Hound Page 9

  Kingsley howled. “Jackie, my love. Come now. I’m your only true friend.”

  Jackie hoofed him a second time, harder. His head struck the car and he slumped against it. Jackie wrenched open the front door, tossed her rifle onto the seat and grabbed hold of Kingsley. She hauled him to his feet, opened the rear door and shoved his limp body inside, where he lay, face down. “Stay put, or you get a bullet in your head.” Slamming the door with a flourish, she went to the chauffeur and began searching through his pockets, finding a thick wad of cash. Jackie grabbed it and searched the other pockets, but found nothing else of any use. She wiped the sticky blood off her hands and got into the sedan. The keys were in the ignition. Now she had a vehicle she could use to evade the police, at least for a while. She figured the syndicate wouldn’t report the loss, but the cops would find her truck if she left it beside the main road. She decided to move it into the hayfield, hoping to buy a few hours’ respite

  She drove the sedan out of the field and onto the road. When she reached the truck, she leapt from the car, taking the keys with her. Kingsley was still incapacitated, and he remained that way for the minute or two it took her to ditch the truck and return to the sedan.

  Jackie cruised through Hamilton until she spotted an isolated motel. Tiredness washed over her as her tension dissipated. She drove to a deserted corner of the parking lot and, with the engine still running, twisted round to observe Kingsley — still face down on the back seat but wide awake, his one visible eye staring up at her from the shadows. She studied him for a while, considering what to do next. First, she would find an ATM and force him to withdraw the maximum amount of cash he was allowed. Then she would return to her rental unit and retrieve the suitcase. On the way, she would make Kingsley promise to get a credit card, a car with a forged ownership and a driver’s licence with her photo on it, all under a new name. He would bring more cash to a location she would specify later. Finally, she would ferry him out of Hamilton and dump him miles away on an isolated back road from where it would take him several hours to rejoin his underworld buddies. He could warn them what would happen if they didn’t leave her alone. The chauffeur’s corpse should convince them that she meant business. If not, there would be more like him. As for Kingsley, she would keep a note of his condo, his private phone number and his email address. If he changed any of them, he would be signing his own death warrant.

  As she expected, Kingsley agreed to everything, although she didn’t trust him an inch. He lay on the seat, inert, one eye staring warily up at her. When she had finished speaking, he raised his head a few inches and made one last pathetic attempt to sway her. “Jackie, my one and only love. Don’t abandon me. We can be together again. I can make it happen.”

  “Stinking weasel,” Jackie shrieked. “All you can hope to get from me is your pitiful life. Now listen carefully. Swear you’ll do everything I ask, and that you’ll protect me from harm, starting this instant. Say it and mean it, or I’ll do you in right now.”

  Kingsley promised to do as she said, pledging to do so on his mother’s sacred grave, which elicited a derisive snort from Jackie. His mother hadn’t meant a thing to him. “Believe me, Jackie, I’ll stick by you. My loyalty is all yours.” She would never again believe a word of what he said, but right now, she needed him. Hopefully he was so terrified that he wouldn’t try and double-cross her.

  “Alright, skunk. We’ve got things to do tonight. Keep your miserable head down until I stop driving and tell you what I want you to do.”

  Suddenly she felt free, as though a crushing load had been lifted from her. After all these years, she was finally seeing Kingsley as the repulsive creep he truly was.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Dad and I are no longer on speaking terms. He won’t return my calls. I feel I have no family and no close friends. I’m so alone. It’s my fault. I’m obsessed with catching Sarah’s killer — as I get older, it’s getting harder to call her Mom. And I’m still a constable. Twenty-three years old and my life is slipping away. But I can’t give up.

  — From the diary of Rebecca Sarah Bradley (March 12, 2006)

  Monday, October 1, 2007

  The search team got to the abandoned mine site in the early afternoon. Several squad cars, two unmarked detective cars, one ERT van, and two search dogs and handlers screeched to a halt, while a helicopter hovered overhead like an ungainly bird of prey. Rebecca found the whole scene ridiculous. The place was deserted. You could tell at a glance that Hound and Jackie weren’t here.

