Domenic Jejeune had never drawn such comfort from the interior of a moving vehicle. Nestled deep in the passenger seat beside Traz, the darkness and cold temperatures that lurked outside were no threat now. Somewhere out there beyond the black emptiness was the vast, raw wilderness that had almost killed him, but the memories of his ordeal that drifted to him now were quickly dispersed by the reassuring glow of the dashboard lights and the steady flow of warm air from the heater.
“You’re pretty quiet, JJ. Still tired?”
“I was thinking about that time we dubbed those Leonard Cohen tracks onto Damian’s CDs,” said Jejeune quietly. “He brought it up while we were out there.”
“And of course you stepped up like the good friend you are to tell him it was all your idea and I had nothing to do with it.”
“He’d already worked out it was a two-man job. Technical know-how and an inside man.” Jejeune paused, and for a moment the only sound was the chip of loose gravel from the unpaved road against the undercarriage of the car. Up ahead, an occasional irregular shape was trapped in the Durango’s high beams, momentarily becoming some grotesque, fantastical creature, until it melted back into the form of a bush or rocky outcrop.
“I was surprised to see Verity up here,” said Jejeune quietly. “I thought you said she was only going as far as South Dakota with you.”
Traz nodded. “She was all set for a quiet few weeks on her grandmother’s porch, but as soon as she knew you and Damian were in trouble, she said she’d come up with me.”
“So she changed her plans, just like that?”
“In a heartbeat. She wanted to do anything she could to help. It’s what she’s like.” He took his eyes off the road and looked across at his friend, his face tinted by a faint tinge of blue from the dashboard light. “Right about now, I’ll bet you’re thinking she made the right decision.”
“And to think you two just bumped into each other like that. How did it happen, exactly?”
Traz smiled at the memory. He affected a Humphrey Bogart side-mouth drawl. “It was late, see, and I was sitting at the bar going over my finances with my accounting team, Bourbon and Despair. She walked into the room like a vision from a sailor’s dream. Her perfume filled the air like the smoke that hangs in a jazz club, the kind of place where Coltrane’s licks made you feel the sound of pain. Her legs were as long as a night in jail and her eyes were as blue as a broken heart. I could tell by the way she wrapped her mink stole around her shoulders that she was a classy broad.”
“You realize a comment like that is considered highly inappropriate these days.”
Traz dropped the accent. “You’re right. Let’s make it a silk scarf that told me she was a classy broad.”
Domenic smiled. “Either way, to paraphrase something somebody said to me recently, you still ain’t no Raymond Chandler.”
A set of headlights flashed by heading east, the presence of another vehicle on the highway unusual enough that both men watched in the mirrors until its red lights had faded into the distance. In the renewed darkness of the car’s interior, Traz waited for to Jejeune continue, but he just kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead.
“The woman who died, Annie Prior,” said Traz quietly, “was she Damian’s girlfriend?”
Traz saw his friend shake his head. “Not at first. She hired Damian to help her with her research. Later …” He shrugged.
Traz moved his head slightly. “When I first went to see Gaetan Robideau, he said she’d been to see him. He said you’d been there, too, asking about her. When I went back this time, to ask him where I could rent a car, he offered me this one. He said it was time to start the healing. Did he have something to do with her death?”
Jejeune shook his head again. “No, but he feels responsible for it.”
“Because he made a deal with her? Promising her access to the Dene sites in return for those photographs?”
“He told you that?”
Traz nodded. “But he knew the council would never sanction it. I guess that’s where his guilt comes in. Because he sent her out there on a fool’s errand. He deceived her into thinking there was a chance that they would, just to get those photos.”
Jejeune was quiet for a moment. His grasp of the Dene culture was shaky at best, but even he could understand the sacrifice Robideau had been prepared to make to protect the thing he loved. Integrity, truthfulness, honour: all cornerstones of his upbringing as a Dene, all abandoned to save the precious waters of the park. How much birch sap would it take to cleanse Robideau of his sins? he wondered. Was there enough in this park? In all of the Dene lands?
