Dan Sharp Mysteries 4-Book Bundle (132 page)

A fist landed against his throat, winding him. Dan’s grip loosened and the man wrenched himself free. A knife flashed, shiny and seductive, released from the folds of a suit. Dan leapt aside.

Before he could strike again, a door opened on the man’s right, releasing a noisy gang from the bright interior of a pub. One unguarded glance over his shoulder was all Dan needed. He kicked out and landed a solid blow against his ribs. The knife clattered away as the man doubled over.

Dan watched him lurch down the alley and disappear around the corner. There was no use pursuing him. His partner was still out there somewhere. It would just be asking for trouble.

“Stop following me,” he spat out uselessly.

A crowd had formed across the street. Someone was punching numbers into a cell phone. Dan heard the word
police
, which sounded pretty much the same in either language. His pursuers were gone. Dan doubted that would be the end of them, but it would buy him time.

He turned and headed back to the hotel, making his way through the crowds. As he reached the corner, he found himself facing the dark man he’d seen in the bar. It hadn’t been a mutual appreciation society after all, but Dan was determined he wasn’t going to stop him from entering his hotel.

“Your buddies just left,” he said, grappling with the newcomer.

With his head butted against the man’s shoulder, and legs entwined, Dan tried without success to force him down. His opponent was small, but wiry and supple. The coupling felt like a form of intimacy, their tangled limbs somehow making them complete. The other fought back expertly. This was a man who knew how to defend himself, Dan thought. Military possibly. Maybe police. It was the latter that worried him most.

Dan squeezed him tightly, pulling them together lest this man produce a knife, too. His opponent drew his arms in close then thrust his shoulders forward explosively, literally knocking Dan aside and forcing the breath out of him. He hit the ground in a low roll, instinctively protecting his vitals from potentially damaging kicks, then lay dazed, waiting for the other’s next move.

“Asshole,” the man spat out as he walked away.

Not French, at any rate.

Nineteen

The Grain Silo

Dan strode through the lobby and headed up the stairs. Throwing his belongings together, he took time to check his face in the mirror, daub the gash on his cheek with toilet paper, then quit the room. Out in the street, he tossed the key into a mailbox and made his way to an ATM.

Cash in hand, he headed down the road to a small hotel he’d spotted on his arrival. A light gleamed in the front window, the vacancy sign still lit up. A lucky thing, Dan knew. At that time of year, most hotels were booked well in advance in the tourist quarter.

The old man who greeted him didn’t hesitate to take his cash. He wrote out a receipt and showed him to a room.
Now this is more like it
, Dan thought, gazing around with admiration at the stone walls and wood beams. Pure
Vieux-Québec
. Probably owned by a descendant of one of the original
habitants
. It would suit his needs, but he couldn’t stop and admire it for long. He’d finish his business and head home. Whatever his pursuers wanted from him, they would have it one way or another. But they’d have to find him first.

He kicked off his shoes and put his feet up on the bed, casting around for something on television he could understand. It turned out not to be a problem. With cable, there were far more English stations than French.
One more reason for them to hate us
, Dan thought.
But god forbid they separate and get swallowed up by the U.S. Then they’ll really have something to scream about.

He settled in with good, sensible Jamie Oliver, righting the nutritional wrongs of the world one social class at a time. There was no sense going back out and showing his face on the street again tonight.

Sleep did not come easily. Wary of every sound outside his door, he finally nodded off before dawn. When he woke an hour later, his back felt as if it had been split open, with a rib or two puncturing his lungs for dramatic effect. That he’d hate to die in a Quebec hotel room was all he could think.

He called the
Sûreté
to confirm his meeting then packed and left. The chief of police was as old and wrinkled as a desert tortoise. He looked Dan over with jaundiced eyes as he opened a musty-looking file. Judging by its condition, it may well have predated computers. Dan watched as he turned the pages till he came to the one he was searching for, stabbing it with his forefinger.

“Ici.”

Dan saw a handwritten coroner’s report in a script that might have been made with a quill pen. He followed what he could make out with his limited French.

He looked back up at the man. “
Mort?
”

“Oui, il est mort, bien sûr.”

“Quand?”

The man frowned and looked down at the report. Surely this idiot Englishman could figure that out.

“Le quinzième mai, deux mille trois.”

He looked back up with bleary eyes. Dan could practically smell the alcohol on his breath. The man should have been packed away in mothballs and put in a closet, not left sitting at a desk in some backwater provincial police station.

Fifteenth May, two thousand and three
.

Dan thought back and felt a chill. That was pretty much when Domingo had started saying she knew Lonnie was dead. He’d been sitting here on some police shelf all that time, waiting for someone to find him. Dan fought a sense of rage over the carelessness of such things. Probably no one had entered it into the police files.

He looked at the report and saw a first name only:
Lonnie
. Someone had added a blurry Polaroid of a boy turned away from the camera, looking back over his shoulder with a wide grin. Elfin. That was exactly how Dan remembered Lonnie. He’d found what he was after.

He wanted to ask what happened, but his French wasn’t honed enough to extract such answers with precision. Instead, he tried to convey what he could with facial expressions. He shook his head and tried hard to look chagrined.
Chagrin
. It was a French word. Surely this old codger would understand that.

“C’est quoi?”

The old man looked at Dan as though he were the daft one.

“Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé?”
Dan managed.

“Ah!” Enlightenment shone in his eyes.
“Il est tombé.”

“
Tombé
. He fell?”

“Oui
.
”
The man used his hands to indicate someone climbing then falling in space. He pointed to a grain silo in the background of the photograph.
“Suicide,”
he pronounced slowly, the word taking on a cultivated gravity in French.

Dan picked up the image and examined it in his hands.

He turned to the officer again.
“L’addresse?”

