Frostbite (17 page)

“They never found it,” he said. His grin was still in place.

Chey thought about asking him what the hell he was talking about. No point, though. He could only be talking about one thing. She popped open his second beer. She didn’t say a word.

“They did a pretty thorough search, surprisingly. Most local cop-shops would have written that one off as an act of God. The good people of Chesterton, though, they really tried. They called in the big guns. The Mounties sent helicopters out into the bush and brought in real live bloodhounds when the aerial search turned up nothing. They found a caribou carcass a ways north of there that looked like maybe it was his handiwork. Only two kinds of animals could rip up a buck like that. Either a grizzly or a…werewolf.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay. That’s enough.” Arkady the bouncer sat up in his chair. “We have a policy here for people who want to talk about things they don’t understand. I get a free smoke break, and you get a free beer. There’s only one catch. You finish the beer and you leave before I come back.”

“Alright,” he said. “If that’s what you want. Listen, though, I brought
you something. Something I think you might like to have.” He started reaching into his pocket. Arkady grabbed his wrist and pulled it back out, twisted it around behind his back. A slip of paper or maybe an index card fell across the bar and Chey picked it up.

She flipped it over and saw it was a photograph. It looked like it had been taken from out of the window of an airplane. It showed a patch of waving grass from above. In the middle of the picture was a wolf rearing up on its hind legs, its massive paws batting at the camera. Its eyes were an icy green that made her whole body tense up.

“Wait,” she said, and looked up.

Arkady had the weirdo in a neck lock. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t struggling, either, which was strange, but then he’d only had one beer. Maybe he was smart enough to understand what the bouncer could do with just a little pressure. “Wait,” she said again. “This picture looks recent.”

“It was taken two weeks ago by a bush pilot flying up near the Arctic Circle. A guy who sees real wolves all the time. He knew the difference and so he took that shot and brought it to me, because it’s my job to look at pictures like that. It took me all this time to connect that thing with your daddy. And then to you.”

Chey flicked the photo back and forth between her hands. Trying to make a decision.

The weirdo raised his eyebrows, making his face look open and honest. She didn’t trust that face, not one bit. But she trusted the picture. Those eyes. She couldn’t remember her father’s face, but she remembered those eyes.

Chey nodded at Arkady and the bouncer let go.

“My name’s Robert Fenech,” the weirdo said, sitting back down on his bar stool. His grin was back. “I’m an intelligence operative with the government. And I’d like my free drink now.”

Three days later she
woke up and rolled out of a motel room bed in Ottawa. Bobby lay asleep under half of a sheet, one arm slumped off the side of the bed, his knuckles buried in shag carpeting.

Chey showered as quietly as she could and then got dressed. Bobby didn’t stir. She went to the drapes across the window of their room and pulled them open a little. Across the street she saw a convenience store, a chemist’s, the parking lot for the local Canadian Tire. Everything had the same muted, grayish colors that blended together. Bilingual signs crowded the sidewalks. She was back in Ontario, alright.

It had been so many years. Her mother still lived in Kitchener. A couple hundred kilometers away, but in the same province at least. She hadn’t spoken to her mother in six months and she wondered if she ought to call her—but it was still too early.

Chey and Bobby had flown in the night before and taken the little room because they were too tired to find anything better. Then Bobby had wanted to fool around, and she’d been too tired to put him off.

No, that wasn’t quite true. As much as she wanted to pretend that she wasn’t attracted to Bobby, she couldn’t convince herself. He was a little daft looking and a little obnoxious, sure. But he got her. When she’d told him about sleep-driving to Chesterton he’d just nodded and held her hand. When she told him about how ashamed she’d been when Uncle Bannerman saw her tattoo he had showed her his own tattoo, a
sloppy black Molson logo on his bicep that a high school friend had done with a hot sewing needle. And when she told him she was still afraid of dogs he hadn’t laughed.

Then there was the fact that he knew more about lycanthropes than she did. He could teach her things. That was his ultimate turn-on.

“Couldn’t sleep?” he asked, his head still buried in a pillow. He brought up his dangling hand and ran it through the spikes of his hair. They were crusty with old mousse and he scratched at the scalp underneath.