  The police swarmed all over the site and the surrounding woods like ants, but found no sign of Jackie or her truck. Charger and the other search dog didn’t catch the slightest whiff of her scent.

  Sykes, too, hadn’t even tried to investigate the site. He stood rooted in the centre of the frantic activity, everyone giving him a wide berth, including Rebecca.

  Hadi Jafari came up and stood beside her, his somber face showing the strain they were all under. “Rebecca, this is as bad as it gets. When DI Sykes goes quiet like that, it means he’s out of ideas. And that almost never happens.”

  “I know what’s bothering him,” Rebecca said.

  Hadi raised his eyebrows.

  “It’s Hound. He might have gone somewhere else, but I’m guessing he came here earlier and left before we arrived. Sykes needs him. He’s cursing himself for not allowing Hound to help us from the start. He warned us we wouldn’t find Jackie without him, and we should have taken him seriously. Our excuse that we didn’t want to put him in danger will only result in something worse. Meanwhile, we’ll be getting nowhere.”

  Hadi glanced at Sykes. “I admire that man more than anyone else, he’s like a hero to me. It hurts me to see him in distress, I feel so inadequate. If Jackie isn’t here, and she’s not near Conroy or Hound’s cave, she could be anywhere. Yet I get the creepy feeling that she’s still somewhere around. She’s just too clever for us.”

  Rebecca rubbed her arms. “Me too, Hadi. It’s like I can feel her presence.”

  “Maybe we should just concentrate on finding Hound and asking him to join the search team,” Hadi said. “DI Sykes is a proud man, but he’s also pragmatic. I think he’s ready to swallow his pride.”

  As though reading their minds, Sykes beckoned them over, and gave them a rueful smile. “Okay, let’s go find Hound. No need to rush. We might as well grab lunch on the way to Conroy. He’ll show up there eventually.”

  “What if he’s in danger?” Rebecca said anxiously.

  “He may well be,” Sykes replied. “But where is he? I get the feeling he’s often in danger. He seems to thrive on it. The best we can do now is wait for him. He doesn’t want to hear from us or have us track him on the GPS — I’m having his phone monitored from Orillia.”

  “Sir, there’s something I need to talk to you about.” Rebecca’s thoughts had returned to her mother. “Since we’ll have to wait until Hound shows up, could we talk about my mother, like you promised?”

  Sykes regarded her for a few seconds. When Rebecca thought he was going to refuse, he exhaled wearily. “Yes, Rebecca. It was unfair of me to tantalise you like that. When we get to Conroy, we’ll find a quiet spot, and I’ll share some of what I know.”

  Some of it? “Thank you, sir. Anything you can tell me will be appreciated.”

  Sykes nodded and hurried off to call the team together.

  Rebecca closed her eyes, barely able to contain her excitement. What would he tell her?

  * * *

  Just as they pulled onto the Trans-Canada Highway, Sykes’s cell phone rang. “Jackie’s been spotted, and Hound’s on her trail. She’d been hiding out at the old sawmill near Conroy. She took a shot at him right in front of his house, and only just missed. Then she fled in her truck. She might be on the Trans-Canada now, although my guess is she’ll have abandoned it for quieter roads. She could be coming our way, or she might already have passed us and be heading farther north. I can’t imagine why she’d go south, alt
hough I wonder . . .” His voice trailed off and he stared into space. Then he shook his head, lowered the car window and waved the convoy to the side of the highway. The drivers got out and formed a huddle. They decided to split up to check as many secondary highways as they could. Sykes figured that this time, Jackie wouldn’t use the back roads and lanes. She would know that Hound had alerted the police and needed to hurry.

  Sykes told Chad to drive to the nearest intersection and park the car somewhere with a good view of the Trans-Canada. The helicopter would check the roads north of that point.

  * * *

  After two hours of frantic searching, the police came up with nothing. Their excitement at the possibility of catching her turned into stunned disbelief. Surely she wasn’t about to foil them again?

  By mid-afternoon, Sykes told Chad to head back to Conroy. They would check in for the night at the Royal Oak Hotel and discuss what to do next.