“Oui, oui.”
The man made a snuffling sound, swiped at his nose, and then handed Dan a form with the address of the mortuary.

“No, the other.”

The man glared as though he were speaking a Martian dialect.

“L’autre addresse,”
Dan said. He pointed to the silo.
“Je veux aller ici
.
”

“Ah!”

Again, the look of recognition passed over the man’s face. He bent and wrote something on the form and handed it back. Dan took it and thanked him.

“Bien sûr,”
he said with a shrug, as though he expected no less.

At the mortuary, Dan was thankful to be greeted by a bilingual attendant who seemed to bear no grudge against him for asking his complicated questions in English. He’d anticipated more trouble on this end. Getting information was one thing, but asking for a cremation was quite a different set of affairs. He handed over his investigator’s licence for identification. The attendant looked it over, glanced at Dan again, and then handed it back with scarcely a flicker of interest.

Dan signed a form and answered a few questions. Yes, a plain metal box was adequate. No, he would not mind coming to pick up the remains himself. Tomorrow morning was fine. Business concluded, Dan thanked the man and left.

On the way back to his car, he passed a florist and ducked inside. It was threatening rain as he drove past the Plains of Abraham, those tumultuous fields where the destiny of the country had turned decisively two hundred and fifty years earlier. On the outskirts of town, he parked and approached the silo. It looked tranquil, not the sort of place you might expect to find death. Then again, it was exactly the sort of place you might decide to kill yourself if you were determined to do so. From pain to peace in one short step, but with a world of difference between. Dan well knew the seductive urge. He’d never do that to Ked, but he often thought of the peace that would follow, a respite from the relentlessness of his dreams, should he ever get so desperate. People did all the time.

He stood looking up a sheer wall of cement. The handle on the door was rusted shut. That wouldn’t stop him. He’d come this far. He put the flowers down and looked around for something to pry it open. Around back he found another door, this one red and covered in dents. It opened to his touch.

The carpet of dirt was soft and hushed beneath his tread. Inside, the air was stale but comforting, like the scent of an old sweater. The space felt welcoming, as though it had been waiting for a human presence. The shaft disappeared in darkness overhead. An arrow of light pierced the gloom, revealing wooden beams criss-crossing the interior far above. A set of rickety stairs tempted the curious to climb up into the shadows.

Dan looked around.
There should be something more here
, he thought.
The memory of a fall, the trajectory of a body arcing through the air. Something marking the spot where he fell
. As a boy, Lonnie was constantly on the move — bicycles, Rollerblades, running sports. There had to be something more. Not just this emptiness.

He held the photograph up.

“You were a good kid,” he said.

He caught the flicker off to one side. Then he turned and saw her. A barnyard Madonna, hair hanging down, classical features etched in the air. Not quite an apparition. She was watching him. No fear on her face, just curiosity.

“Bonjour,”
Dan ventured, wondering if he was about to be arrested for trespassing. Given the way things had been going, it wouldn’t have surprised him. Either that or he was looking at a ghost.

“Bonjour,”
she answered brightly.

“Do you speak English?”

She smiled. “I am English.”

He held out the flowers. “I came here to leave these. A boy died here.”

The look on her face said she knew.

“Lonnie,” she said.

“You knew him?”

She walked to the centre of the space then looked up into the rafters and down again at the sawdust- covered earth.

“It was here,” she said, indicating the spot with her hands. “There were a bunch of us. We all lived here together for a few months one summer. Lonnie, me, and the others.” She looked back at Dan. “Lonnie said we’d found the end of the world here. I think he thought we could stay forever. We knew there was something wrong with him, but you sometimes went days without noticing it and you thought maybe he was all right.”

She looked him in the eye to see if he understood then went on.

“I think we wanted him to be all right. Then it would show up again. Just odd things, you know. Like one day he found a toad and went around with it all afternoon, cupping it in his hands like it was some kind of offering. I asked what he was doing. He said he was getting the toad acclimatized to being carried. When it was ready, he said, he was going to carry it through town as a symbol for animal-rights abuse. He wanted to walk across the country to make people aware that animals were being poisoned by pollution. That was how he was going to do it.”

She cocked her head and looked at him. “You knew him?”

“Yes,” Dan said. “I’m a friend of his mother. Can you tell me how he died?”

She looked back up at the gloom. “We were dancing one night. We’d lit a bonfire. Some of us were drunk. Lonnie climbed to the top of the silo. He said he was going to see the world from the roof. Some of the boys were yelling to him to jump and see if he could fly.”

Dan watched her as she told him all this with the bright, serene light in her eyes.

“They were laughing. We didn’t think he would do it. Next thing I knew, something hit the ground. I turned around and there he was.” She looked at him. “It wasn’t their fault. They didn’t know he was going to do it.”

“What happened?”

“One of the boys phoned the police. We all left after that. Before they could come and question us. We didn’t know what else to do. We were trespassing. We didn’t even know his full name. I still don’t know it.”

“Rhodes,” Dan said. “Lonnie Rhodes.”

He offered her the flowers. She took them and laid them on the soft earth.

“I come back here sometimes. I live in town now, but I like to come back. I think about him. He was so sweet.”

The wind blew through a crack high above, making a mournful sound.

“Will you tell her I’m sorry? His mother?”

Dan nodded. “I will.”

The next day he made his way through Quebec, that rebel holdout from the seventeenth century, back down the Highway of Heroes, carrying the ashes of an unsung hero who would not long be remembered by many.

He had hoped to tell Domingo that she still had a child alive somewhere. That it was all a mistake. Her son had never died. But instead, this box. Ashes. Nothing to warm the heart of a dying woman or bring joy to a face already dazzled with pain and impending loss. Instead, what he was bringing home was grief and a crowd crying,
Jump!
It seemed unfair. Worse than no news at all.

Twenty