make Horseshoe Bay in time to catch the five o’clock ferry to Nanaimo. And if he didn’t make the five o’clock ferry, he wasn’t going to make the seven o’clock meeting with the Geeks, as he had dubbed the motley crew of post-adolescent programmers at LogiGraphics. Why they couldn’t work reasonable hours, like normal people, was completely beyond him. He might as well reschedule for Tuesday morning, just in case. He took out his cellphone and made the call.
The Geeks were more than happy to accommodate him. After all, their business plan was an absolute shambles, poorly thought out, sloppy, and full of inconsistencies, and their marketing projections were pure caffeinestoked fantasy. But if they’d been businessmen, he thought, a bit smugly, they wouldn’t have needed him. And they needed him very much indeed.
He wished he knew more about computers and the Internet. He felt fairly confident that the Geeks were on to something interesting, perhaps even revolutionary, but too much of what they’d told him had gone right over his head. Sandra St. Johns, his assistant—his former assistant, he amended—knew a lot about the Internet, but he’d well and truly burned that particular bridge, hadn’t he? Sandra was almost as pissed at him as Victoria was, maybe more.
Christ, what a fool he’d been to have had an affair with her, if affair was the right word for it. Sandra had called it recreational sex, more fun than squash or racquetball, with no club fees, and almost as good for the cardiovascular system. But of course affair was the right word, he berated himself. He couldn’t weasel out of it that easily. Things may not have been going very well between Victoria and him lately, especially where sex was concerned, but that was no excuse for cheating on her. Despite their problems, he still loved her. Trouble was, though, he couldn’t erase the memory of Sandra, skirt hiked up around her hips as she writhed atop him on his office sofa, humming deep in her throat as she neared orgasm. Even now, his pulse quickened and the god-damned one-eyed worm raised its single-minded head.
Christ, life could be complicated sometimes.
“More coffee?” the waitress asked, hovering over him with the coffee pot in her hand.
“No, thanks,” he said. She went away.
He looked at his watch again. Almost four. He’d give it ten minutes more, then he was out of here. Maybe it was a sign. Maybe he was meant to let the sleeping dogs alone after all.
He looked up as the door opened, letting in a blast of cold, damp air. A man came into the restaurant, a street person from his raggedy appearance. He had a great, bushy moustache that almost completely covered his mouth and his hands were shoved into the pockets of a grimy green parka, shoulders darkened by rain. A filthy scarf muffled his chin and the hood of the parka was up, cinched tight against the chill, and from it protruded the curved bill of a baseball cap. Despite the overcast sky, he wore big wraparound sunglasses. He stood by the entrance, surveying the room, as if looking for someone. It might be easier, Patrick thought sourly, looking at his watch again, if he removed the bloody sunglasses.
The man in the parka approached Patrick’s booth and stared down at him, eyes invisible behind the dark lenses of the glasses.
“Can I help you?” Patrick asked irritably.
The man didn’t answer, just continued to look down at Patrick. Even though his face was almost completely obscured, Patrick felt there was something vaguely wrong about him. Then the man took his hands out of his pockets. He was wearing gloves and had something in his right hand. It took Patrick a fraction of a second to realize that the object in the man’s hand was a revolver. It was the longest fraction of a second of Patrick’s life.
He looked up from the gun. The ridiculous glasses had slipped. Patrick looked into the familiar eyes of his killer. “No,” he said, starting to stand. “Wait. It’s—”
The gun roared and leapt. Patrick felt a massive impact as the first bullet struck him in the sternum, mushrooming and slamming him against the backrest of the bench. The gun roared again, and the second bullet struck just to the right of the first, pinning him momentarily against the backrest. Patrick didn’t feel that one. Nor did he feel the third, which struck on a downward angle as he rebounded, shattering his left clavicle, flattening and tumbling, shredding his lung and blowing apart his heart.
Witnesses would later tell the police that the killer then placed the muzzle of the revolver against the side of Patrick’s head and fired once more, after which he dropped the gun on the table and walked out of the restaurant as calm as could be.
Shoe stood under the awning of a Chinese pastry shop on Cordova, coat collar up and hat brim down, watching the front of the dry cleaning store across the street. Despite the rain, the sidewalks were busy, but at six-foot-six he had no trouble seeing over the heads of the majority of pedestrians, most of whom were Asian this close to Chinatown and Japan Town both. A few held surgical masks to their faces as they hurried along on whatever urgent business occupied them this day.
Through the misted window of the dry cleaning store Shoe could see the woman behind the counter. She was talking to a hirsute, pigeon-breasted man wearing a sleeveless undershirt. From their body language, it seemed to Shoe that they were arguing about something. The hairy man’s name was Seropian and, according to the sign above the storefront window, he was the proprietor. The woman’s name was Barbara Reese. She worked in the store from seven in the morning to three in the afternoon, Monday through Friday. She also held down a second job: from four to midnight, every day but Sunday, she waited on tables in the lounge at the North Burnaby Inn on Hastings, east of Boundary Road, a forty-minute bus ride from the dry cleaning store. It was almost three-thirty, though, and even if she left this minute, she was going to be late.
Rain drummed on the awning over Shoe’s head and the late afternoon traffic crept through the gloom, brake lights flashing, tailpipes smoking. His breath steamed and condensed on the tips of his coat collar. A few degrees colder and the rain would turn to snow. The smell of coffee from a nearby coffee shop was almost irresistible.
It was 3:45 when the woman finally emerged from the dry cleaning store. The rain had let up, but it was getting colder. Shoe watched as she ran to catch the trolley bus that had pulled up to the stop at the corner, holding her red beret on her head with one hand and waving her long black umbrella with the other. The bus left without her.
Abandoning the shelter of the awning, Shoe crossed the street to where the woman waited at the bus stop. The rain began again and she opened her umbrella. Two ribs were broken and it sagged asymmetrically. Shoe’s umbrella was in his car, parked around the corner. The woman smiled tentatively at him as he approached, as if she thought she might know him, but her eyes were wary.
Although middle-aged, she was still very attractive, Shoe thought, in a bruised, shopworn kind of way. She had high cheekbones, a full mouth, and a long, straight nose. Her eyes, though, were her most striking feature. Nested in web of fine, spidery wrinkles, they were a clear, luminous blue and almost rectangular. With a jolt that squeezed his heart like a fist, he realized that she looked a lot like he imagined Sara would have looked now, had she lived.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Ms. Reese?”
“Yes?” She held her umbrella higher, to look up at him. Moisture beaded in her thick dark hair where it curled from under her beret. There was a thin, almost invisible furrow of old scar tissue under her left eye, and another slightly longer one on the edge of her jaw. Sara, too, had had a scar, he recalled, the result of a training injury, half hidden by her right eyebrow.
“My name is Joseph Schumacher,” he said, giving his full name. “I wonder if I could have a word with you.”
“Do I know you?” she
