“So you’d look the other way when the shipments came through.”

  “Which is what you should have done. You should have stayed in Canada. You’re in the U.S. of A. now and we do things different here.”

  The gun looked like a 9-millimetre. Now-finally, Ryan might have said-I wanted a gun in my hand, my own Beretta Cougar with the slide racked and safety off. But as Ryan had predicted, I was caught empty-handed.

  The silencer on the end of her gun was about three feet from my chest. I wondered if I could grab the end of it and twist before she fired.

  “You going to shoot me here?” I asked.

  “Yes. Then I’ll wait until Hubby gets home from the movies and shoot him too.”

  How had this hellish piece of work passed any kind of employment screening?

  “When the police find me here, it’ll all blow open. Too many people in Toronto know what I’m working on.”

  “But they won’t find you here,” she said. “Frank and Claudio will collect you and dump you elsewhere. Nothing will connect you to the Aikens or their house.”

  “Except my blood, my fingerprints and the thirty people who saw me here tonight.”

  For a moment she looked less sure of herself. I made my move, lunging across the table to grab the gun barrel. But she pushed her chair back and jumped out of reach. She stood well back of the table, her thin lips stretched in a sick-looking smile. “Nice try, Geller. Quick and decisive. I like that in a man.”

  She levelled the gun at me, gripping it in both hands. She looked like she was ready to fire so I kept talking.

  “It’s quite an act you put on,” I said.

  “You bought it,” she said. “So does everyone at the FDA. I’m the wallflower who jumps if someone says boo. That’s why no one will ever connect me to this.”

  “Don’t be so sure. The Toronto Homicide Squad knows about Stone and Bader. How do you know they won’t talk?”

  “I know Steven won’t.”

  “And Bader?”

  “Not a problem.”

  “You’re going to kill him too.”

  “Me personally? No. Someone else will handle it.”

  “Ricky Messina?”

  “Oh, you are industrious,” she said.

  I felt a surge of pure hatred for this woman, this animal, who could talk about killing people like we were bugs who had made it through her screen door.

  “That’s quite a look,” Staples said. “So angry. So vindictive. I think I liked your dumb look better.”

  She levelled the gun and I saw the knuckle around the trigger start to pull. I flinched as a sudden roar in my ears made them ring-a noise that came from behind, far too loud for a silenced pistol. Staples’s chest exploded in a cloud of red and she stumbled backward against a butcher-block counter. Another shot and her throat burst open. She made a coarse strangled sound and slumped down to the floor, leaving a thick bloody smear on the cabinets behind her.

  I turned around and saw Dante Ryan at the kitchen door, his Glock 20 in hand.

  His first rule of a fast exit had been: make sure there’s no one left alive to chase you.

  He’d held up his end. I just had to get my ass out the door without kicking Christine Staples’s dead face.

  CHAPTER 49

  We made it to the Peace Bridge in under ten minutes, melting into the long line of cars inching toward the border. It was getting dark, and not just because the sun was finally starting to set on a long June day. Thunderclouds were building in the northwest, gunmetal blue, stacked high like rearing horses. The heat wave was nearing its end.

  Neither Ryan nor I had said a word since leaving the house. My lips and throat felt dry. My eyes were burning, my left ear ringing. I couldn’t get the image of Amy Farber out of my mind. Her body on the floor, one leg draped over her fallen chair, the warmth and life gone out of her.

  We cleared Canadian Customs without incident. Ryan’s gun was back in the trunk of his car, locked in its metal case, and I had nothing to declare. Absolutely nothing.

  The first raindrops fell as we sped along the flat stretch of land between Fort Erie and Niagara Falls. Ryan switched on the wipers. I lowered my window a few inches and felt splatters on my face and arm and breathed in the smell of ozone. “Thank you,” I said to Ryan. “And don’t make me say what for.”

  “Don’t worry. We’re pretty even.”

  “How so? I still don’t know who ordered the hit on Silver. You might still have to carry it out for all we know.”

  “You gave it everything,” he said. “So for that I owe you. Anything you ever need you can ask me, for the rest of your life. Or the rest of mine, anyway.”

