The Trickster

‘Sure. I can get down most things.’

‘So where have you worked before? And what as exactly?’

The man looked into her eyes very deeply indeed.

Pasqual was aware of an acute sexual stirring beginning around her nipples that shifted down over her belly to an area she didn’t have much time to explore these days. He was turning her on with those eyes, and she was ashamed. Why this encounter should have such an effect was a mystery, and made her squirm beneath her fleece with discomfort and irritation. After all, she was surrounded all day by pieces of meat on skis that she could have just by looking sideways at them. If she chose to, she could fuck any instructor on the resort, but sex was never high on Pasqual Weaver’s agenda. Right now, however, it was standing at the front door ringing the bell.

‘Tamarack. Two seasons. Manual grooming mainly.’

She looked at him suspiciously. How could he have worked out doors all day as a manual groomer and still have stayed as white as a baby’s ass? She wasn’t going to be bullshitted. Tamarack just happened to be Silver’s biggest rival right now. So much so, even the name got on her tits.

‘And who was the big white chief at Tamarack? Just in case I want to call him up?’

The man who called himself Moses smiled widely, revealing milky white teeth behind his pink lips. ‘I’d be glad if you called him up, Miss Weaver. His name is William Cole. We called him Hill Billy.’

She knew damned well it was Bill fucking Cole that ran the show over there. Same as she knew that Tamarack had stolen nearly a fifth of Silver’s day trip custom with three new high speed quads. She would drink piss before she would phone up Cole for a reference. The fact that the guy knew his name and his slang name, was enough proof for her he was telling the truth. Plus he would be useful in the office if he knew exactly what was going on with the competition.

‘So are you hoping for manual work again or does something with a desk and a fan heater blowing hot air up your fanny all day interest you?’

‘Anything you got really. I understand you lost a couple of your ski patrol.’

She frowned. ‘Yeah, well we’re on that one thanks. The rest of the guys are still cut up about it and I don’t think they’d take too kindly to me sticking a sits vac. ad in the local newspaper before they’ve got their two buddies in the ground.’

‘A real tragedy.’

‘It’s a dangerous job.’

His eyes were boring through her skull. She looked away, pretending to study the blackboard for tomorrow’s ski class rota. ‘Okay Moses, why don’t you come see me tomorrow at eight thirty and we’ll fix something up. Can’t promise ski patrol, but I’ll be honest and tell you we can use some extra help right now. Things are going to get real busy when the snow reports hit the cities.’

Moses stuck his hand out again and she took it without thinking. This time he held on to it a little longer than she would have liked.

‘Well that’s just great, Miss Weaver. I look forward to that.’

She withdrew her hand as the door threw open to admit five laughing instructors clopping in like carthorses.

‘Robbed the public blind today I hope guys?’ she said in a tone higher than she had planned.

‘Yo, you bet,’ laughed the biggest and brownest of the pack, unzipping his suit with a baroque flourish.

Pasqual smiled once at them, once at Moses, and left.

The tall pale man watched the flimsy wooden door close behind Pasqual and then glanced across at the five faces eyeballing him.

‘Hi,’ he smiled.

Only one nodded back.

Moses Sitconski put his hands back into his pockets without dissolving his smile, then followed Pasqual out into the night.

8

The ploughs went past with the invincibility of a fleet of Newfoundland trawlers putting to sea; lights flashing, funnels blowing out plumes of snow, their metal bows pushing back the ocean of white in huge, semi-solid waves.

Snaking behind these yellow leviathans was a line of nineteen cars, two trucks and a bus, and right in the middle Sam Hunt sat behind the wheel of the company pick-up.

As he drove slowly behind a big shiny Ford, Sam’s eyes were narrow slits of dismay. Not because his progress home was painfully slow, but because last night, alone on the bench in the ticket office at Stoke, he’d had another dream.

So far, it was the worst. Since his blackout three days ago, every night had furnished him with dreams so distressing and unendurable he was beginning to dread sleep. But last night was the pits. It was almost real.

It had been different in detail of course, but the creature was still there. Still fixing him with its unholy, vindictive, glacial gaze as it set about its grisly business. Always the business with the heart. That was the bit he couldn’t take.

There was more last night though. A lot more. Sam made a dry swallow as he remembered.

