cool and firm, because he’d thought this out, every word planned in advance. “It’s probably mine.”
David Leith had only three expressions as Dion had counted them: fed up, indifferent, or angry. He looked the first right now. “I see,” he said. “Quitting, are you?”
“I’m not quitting, but I’m leaving,” Dion said, and then an unexpected surge of emotion swept him badly off script. “… and I don’t know why. How did I mess up? Filed a few late reports? Got pushed and pushed back? Forgot to kowtow?”
“You screwed up every task you got, that’s what,” Leith said.
Dion bared his teeth and stepped forward. “Like what?”
The answer came at him in a near shout. “You really want me to count ’em off for you?” Leith tried to count it off on his fingers. “Shoddy paperwork, punctuality issues, snotty attitude. Insubordination. How about assaulting a fellow officer?”
All of it was true, and Dion felt his metabolism rising. “I’m not like this,” he told Leith, hating the sound of his own voice, shaky and maybe insane. “I’m good. I’m better than you and everyone else here put together. I put in years of blood, sweat, and tears, and I got places. Look at my service record, then you go ahead and put my failures on a chart, put ’em against my accomplishments, you’ll see what I am.” He poked himself violently on the chest. “I’m the best. I’m down right now, but I was getting up, not with your help or anybody else’s. If you couldn’t see that, you’re a worse fucking detective than I even thought.”
He stopped, half blind with indignation, and got his bearings. He saw the vague outline of the man he was shouting at, who looked pale and bruised. “Right,” Leith said. “I get it. You didn’t get coddled like you wanted. So what are you waiting for? There’s the door.”
“I’m going,” Dion said, and looked sideways at the open doorway. His eyes were clouded with inner heat, and the door seemed murky and distant, a challenge to reach.
A moment passed, and Leith said, “I may be a lousy detective, but even I can see you’re not. Or did I get that wrong too?”
The room came into focus, but it shimmered and glitched. Past Leith were maps on the walls, the window looking out on New Hazelton, the flowering cactus on the sill, the desk with its clutter. Dion felt the breath socked right out of him. He moved toward the door and stalled again. From the corner of his eye he saw Leith had turned to face the window and was looking out, and he was speaking now matter-of-factly. The words were strange and incongruous in the moment, halting Dion in his tracks. “As you’re in no big rush, I might have a job for you. Come here.”
Dion joined him at the window. He followed Leith’s gaze outside to the bleak scenery, the pelting rain.
“That trail you walked yesterday with Spacey,” Leith said. “She can’t time it now because she’s sick. You have to go as fast as you can and log it for time and distance. Pretend you’re a desperate man, not a moment to lose. Can you do that?”
“What?”
Leith laid out the details of the mission. “Sergeant Giroux says she’s got a pedometer that’ll do both measurements,” he finished. “So you’ll use that. Spacey’s got the path all flagged out in pink ribbons, so it’s just a matter of following ’em all the way to the Matax trailhead, making note of the time, and doing a fast return trip. Fast, but without breaking your neck. Ignore the blue and the green ribbons. They’re dead ends. Stick with the pink. Think you can manage that?”
“Of course I can manage that,” Dion said. “But why should I?”
“Because you couldn’t walk out that door,” Leith said, losing patience again. “Because you have something to prove, and here’s your chance. And believe me, it’s your very last.”
Dion burst into scornful laughter, because he wasn’t that much of a fool. “I get it. Give me the dirty job nobody else wants to do and dress it up like a big favour.”
“Is that a no?”
Dion snorted. He looked again at the rain, and his first instinct of point-blank refusal was already complicated by a stronger desire to take on the challenge. A minute dragged by, and he knew that point-blank refusals had to be made point blank, not sometime later. He sniffed, and tried to match Leith’s irritation with his own. “How much time did he have to get there and back?”
“Fifty-five minutes between loading slips. Anything else?”
There was something else, but it was touchy. “That thing you mentioned, is it easy to use?”
“Thing?” Leith said.
Dion narrowed his eyes at him. “For measuring distance.”
“Oh, the pedometer? Easy as a wristwatch. Hang on.”
Leith left the room and came back with the gadget. Dion paled as he took it, looking at its LCD display, numbers blinking at him as he thumbed one button then the other. He thought of his new Timex that beeped at him at odd moments throughout the day, and even with instructions he couldn’t figure out why, or how to mute it, or how to make it beep when he needed it to. This was a hurdle he didn’t need right now. But no sweat. He’d just go on the Internet when Leith wasn’t looking. There was a how-to page for everything these days. Except somebody would catch him googling it. Spacey would notice. She’d point it out for all the world to see, him googling how to use an idiot-proof pedometer.
He had no choice but to back out now, tell Leith he couldn’t do this run. His face burned, and the lump in his throat made it difficult to pull in air. Shallow breathing made his ribs ache and the room vibrate. He looked at Leith, and the face was a blur, starting to run, and still he couldn’t put the words together.
Leith took the pedometer from him and dragged over a couple of chairs. “No problem,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
* * *
Dion had no running gear, so he wore his casual civvies, the hiker-like boots from Mark’s, his favourite black jeans, and on top the layers that somebody had suggested, tank, sweatshirt, patrol jacket, rain cape. He and Thackray drove up the mountain, that long, jouncing crawl with the heat blasting, to Rob Law’s cut block. They parked and in the shelter of the SUV went over the plan. Thackray would wait in the vehicle, ears on alert, and be ready to respond in case there were any problems. If he didn’t get any updates for fifteen minutes straight and couldn’t get through to Dion, he’d call in backup and hit the path himself to see what was amiss. Thackray pressed his bony hands into a prayer and told Dion to please, please report in diligently, because he really, really didn’t want to hit the path. Dion promised.
The crew was hard at work in the downpour, and Dion knew enough about the logging industry by now to understand that it was a seasonal scramble; they were racing against the spring melt, which would mire the north in mud, bringing operations to a standstill. He shouted a question at one of the workers, and the answer was shouted back at him that Rob was out at the mill dealing with some sort of tally dispute, and would be back within the hour.
Dion climbed to the raw land behind the Atco trailer and stood in his flapping cape at the mouth of the trail, by Spacey’s first ribbon, and set the pedometer as Leith had shown him. The forest ahead looked worse than yesterday. It hadn’t rained on him yesterday, and the sky hadn’t been smothered in blackish clouds that
