Ocean Drive, page 24
“He lived here, once,” Meghan said.
* * *
Back through Singh’s house, which had been searched and processed, barricade tape strung across the door. Meghan searched the downstairs bedrooms, found nothing.
Through the upstairs kitchen and dining nook. Plates in the sink. Beer and takeout containers, not much else. A blanket lay among the overturned furniture in the living room—not inconceivable that someone had been sleeping on the couch.
So multiple males cohabiting in the property. A hideout, temporary given the thrown-together furnishings, the mattresses on the floor. Meghan peered at the pillows on the bed, noticed what looked like hairs on the mattress. Carefully selected one and held it up.
Natural blond, different from the ones matted in the bloodstain on the carpet. This was fair and fine. Dalton and Cody Hayes had hair like that.
One of the Hayes brothers, living in her backyard. Working, apparently, with Harv and a rival gang.
She walked out to the driveway and lit a cigarette. From the apex she could look down to Crescent Road, where the burnt wreckage of the car had been.
That’s how Cam had gotten inside. Burning the Honda had been a distraction.
And now he was probably dead.
Meghan drove to the station and had the guard bring Sukhi up from the holding cells. The woman came bouncing into the room, took her usual seat and drummed on the table.
“You find him?” Sukhi asked.
“Just his blood.”
Sukhi played with her bottom lip, maybe weighing her options. “I mean, that’s the only place Harv took me.”
“He must have talked about others,” Meghan said.
“Just in general terms.”
“Tell me.”
Sukhi stared at the ceiling. “He talked about a place called ‘the barn’—he’d brought Cam there before, I think. Then there’s the boat—Dalton Hayes has a yacht or something, but it’s usually in storage in the winter.”
“Others,” Meghan said.
“I don’t know any—”
“Where would they kill him?” Meghan said.
Sukhi grinned, then ran a hand over her chin. “How would I know?”
“Because you’re just so very smart.”
“Fuck you.”
“You pay attention,” Meghan said. “You notice things. And you can piece together a likely guess.”
“I tell you, will I walk out of here?”
There it was, the deal, plain and simple.
“If he’s alive,” Meghan said. “He’s dead, your ass gets nothing.”
Sukhi said “No deal” and crossed her arms, but after five minutes of enduring Meghan’s stare, conceded and gave her a location.
* * *
Meghan chose Katy Qiu for backup and radioed Langley RCMP as she drove out to Zero Avenue, following the route through farmland and forest that Sukhi provided.
Less an address than an area. Sukhi had indicated a string of properties running along the border between Langley and Abbotsford. Meghan had heard about tunnels stretching into Washington State, some several kilometres long. From bootlegging to the Cocaine Eighties, to the glory days of BC bud, the area had always been a hot spot for smuggling. Now it was fentanyl, precursor chemicals and guns, always guns.
Her backyard.
Katy gripped her shotgun with the barrel pointed into the roof of the car. She looked nervous. Meghan told her she’d do fine.
“Any sign of anything, we wait for backup,” Meghan said. “We’re just looking. You did recon in the Reserves, right?”
“I set up tents.”
“Well, you probably spent time looking at those tents. That’s all we’re doing here.”
“So we’re not engaging,” Katy said.
“Not unless we have to.”
Meghan watched as the officer clutched the barrel to her cheek.
The properties were thick with pine trees and fallow fields. The occasional half-melted snowbank. Hard to see anything from the road. Meghan went slow, pausing at the mouth of each gravel driveway to look carefully down toward whatever buildings had been built there.
One place looked promising. A hedge of blackberry brambles obscured a century-old barn. A thick chain had been triple wound between fence posts, barring the road in. Meghan stopped the car on the shoulder and leapt over the shallow ditch, trampling the bushes but making it to the road behind the gate.
Trespassing, she thought. Waving goodbye to the moral high ground.
From behind her she heard Katy say, “Thought we were only doing recon.”
“This is recon,” Meghan said.
She walked down the path, noticing that the barn doors were wide open. A car parked next to it, something dark blue, dirty, the windows too scuzzy to see inside.
Farther down, the road dipped, continuing out into a field. Single-engine plane parts littered the grass, a once-white bucket seat now poised scarecrow-like in the middle of the field. Stuffing dribbled from its back. A gunmetal grey Airstream trailer next to it.
“Anyone in there?” Meghan called.
The trailer was locked, but a quick trek around the perimeter showed that the back window had been smashed in. A sleeping blanket lay on the floor, the ticking ripped out. An egg carton and a used coffee filter, so ancient that the grounds stood sandcastle-like inside. Something darting around the floor that turned out to be a raccoon.
The property was deserted.
* * *
Hiking back to the Interceptor, Meghan noticed a layer of gasoline scum atop the ditch water. She followed it down the shoulder of the highway. The runoff seemed to emanate from a culvert on the property across the road. She waited for a semi-trailer to rumble past before jogging over the highway to the other side.
Katy lumbered after her, toting the shotgun.
