“And Bader?”
“Not a problem.”
“You’re going to kill him too.”
“Me personally? No. Someone else will handle it.”
“Ricky Messina?”
“Oh, you are industrious,” she said.
I felt a surge of pure hatred for this woman, this animal, who could talk about killing people like we were bugs who had made it through her screen door.
“That’s quite a look,” Staples said. “So angry. So vindictive. I think I liked your dumb look better.”
She levelled the gun and I saw the knuckle around the trigger start to pull. I flinched as a sudden roar in my ears made them ring-a noise that came from behind, far too loud for a silenced pistol. Staples’s chest exploded in a cloud of red and she stumbled backward against a butcher-block counter. Another shot and her throat burst open. She made a coarse strangled sound and slumped down to the floor, leaving a thick bloody smear on the cabinets behind her.
I turned around and saw Dante Ryan at the kitchen door, his Glock 20 in hand.
His first rule of a fast exit had been: make sure there’s no one left alive to chase you.
He’d held up his end. I just had to get my ass out the door without kicking Christine Staples’s dead face.
CHAPTER 49
We made it to the Peace Bridge in under ten minutes, melting into the long line of cars inching toward the border. It was getting dark, and not just because the sun was finally starting to set on a long June day. Thunderclouds were building in the northwest, gunmetal blue, stacked high like rearing horses. The heat wave was nearing its end.
Neither Ryan nor I had said a word since leaving the house. My lips and throat felt dry. My eyes were burning, my left ear ringing. I couldn’t get the image of Amy Farber out of my mind. Her body on the floor, one leg draped over her fallen chair, the warmth and life gone out of her.
We cleared Canadian Customs without incident. Ryan’s gun was back in the trunk of his car, locked in its metal case, and I had nothing to declare. Absolutely nothing.
The first raindrops fell as we sped along the flat stretch of land between Fort Erie and Niagara Falls. Ryan switched on the wipers. I lowered my window a few inches and felt splatters on my face and arm and breathed in the smell of ozone. “Thank you,” I said to Ryan. “And don’t make me say what for.”
“Don’t worry. We’re pretty even.”
“How so? I still don’t know who ordered the hit on Silver. You might still have to carry it out for all we know.”
“You gave it everything,” he said. “So for that I owe you. Anything you ever need you can ask me, for the rest of your life. Or the rest of mine, anyway.”
“How long were you outside?” I asked.
“I never left. When I came around front and saw you talking to that fed-”
“How’d you know she was a fed?”
“You kidding? That car? That suit? That hair? I knew something was up but where was I going to go? After you left, I went back to the garage and kept watch. When you got back, I moved up to the kitchen door to listen in. And did what I had to do.”
“The husband’s at the movies,” I said. “That’s the only reason he didn’t get it too. He got the jitters and had to go sit in the dark until he calmed down.”
“Lucky him.”
“Some lucky. He’s going to come home and find his wife lying dead with another dead woman he’s never seen.”
“At least he’s alive.”
“Because he wasn’t man enough to stand by his wife when his nerves got bad.”
“Didn’t like him much?”
I pictured the warm, earthy woman who had let her hair go gray, confident enough in herself not to do anything about it. “I liked her more.”
Rain was slanting through the beams of our headlights. The image of one dead body lying on the floor led to another. “I wonder if Marco and the others have been found yet,” I said.
“This kind of heat, it can’t take too long.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. I’m too tired to know. Tomorrow I’ll make some calls and see what I can find out. Maybe Uncle Looch will give me the lay of the land.”
“It would help if we knew who was pulling the strings in Buffalo. Ricky Messina doesn’t strike me as management.”
Ryan eased a cigarette out of his pack and lit up. I reached for the pack. He covered it with his right hand. “Don’t,” he said. “You’ll hate yourself in the morning.”
“I’m going to anyway.”
He moved his hand and I took out a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked one since Israel. I put it between my lips and lit up and blew a stream of smoke out my window. Some people think the first cigarette you smoke after you’ve quit a long time is the best. They’re wrong. The second one is the best. The first you just have to get through without passing out or throwing up.
The rain started to fall harder, fat drops bouncing off the pavement in front of us. Ryan moved the wiper speed to double time. I took another drag off the cigarette and felt light-headed as nicotine rushed through my blood, tagging familiar receptors that whispered, Where have you been all this time?
I threw the fucking thing out the window and slept the rest of the way.
When I woke the car was at a full stop. I jerked upright in my seat, forgetting for a moment where I was. I peered out through the rain-streaked window-we were on Carlaw, north of Lakeshore-and remembered everything that had happened.
Forgetting had been better.
It was after eleven by Ryan’s dashboard clock. The rain was still coming down hard. We drove north on Carlaw, past old warehouses that had been converted into film offices and workshops that created distressed pine neo-antiques. I told Ryan which street to take over to Broadview and we came to it just south of the high-rise I called home. As we neared the front of my building, Ryan asked where he could park without being seen. I pointed to the visitors’ lot on the south side of the building.
“I need to get my guns out of the trunk,” he said. “Since I know yours is probably in a shoebox in the attic.”
“I don’t have an attic.”
“Yeah, you do. Only your steps don’t go up all the way.”
As we were pulling into the lot, I yelled, “Don’t stop!”
A dark green SUV was idling in a parking spot just past the entrance, exhaust snaking around its rear tires. The window of the passenger side was all the way down in the rain.
“Turn around! Go! Go!”
A muzzle flashed on the passenger side and our front windshield shattered, showering us with glass. Ryan didn’t need any further encouragement. He hit the gas and spun the wheel hard with the heel of his hand. The car fishtailed on the wet pavement. He spun the wheel the other way and floored it once we were pointed more or less at the street. We got out to Broadview with the SUV close on our tail.
“Right,” I said.
He turned right and sped up the street. A northbound streetcar was stopped at the next corner, its rear doors open to let passengers off. Streetcars have the right of way in Toronto-when their doors are open, cars are supposed to come to a full stop, like it was a school bus. Ryan just hit his horn and kept going. A man about to step down from the rear exit jumped back up and yelled at us. The driver rang his bell as an admonition. Then the SUV sped through too, drawing another peal of protest.
Ryan gunned it north. “My guns!” he spat. “They’re all in the fucking trunk!”
We blew through the red light at the next intersection. So did our pursuers. I remembered the manoeuvre I had pulled the other day in a similar situation, faking a turn left onto Pottery Road and then juking right through the streets of East York. The SUV didn’t even give me the chance to suggest it. It pulled out into the southbound lane and roared up beside us on our left. We couldn’t match his acceleration. When the SUV was alongside us, the passenger leaned out: Ricky the Clip, his round face wet and shiny with rain. Ryan’s window exploded and he screamed and clutched his left eye. Blood streamed through his fingers and over his knuckles as the car began to drift toward a line of cars parked on our right. “I can’t fucking see!” he cried.