The same day, Tuesday afternoon, February 15th, 1999
Crossing the lake under a bright glare intensified by the sparkling snow, Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars put in a call to Constable Roland Harvey of the Mohawk Peacekeepers. Even in broad daylight, and driving an unmarked car, he preferred to cross onto Indian land with the acquiescence of the local constabulary—and preferably with their protection. He and the constable arranged to meet at Lucy Gabriel’s house, and Cinq-Mars told him that he would be there shortly.
He then put a call through to Bill Mathers, who confirmed that he was deep in a driveway, buried in the woods, but with a sightline to Lucy’s house. He had already seen Constable Harvey drive onto the property. Cinq-Mars warned him to stay alert.
While listening to Painchaud’s story, Cinq-Mars had grown increasingly convinced that he needed Lucy Gabriel alive. He was desperate to find her. If she still walked among the living, he had to make contact. But how could she have been allowed to live while in possession of such terrible knowledge? What had impressed Cinq-Mars in the story’s detail was the involvement of Mohawk Warriors providing access to and from the United States. If they’d been involved at one stage, they might have continued to play a part. Whoever had abducted the young woman had wanted her alive, presumably for questioning, and after the interrogation had taken place in Old Montreal they had not left her corpse behind. On the contrary, a physician had attended to her. Why? Had Warriors intervened? Had the bad guys thought to make contact prior to an incursion onto Indian land? That would have been the wise thing to do. Had a deal been struck? Could Lucy’s life have been a concession granted to the power and, ultimately, the authority of Mohawk Warriors on Indian land?
Possibly.
He had to contact them. But how? He was white, he was a policeman, he’d be mistrusted at every turn. He had met only one Peacekeeper, and he’d have to go with him, to try to convince him to help.
As he drove across the ice, wearing sunglasses to protect against the brilliant shimmer off the snow, Cinq-Mars succumbed to thoughts of his ailing father. His dad had apologized for wishing that he could have been a priest. If matters in his father’s life had not gone awry, Emile would not have been born. The child, then, from one perspective, was a poor substitute for a thwarted ambition. Emile was ashamed that the statement had been necessary, for indeed he had lived with the burden of his father’s lost purpose. Perhaps it was that subliminal message, complete with its secret and hurtful underpinning, that had prevented him from fulfilling his father’s ambition in his stead. He had resented that his dad would have preferred the priesthood over fatherhood, and he was not going to devote his own life to the calling that would have denied him a chance at life itself. To have become a priest would have been tantamount to nullifying his life, correcting the mistake of his existence. He would not do it.
Cinq-Mars had talked these things through with his father’s priest, the one he had found for him. Some psychological murkiness had crystallized during the discussion, and now he had to come to terms with what he’d learned.
For many years, he had been burdened by a sense of error, as though his own soul was intransigent, as though he was repudiating his appointed destiny. Shaking off the shroud of his spiritual failure had taken awhile, longer still to acknowledge that he had found his proper work in life. He was doing what he was meant to do. As he had told Father Réjean, and not without a certain anger, his work was every bit as precious, every bit as ordained, every bit as consecrated as a life in the priesthood. This case had again demonstrated the truth of that viewpoint. A horrific tragedy had occurred in which many people had died. Their lives and their deaths moaned for justice. His reputation was like a beacon, and Charles Painchaud had drawn him into the fold to protect the women he cared about, and protect them also on behalf of those who had died.
Cinq-Mars reached the far shore and stepped hard on the gas pedal to ascend the snowy ramp into the village of Oka.
If a priest in the name of God called upon angels and saints to transform the world and defeat its devils, then the detective called upon his colleagues to institute justice. Devils or bad guys, he didn’t care about the terminology, he had forces to defeat and moral judgments to discern, and he was willing to take it upon himself to do both. The women had committed crimes. As a police officer, he had an obligation to drag them before the courts. As a police officer, he also believed that he had work to do apart from the everyday, separate from the routine, and beyond the purview of the law. As a police officer who carried with him a sense of theworld’s needforredemption, andnotmerely justice, there were times, and this was one of them, when he would act on his own, preferring to answer to the angels and the saints, whether or not they watched or cared, rather than superior officers or prosecuting attorneys. His father had wanted to be a priest, and failing that he had wanted his son to be one. What he had not perceived or acknowledged was that both of them had become priests, minus the garb and rituals, each in his own way. That awareness had taken Cinq-Mars some effort, and some time, both to comprehend and to accept.
Turning the corner toward Lucy Gabriel’s house, Emile Cinq-Mars called upon the powers of the universe to lend a hand with the scheme he was about to put into play.
What Painchaud had told him had changed everything—almost. What had not changed was Andrew Stettler. He remained dead, but he also remained the one person in this case who had made things happen. He had not been fully consumed by a black hole, but continued to emit blips of light, squawks of information. Having talked to his mother, Cinq-Mars now viewed him somewhat differently, and certainly more deeply. What he had dredged up from the brief that Lieutenant Tremblay had passed on to him was interesting in that nothing fit with his recent involvement with BioLogika. Cinq-Mars believed that he had good reason to focus on the man. The more that he uncovered about the case—and he had uncovered a lot in a short time, thanks to Painchaud—the more he realized that he had been launched among conspirators of every description, a phalanx of shooting stars. Honigwachs liked to dabble in cosmology and ponder the possible origins and fate of the universe. In those interests, they were alike. For Cinq-Mars, every aspect of the case, every turn, was complicated, not unlike trying to figure out the grand issues of time and space. Black holes and comets and the influence of dark matter and galaxies collapsing and red shifts of light—in his personal constellation he could rely upon one thing only. Anything that had happened of any consequence, any planetary rotation, had revolved around Andrew Stettler.
After interrogating Painchaud, while he was waiting for Bill Mathers to put on a disguise, Cinq-Mars once again read the report on the ex-con. He had been raised by a single mother, the wacky apparition encountered the night before, in some kind of spiritual cult. Cinq-Mars imagined that the boy had learned to be secretive from infancy. Probably, he had never been allowed to bring friends home or talk about his life. He began to build a sense of the man as a divided mind, someone who could bring down the curtain on one part of himself and seal it off from another. The record showed that he had begun his troubled youth in a spectacular fashion. He’d never been known to rob or do violence, but one day, at the age of sixteen, he had advised a few young friends that he felt like killing somebody, nobody in particular: That night at an amusement park a youth was knifed, his life taken, and Andrew Stettler was arrested for the murder. He got off, pleading self-defence, but the jail time that he served during the trial, and the nature of the crime, attracted the attention of the Hell’s Angels, who were always on the lookout for talent in the prisons they controlled. After that, he’d suffered a few minor busts for burglary, then dropped off the radar screen. Had he reformed?
