(Blaze of glory)
At HQ, Cinq-Mars burst into Touton’s office, finding it vacant. Officers in the main room had no clue where he’d gone. A miscreant brought in for throwing a punch at his barber listened to the cops discussing the matter, then piped up, ‘He went to the morgue.’
Not knowing the charge against this man, only that he was cuffed and sporting a bizarre haircut, Cinq-Mars asked, ‘Ours? The basement morgue?’
The man shrugged. ‘He told me he’d be in the morgue. Like he wanted me to know. Weird. I don’t think it was a suicide note, but I’m not sure.’
‘What happened to your hair?’ Cinq-Mars asked him.
‘Only my barber knows for sure. He might be conscious by now.’
Cinq-Mars tore off to the bowels of the building, praying to high heaven that if a newly arrived corpse had been dropped off it wasn’t Quinn’s.
The dead person turned out to be male, mid-fifties. A jumper. Lazy in his preparations for death, he’d botched the job. Instead of hitting the river off the Jacques Cartier Bridge, he’d done a belly-flop onto solid earth. The gruesome carcass was less the center of attention than an unrelated conversation, with raucous laughter, involving Touton, Huguette Foss and Dr Eudo Lachapelle.
They didn’t notice Cinq-Mars enter and looked up only when he announced himself, loudly. ‘Hey!’
‘Look what the cat’s dragged in!’ Huguette exclaimed. ‘The prodigal mouse. I mean, detective. The prodigal detective.’
The remark might have instigated a fresh round of repartee, except that Touton knew his former junior officer had a situation on his hands.
‘What’s the verdict?’ Touton pumped him. His tone abrupt, intent.
‘The girl’s been abducted. Confirmed. An APP is out on a blue van. We got nothing else. Looks pro.’
‘Ciampini, you think?’
‘Over a baseball?’
‘That ball could mean his life.’
‘You two have been around the block.’
‘All right,’ Touton consented, ‘I’ll talk to him. Do you get what’s going on? He’s not worried about me or concerned about the law. His mob cousins in New York irritate him more. If they receive confirmation that in the old days he took out their favorite uncle, we’ll be videotaping his funeral.’
Cinq-Mars agreed. ‘That’s why we need more than a chat with him.’
Nearby, Huguette was revisiting the jumper’s corpse. He had to look away. One unholy horror.
‘I can make our displeasure known,’ Touton said. ‘Twist the blade once it’s in.’
‘A reprimand won’t make him give the girl back.’
‘What’s your thought?’
‘Blaze of glory, Captain.’
Touton gazed back at him. He had an inkling of what was fermenting in Cinq-Mars’s head.
Huguette ceased her ministrations.
‘Some new trick?’ Touton inquired.
‘Armand, we’ve talked about it, but never gave it a name. Wouldn’t it be great, we said, to go full throttle? Disrupt his night clubs. Shut down his bookies. Plow his drug pushers under the sidewalk. You know what I’m saying. Round up his addicts, bugger his clients, give his restaurant patrons indigestion.’
‘Cinq-Mars—’
He wasn’t finished. ‘Disorient his hookers, scoop up their johns. Drive the pimps so deep manhole covers will be their rooftops. Maybe that time has come.’
‘What is it with you and this girl?’
‘I’m dead serious, Armand.’
‘I see that.’ Touton folded his arms across his chest, leaned back against a gurney. ‘OK, we talked about it, or was that the whisky talking? The case against full throttle hasn’t changed.’
‘One thing has.’
‘Explain.’
‘Your retirement. Except for the back of your heel, you’re already out the door. What does it matter if they give you the boot early? What’s a few weeks?’
Touton understood the parameters. A blaze of glory. By the time department heads and political elites got wind of the operation, he and Cinq-Mars might have accomplished what they were setting out to do. They could put the business operations of Joe Ciampini through a meat grinder and inflict severe damage to his reputation in places where his reputation mattered.
‘Doesn’t mean we get to nail his tail to the wall,’ Touton noted. ‘He gets mad. Releases the girl to put an end to it. Maybe. Best case. We still don’t come away with an arrest. Ciampini walks.’
‘Let him walk. I promise to take up the cause after you stroll off into the sunset. He walks. So does the girl. Quinn deserves to live. We show Ciampini who’s boss. We let him know that if she disappears, it’s the end of him.’
‘It won’t be. The end of him. If she dies.’
Cinq-Mars twisted in the wind right where he stood, wrestling with that reality. ‘He doesn’t need to hear it from me,’ he determined. ‘Convince him otherwise.’
Touton mulled things over. Cinq-Mars had learned that Touton forged big decisions slowly. Patience was required to push him in a new direction.
‘If I’m the colossal idiot you think I am and buy shares in your cockamamie blaze of glory,’ the senior cop determined, ‘it still won’t be enough. He’ll knuckle down. He needs the baseball. It follows that he needs the girl. If she has something to say, she’ll talk. Then what? Poof! We’re fishing her out of the river.’
