Squall (3 page)

The cottage itself stood on the last piece of private property on this stretch of side road, perched on the tip of a narrow peninsula where the road dead-ended, the nearest neighbor six miles back, a summer dwelling Dale could see was vacant as they passed it on the way in.

He found the key where Uncle Frank had hidden it since Dale was a kid, in the flared nostril of a grim figure on a thirty-foot totem pole Frank had picked up at a yard sale someplace.

He got the front door open and Ronnie pushed past him saying, “I’m going to bed.” She snatched the truck keys out of his hand and took the gym bag and the briefcase upstairs with her. Dale said, “Make yourself at home,” and listened to her—boot heels stabbing the wood floors up there, the squeak of bed springs and then silence—before getting his coat and boots off, turning up the heat and taking a stroll through the place.

Being here, amidst Uncle Frank’s weird antler furniture and hunting trophies, made him feel like a kid again. After his mother died and his father buckled down for the serious drinking, Dale had come up here as often as he could. Uncle Frank had always treated him like a prince, teaching him to fish, letting him take the power boat out by himself, and telling him stories about how crime didn’t pay and he didn’t have to turn out like his brother if he didn’t want to. What Uncle Frank never understood was that in those days Dale wanted nothing more. Nobody messed with Ed, that was the thing. Ed always got what he wanted, one way or another, and Ed never felt fear, something Dale had lived with since his mother died, a withered stick figure in a prison hospital bed, eaten alive by cancer while still in her thirties.

Fucking fear.

In the kitchen Dale checked the fridge: a half-used jar of raspberry jam in there, six cans of beer and not much else. He helped himself to one of the beers and sat on the couch facing the big picture window that overlooked the lake. Nothing moving out there in the cold, not even a breeze. The sun was out now, but muted by a white sky that shaded to near black in the south.

The beer tasted flat and Dale set it aside, little comfort there. His demons were awake now, capering and hungry as hell.

He listened into the remote silence of the place, the starkness of it serving only to amplify his need. He glanced up at the ceiling, knowing that Ronnie was in the room directly above him, probably already sound asleep. Bitter, he wondered what it said about her feelings for him that she took that bag of dope upstairs with her. The money, too, for that matter. What was he going to do, take off with it and leave her stranded here?

She doesn’t want you getting high
, the demon said.
Bitch probably filled her own snoot with it before passing out on your uncle’s Posture-Pedic.

He said, “Slippery bitch,” and headed for the stairwell in his socks. He knew every creak in the floorboards and risers and made the trip to the master bedroom without a sound. She’d pulled the door shut but hadn’t latched it, and it opened quietly on well-oiled hinges. In the dim, Dale saw her lying on her side with her back to the curtained window, her breathing slow and raspy with sleep.

The gym bag was on the foot of the bed next to the briefcase. He was almost out the door with it when Ronnie said, “Put it back,” without moving and Dale said, “Just a taste, Ronnie. That’s all. To quiet the voices.”

He heard her say, “Asshole,” as he pulled the door shut and set the latch.

Back on the couch, he rested the gym bag on his lap and unzipped it, removing one of the kilo bags of heroin. It occurred to him as he hefted it that a few good snorts would get him there, but not like blasting it would—and remembered Uncle Frank was diabetic.

He found the insulin syringes in a kitchen drawer, thirteen of them left in a box of fifty, as seductive a sight as anything he’d seen in their crisp, sterile wrappers. He scooped them up, got a teaspoon from the cutlery drawer, a wad of cotton from an aspirin bottle and found a book of matches by the fireplace.

There was a moment of hesitation, a distant voice telling him not to blow his clean time...then he punched a hole in the kilo bag with his pocket knife and measured out a hit with the tip of the blade.

A prickly sweat broke out in his armpits as he cooked the hit then drew it up through the cotton into the slender syringe. His mouth was bone dry now and his breath came hot and fast.

He held the syringe up to the light, teasing out the last few bubbles from the amber fluid, warm and amniotic. That same distant voice bade him reconsider, but he was committed now.

The prick of the needle was glassy, inordinately painful, but the feeling passed quickly and he watched with detached fascination as a tiny eruption of blood rose to meet the falling plunger.