Given his connections, his smarts, his ability to live a covert life with ease and, apparently, with conviction, Cinq-Mars readily imagined that Stettler had proven to be an asset to one gang or another. From what his mother had said, the Hell’s Angels were his associates. He was not a full-patch member—all of these were known to the police—but he must have developed talents that the gang could use, which would have made him a valuable entity. As he had enjoyed a meteoric rise inside the BioLogika Corporation, it stood to reason that BioLogika, and, by extension, Honigwachs himself, were also involved with the Angels.
Andrew Stettler was the go-between.
Now men were dead by the dozen.
Coincidence?
Emile Cinq-Mars turned down the drive onto Lucy Gabriel’s property, which was much easier to find in the daylight than it had been on the night of her abduction. Roland Harvey’s patrol car was parked there, although the officer was not in sight. He resisted the urge to see if he could spot his partner, as the act of looking for him could compromise their situation. Instead, Cinq-Mars searched for Roland Harvey, which led him to take a peek through a garage window. Then he noticed tire tracks leading into, or out of, the garage, beneath a light dusting of snow. He also discovered footprints going one way only, upstairs, to Lucy’s loft. Cinq-Mars climbed the stairs himself, but, before he had a chance to knock, the Mohawk Peacekeeper opened the door for him.
“Hey! Good to see you again, Roland. How’ve you been?”
“Not bad. You?” Although the uniformed officer was being civil, his tone indicated wariness.
“Not too bad. Obviously, you have a key to this place.”
The officer nodded and looked around. “I thought I’d see what there is to see. Nothing much here, I guess.”
Cinq-Mars surveyed the premises himself. He liked the apartment, for often crime scenes gave no clue to an occupant’s character. The general tone of the place defined Lucy’s personality in his mind. The apartment spoke of an active, engaged, interested, casual, intent, whimsical, probably talkative and well-informed, probably complicated and somewhat troubled individual. The subdued chaos of the room alluded to her free spirit, and it was that innate spiritedness that had gotten her into trouble, no doubt, as Painchaud had implied.
Cinq-Mars faced his native counterpart. “Advise me on something, Roland. If I wanted to set up a meeting with the Mohawk Warriors, how would I go about that?”
The constable’s eyes shifted away, then back again. “Anybody in particular?” he asked.
“Ones who count. Men who make decisions. The leadership.”
“What about?” Roland Harvey asked him.
“Personal matters,” Cinq-Mars told him.
The thermostat had been turned down. Cinq-Mars stood with his long overcoat buttoned in the cool room, while the zipper and the snaps were done up on Harvey’s police bomber jacket.
“Not police business?” the Mohawk constable inquired.
“Personal matters,” Cinq-Mars reiterated. “You’d be welcome to attend the meeting yourself, Roland.”
The two men were gazing at one another. Harvey had the wide neck and big chest of someone who used to lift weights, the muscles having fallen into fat now that he had quit working out. His stomach was quite immense. Cinq-Mars crossed his hands in front of him. A softness to the eyes of each man indicated that they were not staring one another down, but making an evaluation.
“You’re assuming that I’m on speaking terms with Warriors.”
“In my department,” Cinq-Mars countered, “guys in the anti-gang squad are always on speaking terms with the bikers. It’s only normal. I figure it can’t be much different here. I want you to know, I don’t mean any offence by that.”
Roland Harvey put his thumbs in his gun-belt and thoughtfully nodded. “I could arrange it,” he agreed, “if the Warriors are willing. They might say no.”
“No is no. I’m just asking for the meeting to be proposed.”
Roland Harvey had sagging jowls and a flat face, and when he shook his head his double chin trembled like jelly. “I might need more to go on than ‘personal matters,’” he pointed out. “Nobody knows what personal matters you got going with the Mohawk Warriors.”
Cinq-Mars did a little tour around the room. “Roland,” he said, “I want to be straight with you.” He opened a couple of cupboards and gazed inside at the plates and cups, glassware and pans. Lucy didn’t stick to patterns with respect to her dinner service, and had accumulated mismatched pieces throughout her life. “Lucy Gabriel’s in trouble with the law, but I don’t give a damn about that. All I care about is that she’s safe, and that the trouble she’s in doesn’t get pinned on her. She has information. That makes Lucy a valuable commodity in this world. I think she’s doing the right thing to be in hiding—”
“Who says she’s in hiding?” the officer interrupted. “The last I heard she’d been kidnapped.”
“Well, now, Roland, there’s kidnapping and then there’s kidnapping. I don’t know for sure if she’s being held against her will, but it’s not a big concern of mine. Tell the Warriors that, in case they’re the ones holding her.”
“What makes you think so?” Harvey didn’t move from his position, just followed Cinq-Mars around the room with his eyes.
“Come on, Roland, do you really think the bad guys came onto this reserve without first getting permission from the Warriors? It’s common sense. If the Warriors gave their permission, do you think they’d also give them permission to do whatever the hell they wanted? I don’t think so. Warriors would look out for a woman who fought alongside them during the crisis, or the war, or whatever you want to call it. I think they’d take an interest in her safety, just like I’m doing. Especially because recent information which has come my way indicates that the Warriors were a party to her present difficulty.”
“What does that mean?” Harvey asked. He led only with questions, never responses, but the nature of those questions allowed Cinq-Mars to trace an outline of the man’s knowledge.
“I mean she was crossing the border at Akwesasne and the Warriors over there assisted with that. I know this to be true. I don’t believe they’d just abandon her to some white gang. Do you know what I mean?” Cinq-Mars caught Roland Harvey nodding for a split second before the man altered his demeanour and merely shrugged. The visiting cop continued to browse through cupboards and drawers and wound up doing a full circle of the room before returning to Roland Harvey’s side. “Well,” he concluded, “it’s not in here.”
“What’s not?” The officer was genuinely puzzled this time.
“Her Honda Accord. It was in the garage downstairs two nights ago when she was abducted, but it’s not there now. Do you know where it is, Roland?”
He had caught him off guard, Cinq-Mars guessed, but he didn’t know what to make of that. “No,” he confessed, “I don’t.”
“Neither do I. Do you think if we find the Accord we’ll find Lucy?”
The Indian cop made a questioning gesture with his hands. “I don’t know.”
Cinq-Mars found it curious that he was finally speaking to him about matters beyond his awareness. “Neither do I,” he admitted. “That’s something else I’d like to talk to the Warriors about, Roland. But understand, this is strictly personal. I won’t be going into that meeting as a cop. I’ll be going into that meeting as someone who wants Lucy Gabriel alive and, as soon as it’s possible, I want her out of hiding also. Do you want that, Roland?”