“I’m too excited,” she confessed.

He turned his head enough to smile at her. “You’re doing a good thing,” he said. He pushed his butt up in the air, getting his knees up underneath him, then sprang out of bed and whooped as he jumped into the shower. “Today’s going to be a good day.”

A car came for them promptly at nine, a white sedan with a government seal on the driver’s side door. They drove along the St. Lawrence River to spy headquarters, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service building. The building was a three-sided monolith with big mirrored windows surrounded by a miniature park. It looked pretty impressive from the highway.

Maybe Bobby had seen it one too many times. “You know, America’s got the Pentagon. That’s got
five
sides. Even the CIA building in Virginia has four.”

Inside they passed through a metal detector and were fitted for security cards. Chey had worn her best outfit, a black velvet skirt and a purple blazer. When they clipped the
VISITOR
pass on her she felt like Gillian Anderson in
The X-Files
. It was all she could do not to giggle.

A woman with permed hair and thick glasses led them down a long corridor and then they went inside a conference room where a lot of men and women in suits waited to shake Chey’s hand. They seemed really happy to meet her. She forgot all of their names as soon as she heard them. Once everybody was seated another man came in and put a tape
recorder on the wood-grain table. He explained that everything she said was going to be recorded for later use and she agreed that was okay with her.

The newcomer, who had not been introduced to her, started asking her questions then. Most of them were pretty basic. He wanted to know the date and the time of the attack. He apologized before he asked her a series of simple questions about how, exactly, her father had died. She didn’t mind answering.

“It went right for his throat, for—” she couldn’t remember the word. “For the artery here,” she said, and drew a finger across her neck.

“That’s the jugular vein,” one of the other men offered. Chey smiled her thanks.

The next bunch of questions surprised her: questions about her life since the attack. A woman dressed like a doctor asked her if she’d ever grown any hair in unnatural places. She did laugh, then. They asked her if she had ever experienced an occurrence of unusual strength or fast reflexes.

“Well, I exercise a lot,” she told them, looking around to see their reaction. A couple of them frowned. “I don’t sleep very well, you see. So I need something to do with all that extra time.”

The man with the recorder suggested that they move on. It turned out he only had one more question. “At any time since the attack have you been contacted by the lycanthrope? In any way? I want you to take time and think about this. There’s the possibility of what we call subtle communication.”

“Subtle?” she asked.

The man with the recorder shrugged. “For instance, telepathy. Or maybe a telehypnotic suggestion. Have you ever done something, especially when you were tired or in a trancelike state, that you can’t explain?”

She looked over at Bobby, excited. “Yes,” she said, her hands grabbing at the table edge. “Yes.” And she told them everything about her sleep-driving.

Some of the men glanced at each other and her heart sank, because she thought she knew what they were thinking.
That doesn’t sound like telepathy. That sounds like crazy
.

They had a lot more questions after that, but she couldn’t help but think she’d blown her big chance. Whenever she glanced at Bobby, though, he nodded confidently. Encouragingly. It helped her get through the endless session.

When she was done the men all stood up. She didn’t understand what they were doing. Then she stood up and they all started shaking her hand. “The CSIS is extremely grateful for your help,” one of them said. Another repeated the same message in French. She started shaking their hands.

“Wait,” she chirped. She couldn’t believe that was all they wanted. “Wait, I’d like to ask you something. If I may.”

They had already started filing out of the conference room. Now they stopped and looked at her patiently.

“If you catch him.” She swallowed painfully. “If you catch it. The lycanthrope, I mean. Is there any way you could let me talk to it? I don’t mean privately. You can have anyone there you think should be there, or just listen in if you want. I want to ask it a question, you see. I want to know if it hated my father or if it was just hungry.”

The men and women looked at each other, not at her. The same look as before. Now they definitely thought she was crazy.

“Look, I know it’s weird. But it would help me so much,” she pleaded.

Finally the man with the recorder cleared his throat and put a hand on her upper arm. “Ms. Clark, I’m so sorry if we gave you the wrong idea. This was just a backgrounder session. For informational purposes only.”

She shook her head. She didn’t understand.

