Blink & Caution (28 page)

When you’re finished, Wallace leads you through a long dining room that opens up into a huge living room. There is a fireplace in the center of it, big enough to stand up in. It’s built of pink and yellow and deep gray stone and rises into the darkness of varnished yellow-gold timber beams. There’s a rustic stairway of thick planks notched into a single, central tree trunk, with branches forming the balustrade leading up to a gallery that looks down on the living room. The lights are low and solar powered. That’s what Wallace tells you, like you are a tourist or in the market to buy the place. The fire is bright and crackling. There are stuffed deer heads on the walls, a couple of sets of moose antlers, long, sharp-nosed fish mounted on plaques. There’s a rack for fishing rods and a gun rack with a half dozen rifles in it.

“Are we just about ready?” says Niven. You’ve been avoiding looking at him as long as you can. From the look on his face, his patience has worn thin.

He’s sitting on a couch, working on his laptop. He’s got his feet up on a wide coffee table. He closes the top of his computer, and Wallace leads you before him. Niven nods toward an ugly, old easy chair across the coffee table from him. You sink down so low, your knees stick up as high as your chin. Not something you’re going to leap up from any too quickly, assuming you had any leap left in you.

Wallace takes a chair nearby, just in case you have such an idea in mind. His chair is of about the same vintage and ugliness. All the furniture is old and homey, with colorful blankets thrown here and there to cover holes and stains — that’s what you figure, anyway. It’s the same as your mother’s idea of home decorating. The blanket on this chair doesn’t do much to lessen the effect of the spring that’s sticking into your backside. But what did you really expect?

The coffee table between you and Jack Niven is heavy and hokey knotty pine.

Niven looks at Wallace first. “Did he find a vehicle?”

Wallace nods. “And it’s not some punk’s ride.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a late-model Jeep Wrangler.”

You watch Niven’s face darken, his eyebrows knot. “What color?”

“Yellow.”

“Really?” He glances at you, perplexed.

“That’s what Tank said.”

There is a flash of panic in Niven’s face. “Where did you get that car?” he asks. And although his voice is not raised, there is trouble in those piercing blue eyes. There is no point in fooling around.

“From Alyson.”

“You stole my daughter’s car.”

“No way. She lent it to me.”

“Do not lie to me.”

“I’m not lying. She had this idea you might be up here, and she couldn’t come herself to find out. So she asked me to do it.”

“Asked
you
to do it.”

“To come up here. To check. She was worried about you.”

He clears his throat but can’t speak.

“How would I ever find a place like this in the middle of nowhere?”

He rubs his face with his hands. There are bags under his eyes. He looks down at the table in front of him, shaking his head. You glance at Wallace. His eyes are on the boss. You turn back as Niven raises his head and looks at you hard.

“You saw something at the hotel. You saw us leave the room. Is that it?” You nod slowly, just once. “And then you contacted Alyson?”

“She phoned you. I just picked up the call.”

Niven’s eyes close for just a moment and then open again. “And you told her what you saw.” You nod again, but the look on his face gives you a sinking feeling. “And she . . . what?”

You shrug. “She didn’t believe me. I was just, like, trying to tell her that you were okay. That’s all I was doing, honest. I figured she’d want to know. I didn’t get it . . .” You stop there. Niven’s face looks gray. He stares at the fire for a moment. You can see the fire in his eyes. His hands are clenched. The room is silent but for the crackling of the logs.

He rubs his face again. “So what exactly was the plan, Brent?”

You swallow hard. “I was supposed to drive up here and check and then drive right back and let her know. She’s expecting me back, like, by eight — nine at the latest.” You’re not sure if you should tell him this. Someone is expecting you — that should be a deterrent to him trying anything, except that the person expecting you is his daughter. His well-loved daughter. It doesn’t look good.

He looks at you again, and the concern on his face melts away and shifts to a wry smile. “Do you really expect me to believe this?”

“It’s true.”

“Who put you up to this, Brent?”

“Listen. I’ve got her car, right?”

“Apparently, and you’re trying to tell me my daughter — my highly intelligent daughter — just handed over her new set of wheels to a scumbag street kid — a thief, no less? Is that what you’re telling me, Brent?”

You reel a bit from the force of what he’s saying, but you also hate him for it — him calling
you
a scumbag. Your jaw clamps tight to hold back the rage you feel percolating up inside you. Then you look down and see a cell phone on the table in front of Niven. There are no cell towers up here, but this one has a heavy-duty antenna on it. You look right at him, eye to eye. “Why don’t you phone her and find out?” you say.

N
iven leaves the room. He just ups and leaves. Doesn’t take the phone, doesn’t say good-bye. He gives no instructions to the Moon. You look over at Wallace; his hands are folded on his belly, his face giving nothing away. You lean your head back, close your eyes, and try to think what the last expression was that you saw on Niven’s face. Something happened to that cool exterior. And you remember once when Da came to pick you up, out of the blue, and your mother tore into him. She still had a bit of fire in her then, and she called him a disgrace. “You’re a disgrace, Ginger Conboy,” she said. And Ginger, for all his smiling and winking at you, had this look — this flinching — as if she’d struck home. Was that what he saw on Jack Niven’s face? Shame. Could a man like that feel shame?

You drift off to some restless turbulent place that is as far from sleep as it is from wakefulness. You’re jarred back to consciousness by the sound of a door slamming. You look up, bleary-eyed, but it’s not Niven returning but Tank with a tool belt on and a cardboard box in his hands.

“What are you doing here?” says Wallace.

“Keep your shirt on,” says Tank. “The boss got me to take a padlock off one of the sheds. I’m supposed to put it on one of the bedrooms upstairs.” He looks at you with a smile that he’s been soaking in some solvent. “Seems like we’ve got ourselves an overnight guest.” As he passes you by, he leans down to speak in your ear. “Hope you call for room service,” he says.