The question was trickier than it might have sounded, for to answer in the affirmative Roland Harvey had to agree on some level that Lucy Gabriel was in hiding and was not being held against her will. Cinq-Mars would not have pilloried the man had he missed that subtlety, but the constable appeared to be giving his reply all due consideration, which suggested that he might be fully cognizant of the ramifications. Constable Harvey said, “Sure.”
Cinq-Mars lightly patted his shoulder.
In his car again and driving away from the meeting, Cinq-Mars called Bill Mathers on his cellular. “Track him, Bill. And listen up, we’re looking for a relatively late-model Honda Accord. I don’t recall the colour. It’s missing from Lucy’s garage. I’ll get that information and a plate number for you. Lucy could be mobile.”
That was interesting, he was thinking. If Lucy Gabriel was driving around, what would she be up to? Mischief, most likely. From all that he knew about her, she wasn’t a woman to be kept down for long. As a captive, she wouldn’t make a model prisoner, and if she had chosen to be in hiding, probably she stunk at it. Either scenario, Cinq-Mars mused, suited him.
Sergeant Charles Painchaud was feeling excited and confident. All along, he’d planned to coax Cinq-Mars onto the case, keeping him interested long enough to learn the players and draw the right conclusions. He’d succeeded in that. The celebrated detective had made no promises, but he seemed inclined to adopt a favourable attitude. He sympathized with the women and reviled Honigwachs. Now, he had only to wait for the detective at home, and they’d be going over to Camille’s house, where his girlfriend would continue the eminent police officer’s education.
Charles Painchaud’s life and career had been an ongoing frustration to him. As a child, he had been regarded as unpromising. People thought less of him because he had fallen victim to polio and his mouth was partially paralysed. Early in his life, dyslexia had been wrongly diagnosed as a lack of aptitude. That he was too small to compete with his older brothers in anything athletic confirmed that he would be the underachieving, ordinary son. By the time that he was ready for university, his reading disability had been diagnosed, and Charles successfully clawed his way through classes by recording lectures and playing them back until he had them all but memorized. Although reading remained a chore, he managed some plodding improvement, enough to graduate, but Charles would not be able to prove himself by following his brothers into law, or his father into politics. Law enforcement interested him, however, for surely he’d be looked upon differently in a uniform.
Diminutive, Charles had to lean on his father to coax the police department to make an exception to the rules. The process was humiliating on several levels. He had to plead with his father. He had to listen to his father get on the phone to beseech high-ranking officers in the department. When he was finally awarded a hearing, he had to point out to a panel of officers that the SQ was finally hiring women, and that many of the women were no bigger than he was. It seemed a mortifying position to take—my daddy’s power-fid and I’m no smaller than most girls, and they’re no stronger than me—but he so desperately wanted in.
Promotions would come at regular intervals—no one could say for certain why, but most officers were willing to guess, and the word went around that Charles Painchaud was connected. His old man looked after him. Having begged his dad to get him onto the force, he couldn’t suddenly ask him to butt out, and the young man was obliged to accept promotions he knew he did not wholly deserve.
Happy enough being a cop, he was happier still that the khaki-green uniform had brought Camille Choquette into his life. They both lived on the same side of the lake, she in a small village, he in the countryside. From time to time she had noticed him shopping for himself in a local supermarket. She had discerned the bachelor traits, particularly a predilection for frozen dinners to augment a diet of chips and beer. Camille made the first move.
“It’s not that I love cops,” she cooed. “I don’t know any cops. It just seems to me that a man who straps on a gun to go to work in the morning has to be more interesting than some toad who checks to make sure he has his comb and calculator.”
Painchaud was not going to argue the point. Accepting his elevated status above mere toads, he smiled, and conceded that she might be right.
Camille made the relationship amazingly easy for him. Initially wary, he understood the situation soon enough. He was no prime catch, but she was an unwed mother, which limited her options and opportunities. Everybody carried baggage, and if he possessed liabilities—not too tall, not particularly charismatic, a wonky smile—well, so did she. Love was a guessing game for him. Camille made him happy, and he offered her the convenience of an established man with a regular job and a natural affection for children. He was someone to take her to dinner and a movie on a Saturday night. Love? Maybe. She offered him intermittent companionship—she didn’t seem to want him around too much—and aggressive sex. They were a fit.
Painchaud showered, shaved, and put on his uniform. He’d pulled a half-shift in the morning and planned to record his meeting with Cinq-Mars and Camille as being his second half-shift of the day. As he geared up for the meeting, his excitement intensified. His purpose in all this was to save Camille, and that thrilled him, for it would make him look good, possibly heroic, in her sight. He also hoped that he could save Lucy. While his primary interest was to help the two women, he knew that if he succeeded he’d reap personal benefits. If he continued to work alongside Cinq-Mars and crack this case, his own reputation within the department might soar. Suddenly, he’d be looked at differently. He did not require the adulation that consistently befell Cinq-Mars, but he was hoping that, finally, he might earn simple respect from his colleagues.
That would be nice.
Emerging from his bedroom, Painchaud heard the cranky buzz of his doorbell and checked his watch. Too early for Cinq-Mars. He crossed through his small living room to answer the door and neither saw nor heard either of the two men who emerged behind his back, crouching, moving silently forward, one from the kitchen, the other from behind a bookshelf. Opening the inside door, he saw the back of a man’s head outside the locked storm door, then white light as a blow to his scalp drove him to his knees. Too late, he resisted, grasped a leg, but he had lost his bearings, his strength was gone, his coordination. Vaguely conscious, he remained unresponsive while he was dragged back across the living-room floor. He wanted to kick, or flail, but he could not. Through his daze he tried to make out the man who had rung the bell and who had been admitted into his house, and at first he saw only that he wore a suit and tie. Something was wrong with the guy’s face. It looked grotesque. Suddenly, Painchaud understood, and he was terrified. This attack was not the work of drugged thieves or juvenile hooligans. The man who had entered through the front door was wearing a nylon stocking over his face.
Simpler to blindfold him. Simpler still to knock him out cold. Apparently, the men in his house wanted him to see what was coming next, and so had disguised their identities.
Mathers stayed behind Roland Harvey at a safe distance. The rolling, wooded terrain allowed him to catch sight of the squad car ahead of him through the trees or on the crests of hills while simultaneously providing camouflage. In his rickety wreck he remained inconspicuous on Indian land.
They crossed into Oka, then left that town behind.
