hilarity, and imaging it all the same. Frank had told all, by now, every last excruciating tidbit, and the story would have gone viral. They’d be laughing hard. Spacey would laugh hardest.
The thought of the story doing the rounds in this detachment and spreading to others, probably eventually reaching the world at large, sickened him, literally, and he limped into the bathroom and leaned over the throne, hands splayed on the tank, ready to barf up his hospital breakfast, whatever that had been. The nurse came up behind him as he stood contemplating the plumbing and asked if he was all right. He straightened, wiped his mouth, and accepted the glass of water she offered. Somehow the dizziness had passed, and so had the nausea, and even the rip in his side didn’t seem so bad. Only the worry remained. “I’m okay,” he told her.
“I don’t think you are,” she said.
She went to get him a couple of T3s, and he thought about fleeing the scene, walking, jumping on a bus, hitchhiking, anything, just getting out of there, fast. Cross the border, sink into anonymity, become a bearded street person.
But there was a hitch in that he had no jacket. They had taken it away, along with the uniform he’d been wearing during the farcical confrontation with Scott Rourke last night. He now wore the clothes somebody had brought in from his room at the Super 8, the winter-weight joggers and sweater he usually wore on his days off, the black leather Nike runners, and a scarf around his throat. The scarf he’d wrapped around twice, depressed.
“Hi there,” Thackray said, poking his head around the door. “Ready to go?”
Ten minutes later they walked into the detachment, and Dion found it quiet inside, nobody laughing. Spacey was nowhere to be seen. Leith stood from his desk and said, “Hey, glad you’re okay,” then summoned him down the hall to the “soft” interview room.
They sat across from each other, like accuser and accused, and Leith said, “I really thought you’d caught a bullet. Took you down Code 3, man, made quite a scene.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.”
Leith seemed glad to be done with the small talk and got down to business, opening a file that turned out to be an interview with Chad Oman. He told Dion the date and time of the interview and asked Dion if he remembered it.
Of course Dion remembered it. He answered coldly. “Right, it was last week.”
Leith read out what they had written out together at the end of that miserable interview, after the disaster with the recording device. He finished reading and said, “You told me you thought he was lying about something but couldn’t remember what it was. But you were flustered then. Maybe now something’s twigged, huh?”
Dion pulled the statement across the table and read it again, trying to put himself back in the moment, imagining the witness in the room. He couldn’t remember what had prompted him to say Oman was lying. Oman had been loud, a fast talker, hard to track, and his own regrettable comment about lying had come out of him spontaneous as a sneeze.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. There was that bit where Oman paused here, said something was funny, then wouldn’t say what he thought was funny. Maybe it was there.”
“That’s kind of what I was thinking. But that’s not really a lie, is it? At worst, that’s holding something back.”
“I don’t know, then.”
Leith looked far from shocked and closed the folder. Now it was time for another painful rehashing: what happened on the East Band last night. He let Dion run through the narrative first, no questions asked. Dion did his best and told what he could remember, which was just about everything, from picking up Evangeline, to spotting the abandoned bicycle, to the directions he’d gotten to the Gates of Heaven, to calling Spacey for backup. He told of his drive up the mountain, expecting reinforcements that didn’t seem to be coming, his hesitation, and his ultimate decision to plough on. He told of his conversation with Scott Rourke, and his final ploy of giving Rourke a false motive for not wanting Frank Law to go to jail. Here he fell silent, unable to finish.
Leith said, “Yes? And what was that false motive?”
“I told him Frank and I were friends,” Dion said. Which was the truth. Not the whole truth, but enough. He watched Leith’s face, expecting he’d already got the punchline out of Frank and was just holding back the guffaw. But there wasn’t even a smirk. Just an intense and skeptical gaze.
“And he believed it?” Leith asked.
Dion basked in relief for a moment. So Frank was just as embarrassed about the whole thing as he was and hadn’t said anything about love at first sight or any of the rest. Maybe it would never come to light. He sat straighter and gave a shrug. “I guess Rourke believed me. He let Frank go. Then you and the others finally got there, and you know the rest. What took you so long, by the way?”
Leith skirted the question, saying, “Any idea why Scott Rourke wanted to blow Frank’s head off in the first place?”
“Like I said, he thought Frank was going to jail. He wanted to preserve him from a fate worse than death.”
“Honestly? Sounds like a stretch to me. How about he, Rourke, killed Kiera, and Frank knew it. Rourke thought Frank was going to report him, so he had to silence him.”
Dion shook his head. “Everything we said up there pointed to a mercy kill. Or that’s the way it looked to me at the time. I figured the only thing that might stop him was my promise that I’d keep Frank out of jail. For personal reasons. So I ad libbed.”
“You think he would have actually shot him?”
“No, I don’t,” Dion said glumly. “I should have just sat at the crossroads and waited, and they’d have probably wrapped up their drinking party and come down and met us. But I did what I did, and what happened happened. I don’t expect any medals. I’m just glad nobody got killed, because then I’d really be up to my neck in it, wouldn’t I?”
Leith agreed. He said, “There’s a lot more we have to talk about yet. You and Scott Rourke, and his girlfriend, Doyle. I don’t know you’ve broken any rules, fraternizing with witnesses, but you’ve sure bent common sense out of shape. Pretty soon you’re going to have to tell me all about it.”
“Sure,” Dion said. He felt unburdened, empty but free. It was all coming together, reaching a conclusion. Things were wrapping up, and he could walk away with few regrets. He thought about his watch, running slow, the source of all this mess. The watch lay on an icy riverbed now and would rust there till eternity. Looch was dead, which had its advantages, and Cloverdale was worlds away. Everything seemed good. He could breathe.
“But for now,” Leith said, having ended the interview, turned off the tape recorder, and signed off on his notes, “We’re going to have another chat with Chad Oman. I want you to sit in and pay attention, and maybe you’ll catch it again, whatever you thought he was lying about the first time, for what it’s worth. And just one more thing. You called Spacey last night, and we know the time of your call from the records. I just can’t figure out how it took her an hour to get things moving. She says your message was garbled or unclear, and she had a helluva time trying to locate Evangeline and find out what was really going on. Any comment?”
“It wasn’t complicated. I was clear as I could be. She doesn’t like me, and she lets it get in the way. When can I get off this case and go back to Smithers? You must have it figured out by now, I’m