“Was Damian in on this?” asked Traz. “Was he part of this plan to help Prior get access to those sites?”
Jejeune shook his head. “Damian knows less about anthropology than he knows about saying no to pretty women. He was just there to capture the cranes and retrieve the photo chips.”
“So, it was just the two of them involved, then? Just Prior and Robideau?”
Jejeune stared at the unbroken darkness as it drifted past the car, as if looking for something in it. Perhaps there was some guardedness in Traz’s voice, a hint of uncertainty? Or did he just want it to be there, to make his task easier when the time came? He couldn’t find the will to go there yet. But he couldn’t manage casual conversation with Traz in its stead, either, not now they had tested the edges of the topic. “Okay with you if I grab a couple of hours more sleep?” he asked. “I’ll just stretch out in the back for a while.”
Dawn broke with a pink sunrise. On both sides of the car, the spiky silhouettes of conifers lined the road like tiny mountain ranges, dark against the soft, rose-coloured glow of the sky. Domenic stirred in the back seat and sat up to look through the windscreen.
Traz saw his friend in the mirror. “Welcome back,” he said, pulling over. “About time for a stretch, anyway.”
He looked up and down the highway as they got out, a long lonely ribbon of tarmac stretching arrow-straight through the wilderness, as relentless and uncompromising as truth. “You know what’s strange about this road?” Traz said. “Not a single billboard. You drive through the U.S., and it seems like there’s one about every ten metres. But up here, take away the road markings and you could travel for hours without any evidence of human existence whatsoever.” He looked around again. “Once, that kind of seclusion would have really appealed to me. Now, though,” he shook his head, “I’m realizing it’s kind of nice to have somebody to share things with.”
Jejeune looked out at the unblemished green carpet of conifers rolling out to the horizon in all directions. From here, you could almost believe this forest stretched to the ends of the earth. The prospect of finding two people lost in this landscape seemed impossible, and his gratitude grappled with what he had to do. But in the end, he knew his duty would win out. It always did.
“I’m guessing you don’t mean share them with me,” said Jejeune quietly.
Traz smiled. “We just connected. We see things the same way, we like the same stuff — well, mostly. It’s just, I don’t know, there, in the air between us. You know, don’t you, JJ? You know when it’s the right one. It must have been the same for you when you first met Lindy.”
The comment was like a dagger into Jejeune’s heart. He could tell from his friend’s voice that it was like when he met Lindy. Real. Certain. Unshakeable. How would he feel if Traz had been the one trying to destroy that? A wave of regret overwhelmed him. But he knew he had no choice. It was who he was. He did what was necessary. He did what was right, however wrong it seemed. “Did you ever think about what a coincidence that was, the two of you meeting like that, and her needing a ride in exactly the same direction you were heading?”
Traz turned sharply to look at his friend. “What, you think Verity was just in that bar looking for a lift?” He shook his head. “That’s not how it was, JJ. It was my idea. As a matter of fact, she even refused at first.”
Traz looked into his friend’s eyes, but he seemed not to care for the expression he found there. “You think she was just playing me? No, you’re wrong.”
But it was there in his voice now, the sound of a man fighting against a rising tide of logic, fighting to deny what his own senses were telling him. Traz was scrabbling around frantically for a grip that would allow him to hold on to his fantasy world where happy coincidences occurred in cowboy bars and soul-mates dropped out of the sky into your life.
Traz shook his head again. “Come on, JJ, let me have this one, okay? Give that suspicious policeman’s mind of yours a rest for once, and just accept this for what it is. Fate, baby. Karma. I’m telling you, this is the real thing.”
But Traz knew it wasn’t. Jejeune could see it in his eyes. And that was why, instead of standing out there on the gravel shoulder of this empty road in the crisp morning air, waiting for his friend to continue, Traz slid into the passenger seat of the Durango. “You want to catch that flight, we should be moving. Just remember to keep to the speed limit. We don’t want your name coming up on the RCMP’s radar if you get stopped for speeding.”