  Disheartened, Rebecca realized that Sykes wouldn’t be in any mood to talk about her mother that evening.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Tuesday, October 2, 2007

  Two hours before dawn, with Kingsley’s cash in her pocket, Jackie motored out of Hamilton. Her ultimate destination lay fifty miles north of Conroy. Highway 401 and the roads around Toronto would be heavily patrolled by the OPP, so it was safer to drive west and then go north. She was heading for Cora Simon’s place. Cora was an indigenous woman that had been her mother’s childhood friend at the reserve. Jackie had visited Cora’s house dozens of times with her mother in the days before Steven Bradley bankrupted her husband and destroyed their family. She hoped Cora would take her in, at least for a few days, and help her find someplace to hide where the police wouldn’t think of looking.

  She heard a low moan followed by a hacking cough. Kingsley was in a bad way. Good. Smiling, she concentrated on finding a side road that would take her to a suitably isolated spot.

  Memories of Cora drifted into Jackie’s mind. Cora lived a simple life, deep in the forest. Jackie had always dreamed of leading such a life, and it was even more attractive now. She looked forward to surprising Cora with a fistful of the bills she had gotten from Kingsley. She intended to extort more from this miser. After all, he’d never spent more on her than the price of a few lousy coffees.

  Maybe Cora could help her retrieve the car that Kingsley had promised to deliver in a week’s time. But what if Cora wanted nothing to do with her? Then Jackie would be all out of plans, other than that of murdering Rebecca Bradley and her gold-plated father. Like Hound, the Bradley whore seemed to have nine lives, but she would get to her soon enough. Maybe slaying Rebecca and her father was the best she could hope to accomplish before the police caught up with her. If Kingsley helped her for a while, all to the good. She really should kill him now, before he double-crossed her again. Aside from Cora, there was no one in the world to turn to.

  Spotting a crossroad, Jackie turned off the highway and drove along until she reached a lane that appeared to be unused. She turned onto it and continued for about a hundred yards. Then she stopped and dragged Kingsley out. She proceeded to push him into a ditch, whereupon he cried out pitifully — he probably thought she was going to kill him there. She climbed back into the car, spat on him and reversed back down the lane. In the rearview mirror, she watched Kingsley stumble out of the ditch and gaze stupidly after the sedan.

  Back on the highway, Jackie’s shoulders sagged. The accumulated stress combined with too many sleepless nights almost made her pass out, but she gathered herself together and motored on. After driving all night, skirting the north shore of Georgian Bay, she headed southeast on a potholed road some fifty miles north of Conroy. Soon she would reach the narrow lane that snaked through the dense woods to the rough cedar shack where Cora had lived about thirty years ago, at the time of Jackie’s last visit. She had no idea if Cora still lived there, presumably she still didn’t have a phone, or electricity. Would she remember the way to the house? The road she was driving on didn’t seem to have changed much, but on previous visits her mother, Lily, had been at the wheel, and Jackie hadn’t paid much attention to where they were going.

  After her mother abandoned her, Jackie had first thought of going to Cora and asking her why. But Jackie hadn’t been old enough to drive, and her shattered father was incapable of taking her anywhere. All he did was sit on the living room couch, staring at the television or out the front window. They soon ran out of money and their house was repossessed. They moved to a small rental flat, and Jackie concentrated on caring for her father as best she could. But he wasted away and died in middle-age, old before his time — thanks to Steven Bradley.

  Filled with these sad memories, Jackie almost missed the lane. Right at the last minute, she spotted something familiar about a stand of trees at a bend in the road. She slammed on the brakes and turned into a stony lane, little more than a path. This was it. She began to plan what she would say to Cora.

  Jackie passed a ramshackle house that she didn’t recall from her childhood. Had she mistaken the turning? Then there it was, a mile further on, a bright yellow bungalow with painted black window frames, nestled in a grove of hemlock trees. It was certainly no longer a shack, but it had to be Cora’s, surrounded as it was by a dozen birdhouses, one for each month of the year, all of varying sizes, shapes and colours. Jackie remembered them from her childhood visits. Cora and her mother were both such warm and loving women, so full of life. She had always enjoyed spending time with them. They played together like sisters, and they always included Jackie in their games, treating her like a precious younger sibling. Some of her happiest memories featured this joyful home.