Mandy said, “Better get a move on, young man, or you’re gonna miss your bus.”

Cocooned in his pillowy red snowsuit, Steve came whisking down the hallway, his overstuffed school bag flopping between his shoulder blades. Though he wasn’t a big fan of school, the little guy was excited about it today. His JK teacher always made a fuss about the kids’ birthdays, and Steve had been chattering about it all morning.

“Miss Sutcliffe always makes a cake,” he told her. “I asked for chocolate. And she puts money inside it in wax paper. It’s not a surprise. She has to tell us so we don’t crack our teeth. Timmy MacNamara got a Toonie last week and it wasn’t even his birthday.”

Mandy held the front door open for him and Steve barreled past her, stopping on the porch to watch his mom pull on a parka and trade her fuzzy slippers for galoshes. Then he was down the steps and running, skidding to a stop at the verge of the rural road just in time to meet the bus.

Earning a disgruntled “Mu-um!” for her efforts, Mandy lifted him onto that first high step and Steve tramped the rest of the way up, grinning shyly when the driver and some of the other kids shouted, “Happy Birthday, Steeeeeve!”

As the door hissed shut, Mandy felt a bright jab of pain in her side and thought
Oh, shit
; but it passed quickly and she turned to go back inside, watching the big yellow bus chuff its way along the ice-patched road.

She was in the foyer stepping out of her boots when she heard Tom’s voice on the radio.

* * *

Tom spoke into the boom mike on his headset, his voice raised against the drone of the aircraft as he taxied toward the outpost cabin on Biscatosi Lake. “This is Quebec-Victor-Bravo on the ice at Outpost Three,” he said. “I can see the damage from here.”

Mandy’s voice in the headset: “Acknowledge, Quebec-Victor-Bravo. Birthday boy. What do you see?”

“Branch through the front window. A bunch of shingles blown off. Gonna be here a while.”

“Roger that, QVB. Storm’s still headed your way, though, so maybe you should tackle the window first so you can be ready to bolt if the weather starts bearing down on you. You know what you’re like once you get started on something.”

“Say again, Home Base? There’s no one here fits that description.”

“You heard me, wise guy. Don’t make me come out there. I want you home in one piece
and
on time for Steve’s party. Get that right and who knows, maybe we’ll have a private party later on.”

“Mission understood, but may induce labor.”

“Let me worry about that. Home base out.”

Smiling, Tom guided the Cessna to a stop twenty feet from shore and powered down. This past week had been unseasonably cold, even for the Sudbury Basin, temperatures plummeting to a frosty thirty-five below, some days even colder with the wind-chill, and many of the remaining birch trees in the area had been losing their branches, the heftier ones popping off the trunks with sharp pistol cracks. That appeared to be what had happened here, the ejected branch plowing through the front window, letting the weather in.

As Tom approached the cabin, bent against a freshening wind, he could see that it wasn’t only the weather the shattered glass had allowed inside. A fair-sized animal, a lynx, maybe, or a restless raccoon, had gotten in there, too.
God damn.
Supplies torn up. Curls of frozen animal shit all over the place.

Oh, well
,
Tom thought.
Cost of doing business.

He set about wrestling the heavy branch out of the window frame, deciding to cut down the parent tree in the spring and chainsaw it into stove lengths.

As the branch pulled free and Tom dragged it clear, trying not to topple himself in the knee-deep snow, he saw the amber eyes of a lynx, almost certainly the culprit, tracking him from the edge of the bush. He said, “I don’t suppose you’re going to help,” and the skittish animal turned tail and bolted into the woods.

Tom thought,
Beautiful.

After a quick look at the sauna shed, still mercifully intact, he unlocked the cabin door and let himself inside. He thought of getting a fire going in the wood stove, but with that frosty wind picking up now, setting off a low howl as it gusted through the open window frame, he could see little point in wasting the wood. He got the plastic garbage bin from the kitchen and started picking up the glass.

