DAVID STAGGERED DOWN the dim corridor, hands thrust forward like feeble antennae. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been walking, only that it had been a long time. Some terribly pressing business spurred him onward, step by fruitless step down the unchanging hallway. To his left ran a series of kennels with doors woven of stiff wire, some unoccupied, others holding a motley assortment of dogs. There were Corgis and Pekinese, German Shepherds and sleek-legged Greyhounds, terriers, and retrievers, mutts of every size and description. All of them were mangy and underfed, and many were marred by various mutilations or deformities—missing paws, truncated tails, eye sockets scooped clean or blighted by cataracts thick as egg whites. They paced and whined and whimpered, an orchestra of misery hopelessly out of tune. There seemed no end to the kennels. They ran beyond bends in the hall to either direction, and stacked one atop the other by the dozens, rising until they disappeared into a haze of gloom.
The wall to David’s right was a vista of flat featureless grey, marked only by the occasional locked door or inscrutable sign. He studied the signs when he saw them, but the words sloshed and smeared like inky liquid, running through his fingers every time he strove to grasp their meaning. As he pondered one such collection of fluid hieroglyphics, the disjointed sounds emanating from the kennels swelled in volume. Whines and whimpers became howls and wails, which burst apart into a cacophony of savage barking. Dogs hurled themselves at the doors of their kennels, bloodying their paws and breaking their teeth against barriers of crisscrossed metal. The wire doors groaned against their weight.
“Hang on!” David cried. “I need to find the right one!” He ran down the hallway, scanning the kennels in a desperate search for the dog who’d first started barking. If he could find it, calm it down, the others would follow.
The shrill bleating of an alarm rent the air, dialing up the dogs’ aggression to an even higher pitch. Muzzles drew back in monstrous snarls, revealing foam-flecked jaws that gnashed in David’s direction. A million pounds of canine fury battered the kennels’ doors, snapping wire and bursting hinges. David heard a protracted squeal of shorn metal as the doors gave in as one, unleashing a tsunami of fangs and fur. It crested over him, a thousand thousand dogs roiling and snarling, crushing him—
He awoke with a snort and a muffled cry. Nancy’s hand clutched his shoulder, shaking him gently. She pointed to the nightstand, where David’s cell phone sat ringing. He grabbed the phone and nearly dropped it, his hands clumsy with sleep. The ring cut out mid-bleat as he thumbed the talk button. “Yeah?”
“Hey, Dave. It’s Walter.” Even in his fuzzy state, David noted the absence of jocularity in Walter’s voice.
“Walt,” David said, blinking crust from his eyelashes. “What’s up?”
“You get a call from me at three in the morning, only one thing it could be about, no?”
Swinging his legs out of bed, David grabbed a pad of paper and a pen from his nightstand. He balanced the pad on his thigh and posed the pen to write. “Where are you?”
Walter recited an address. “Sorry to wake you, pal, but you’re going to want to see this. I mean, you won’t want to, but, well, you’ll get what I mean. Just get down here.”
“Everything okay?” Nancy mumbled.
David rubbed his eyes. “We’ll see, I guess.”
He dressed in the dark and left, grabbing a coffee from the Tim Hortons drive-thru on his way. He turned onto Stanford Street and checked the address he’d scrawled in his notepad. He struggled to read his handwriting by the flicker of passing streetlights, but the address proved unnecessary. There was little doubt which house he was looking for. Police cruisers straddled the curb, lights flashing silently, while an ambulance idled in the driveway. Police caution tape cordoned the house in streamers so thick they formed a web. A clutch of neighbours and curious onlookers—the former distinguishable by their bathrobes and pyjamas, the latter by their post-closing time stagger—peered over the barrier, their faces dyed alternating shades of blue and red by the twirling police lights. A pair of uniformed officers walked the line, imploring the onlookers to move along and return to their homes. A few people shuffled off when confronted, but the others mostly ignored the officers’ pleas, and some even tried to pester them for information.
Members of the crowd spotted David, but he was plainclothes and they paid him little mind. A lone exception emerged from the fold: a woman in her mid-thirties, blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, slim legs descending from a tweed skirt. She drew a pen and paper from her purse with a gunslinger’s speed and poised to write.
“Detective Moore? Dawna Lane. We’ve met before, shortly after the fire at Stanford Acres?”
“I remember,” David said, his voice bereft of inflection.
“Care to comment a little on what happened here tonight?”
“I couldn’t tell you. I haven’t even been inside yet.”
Dawna jotted. “This is the third crime of horrific scale in the last few months. Should the public be concerned for their general safety?”
“No more than usual.”
“There’s growing frustration that these cases aren’t being treated seriously. What are the police doing to ensure the public are safe?”
“I really can’t comment on any investigations at the moment. Now, if you’d excuse me.”
He ducked under the caution tape, flashing his badge at the uniformed officer who’d come to send him back. The officer backed up, hands raised. “Sorry, detective. We’re having a hell of a time here.”
“No worries. Seems like half the neighbourhood’s up in our business.”
The cop shook his head. “It’ll only get worse once word gets out.” His narrowed eyes glanced towards Dawna Lane, who continued her scribbling. David nodded, eased the door open slightly to offer the smallest possible view to the crowd, and slipped inside.
Shit. This one’s making the front page, all right.
The destruction was on a scale so massive it seemed staged, a director’s wet dream of domestic mayhem. In the long, L-shaped room stretching from front hall to dining room, maybe one or two pieces of furniture remained unbroken. David spotted an ottoman leaning face-down against the hearth, toppled but otherwise undamaged, and a wooden chair that stood entirely undisturbed, miraculously pristine amidst the chaos. The rest of the room was a maelstrom of splintered wood and shattered marble and smashed electronics. In his days as a Toronto cop, David had been in some scuzzy places, but this was something else altogether. It looked like some well-meaning eccentric had tried to housebreak a hurricane.