Suddenly, he lost him. The road skirted a hill with broad views of the valley sweeping down through parkland to the lake. The vehicle was no longer ahead of him on a straight run. Mathers did a U-turn and slowly headed back, watching for side roads and drives. This time he spotted the squad car as he passed the Oka Monastery.
He continued on by and turned again, and he was passing the monastery a third time when he pulled off into a visitors’ parking lot, close to the store where the monks sold their cheese, maple syrup and sundry farm products. Famous for their cheese, the monks had sold their operation to Kraft, but they continued to maintain small cottage industries. From the lot, Bill Mathers strolled down through the snow and the trees to lower ground, and there, in a much smaller parking area, were two cars—Roland Harvey’s squad car, and a blue Honda Accord.
His cellphone vibrated in his pocket. Behind a maple tree, Mathers answered. “Hello?”
“Bill?”
“Excuse me?”
“The license plate for Lucy’s car, do you have it yet?”
“Hang on.” Cinq-Mars read the plate number back to him.
“I’ve found her, Emile. The car, anyway, but I bet she’s here. I bet she’s in the east wing of the Oka Monastery. Harvey led me right there. How about them apples?”
His partner whistled at the news.
“What should I do?”
“Beat it. Don’t be seen. Knock off for the day. I’ll call tonight.”
“Take care, Emile.”
At the monk’s store he purchased a pound of cheese, then headed back to the city. Along the way Mathers passed Charles Painchaud’s house—out of curiosity, he’d looked for it on the way out—and noticed, beside an SQ, squad car and a Dodge Neon, a white stretch limo parked in the front yard. Some cops, although not too many, lived charmed lives. Mathers assumed that Painchaud’s big-shot father was paying his son a visit, and he continued the drive around the frozen lake toward home.
The impact of the first blows to his gut was thunderous, robbing him of air and strength, and Charles Painchaud was reduced to gasping on the pinewood floor. As a skinny kid he’d been bullied often, and he knew that he had to keep his mind together, he couldn’t panic, he’d have to start talking soon. But this was already different, he felt paralysed, he couldn’t breathe and he was scared for his life. The men were waiting for him to recover, and nobody had pulled a knife or a gun. That gave him hope. Then a big man commenced beating him again, raising his fist back and smashing whatever part of him Painchaud could not protect, and the policeman cried out and groaned.
The gorilla started methodically kicking him. Painchaud buckled with each blow and he was moaning now continuously as blood filled his mouth and nostrils and a horrendous pain in his groin made him scream, and he was spitting blood when he was skimmed off the floor and thrown against one wall and picked up again and thrown against another. He crashed through furniture and blood blinded him and suddenly he was tossed back up on the arm of his sofa.
“Sit up,” a voice instructed him.
Painchaud groaned and held his arms wrapped across his chest as though holding himself together, and he tried to concentrate on breathing.
He looked up through the blood in his eyes.
The three men who faced him wore nylon stockings over their heads.
“Sergeant Painchaud,” said the man who had been at the door, as he put on a pair of leather gloves, “call me Jacques. I answer to that name if you speak to me in a civil tongue.”
“What do you want, Jacques?” Painchaud’s own voice was faint, breathless, it sounded far away to him. Breathing hurt. One of the punches had probably cracked a rib and the pain had begun to overwhelm him now. He saw that the goon who had done most of the damage had huge hands and wore a massive set of brass knuckles that dripped blood. His blood.
“Explain to me why you killed my good buddy, Andrew Stettler.”
“I didn’t.”
That was the wrong answer. A fury of blows drove him over the side of the sofa onto the floor again where he was kicked and stomped and the policeman sheltered his eyes in the crook of an elbow and curled up to protect his groin. Painchaud was spitting up blood now and he was delirious, wanting to get away, wanting to be released from the hammering punches and the scrum of boots, and when it was finally over he wanted to crawl away but he could not, he could only curl up with the pain and moan.
His assailant pulled him off the floor again as if he were weightless and propped him up on the sofa’s armrest once more.
He could see through only one eye now and breathing caused sharp pains in his chest.
“Now that’s a shame,” Jacques commented. “I was hoping we could get along. You’re a professional, I’m a professional, I thought we could conduct business in a professional manner. In a practical way. You know what I mean? If you killed Andy Stettler, say so. I’d like to discuss that with you. Find out what happened. Just don’t bullshit me, Sergeant. That’s all I’m asking of you right now.”
He wobbled on the armrest. He tried to look at his inquisitor, but had trouble raising his head, and when he did he only glimpsed that nylon stocking through his one undamaged eye.
“So I’ll ask you again. Why’d you whack Andy?”
To answer honestly would be to receive another drubbing. In his misery he was tempted to lie, to confess to the crime. He had to believe that they were beating on him because they were not sure of their facts and wanted things confirmed. If he was going to prove his innocence in this courtroom, he would have to convince the judge and jury through the crucible of punishment.
“I didn’t do it,” he said.
The thug held him up with one hand and slammed blows to his midsection with the other. With every punch, Painchaud emitted the last of his air and spittle, and his body convulsed and he moaned aloud. He fell to his knees and the man punched his face then. He heard his nose break and felt teeth pop loose, and his jaw cracked, and that punch turned him around and dashed him to the floor again.
He was being raised up once more, but now the pain and the shock and the misery raged inside him, and he was seated once more on the armrest, where he tottered.
“My man will keep whaling on you until you learn to speak truthfully. I know you think you’re Camille Choquette’s boyfriend, I know you were jealous that Andy was giving it to her the same time as you, and I know you killed him because you’re a jealous little prick. Now hold your head up and look at me, Sergeant!”
Fearfully, Painchaud managed to do so.
“Do you want me to take off my stocking? I’m asking you fair and square. Do you want me to take off my stocking?”
He knew what that meant. “No,” he mumbled.
“That’s the first smart thing you’ve said since I got here. I’m not going to knock you around for that. See how it goes? If you make sense, we leave you alone. We’ll listen to what you have to say. If you want to be an idiot and waste my time, then I’m sorry, but my partner’s going to work you over. Understood?”
Jacques was speaking rapid-fire French. Painchaud wanted to plead with him. He resisted, knowing that it would do him no good. With every unbroken bone in his body he wanted to reason with this man’s good nature, because with every pore of his flesh he wanted to believe the man had to have a good side to his nature—his life depended on it.
“I’ll ask you again. Do you want me take off my stocking?”
“No, don’t take it off,” Painchaud insisted, slurring his words as his tongue, which he had bitten himself, and his swollen lips no longer functioned properly.