Here the property rose up from the road in a rocky grass-covered shelf. A pair of drainage pipes flanked a path of hard-packed dirt. A slack chain hung loose from a yellow pole staked into the side of the road, tire treads imprinted in the mud. No way to see over the hill except to walk up. Meghan did, telling Katy to wait here and watch the driveway.
At the top of the hill the ground flattened. She saw two large Quonset huts, doors shut. Beyond that several shipping containers. SUVs and pickups parked on a gravel island between the huts, the turnaround a soup of gravel, mud and rainwater.
Meghan walked to the closest container. The doors were open, tendrils of a dead rose plant snaking out of its mouth, long bent and trampled.
A bald bearded white man in jeans and a leather vest stepped from one of the huts, careful to close the door before Meghan could get closer.
“Help you with anything?” he said, some sort of Maritime accent.
“Looking for two men,” Meghan said. “Harvinder Singh and Cameron Shaw.”
“Uh huh.” He was at least a head taller than her. Both arms sleeved out with skulls, inverted crosses, a yin-yang symbol on his bicep.
Meghan described them. The man spat and took a step toward her, trying to force her back down the trail. Meghan held her ground.
“Nah,” he said, “I see anyone like that I’ll tell ‘em you’re looking.”
“Who owns this place?” she said, offering her card.
“Company sells tools. Gardening shit. I can get you a brochure.”
She nodded. Kept eyeing the trailers. Only the doors of the closest one were open.
“Don’t have any just now,” the man said. “Brochures, I mean. Your email on that card? ‘Cause I can send one to you.”
“Cody Hayes,” Meghan said.
The man paused, the name obviously striking a chord. “Yeah, don’t know about him. I should get back to work.”
“Don’t let me keep you.”
Meghan didn’t move.
The man waited for maybe five seconds, then said, “Nobody’s s’posed to be here when the owners aren’t, ’cept workers.”
“Are you asking me to leave?” she said.
“Guess so, yeah. Got work that won’t do itself.”
“Your name?”
He scoffed and, shaking his head, brought out his licence. Treece, Bryan R.
“Thanks, Mr. Treece. Who’s your boss, and when’s he or she due back?”
“Missy, I just work here,” Bryan Treece said, turning away.
Missy. Meghan sighed. She’d let him have that one.
She walked back to the highway. Katy fell in behind her.
“You drive back to town,” Meghan said.
“You’re staying here alone?”
She nodded. “Find out who owns this place. Look up a Bryan Treece, see if he’s got pals or priors. I’ll talk with the Langley detachment about getting a warrant.”
“What’s going on in there?” Katy asked.
“Nothing good,” Meghan said, taking the shotgun. “I’m pretty sure that’s the place.”
Twenty-One
There were two lives: The Container and What Came Before.
The Container was nothing but silence and the throb of pain from his mangled hand. It was sustained by wild hopes of breaking out, diminishing and dying into thoughts of how to end this. Harv’s words about swallowing his tongue would come back to him even as he planned an escape. Futile. The thought would work on him till his arms fell below his head and he’d hang, trussed up like a slab of beef, defeated.
If he told them the truth—that he’d made up CPG just to fuck with them, to give him enough time to kill Harv—they’d only scoff and ask if he really expected them to believe that. Trapped by his own cleverness, by his not being clever enough.
Tell them nothing. Let them do what they wanted.
He didn’t sleep but passed out during the night. When he woke, his mouth was cracked and filled with the taste of dust. The pain in his hand was a livid throb. He tried to flex the broken hand but the pain snarled at him and he drifted out again.
Dull grey cracks of sunlight had penetrated the container. It gets worse today, he thought. Worse from here on out. Best to end it, even if that means dashing your head against the roof.
But before that, let’s at least make one good try.
The sensation of swinging his torso hurt—but then everything hurt. He struggled and exhaled and contracted his abdominals and pulled himself up so that he could grab onto his jeans with his good hand, holding himself up in a jackknife position.
He couldn’t sustain this for long. Worse, with his functional hand busy holding him up, he couldn’t feel his leg bonds, had no sense of how to get free.
The breath he was holding burst, and he sighed and fell back, panting, swinging, choking down despair. It was over.
Everyone had seen this coming but him. From the moment he’d walked out of Kent, he’d been on track to end up here. Dying by fits and starts. Another unpleasant cargo.
He had a thought, dismissed it as impossible. Sometime later it returned, along with enough strength to try.
Again he sat up, pulling his body into a ninety-degree angle, using his good hand to cling to the leg of his pants. This time he threaded his right arm behind his right knee, pinning it to his chest. The pain in the broken hand was screaming, but he found by putting pressure on the forearm and elbow, he could hold himself in place, giving his left hand freedom to roam.
He reached and touched the ceiling, waited as his head swooned, then settled and cleared. Worked his hands over to the pulley that his legs were lashed to.
It had been done with a thick chain, wrapped around his ankles in alternating diagonals. He tugged at the chains, tensing his calves and twisting his thighs, trying to create play. His fingers crawled across the links, the chain finally terminating in a hexagonal box. A padlock.