“Mr. Fenech will explain, I’m sure,” he said, and then they all left. An hour later the car took her and Bobby back to the motel. Chey
sat down in a chair and smoothed out the wrinkles in her skirt. Bobby tore all the sheets off the bed and threw them at the TV set.

“Goddamned grits!” he shouted. “I shit on all the Green Party bilingual wine-sipping owl-hugging dolphinfuckers who run this country! I knew this would happen.”

Chey exhaled deeply before she spoke. “What happened? You said the government wanted my help.”

“Yeah, and I was right.” He threw the plastic ice bucket at the tempered glass windows. It bounced off without leaving a mark. “They wanted you to help them not make a decision. What you said in there should have gotten me the paperwork I needed to go up to the Arctic and give this animal a sterling silver enema. Instead they took what you gave them as a sign that they needed to do more fact finding. Maybe form a new committee on Lycanthrope Relations.
Lycanthropes!
I hate that fucking word. It’s Greek or something, right? It’s one of those
science
words. It’s the name of a
medical condition
. This isn’t some kind of cancer that only baby seals can get. It’s a godforsaken monster. Why can’t anybody ever say the word
werewolf
with a straight face?”

“So they’re not going to do anything?” Chey asked.

“They never do,” he told her. Then he tried to pull the curtains off the curtain rod. They wouldn’t come loose.

“How about a Cuban
cigar, Captain?” Bobby asked, waving one at Uncle Bannerman. Chey’s heart sank. She jumped up onto a wooden fence and sat down on the top rail. She didn’t have high hopes for this introduction to start with—she had known all along that the two men weren’t going to click—but it seemed almost like Bobby wanted this to fail. “You can’t get these down here in the States, right? There’s nothing like them.” He rubbed the cigar under his own nose and breathed out joyfully.

“Thank you, no. I don’t smoke.” Her uncle was dressed in his ranch clothes. Flannel shirt, jeans, perfectly clean work boots. He didn’t wear his uniform anymore—he was retired now, retired with honor and a nice pension after he cleaned up some bad prison riot or something with no casualties. He had transitioned to private life pretty smoothly and had bought a ranch where he raised Appaloosas. He had a bag of carrots with him and he was methodically feeding them, one after another, to his favorite animal, Vulcan, who kept flicking his tail back and forth.

It was 2006, the year the Canadian government went to the Conservatives, and it seemed like maybe, finally, they had a chance. If they were discreet about it. They needed Uncle Bannerman’s help, though, so the two of them had flown down to Colorado to ask him in person. It was January and there were patches of snow on the ground and Chey wished they could just go inside and get warm.

Bobby bit off the end of his cigar and spit it into the grass. Bannerman followed the projectile with his eyes and stared at where it hit the ground, probably memorizing the location where it fell so he could pick it up later. Bobby put the cigar in his mouth unlit and started sucking on it.

“Do you need a match?” Bannerman asked.

“Fuck no. You think I want lung cancer? I just like the taste.”

Bannerman looked away. “You can get mouth cancer just as easily.” He shook his head, clearly ready to give up. “Cheyenne told me that you wanted to ask me for a favor. I suppose I should let you ask, at least.”

“Yeah. I need your help with killing a werewolf.”

Bannerman didn’t react to that at all. He fed the last carrot to his horse and then wadded up the bag and put it in his pocket.

“It’s a matter of public safety,” Bobby tried to explain. “Canadian citizens are at risk and you can help me put an end to that. Surely you can appreciate that. This asshole ate your own brother.”

This time Bannerman winced visibly. Then he collected himself and reached up and patted Vulcan on his forelock. The horse snorted and kicked at the icy ground.

Bobby tried a new tack. “This is kind of my life’s work. Can you understand that? You’re at the end of a pretty distinguished career. I’m at the start of mine.”

“I served my country to the best of my abilities, that’s all.” Bannerman ran his hands down the horse’s mane a few times and then clucked at him with his tongue. The horse knew exactly what that meant and he ran off toward the far side of his enclosure, his hooves kicking up bright sprays of snow. “Tell me now, please, what exactly it is you want me to do for you.”