  “How long were you outside?” I asked.

  “I never left. When I came around front and saw you talking to that fed-”

  “How’d you know she was a fed?”

  “You kidding? That car? That suit? That hair? I knew something was up but where was I going to go? After you left, I went back to the garage and kept watch. When you got back, I moved up to the kitchen door to listen in. And did what I had to do.”

  “The husband’s at the movies,” I said. “That’s the only reason he didn’t get it too. He got the jitters and had to go sit in the dark until he calmed down.”

  “Lucky him.”

  “Some lucky. He’s going to come home and find his wife lying dead with another dead woman he’s never seen.”

  “At least he’s alive.”

  “Because he wasn’t man enough to stand by his wife when his nerves got bad.”

  “Didn’t like him much?”

  I pictured the warm, earthy woman who had let her hair go gray, confident enough in herself not to do anything about it. “I liked her more.”

  Rain was slanting through the beams of our headlights. The image of one dead body lying on the floor led to another. “I wonder if Marco and the others have been found yet,” I said.

  “This kind of heat, it can’t take too long.”

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know. I’m too tired to know. Tomorrow I’ll make some calls and see what I can find out. Maybe Uncle Looch will give me the lay of the land.”

  “It would help if we knew who was pulling the strings in Buffalo. Ricky Messina doesn’t strike me as management.”

  Ryan eased a cigarette out of his pack and lit up. I reached for the pack. He covered it with his right hand. “Don’t,” he said. “You’ll hate yourself in the morning.”

  “I’m going to anyway.”

  He moved his hand and I took out a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked one since Israel. I put it between my lips and lit up and blew a stream of smoke out my window. Some people think the first cigarette you smoke after you’ve quit a long time is the best. They’re wrong. The second one is the best. The first you just have to get through without passing out or throwing up.

  The rain started to fall harder, fat drops bouncing off the pavement in front of us. Ryan moved the wiper speed to double time. I took another drag off the cigarette and felt light-headed as nicotine rushed through my blood, tagging familiar receptors that whispered, Where have you been all this time?

  I threw the fucking thing out the window and slept the rest of the way.

  When I woke the car was at a full stop. I jerked upright in my seat, forgetting for a moment where I was. I peered out through the rain-streaked window-we were on Carlaw, north of Lakeshore-and remembered everything that had happened.

  Forgetting had been better.

  It was after eleven by Ryan’s dashboard clock. The rain was still coming down hard. We drove north on Carlaw, past old warehouses that had been converted into film offices and workshops that created distressed pine neo-antiques. I told Ryan which street to take over to Broadview and we came to it just south of the high-rise I called home. As we neared the front of my building, Ryan asked where he could park without being seen. I pointed to the visitors’ lot on the south side of the building.

  “I need to get my guns out of the trunk,” he said. “Since I know yours is probably in a shoebox in the attic.”

  “I don’t have an attic.”

  “Yeah, you do. Only your steps don’t go up all the way.”

  As we were pulling into the lot, I yelled, “Don’t stop!”

  A dark green SUV was idling in a parking spot just past the entrance, exhaust snaking around its rear tires. The window of the passenger side was all the way down in the rain.

  “Turn around! Go! Go!”

  A muzzle flashed on the passenger side and our front windshield shattered, showering us with glass. Ryan didn’t need any further encouragement. He hit the gas and spun the wheel hard with the heel of his hand. The car fishtailed on the wet pavement. He spun the wheel the other way and floored it once we were pointed more or less at the street. We got out to Broadview with the SUV close on our tail.

  “Right,” I said.

  He turned right and sped up the street. A northbound streetcar was stopped at the next corner, its rear doors open to let passengers off. Streetcars have the right of way in Toronto-when their doors are open, cars are supposed to come to a full stop, like it was a school bus. Ryan just hit his horn and kept going. A man about to step down from the rear exit jumped back up and yelled at us. The driver rang his bell as an admonition. Then the SUV sped through too, drawing another peal of protest.