He suddenly vomited blood, and the men waited for his retching to cease.
“Why’d you kill Andy?”
The thug was already raising his fists, the knuckles dripping blood. Those hands could do him serious damage. “I think I know who did it,” Painchaud managed to murmur. “But it wasn’t me.”
The man’s fist seemed the size of Painchaud’s head, and he raised it back with the brass glinting in the light as though to unleash a horrendous blow. The policeman cringed and was trying to back his head away when Jacques dropped an arm across the goon’s chest to deter him. “I’m listening,” he said.
“Werner Honigwachs,” he gasped. Painchaud winced as he tried to draw a decent breath.
“Look at this!” Jacques yelled at him as the third man in the room came over with the policeman’s holster and pistol. “We’ve got your weapon. We’ll use your own weapon! Now, do you want me to show you my face or not?”
“No! No! Don’t show me your face. I’m the Investigating Officer on this case.” He had to talk without moving his smashed mouth. “I believe it was Honigwachs!”
“Prove it.”
“I can’t! Yet.”
“I’m taking off the stocking now—” Jacques threatened.
“No! No! It wasn’t me!”
The next punch came right across his jaw, his head spun out and back, and Painchaud flew up and landed hard on the floor. The three men stood over him and he was breathing in pain and he was in shock and not wholly cognizant of his circumstances any more.
Then the two larger men came around to where he had fallen and between them they kicked him awhile.
Jacques bent down beside him when the other two had stopped. “Your own gun,” he said in a low, soft voice. “Think about the indignity of that. That’s gotta be the worst thing for a cop. Everybody in the SQ will know it. They’ll say, poor bugger, he bought it the worst way there is. That’s a stinking way to die, if you ask me. Me, I’ll take my mask off. I’ll let you see my face. Then I’ll blow your brains out. But your buddies? The cops? They’ll kill you a thousand times over. Poor little shit, they’ll say. Took it up the ass with his own gun. Oh yeah,” he whispered. “First I’ll blow your brains out, as a kindness, then I’ll shoot one up your ass. For posterity, you know? You’ll be remembered that way. The cop who took it up the ass from his own weapon.”
He shifted his weight around to rest one of his bent knees. “Hand me his pistol,” he said to an associate. He took the gun in his hand. Jacques snapped the safety off. He pulled back the hammer and placed the cold steel of the barrel’s tip against Painchaud’s temple. He began to tug his stocking up and off.
“It wasn’t me,” Painchaud coughed, and with his words he spit blood.
“Why’d you kill Andy? Just tell me why, that’s all, and I will leave you.”
“It wasn’t me,” he pleaded.
Jacques tugged the stocking higher, revealing his chin and then his mouth. “Why?”
“It wasn’t me!” He breathed out heavily and a tooth that had been rammed through his lower lip tumbled out, pulled from its socket by the effort of speaking.
“Why’d you kill Andy?” The policeman’s head lolled around and Jacques followed it with the pistol.
He was weeping now. Painchaud sputtered quietly. “I didn’t. It wasn’t me.”
Jacques pulled the stocking up to his nose.
The cop dropped his head down and he found the strength to raise his hands and cover his eyes. He awaited death.
Jacques held the gun to his head.
Then he said, “Shit,” and he pulled the stocking down. He stood up. “The goddamned system gives us a reasonable doubt. I’ve gotten off on a reasonable doubt myself once or twice. Maybe it was three times. So I’ll do the same thing for you. This is your lucky day, asshole. I won’t do no cop-killing if I got a reasonable doubt.” He tossed the pistol onto the sofa. “Beat on him awhile,” he told his confederates, “just in case I’m wrong and he killed Andy. I wouldn’t want him to think he got away with something here.”
The two other men beat him with their boots and their brass-covered fists, and the only sounds in the room were the terrible thuds into the man’s body and the grunts emitted by his attackers. Finally Jacques said, “All right. Now wreck the room.” His goons went around the room smashing things until Jacques called them off.
The three left by the front door.
Long after they were gone, Painchaud was awakened from his stupor by the buzzing of his telephone. The instrument had been knocked from its table onto the floor, and the phone emitted a repetitive burring to alert the occupant that the receiver was off the hook. Painchaud gazed at the phone awhile. Then he crawled toward it. He had a little bit farther to go, although his body screamed to stay still.
Painchaud worked his thumb onto the small plastic bar that closed the line, then released it to get a dial tone. He had automatic dialling. The phone had been a Christmas gift from a brother who thought the convenience necessary for the proper enjoyment of life. Concentrating, Painchaud tapped Camille’s code. One digit. The only speed-dialling numbers he had entered were hers. He intended to call her at work, but in his pain and delirium he’d dialled her home answering machine by mistake. “Camille,” he stammered. “It’s Charlie.” His voice was guttural, plaintive, slurred. “Need help. My place. Get help. Call someone. Hurry.” He never did hang up. The receiver fell at his side as he succumbed first to a tide of pain, then to a growing grey fog that seemed to rise from the floor like smoke and, entering through his skin and larynx, comforted him.
The same day, after dark, Tuesday, February 15th
Camille Choquette pushed her child ahead of her into the house, toting the groceries, yearning for the day when somebody else would perform these chores. Freedom! From the mundane, from crap! She was so close. She just had to get through these days, and she and Werner would be home free.
She’d had to pick up food for dinner, and something to serve Charlie and Cinq-Mars when they dropped by in the evening. She had had to dash to make it in from work, pick up Carole from her after-school babysitter, tidy the house, feed herself and her child, and plan what she was going to say and how she was going to say it. Damn you, Charlie—springing this on me!
And yet, she could not have refused. Cinq-Mars knew things now, Charlie had said, and it would be just like the little prick to have revealed those things himself! She planned to wring his neck. He had actually sounded excited when he’d called. She didn’t think she had to worry, but things were moving so fast it was hard to stay calm. And she had to stay calm.
Andy was right to have wanted Cinq-Mars out of the way.
She was scrubbing up in the kitchen and yelling at her daughter to turn down the volume on the television when she reached out and punched the play button on her answering machine. Just one call. She froze with her hands under the taps. Then she spun the taps off, yelled furiously at Carole once more, and replayed the message from the beginning. There was no end to it. Charlie never hung up. She tried her phone and there was no dial tone. Was she still connected to Charlie’s house? She said his name. Suddenly she was in a flurry again.
“Carole! Get dressed! We’re going out.”
“Mommy, I’m watching TV.”
“Get dressed!”
Her tone scared the girl, and Carole, whimpering, complaining incessantly but only to herself, put her winter clothes back on. Camille dressed as well and held open the front door for Carole to scamper past.