He heads upstairs, chuckling. You close your eyes again, and even though you try not to, you fall asleep to the sound of an electric drill. Next thing you know, Wallace is shaking you awake. You look around and rest your gaze on Niven, sitting on the couch again.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he says. “The cops will find the Jeep in Toronto somewhere. Stolen and abandoned.”

You think about Alyson’s friend Jason, who was supposed to have borrowed the car to go to Ottawa. But that’s not your problem, and you’ve got enough of your own.

“We’ll deal with that tomorrow.”

“Boss, we didn’t find no keys.”

Niven chops the air with his hand. “We’ll deal with that tomorrow, Wallace,” he says. Then he clasps his hands together and examines you a moment like a man wondering whether he wants to soil his shoe by stepping on a cockroach.

“I do not appreciate you dragging my daughter into this business,” he says. “Mistakes were made. That happens. We are going to clear up those mistakes. But she is never going to know about this. Ever. Do you understand me, Brent?”

You nod. You almost admire him. How amazing it would be to be loved so much.

“Good,” he says. He looks down at the coffee table for a moment. When he looks up, his face is all business.

“So, Brent, what do you think is going on here?” You shrug and he leans forward, rests his chin on his fists. “This can be done quickly, or we can take all night, but I think you’ll be a lot happier if you choose the quick option.”

His voice is straightforward, but there’s no mistaking the threat. He’s not a man who has to try very hard to be frightening.

“If I say I don’t know nothing, will you just let me go?”

“No,” he says.

“So, why not just kill me and get it over with?”

“Not unless you really piss me off,” says Niven, which makes Wallace laugh. He gets up to stretch. You look at him in the firelight. He gives you a little encouraging nod, as if maybe this thing could still get turned around.

“Brent,” says Niven. “Can we just do this?”

That’s what Alyson said.
Can we just do this?
Maybe it’s a Niven family thing.

You look from him to Wallace, who nods at you again.

“What am I supposed to do?”

“First of all, I want to know who you’ve talked to about this, apart from my daughter. You could lie to me, but I’d rather you didn’t.”

“No one,” you say.

Niven nods. “Okay, good. Now tell me what you know — what you think you know.”

“Okay. So you own this land, and you want to open a mine on it. But there’s these Indians who say it’s their land, and they don’t want you mining uranium because it’s like a major pollutant and ‘everybody lives downstream’— that’s what this guy in the paper said.”

Niven looks peeved. “Go on,” he says.

“So, anyway, they’ve got this big protest happening that is getting lots of press and making you look bad, and you say you’re willing to back out if the government takes the land off your hands for forty-eight million.”

Niven is looking at you with interest. “Am I supposed to think you figured this all out yourself ?”

“Yeah.”

“No one coaching you?”

“You mean like the FBI?”

He frowns. “Don’t be smart, kid.”

“I told you I didn’t talk to no one. You can believe me or not — that’s your problem. Do I look like some undercover agent?”

“Good point,” he says. “You
look
like a street punk. But you haven’t exactly acted like one, and you don’t talk like one.”

“I had your BlackBerry. There are newspapers. I can read.”

He nods. “Apparently. But I can’t help wondering if you’re some kind of Greenpeace troublemaker or something. Someone with a simplistic and overly emotional take on business in general and mining in particular.”

You shrug. It almost feels like a compliment.

“Does that shrug mean you
are
or are
not
affiliated with some such organization?” he demands, as if he were the prosecutor in some TV drama.

“What if I am?” you say. But seeing the look on his face, you decide that playing cocky is not going to help. Your shoulders slump. “No,” you say. “Do you see anyone around coming to my rescue?”

“No,” he says. “No rescuers and no media so far, which is how I want it to stay. So you just fell into this thing, is that what happened?”

You nod. “Tank chucked the key thing, and I took a look in the room, found your BlackBerry, and checked it out. There were a lot of people pissed off at you.”

The Moon chuckles, leans against the fireplace.

“Yes, well . . .” says Niven, raising an eyebrow at the Moon. Then he turns his courthouse eyes on you again. “So you find my phone, which is when you make contact with my daughter.”

“Yes, sir.”

He settles back on the sofa, his arms crossed as if he’s trying to figure out how badly he’s going to hurt you. You are the little piece of grit that got into his fancy machine here and maybe could bring it screeching to a halt, if you were to tell the right people what you know. Somehow you’ve got to make him believe you have that power, right? God, no, boy — think again! What you want to do is the opposite: try to convince him you wouldn’t have a clue what to do with what you know.

“So, let’s see where we are,” says Jack. “You ran away from home last May; you’re living on the street; you’re a thief —”

“Who says I’m a thief ?”

“Five hundred and sixty dollars says you’re a thief, though why you left anything in the wallet, I’ll never know. We have our contacts in Toronto, Brent.”

“Yeah, right. Your lawyer.”

“My lawyer knows nothing about this. He passes on information about the investigation to my office, and one of my associates passes on that information to me.”

The Snake. He means the Snake.

“Anyway, my point is that you need money. And what I have to try and establish is how much will keep you quiet and whether I can trust you to keep quiet.”

Money? They’re thinking of giving you money?

Jack is looking at you, and there’s a sly grin on his face, like he read you dead to right. “I’m a businessman, Brent,” he says. “Businessmen trade in all kinds of commodities. And silence, non-action, compliance — these are just commodities as far as I’m concerned. Or, to be more accurate, goods and services.”

“Maybe you need to say that more simple,” says Wallace.

“No, I get it,” you say.

“Clever lad,” says Jack. “So let’s say if I were to give you a thousand dollars. Would that do the trick?”