  Ryan gunned it north. “My guns!” he spat. “They’re all in the fucking trunk!”

  We blew through the red light at the next intersection. So did our pursuers. I remembered the manoeuvre I had pulled the other day in a similar situation, faking a turn left onto Pottery Road and then juking right through the streets of East York. The SUV didn’t even give me the chance to suggest it. It pulled out into the southbound lane and roared up beside us on our left. We couldn’t match his acceleration. When the SUV was alongside us, the passenger leaned out: Ricky the Clip, his round face wet and shiny with rain. Ryan’s window exploded and he screamed and clutched his left eye. Blood streamed through his fingers and over his knuckles as the car began to drift toward a line of cars parked on our right. “I can’t fucking see!” he cried.

  I grabbed the wheel with my left hand and steered us back into our lane.

  We were coming up to the Pottery Road intersection. I snapped off my seatbelt and got my left foot over the centre console and hit the brakes. The SUV driver, still accelerating, couldn’t react fast enough and we slipped in behind him just in time to make a hard left turn down Pottery Road. The other driver hit his brakes, his lights flashing bright red in the darkness, reflecting on the wet road like two smears of blood. His wheelbase was too long to make a U-turn; he had to make a three-point turn instead, which gave us a lead. We swerved through one S curve after another down Pottery Road. I was trying to keep control with my left leg draped over Ryan’s right, my foot jumping from gas to brake, and my left hand spinning the wheel back and forth like a helmsman on a wild sea. The road grew narrower as thick foliage reached out from both sides. The Dadmobile banged off the guardrail on our right. I overcorrected and we veered into the left lane, narrowly missing a northbound cab. Headlights appeared in our rear-view. The SUV was gaining. Bayview wasn’t going to work. Pottery Road ended there. If we caught a red light, we’d have to come to a dead stop. Ducks waiting to be blasted.

  An idea came to me. A way to better the odds. We were coming to the bike path where I’d rollerbladed the other day. If we could make them chase us on foot, they’d lose some of their advantage. I knew the path well. Ricky was from Buffalo; no way he’d be familiar with it. And the driver-Vito himself or one of his thugs-was equally unlikely to know it like I did. I hit the brakes and spun the wheel hard, and the car slid sideways into the fenced-off lot where the path began. I undid the catch on Ryan’s seatbelt, opened his door and shoved him out. I popped the release on the trunk and scrambled out my side.

  Ryan’s eye was a mess, but not from a bullet. He’d be dead if he had taken a direct hit. Because the SUV stood so much higher than the Volvo, the bullet had deflected downwards when it hit the window, rather than penetrating it in a straight line. But there had to be glass in his eye, the way blood and tears were running out of it together.

  I was reaching into the trunk for Ryan’s gun case when the SUV shrieked to a stop behind us. Two shots from the passenger side rang off the open trunk. We ducked. I grabbed Ryan’s hand. “This way,” I said, and we slipped gunless through the gap in the fence and ran down the road. I heard another shot behind us and a bullet smacked into the trunk of a poplar. We kept running, hunched down as far as we could while still making speed. To our left was the Don River, to the right the Don Valley Parkway. We passed the first lifesaving station. Another shot, another tree trunk pocked.

  “Down the bank,” I said.

  Along the river were elms, cedars and oaks, their foliage thick enough to provide cover. We slid down the bank and huddled behind a thick stand of hollyhock. My white shirt offered too tempting a target. I ripped it open and shrugged out of it and smeared cold black mud on my torso, arms and face. I got Ryan to cup his hands and rinse his eye with river water.

  “Can you see?”

  “A little in my right.”

  “Ssh.” I could hear footsteps on the road now. The beam of a flashlight swept from side to side.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Ricky sang.

  We started creeping silently along the muddy bank.

  “Hey, Ryan!” Ricky called. “Dante Ryan? You know who this is?” He paused as if Ryan were really dumb enough to answer. “Ricky Messina. Remember? Out of Buffalo? We were introduced at the Ierullo funeral. They call me Ricky the Clip.”