Walter stood beside the remains of the dining room table. Built of solid oak by a craftsman worth a damn—no IKEA junk in sight in this place—it had nevertheless broken neatly in the centre, as if a drunken Paul Bunyan had cleaved it in two with his gargantuan axe. Playing cards and plastic chips filled the valley between the table’s severed halves, a stream of them partially covered by a man’s headless body. The head, David was pretty sure, had landed in the curio cabinet, roosting in a nest of broken porcelain figurines. Though it was possible the head belonged to someone else: the floor was strewn with bodies, few of them whole. A quick count put it at six in this room alone, but they’d need forensics to say for sure.
“Quite a sight, eh?” Walter said. “When these guys play high stakes poker, they really play high stakes poker.”
David paced the length of the room with his hands clutched behind his back, stepping carefully to avoid disturbing any evidence, organic or otherwise. The bodies were still pretty fresh—no more than two hours dead, he guessed—but their ripe smell was already unfurling through the room. David considered lighting a cigarette but decided against it. It seemed disrespectful somehow, even if the house’s occupants were far past caring about the adverse effects of secondhand smoke.
He passed his measured gaze over the walls, the floor, the furniture, a single long sweep of a prospector’s sieve, panning for nuggets of meaning amidst the murky rubble. He paused at the dining room window, or rather, what was left of it. The panes had exploded inward in a shower of glass and splintered wood, both sashes torn clear from the frame and smashed to kindling on the carpet below. Something huge had leapt or been thrown inside from the back patio, where muddy prints described a running leap that suggested the former option. Deep gashes scarred the sill and, to a lesser extent, the transom. He took a small flashlight from his pocket and peered through the ruined window, careful not to cut his hands on the glass shards littering the sill.
“It doesn’t make much sense, does it? They came through the window—or at least one of them did. But I’m not seeing any shell casings.”
“I don’t think our guy was packing. Not with anything automatic, anyway. Only casings we found match the guns lying next to ‘em. At least a couple of the victims were armed, but the heat didn’t seem to do ‘em much good.”
“So what, you’re saying these guys we’re attacked by a mob with, I dunno, machetes?”
“Axes, maybe? Whatever it was, it wasn’t a firearm. Only way you’d cause this kind of mayhem’d be with a machine gun. And even if they’d rigged up some mechanism to catch the casings, there ain’t a sharpshooter alive who could pour bullets into a room full of people and not mess up the walls. Coroner’ll say for sure, but I’ll bet you a six-pack of your hipster beer we don’t find a single bullet in these guys, unless they panicked and started shootin’ each other.”
David knelt down and lifted half a broken plate out of the way, uncovering a muddy smear much like the ones he’d spotted on the patio. It was definitely a footprint, but the guy who left it must’ve been pivoting or really filthy, for the shape it left was nothing like a human foot. It flared in the front in a starburst pattern and tapered to the back into a sleek arrowhead.
“All this remind you of something?”
“You mean a certain scene outside a certain strip club? You don’t know the half of it. Look.”
Walter led David to the hearth, where a body lay slumped again the stone fireplace. Something huge and immensely sharp had raked him scalp to sternum, tearing flesh and scoring bone down to the quick. His upper body resembled a piece of roadkill, a slurry of ruined tissue. Walter picked up the wallet lying nearby with gloved hands and held it up, open, to David. A clear plastic window displayed a driver’s license belonging to Vincent Ballaro. David’s gaze snapped back to the body.
“Jesus Christ, you mean—”
“Our best guess, yeah. Again, we’ll need a blood test to be sure, but take a look at the hair. The build. It matches near enough to convince me. First responders already talked to some neighbours, found out this place belongs to a couple named Hank and Stella Mirano. Hank’s got a cozy job in upper management at one of Ballaro’s hotels, or at least he did. Several of the other guys got similar pedigrees. It seems Saturday night poker was a bit of a tradition with these guys. Took turns hosting, played for decent stakes. Ten-buck antes, I heard. Not high rollers per se, but not pocket change, neither.”
David pictured Vincent Ballaro as he’d last seen him: proud, sternly handsome, unintimidated by the two homicide detectives showing up unannounced on his father’s doorstep. He tried to reconcile this image with the charnelhouse scraps lying before him and found he couldn’t do it. It shouldn’t have been so difficult—powerful men died just like any other; David knew that better than most people—and yet the two facts wouldn’t gel. They mingled uneasily as oil stirred in water, globs of one image repelling swirls of the other.
“Fuck me.”
“You got that right. Goddamn place looks like the scene of a bear attack, but I ain’t never heard of a bear who had it in for a mob family.”
Walter reached for his cigarette pack, contemplated the filters for a moment, and put the case away unsmoked. He tongued the tip of his moustache until the hairs grew slick and matted with saliva. “I’ll tell you one thing. Someone’s sending Ballaro a serious fucking message. And subtlety ain’t exactly their strong suit.”
David hunkered next to Vincent’s body. A piece of metal glimmered amongst the wreckage of splintered wood and shattered ceramic a foot or so from Vincent’s fingers. David brushed the debris aside and gently withdrew the object. He held it up with thumb and forefinger to avoid smudging any latent prints. As best he could tell, it was a letter opener in the shape of an ornate dagger, its handle and blade molded from the same bar of tarnished silver. A bit of waxy, blackish blood clotted on its bladed tip.
“Whatever message this fucker is sending, I think the Ballaros are getting it loud and clear.”