Roy’s house was a sprawling two-story McMansion with ten bedrooms and kids’ toys strewn across the carpet. “Oh those grandkids,” he told us, pushing a plastic trike out of the way.
Everyone was asleep, but his wife Linnie woke up to greet Roy, and didn’t blink when Roy said we’d be spending the night. She was a heavyset, apple-cheeked woman with stiff black hair and an easy way about her. She made a fuss over Ollie, who was still wet and shaking with cold, and gave her a fleece hoodie and sweatpants to wear. (Whatever was in Ollie’s backpack, it wasn’t clothes, and I didn’t dare ask her to open it in front of the smugglers.) The sweats were several sizes too big, but everything was too big for Ollie.
They sat us down in the kitchen and started hauling out chicken-fried steak, gravy, corn, mashed potatoes, and cornbread, plus a loaf of white Wonder bread and a bucket of real butter.
“They’re beigetarians,” Dr. Gloria said.
I wasn’t about to complain. Comfort food was exactly what we needed. Or what I needed. Ollie barely ate, and spoke even less. At first I chalked it up to the cold, but even after her chills had died down she seemed to be somewhere else, her gaze fixed on the middle of the table.
It didn’t seem to bother Roy or Linnie. Roy talked as I ate, explaining at length the justness of his tobacco business. I thought of Christian soup kitchens where the price of the meal was a sermon, and like other homeless people, I took the deal. Roy let me know that the tobacco trade was absolutely legal and, more than that, integral to their tribal independence. Canada, he said, had no right to place taxes on products that the tribe produced, on their own land. Tobacco had transformed the Akwesasne Reserve from a third-world nation to a first-world one. If Canada would stop illegally seizing their product, they wouldn’t have to run it over the water in boats.
I didn’t ask him what smuggling people across the border had to do with tribal self-determination; this person shut up and ate, pausing only to nod in agreement.
Afterward Linnie showed us to a guest bedroom, gave us towels, and pointed out the bathroom. Finally we were alone. But still Ollie looked grim.
“What’s going on?” I asked her.
“We shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“In this bedroom?”
“In this house. These people are criminals, and they’re being kind to us for no reason whatsoever. They’ve been paid. We should be driving the hell out of here, now.”
I didn’t need to remind her that we had no car, and our ride wouldn’t be here until the morning. “If they were going to axe-murder us they would have done it by now,” I said. Then: “No, you’re right. Axe murderers always try to kill you after you’ve gone to bed, when you’re having sex.”
Ollie was not amused. She pulled off the pile of decorative pillows covering the queen-size bed and crawled in, still wearing the fleece suit. I stripped off to my underwear and got in beside her … where we lay, wide awake, listening to each other breathe.
“He knew about Rovil,” I said. “How the hell does he know?”
“He could have tapped Bobby’s phone before I made you stop using it. He could have followed you when you mailed the FedEx package. Were you followed?” She sounded angry.
“No, I wasn’t—fuck, I don’t know,” I said. “How would I know?”
“And we don’t know if Rovil’s still coming.”
“He’ll come if he can,” I said.
Ollie didn’t answer.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Dr. Gloria looked up from her notepad. “You have to consider what she’s gone through.”
What she went through? I thought we’d both had it pretty rough.
“Think, Lyda,” the angel said. “What happened back there? Tonight.”
Well, a shit-load happened back there. The fake drug exchange, the man in the black hat, Hootan getting shot. Then the run to the boat, and Aaqila …
Oh.
Ollie was facing away from me, her head tucked into her chest. I could picture Ollie, the rock raised above her head. The way she looked down at Aaqila’s body. She’d killed someone for me. I put an arm over her stomach and pressed my forehead into her back. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
Ollie didn’t move. Then she said, “For what?”
“For Aaqila. The Afghan girl.”
“She was shooting at you. I hit her in the head.” She said this calmly.
“I know, I know. But I put you in a position where you had to do that.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
I sat up so I could see her face. “Ollie, I never wanted you to kill for me.”
Ollie blinked up at me. “She’s not dead. At least not when I left her. She was still breathing; I checked.”
“Oh. Thank God.” Maybe, I thought, Fayza wouldn’t hunt us down now.
“But I would have if I needed to,” she said.
Not for the first time I wondered what Ollie had done before she’d been an analyst. She said she’d been in the army, but she refused to talk about where she’d been deployed, or what she had done. I’d never pressed her. It wasn’t that kind of relationship.
“Keep telling yourself that,” Dr. Gloria said under her breath.
“I never should have put you in that position,” I said.
“You didn’t put me in that position,” Ollie said. “I put me in that position. It was my plan.”
“Because I forced you to break out of Guelph Western. I made you go off your meds, then—”
Ollie sat up. “Are you that egotistical?”
That stopped me. Ollie got out of bed looking like a child wearing her mom’s clothes. “You didn’t force me to do anything,” she said. She dropped her voice. “You didn’t make me go off my meds, or trick me into helping you. I chose to help you. So did Bobby. You think you’re so damn smart that you can manipulate everybody into doing what you want?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“Of course she does,” Dr. Gloria said.
“I’m the one who fucked up,” Ollie said. She started pacing. “I should have known that the cowboy would still be tracking you.”
“How could you possibly—”
“Not the cowboy exactly, though I should have realized back at the marina that he was watching us too carefully. But somebody. Someone went to the church after you did, then killed those people and took the printer.” She was trying to keep her voice down, but she was talking fast, growing more agitated. “He had to have followed you. But who is he working for? We know now that he’s not working for the Millies.”
“Not after he shot them,” I said.
“So he’s working parallel to us, trying to shut the church down. His accent was American. Does that mean anything?”
“It sounded fake to me,” I said. “A little too John Wayne. He could be anyone who watched a lot of movies.”
“But American beneath that,” she said. “Midwestern.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t going to argue with a woman who used to monitor phone calls for a living. “So a drug agent then. DEA.”
She fanned the idea away. “No, not a cop—he wouldn’t be working alone. Maybe an ex-officer.” She spun suddenly, looking at nothing. “What if he’s working for the church? Plugging leaks? He follows you, sees you talk to Luke and Pastor Rudy, then kills them. He gets to Rovil somehow. Then he follows you to the beauty salon, then to Cornwall—I should have spotted him!”
“Easy, easy,” I said. “Edo’s a billionaire; he can afford to hire good people.”
“You’re sure it’s Edo, then.”
“Pretty fucking sure.”
She said nothing for a moment, then: “If you find him, will you kill him?”
I laughed nervously. “Jesus, Ollie!”