Storming violently through the suburban streets, she hit the highway on the fly. Charlie’s house was normally fifteen minutes away, but she was there in less than eight, fishtailing on the slippery slope that ran up between apple orchards. Both Charlie’s own car and his squad car were in the circular drive. No lights were on in the house. She drove onto the lawn where snow had been cleared for the purpose, and parked.
Camille turned to her daughter. “Stay here. You stay put! If you step out of the car, young lady, I’ll paddle your bare bottom until it bleeds. Do you hear me?”
“Mommy! Don’t say that!”
“Shut up and listen to me! Stay in the car!”
“Okay!” She slumped back in her seat, pouting, on the verge of tears. Her curls fell in a cascade along the top of her forehead under her multicoloured wool hat, and she reached across and clutched her favourite raggedy doll. The doll had often been patched over the years, and its lips were sewn shut to keep its stuffing in.
As though to emphasize her command, Camille slammed the door shut getting out. She stomped up to the house and rang the bell, but when she tried the outer storm door, which was usually kept locked, it swung open. The inner door opened as well, and Camille moved cautiously inside.
Everything was in darkness. She flicked the pair of light switches by the door. One was for the porch light behind her, the other, for a standing lamp along the wall on her right. The lamp came on, and Camille gave a start, for it lay on the floor.
The beam shone across the carpet, creating spooky designs on the ceiling and walls, and at first Camille noticed only the chaos. She stepped over and around debris carefully.
“Charlie!”
Then she saw him—or a body, anyway—behind the end of the sofa. He was lying on his stomach, one hand on the telephone receiver, his head facing away from her. She moved closer, tripping slightly over a belt of some kind.
Camille moved forward with baby steps, as if the floor might suddenly give way. Closer, she could see a dark pool of blood around his head, and more smashed objects in the room. She pulled the coffee table out of her path, leaned closer, and confirmed that it was him.
Camille backed off and stood still, five feet away from him, panting, fighting her surprise, and trying to think.
Suddenly, she stepped quickly toward the kitchen. She turned on the light there and glanced at the room, then came out and went down the corridor to the bedrooms. She turned on lights, and when she came back she switched on a wall lamp at the edge of the living room. She was alone. Whoever had done this was gone. Camille assumed that Charlie was dead.
She moved closer to him then, and knelt down a few feet from the top of his head. She heard a faint gurgling sound. Blood clogged his throat but he was still breathing and Camille flew into a tantrum. She stood up and spun around. She wanted to get her hands on the man who had done this. “I didn’t want him beaten up!” she railed. “I wanted him dead!”
She needed to cry. This was too much torment. She had hoped to get Charlie out of the picture and had assumed that Jacques was going to take care of that for her. She had told him that Charlie had killed Andy—shouldn’t Charlie’s death be the logical outcome? Now what? Had he talked? Had Jacques told him what she’d said? This was serious. She’d wanted him dead but now that he was both beaten and alive she was worse off, and Charlie was more dangerous to her. What did he know? What had he told Cinq-Mars? What did Cinq-Mars know? Damn!
Camille spotted the pistol lying on the sofa. At her feet was Charlie’s gun-belt and holster, the one she had tripped over earlier.
Camille went to the front window. She could see Carole rambunctious behind the steering wheel of the Mazda, pretending to drive, as usual.
“Charlie,” she said, and her voice was stern, filling the room. “Charlie. You’re pathetic.” She moved back into the room and sat properly, primly, in the armchair across from him. “Do you really think I loved you? Do you? Do you really think I cared? You’re a cop, Charlie. You’re a cop. Let me tell you something about cops. Are you listening to me, Charlie? Maybe there’s something you should know.”
Camille slumped back into the chair, her legs wide now, her body sprawling. She closed her eyes and touched the tip of her mouth with her index finger, while the other arm dangled across the armrest. “Aw, Charlie,” she said, “aw, Charlie,” and she was beseeching him, moaning, as a lover in the throes of passion might do.
“Andy knew,” she told him. “He knew something. I don’tknowwhat. Andyknewsomething, buthe couldn’t know it all. Nobody knows it all but me.” She brought her hands behind her neck, as though massaging a tension there. “My dad, he said I had to kiss my brother’s lips. He watched me do it. My brother was in his coffin, and I leaned over him, and I saw that his lips were sewn together. I kissed him and I could feel the threads. His throat, too, was all sewn up. I saw it. I didn’t like that at all. When everybody was gone, when the visitation was over, my dad asked the funeral director for some quiet time alone with Paul. He took me in there. Dad did. He whispered to me. My dad whispered. He said—real quietly, Charlie, I could hardly hear him, you know? He said, ‘You killed him you kiss him you killed him.’”
Camille began to toss her head and she flapped her arms in a vague fashion. “Well!” she said. “Well, Charlie!” She stood up, and made several full turns, her arms flapping as if she were trying to shake off a swarm of bees. “I was upset! I know I sent my brother to buy me drugs, but I didn’t pull the trigger! Charlie! It was a goddamned accident! I didn’t kill my brother Paul. I loved my brother Paul. I loved my dad, too, but he said it to me again. He said it to me, ‘You killed him you kiss him you killed him.’ And my daddy, my daddy pulled me over to the coffin again and he was saying, ‘Kiss him, kiss him again,’ and I was screaming, Charlie, I was begging him, Charlie, I was saying, ‘No no no, Daddy, nooooo!’ And he was pulling me over and pulling my hair and he said, ‘Kiss him, kiss him, kiss him again. You killed him, you kiss him.’ And I don’t know why he did that, Charlie, but he made me kiss him again. I kissed Paul, and my daddy, he pushed my head down and he held me down and I could smell the awful makeup on Paul and I could see his sewn neck under his collar and my lips were on his lips and his lips were all sewn together. Oh, Charlie! It was terrible, you know? Aw, Charlie.”
Camille stared at the ceiling for a few moments and then removed her winter coat. Charlie had a small corner table which had been undisturbed in the melee, and she placed her coat across it. She was wearing an ankle-length, floral print dress and she pulled it over her head. She was now in her flesh-coloured bra and panties, her short black winter boots and almost knee-high socks.
“Aw, Charlie,” she said. “I never loved you. I just noticed you, you know? I thought it would be nice if Carole had somebody to look after her once in awhile. A decent kind of guy. I figured you might be a decent kind of guy in that uniform. I thought it would be nice to have an ordinary guy in my life for a change. You know? Somebody to go to the movies with. You must know yourself it wasn’t working out. We were just playing house, eh, Charlie? Me and you? Until something better came along? One thing about you, you got that paralysed mouth. Know what? That attracted me, Charlie. What do you think about that? I was attracted by your freaky mouth. Ah, Charlie, maybe things could’ve been different, but you were a cop, you know? You know? You were a goddamned cop, Charlie.”