He could work with that.
Given two hands and the proper picks and tensor tools, and his uncle’s confident advice, Cam could have picked it. In his condition now, clinging to his own body to keep upright, with only what he had on him? Not possible.
Cam felt his right arm slipping. He let himself drop, then with his good hand, undid his belt. Threaded it behind one leg and around his shoulder, then tightened it, sat up, tightened it again. There was no belt hole for the tongue to fit through, but it was easy enough to wind the length of excess leather around his arm, holding the tongue in his teeth.
Upright again. Cam felt for the pulley. Bolted into the sides of the container, the bolts capped and slick with ancient grease. Impossible to work free.
How many others had tried this? Got this far and given up?
The League has done this enough to know not to leave ways out.
The thought coincided with a deep exhalation, and he felt like sinking back, then recovered by forcing himself to believe it wasn’t true.
Experts? These dumb fucks? The way they panicked at the dock? Their half-assed plan to take the Vipers’ shipment in the forest? Brutal, violent, smart, give them all of that. But not experts.
He’d survived seven years of prison. He’d survive this, too.
Cam tried moving the tongue of the belt into the lock but it was too wide.
Something else. Think.
A good padlock couldn’t be jimmied open. A cheap or old one—he remembered seeing his uncle knock a padlock off his shed once, when he’d lost the key. Uncle Pete had Cam hold the lock tight while he smacked it with a mallet, just beneath the junction with the bar. Cam had no hammer and no help. He felt the padlock, twisted it against the pulley’s bolt, felt no give in it.
Bending the tongue of his belt into a U, he fed it through the lock, playing out slack carefully so as to maintain his upright position. Adding his weight to the pressure on the lock’s bar. Leaning back slightly so that the lock stood upside down.
No way this will work, Cam thought.
He jerked the belt down, smacking the lock against the pulley’s housing. It didn’t pop magically open. It didn’t budge. He tried again, harder, with no result.
Lashing the belt around his right forearm, careful of the broken hand, Cam pushed the air out of his chest and crunched further, so that his head brushed the roof of the container. He played eight centimetres of belt through the loop in the lock, leaving it slack enough so that the bar relaxed away from the metal housing.
Deep breath in and out.
He let himself fall, tightening the belt, putting the weight of his falling body behind the lock, smashing its side against the pulley.
Snapping it.
The lock panged off the wall of the can like a tinny gunshot. The chains slackened but held. Cam flailed, finding his body dropping, still entangled. If someone heard that, they’d be walking toward the container to examine it.
The chain hit the ground with an industrial rattle. Cam dropped, the leather belt suddenly snapping. He stood and stepped out of his restraints—
—and realized at once the futility of what he’d just done.
Containers don’t open from the inside.
It had been a running joke with Sheedy and Tyson at the warehouse. One of them would be deep into a can, unloading a shipment, and barely notice the light go out, then the doors shut. They’d pause, realizing their predicament, then bang on the door.
Okay, that’s enough, guys.
Seriously, let me out.
What’ll you give us if we do?
Anything, he thought. I’ll give you fucking anything.
Holding his broken hand to his chest, Cam thought of the lock rods on the outer side of the door. They’d have to be raised and then turned in their keepers to open the door. Unless Cody and Harv had left them open and merely shut the door.
He pushed, felt the metal yield—then click against the bar. It was locked, maybe not entirely, certainly too tight for him to move them.
Cam sat and felt tears form in his eyes. His great breakout thwarted by a fucking door.
There was a small hole in the back of the container where the light was coming from. A structural fault, or maybe a result of rust. He tried climbing up and working his fingers through, but cut his palm.
He walked back toward the doors, over the chains and cuffs, the small puddle of dried vomit and blood.
The lip of the right door fed over the left, so that the right always had to be opened first, once the lock rods had been turned correctly. Cam crouched down to the left. He reached out for the chain and slapped it down on the floor. Again, this time smacking it against the side of the container. Then wound part of it around his arm.
He heard footsteps and muttering, “The fuck is it now?” The lock rod turning, the door swinging back.
A figure appeared, moving inside, the bald man in the leather vest. As the man’s eyes adjusted and registered the absence of a strung-up body in the hold, Cam snaked the chain around his neck and fell back, choking, thrashing, beating on the man’s skull with the chain around his good fist. The man writhed. Cam sunk fingers into the man’s eye sockets and slammed the man’s skull hard against the floor of the can.
He’d never heard a scream like that, apart from himself, the day before.
The man shuddered. Cam’s knee pressed into the man’s neck, his weight on it, driving his fists into the face until the man stopped.
If anyone else was around, they’d be alerted to something going wrong inside the container.
Cam searched the man, tossing his wallet, finding a fold-up knife. He walked out into the brightness, stumbling over uneven grass.
There were other containers on either side of him, a pair of Quonset huts beyond, and what looked like a dirt road leading down. It was cold and the sky was the greasy grey of a sweat-stained pillow, the sun halfway up in the east. Behind him, to the north, lay a wide field of grass, then a treeline of evergreens.