  Warily, she pulled into the driveway. What if the police had discovered her link to Cora? Even though they wouldn’t recognize the sedan, it was incongruous in this setting and they’d know something was amiss. Her chest tightened.

  Driving up to the house, she spotted an ancient Volkswagen Beetle parked beside a weathered pinewood shed. No police cruisers were in sight, but there was no Cora either. Maybe she was in back or was away somewhere, or she had moved and somebody else owned the place. Jackie drove up to the Beetle and cut the motor. She lowered the window and listened, but all she could hear was the chirping of birds and the rustling of leaves in the gentle autumn breeze. She got out of the car and gazed around. Seeing nothing ominous, she filled her lungs with fresh country air. It felt like coming home.

  Suddenly, she heard a voice, coming from somewhere in the woods behind the house. Moving away from the car, she recognized Cora strolling along a winding forest path, followed by a tall, slender woman whose head was down and her face hidden under the wide brim of a straw hat.

  Suddenly overcome with shyness, Jackie backed around a corner of the house. Cora’s gentle voice floated across to her. “I wonder whose car that could be? Better go back into the woods while I find out who it is.”

  A voice from Jackie’s past replied, “I’ll wait for you at our secret place. Come to me when you’re sure it’s safe.”

  Jackie staggered into the open.

  “Mama!”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Tuesday, October 2, 2007

  Hound waited impatiently inside the shack, while Matthew sat quietly, regarding him. Hound eventually figured out what Matthew wanted — to head into the woods and track animals. There would be ample time for conversation when they returned, probably not until late in the evening. It would be futile to try and get him to talk now.

  Matthew’s face broke into a rare grin. Hound heaved himself to his feet as Matthew sprang up, lifted his longbow off its hook, and slung a sheaf of arrows over his shoulder. Without a word passing between them, they left the shack and were soon engulfed by the dense forest. Hound closed his eyes for a moment, breathing in the musty aroma of hardwood and softwood trees, their bark laden with lichen. He soon forgot about everything but the hunt. They had done this together several times, so Hound knew what Matthew expected fr
om him.

  They passed cedar, red oak and hemlock trees, skirting dense bushes and tangled underbrush to avoid alarming the wildlife. It was unlikely they’d be able to sneak up on a white-tailed deer or a moose — the largest, most unpredictable and dangerous member of the deer family — so they searched for a suitable place to hide and wait. Hunting took patience. They found a secluded spot and settled down, prepared to wait all day if necessary.

  The day unfolded slowly, the silence disturbed only by the furtive movements of small animals and the strident calls of birds. Hound relaxed, his shoulder muscles loosened and he drifted into a semi-meditative state.

  The hours marched on and the shadows slowly grew longer as shafts of sunlight slanted through the autumn leaves, turning them gold. Deer and moose would soon be moving about, searching for food and water. It was prime hunting time.

  Hound heard the crunch of animal footsteps. A large animal was drawing near. Hound held his breath. The crunching ceased, and an eerie silence fell over the forest. Hound wanted to look but he didn’t dare move. Matthew put a finger to his lips and lowered his palms, warning him to remain still.

  The standoff continued for several seconds. Then Hound was startled by a heavy grunt. Instinctively, he dropped his hands onto the ground, preparing to bolt. A twig snapped. More silence followed, and then a deep cough echoed through the forest, followed by more coughs, seeming to get louder. A moose! Hound felt sweat trickle down his sides.

  Matthew rocketed to his feet and shouted, “Run!”

  The forest exploded in a frenzy of snapping branches, crushed bushes and thumping hooves. Hound wrenched his body sideways. The beast was charging straight at him! Just as the enormous animal pounded into the thicket, he rolled out of its path. It thundered past him like a runaway freight train and continued on, leaving broken branches and crushed ferns in its wake.