In her underclothes, she sat on the armrest this time, placing her hands on her upper thighs. “Everything’s gone nuts, you know? It wasn’t supposed to work out like this. Aw, shit, Charlie. It’s all a big mistake. One giant fuck-up.”
She started to breathe heavily, as though she might be on the verge of retching, as though something was moving against her ribcage from within. The speed of her breathing increased, and she cried out once, twice, a pain overcoming her. Tears broke, she wiped them off her cheeks, and somehow that release seemed to restore her somewhat.
“A couple of days after we buried Paul,” she told him quietly, “my daddy came home early. He took me into my room. Told me sit down. I sat down. He said I used to be a good student. He said I was going to be a good student again. He told me that some men had talked to him. They were sorry, they said, about what happened to Paul. They wanted to show their sympathy, my daddy said. They were going to pay for my education. So long as I was in school, so long as I didn’t quit or flunk out, they were going to pay for my education. They’d tell the press, too. Public relations. You know, Charlie? I had to go to school. I had to be a good student. It was like a prison sentence. When I got older I had to go to university. The men were paying my daddy. I got some of the money for that and he got the rest. He smacked me over the head if I didn’t do so good. One time, when he was really drunk and mad at me, he said he’d kill me if I quit, and I believed him. You know? I believed him. He said I had to do it for Paul. I had to go to school, Charlie. Do you understand? I had to go school and live off my brother’s blood money so my father could live off my brother’s blood money, too. Do you understand me?”
Camille stood and removed her bra. Her breasts were small and the nipples dark against the stark white of her skin. She carried the bra over to the desk with her other clothes and tossed it on the pile. Then she kicked off her boots and peeled off her socks and panties. Naked, she walked back to Charles Painchaud.
“Let me tell you about the cops, Charlie. They were fucking useless. They never caught the guys who shot my brother. One guy smiled at me and he said that life was tough sometimes. Well, what the fuck did he know about it? What the fuck did he know? You listening to me? Do you understand me now? Charlie? Life was tough? That’s all he had to say? Cops! Charlie!”
She walked around him and down the hall to the bathroom and her heart was pounding now. This was different. She had made love to this man. She had kissed him and held him in her arms. This didn’t feel so good. But some things had to be done. She was always telling Honigwachs that. Some things had to be done. She had to make it look like the men who had beaten him had killed him also. Nobody would be surprised by that. Bad guys shoot people.
She’d do it the right way. She’d shoot Charlie with his own gun.
In the bathroom she retrieved a washcloth. She would pick the gun up with it to conceal her fingerprints. She had to think of everything. That was always her job. She had to be meticulous with details.
This was so good. Nobody would ever think for a second that she could have inflicted the beating on Charlie, even if he was a pipsqueak. Everybody would assume the gunshot was the final act of the beating. In a million years, nobody would think that this had anything to do with her.
She slowed down now. She liked this part. What had been so good about New York and New Jersey was that she could take her time. She could talk to her victims. She could prolong the pleasure. Camille was not terribly surprised that she had killed two men herself in the States. What an opportunity! That’s all she had ever desired, what she been longing to do for years. All she had needed was opportunity, and the dying AIDS patients had given her that. Weak men. Unable to resist her. She could go slow and enjoy the moment and she was free of the fear of being caught. From the beginning, from the time she had first pushed Werner Honigwachs to do the drug-testing in the States, she had expected the opportunity. To kill the dying. To snuff out the weak. To expel her rage. To sew the lips of each victim and then give his corpse a final kiss.
Camille returned to the living room. With the washcloth in her hand, she picked up the pistol and crooked two fingers around the trigger. Next, she positioned a cushion from the sofa against her biceps, and another against her forearm, and held both in place with her other hand and arm. The cushions would muffle the sound. The technique made her awkward, and she had to stoop over Charlie’s body with care, anxious not to pick up any trace of blood. She looked at his pulverized face. The closed eye. The blackened cheeks. The blood dribbling from his mouth and nose, and seeping through holes in his puffy lips where teeth had come through.
“He touched my ass, Charlie. He did. I’m not making that up. I’m sure I remember that now. It’s hard to remember some things. I try. I try. He was rubbing my ass. My daddy. I didn’t want to remember that, I didn’t want to think about it. He made me bend over Paul and kiss him and his lips were threaded and I had to kiss him and I went on kissing him because my daddy held my head down and he rubbed his other hand all over my ass. You see? You see, Charlie? How it goes?”
Camille asked him that question, then she shot him just above his bad eye.
The body convulsed and a small fountain of blood poured up for a second, then diminished, and blood ran down from his temple across his face onto the floor.
The shot had thrown Camille off balance. Her legs buckled, and a knee touched blood. She lost control of the cushions and one fell onto Charlie, while the other landed off to one side. There was blood on her ankles and Camille did turns again as if she had to catch something in flight behind her, catch a movement, or a presence that was stalking her. She spun in circles the other way, looking to put the gun down, wash herself, scream, do something. She kicked his foot. Then she kicked it again. “Stop it!” she hollered. “Stop it!” Meaning, perhaps, herself, or the invisible hand on her ass, the hand on her neck holding her down. She wanted to stop the eroticism and the horror of that kiss, the excitement and terror she had felt kissing the dead, her beloved brother, his lips sewn shut, which meant that he would never tell. Nobody would tell. Nobody would know. “Stop it!” She dropped the gun and it hit the coffee table and fell onto the floor, and Camille ran around Charlie into the bathroom to wash off the blood and clean up.
The washcloth seemed fine, there was no blood spatter that she could see. She rinsed it thoroughly under the hot water tap and wrung it partially dry, then dropped it into the laundry hamper after shifting a few clothes around to conceal it from view. She didn’t imagine that the bad guys would’ve used a washcloth, so she wanted it hidden.
Better. You’re doing better.
Camille used toilet paper to clean blood off her ankles and the tops of her feet. She noticed herself in the mirror. She stared back into her own eyes. I can do this. She’d been so strong when Honigwachs had shot Andy, this was no different than that. Both men were almost dead at the time. She had been merciful, putting them out of their misery. The same with the AIDS patients, they were half dead, too, she’d just been putting all of them out of their misery. Giving them a kiss. Dispatching them to the other side of life. She hadn’t done anything so wrong.