  Even in his pain, Ryan mouthed the word they and shook his head.

  “I’ve always admired your work, Ryan. You were like a future hall-of-famer in the trade. But this thing… taking up with detectives

  … turning down a fat fucking payday. Going against our thing? What the fuck were you thinking?”

  I wished he’d shut up and let the other man speak, but Ricky wasn’t through. “You’d never catch me consorting with outsiders like this. Telling tales. Leaking family news. Man, you fucked up. You and this Jew you’re with. You there too, Jew?” he cackled. “Yoo-hoo! Jew-Jew! You’re through, Jew. You and Ryan both, you’re fucking done!”

  His rant helped cover our sound as we crept upstream. Just as he stopped to take a breath, Ryan’s foot slipped on a wet rock. The splash seemed as loud as a right whale breaching. Two shots came at us almost simultaneously. Two muzzle flashes. Two pocking sounds in the trees. So they both had guns. Two men with guns and a flashlight versus two unarmed men, one of them half blind. Our only chance lay a hundred yards away. I reached for Ryan’s hand and we started moving again.

  “Come on out, guys,” Ricky called. “Come meet the new generation.” His voice was almost lost amid the rushing sounds of the river and traffic. “I heard you’re good with a knife, Ryan, that true? Say the word, I’ll put down my gun and we’ll go mano-a-mano, blade against blade, what do you say? You like to dance, Ryan? Not answering? That’s okay. You’ll make a fine trophy. I already know what I’m going to cut off the Jew, but you-I have to think about what part I’m going to take as a souvenir.”

  The other man still hadn’t said a word. Maybe too dumb to think of anything to say. Or maybe the smart one.

  “A little farther,” I whispered to Ryan.

  “What’s there?”

  “A lifesaver,” I said.

  I peered through the foliage at the road. Saw nothing but dark green leaves and the black sky beyond. We kept going. Branches scratched my arms and face. Ryan’s hand felt wet and clammy in mine.

  “There!” I hissed. A flash of orange in the trees. The life-saving station with the long metal pole. Time to put the equipment to good use.

  “Wait here,” I told Ryan.

  “For what?”

  “You want Ricky?.”

  I crawled up the bank as quietly as I could. Judging by their flashlight beam, they were maybe twenty yards down the road. I picked up a rock and threw it as far as I could upstream. It hit some brush and landed in the water with a loud splash, drawing more gunfire.

  “Up there,” Ricky urged.

  As they started up the road, I crept up to the lifesaving station and silently eased the pole off its hook. I waited in the shadows, hoping my pounding heart wasn’t making as much noise outside my chest as it was inside. The men drew closer. The flashlight beam grew brighter. I could hear their shoes scraping the surface of the road. One man murmured something I couldn’t hear.

  “We’ll get them,” I heard Ricky say.

  I kept the pole steady, careful not to snag any branches overhead. I breathed in and out, calming my body. The footsteps grew louder. The moon was hidden by clouds but tungsten lights on tall black stands lined the Parkway. I saw their cold light glint on gunmetal. Then I saw a hand holding the gun, then the arm.

  Now!

  As Ricky came into view I slipped the ring of the lifesaving pole over his head and yanked it as hard as I could. He gave a strangled cry and tumbled down the riverbank to where Ryan was waiting.

  The other man yelled, “Ricky!”

  The Clip’s gun landed on the road a few feet in front of me. I was reaching for it when the other gun roared and a bullet smacked the pavement inches from my hand. I dove down the bank, rolling through brush. My right wrist hit a rock as I landed and went numb. I could hear Ryan and Ricky struggling in the water. There was the sound of a fist smacking something and one of them cried out. Which one?

  A cedar had toppled over at the edge of the riverbank, its exposed root system creating a wall of dirt I could hide behind. I huddled there, wondering if I could make it across the river without getting shot in the back. A line of large stones made a natural walkway to the far side, and the water level was low at this time of year. The rocks looked either dry or just barely submerged. Up the opposite bank were railway tracks that led back to a crossing at Pottery Road, not far from Ryan’s car and his case full of guns.