastic ties still
held. The old radiator was unmoved. And for all his effort a trickle
of blood oozed from his wrist.

Helpless and frustrated, Sean leaned back against the radiator. His
mind returned to his pain, and his idle fingers restlessly traced the
contours of the pipe and radiator to which he was attached.

Then he touched something, and his mind came to life. His fingers
had brushed against an imperfection. He had felt a rough edge at
the bottom of the casting. It was small, but it was sharp and ragged, and he was sure that it made a tool good enough to wear away at his restraints. He only hoped he could make it work in time.

After that, Sean focussed all his concentration and strength on chafing the plastic ties up and down against the edge of the cast
iron. It was difficult, repetitive work, but Sean dug into it at a
feverish pace. Before long, his body began aching. After ten minutes the muscles in his arms and shoulder were burning. After fifteen minutes, the last strand let go. At last he was free.

Then he picked up the phone.