The gun, the gun had been the shock. The force of it exploding in her hand. So that’s what Honigwachs had experienced out on the ice. The gun. The power of it. The thrill. All she had done was squeeze a trigger. Big deal. But she felt strangely, oddly now, thrilled.
She bolted to the living room.
Watch where you step! Watch where you step, Camille! Don’t leave a woman’s footprints in blood!
She carefully checked the floor to see if she had done that, and was soon satisfied that she was in the clear. She put her clothes back on, facing Charlie and making sure that her panties went on the right way around, pausing once to notice that the pool of blood was still growing across the floor.
Run, Camille! Leave now! Get out of here!
She hesitated.
Camille stepped into the kitchen. She knew where to go. She wanted to escape this ritual but already knew that she would not, could not. She knew where Charlie kept needles and thread, and she brought out the box of goodies, sat down at the table, and calmly threaded a needle.
No need to hurry. She took her time.
This is what she had to do. Make this her own doing.
The bad guys wouldn’t do this, Camille!
How do you know? How do you know that? How does anybody know that?
She put the box back and returned to Painchaud’s corpse.
Maybe if his lips hadn’t been pummelled by the beating, if they weren’t cut and damaged, she could think only of her own safety and do what was necessary—run, escape. But she had to stay awhile longer. She had to pierce her needle along the edges of his cuts and draw the thread through. Camille did so. He didn’t bleed as she sewed his wounds tenderly, lovingly. She sutured his mouth shut, a kind of commemoration.
As she was running out of thread she leaned over the dead man to cut what remained from the needle in her teeth, and knotted the last stitch.
Then she leaned forward and tenderly, tenderly, kissed him.
She pulled her lips away. Tasting his blood. Licking Charlie’s blood off her lips. She had loved the kiss, and wished it could never end. The others didn’t mean anything to me, Charlie. I wasn’t cheating on you, honest. They were just a glorious opportunity. Who could resist? You, Charlie, I want you to know, you’re special. You’re the best yet.
Camille! Stop talking and get out of here! I don’t like it here, Camille!
Her hands were all bloody now. She looked at them.
She walked around the body and returned to the bathroom, where she dropped the needle down the drain.
She had blood on her boots now. She’d left a trail back to the living room.
Everything’s fallen apart. Everything!
Shut up!
She washed her hands, and used toilet paper to clean up her boots, flushing the soiled paper down the John. Then she went back to the living room.
Camille Choquette surveyed the damage.
She picked up the pistol and dropped it in her coat pocket.
Stop being such aßtcking idiot!
Shut up, I said! I might need it. You never know.
Everything was perfect!
It’ll be perfect again.
She had a vague feeling that everything was not yet over.
Leaving the house, Camille was struck by a sadness of heart, a heaviness of spirit. She walked quickly down to her car, where Carole stood up on her knees in the driver’s seat, spinning the wheel to one side and the other. The front tires had burrowed a wide shallow hole in the snow. The doors were locked, the keys still in the ignition.
“Open up, sweetie!”
Instead, the girl honked the horn.
“Stop that! Open this door right now!”
Knowing that she was in for it now, the child crawled off into the back seat, but she would not release the door locks.
“Carole! I mean it! Open this door right now!”
She shook her head. Stuck out her tongue.
Camille looked quickly around. She ran up to the house and came charging back with a snow shovel held aloft like an ax. She slammed it down hard on the roof of her Mazda. “Open up! Open up right now!” She looked through the back window at her daughter. “Do you want me to smash your little head like this?”
The girl nodded no.
“Open up, Carole.”
The girl cried.
Beside herself, Camille reared back and smashed the driver’s-side window with the blade of the shovel. The glass shattered but held together like a jigsaw puzzle until she rammed the butt end of the handle against the window and it caved inward. She tossed the shovel away, unlocked the door, opened it, sat down on the glass, and started up the car. Camille spun her tires in the snow getting out of the driveway and never looked in any direction hitting the road. She drove hard, the cold wind blasting her, slowing down only when the house vanished from her rear-view.
“That’s enough,” she told Carole. “I don’t have the energy to punish you so just stop your snivelling.”
The child had not been making a sound. She sat with her head down, staring at the floor, her mouth opening and closing the way a fish breathes through its gills underwater.
“Quit while you’re ahead, that’s my advice.”
She had to make sure the girl stayed quiet. Before long, Cinq-Mars and other cops could be on her doorstep. She had to appear shocked, play the grieved girlfriend whose car, coincidentally, had been vandalized. She had to be the warm, comforting mother. She’d try to farm Carole out for the evening. She had an excuse. Cinq-Mars and Charlie were supposed to be coming over for a serious chat, weren’t they?
“Carole? How would you like to spend the evening at Minnie’s?”
Carole raised her head up. She looked out the window, her mouth still opening and closing, and she was making smacking noises now with her lips.
“Carole! I’m talking to you! Do you want to go to Minnie’s or not?”
“I don’t like Minnie,” the child said.
“She’s your best fucking friend.”
“I don’t like her at all.”
“Are you trying to get on my nerves? Are you trying to get on my nerves?”
“You broke the car, Mommy. It’s cold in here now.”
“You’re going to Minnie’s. That’s that. I don’t want to hear one whiny word out of you.”
“I didn’t say a whiny word.”
“Just look at you. You’re pathetic. Do you think I love you? Stop doing that with your mouth! Do you think I love you? Ask Charlie how much I love you.”
“Mommy!”
“Ask him.” She made eye contact with her daughter in the rear-view, her eyes blazing.
“Mommy—stop! Stop it!”
Maybe she could put a plastic sheet in her car window, pretend to be a victim of vandalism if necessary, but keep the car out of view so no one would ask.
“I’m a guppy,” the child said. “I breathe through my ears. The water goes in my mouth and I breathe through my ears. Look, Mommy. I’m a guppy.”
“That’s right, honey. You’re a fucking guppy.”
“That’s not nice that word. You broke the car, Mommy. You shouldn’t say that not nice word.”
“No? Well, I know what I should’ve done. I should’ve had a fucking abortion.”
Camille drove into her town in the dark at a moderate pace. She had a lot to arrange, but she was confident that she could do it now. She’d get through this. Charlie was a dead cop, and murdered cops got all the attention.Whowouldbeinterestedinherexcept sympathetic friends? She had a role to play, and she had to get on with it. She believed that she could do it now. Believed that she was all right. Suturing the lips had been a good idea after all. She’d got what she needed out of that.
Charlie had been a cop. The cops had been no help at all when her brother was killed. No help at all. The bad guys brought money, she got an education, and the cops did nothing. They deserved their punishment, and now she was ready for whatever came next.