As he worked Tom realized that in spite of the occasional nuisance like this, his life was exactly as he’d always imagined it. He’d married his college sweetheart, fathered a beautiful boy—with another one ready to pop out and say howdy any day now; Mandy had refused the ultrasonographer’s offer to tell her the baby’s sex, but Tom had wanted to know—and the once flagging business that was originally his dad’s had finally started to thrive. Tom had always loved the outdoors, so his transition into the family business had seemed a natural one. They owned a half dozen cabins on some of the most remote and well-stocked lakes in the North, hauled cargo to otherwise inaccessible mining sites, and ran a small, year-round flight school, which Mandy managed when she wasn’t busy being pregnant. Life was good.

There were some scraps of plywood under the stilted cabin, left over from building the sauna shed, and Tom reckoned he could use those to board up the window until he could get a new piece of glass cut. He’d have to shovel a bit of snow to get at them, but that wouldn’t take too long.

He got a shovel out of the storage bin on the deck and paused to study the sky in the direction of home: stormy all right, low and threatening, but still a long ways off. If he played his cards right, he could get the window boarded up, scrape the lynx shit off the floor, tack those shingles back on and maybe even split a cord or two of wood for the spring.

Shivering in the wind, Tom set himself to the tasks at hand.

––––––––

Dale came awake with a kink in his neck, sitting on the couch with his head slung back, a strand of drool connecting his chin to a wet spot the size of a saucer on his Tragically Hip T-shirt. The sky outside the picture window was dense with cloud cover now, and a light snow was falling. There was no sign of Ronnie.

He glanced at his watch, mildly surprised to see that it was past four in the afternoon. He gave his head a shake and leaned over his works, spread out in front of him on the raw-pine coffee table. A quick inventory told him he’d already used three of the syringes, though he could only remember the first. The reason he was here rose up in the fog of his mind and Dale decided it was time for a little pick-me-up.

He got it done quickly, nodded off briefly then got up to go to the john. That done, he felt around in his coat pockets for his cigarettes before remembering he’d left them in the truck. He got his boots and coat on and went outside.

He was halfway across the yard when he heard Ed’s phone ringing in the Ram. He thought,
Fuck,
and tramped through the snow to answer it, Ed’s voice coming at him before he got the handset to his ear.

“Dale? Answer me, dipshit. Is that you?”

“Yeah, Ed, it’s me.”

“It was the coke whore, am I right? Your fian
cée
? Tell me I’m right, Dale.”

He thought of lying—for all the good it would do him—then thought,
Screw it, I told her to wait in the truck.

He said, “Yeah, Ed. It was Ronnie.”

“I fucking
knew
it. You know what I’ve got to do now, Dale? I’ve got to go see Randall Copeland and explain this to him. Tell him how my dipshit brother and his coke whore slaughtered three of his best customers. How you then stole his product
and
his money and tried to make a run for it. Jesus Christ, Dale, how many times do I have to tell you? When you do a job for me, you repre
sent
me. How many times?”

There was a pause, Ed waiting for an answer, but Dale couldn’t think of what to say, the dope making him want to giggle.

Ed said, “Are you high?”

“Maybe a little.”

Ed gave a dry chuckle. “You’re a piece of work, bro, I’ll give you that. A real piece of work. All right, listen. This still might be fixable. You get the cash and the product back to me a-sap, all I’ve got to do then is convince Copeland he doubled his money. Where are you right now?”

Dale said, “We’re—” and felt the phone snatched out of his hand. He turned to see Ronnie in her jeans and red tank top pitching the phone as far as she could into the woods. When she faced him again she had the .380 in her hand, the stubby muzzle aimed at his face.

She said, “I ought to shoot you myself, save Copeland the trouble.”

The sight of that muzzle, the tension in Ronnie’s trigger finger, Ronnie barely dressed out here in the snow, cut through Dale’s buzz like a scalpel blade.

He said, “Ronnie, wait. Ed was pissed, sure, but he sounded okay about it, like he could smooth things over with Copeland.”

“Did you tell him where we are?”

“No.”

“Dale?”

“
No
. You took the phone before I could.”

She glanced at the Ram. “What about the truck? Doesn’t it have one of those GPS tracking dealies in it? So they can find it if it’s stolen?”

Dale shook his head. “It did when Ed bought it, but he had it removed, in case he needed to flee in it someday. Besides, who’d be stupid enough to steal Ed’s truck?”