‘I hate those,’ Huguette Foss chimed in. No one was keen on her dark tone or wanted her to explain.
‘You understand my point,’ Touton reiterated.
Cinq-Mars did. ‘We need her to keep her mouth shut as long as possible. Let’s pray she buys us time. That’s why I need the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal in its full glory, armed, dangerous, and royally pissed off, to shake out the cobwebs and hit the streets hard. I need Ciampini’s head snapping back with the sheer brute force against him. Shit hitting the fan non-stop might keep Quinn alive for more than a few hours.’
‘Émile—’ Touton tried to sneak in a word of caution.
Cinq-Mars didn’t let him. ‘Keep Ciampini occupied. I’ve got a plan. We’ll put it into play and maybe get the baseball back. Then we deal. When you’re holding his balls – metaphorically a pair, but specifically a baseball – in the palm of your hand, then you talk to him.’
‘You lost me at “metafork”. Was that the word? So, how—’
‘You don’t want to know. Don’t ask.’
‘Really? This blaze of glory thing I’m supposed to pull off – which, I don’t mind telling you, has balls – it’s your blaze, too? You go out with a big bang too? Not just me? My retirement is coming fast. You want to risk your career? I don’t like that.’
‘It’ll be fine if it works. If not and the girl’s dead, who cares if my career’s still alive? I’ll sell horses with my dad.’
‘You’re more likely to check into a monastery. How’s that girlfriend of yours?’
‘I lost her.’
‘I knew that.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘Really? You think I don’t know why you left the Night Patrol? You’re a heartbroken sap. Rather than lose you altogether, I let you slide to the day shift. I didn’t want you sabotaging what’s left of your career over some girl you lost, and I don’t want you to do it over a girl you might lose tonight. Follow me? You want a front-line assault on all things Ciampini? Promise me, here, right now, you won’t toss your career off a bridge like this joker on the slab. I got more invested in you, Cinq-Mars, than that. Whatever you’re planning – legal, illegal, that part I don’t give a shit – make it work. Follow me on that, kid?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Touton had still to give his approval. His mind was made up, but he needed to take his time, to consider the downside.
‘Last chance,’ Cinq-Mars urged him. ‘One final fling. Like in the old days, with the old ways. Do we get our blaze of glory?’
Touton nodded. He spoke quietly. ‘A fucking bonfire. He’ll think his house is burning. He won’t know what hit him. He won’t know if it’ll ever end. If I talk to him, it’s because he’s calling for the meet, not the other way around.’
They both straightened up, suddenly aware of what they’d agreed to do.
‘Thanks, Captain.’
‘You bag of yellow piss, don’t thank me. You’re always on my ass about the morals, the fucking ethics. “Don’t bust his jaw, boss, how’s he going to talk if it’s wired shut?” I put up with your crap because you’re smart, and maybe you’re right – always, the times move on. Yet here we are – you messing with me, wanting to roll out the troops and damn the house rules.’
‘Time and place, boss.’
‘Your time, your place. Just tell me what you need with this scheme of yours. It damn well better work.’
Cinq-Mars hesitated only a beat. ‘Eudo and Huguette.’
‘What?’ Touton demanded. ‘Why? How?’
‘Say that again,’ Huguette asked. She already sounded thrilled. From the opposite side of the room Eudo Lachapelle boomed, ‘What!’
Cinq-Mars spoke up for everyone to hear. ‘I need a couple who won’t look like two cops in disguise. The guy we’re playing would sniff that out in the blink of an eye. I need two people who can pull off crazy as if it’s their normal. I need two people who can pull off being in love as if that’s their normal too. I need you, Eudo, and you, Hu, to be your normal crazy selves. Can you be in love for a day?’
‘Excellent!’ Huguette exclaimed.
‘Young man, I’m insulted!’ decried Eudo.
The other three in the room laughed. Cinq-Mars drove home his offer. ‘Your lives won’t be in danger, but you’ll be saving someone whose life is on the line.’
‘We’re both in,’ Huguette said.
‘Do you presume to speak for me now?’ Eudo asked her.
‘Of course!’
‘Of course,’ Eudo confirmed.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ Cinq-Mars told them. ‘Be home or be here. Agreed? This will be a daytime job. You might want to sleep tonight.’
Captain Armand Touton did something he’d not done before. He mimicked plowing his massive fist into the younger man’s gut. Then let his hand fall.
‘You realize,’ he reiterated, ‘this depends on the girl prolonging her silence. She won’t hold out forever, if she holds out for even a minute. She can’t.’
Cinq-Mars conceded the point. ‘I’m aware. Everything depends on her.’
‘Go,’ Touton ordered. ‘I need to put a war machine in motion.’
‘Blaze of glory, Armand.’
‘Depends on who lives. Who dies. Whose career gets washed away. We’ll see.’