The office that smelled of wet floorboards and hot dogs during the day was a different place at night. Fierce heating dried the wood after the last customer had left, slowly evaporating the puddles caused by skiers dragging the snow in on their moonboots. For a while it made the room steamy and sour. But once it had dried, and the cleaners had done their stuff sweeping up discarded sticky backs from the lift passes, the office was a pleasant and inhabitable room, and when Sam had called Katie he was comfortable. There was, after all, something soothing about seeking refuge from the storm in a commercial rather than a domestic setting, appealing to that childish excitement of bedding down somewhere alien and forbidden.

The first time Sam had been in a church in Calgary he felt that way. He was fifteen years old and the luxury of the interior, the cool but ornate splendour, had astounded him. There had been no sense of God to the young Sam Hunt, just a million opportunities for making tiny living spaces in the dozens of marble and oak corners the building boasted. He sat on the hard pew, imagining creeping into that fabulous building when everyone was gone and unfurling his sleeping mat beneath the high, carved wooden pulpit. It was like a palace. What would it be like to run barefoot on that marble floor in front of the minister? Think of the feasts that could be laid out on those huge stone steps, and the dancing that could go wildly out of control in the vast empty space between pews and altar. The pragmatist in him figured that cooking could be accomplished quite safely on the stone-flagged floors, since the smoke would have ample space to rise and dissipate high above, amongst the barrel-vaulting. Sam knew he could live there like a king.

The Reverend and Mrs Jenkins were delighted by Sam’s expression of wonder and awe as he sat between them that day, his black-button eyes roving over the architecture like a blind man seeing for the first time.

They were not to know his thoughts were on a flight of fancy as to how he would live secretively in such a place, instead of an awakening to the glory and love of their God: but they often misinterpreted their young charge. They never really knew him at all.

The Silver Ski Company ticket office in Stoke was no comparison to the Calgary Church of All Saints on Third Street, but as Sam selected a place to sleep, his instincts were the same as those of twenty years ago. All these interesting nooks and corners to sleep in. Areas to make your own.

He had three blankets in the truck and found a long, foam seat cover from the back of the office where the staff took their boots off. More than enough for a bed. He made his nest beside the radiator pipes at the back wall, where he faced the big digital clock above the ticket windows.

Outside, the blizzard battered at the windows, the snow hitting the glass like shotgun pellets. Sam turned off the overhead striplight and wriggled, snug beneath his blankets. The big green digital numbers of the clock cast an eerie illumination on the room, reflecting dimly on the floorboards. They were reading 10.07 when he settled down, his hand beneath his head like a child. Sam had decided he was feeling better. Dreams aside, there had been no further blacking out, and it was that void of consciousness that held most terror for him. Brain tumour? Cancer? All the demons of modern medical knowledge had plagued him like a hypochondriac since that numbing collapse. But it was over now. He was well. Sure of it.

When he woke up after the dream and threw his load, the green digits were reading 10.45. Sam found himself on all fours, hunched like a dog over a pile of his own hot vomit. He was sweating and panting, and the stench of the wet bile beneath him made him retch again.

The memory of it made Sam clutch the steering wheel like a life-line. But it was what came after that was making Sam’s heart thump in his chest like a trapped bird. Nothing. That’s what happened after he woke over his own sick. At least nothing until he woke a second time. At 7.30 a.m. Fully clothed, standing outside his truck.

When Craig saw the guy that stepped out of the car he’d been more than disappointed. Not in his whole term as staff sergeant in Silver had he ever had to call in forensics from Edmonton, and this small bald man in a suit jacket covered by a cheap nylon parka didn’t look much like the cavalry.

That was six hours ago. Craig was going to give him the benefit of the doubt. Doctor Brenner had been working at Joe all day, talking into a tape recorder as he did so, and now he was standing in Craig’s office with a styrofoam cup in one hand ready to pronounce sentence.

Craig was calm as he offered the doctor a seat.

Brenner ran a delicate hand over the pate of his bald head and sat down heavily in the chair by the window.

‘How’s it looking out there?’

Brenner gesticulated with his coffee to the outside world behind him. Craig glanced out of the window.

‘It’s okay. Cold. What have you got for me?’

‘Time of death around 11.30 p.m. Cause of death, a violent blow to the head followed by lacerations to the chest. Further damage, probably after the initial blows, and due to the incisions, indicates massive loss of blood.’

‘Incisions.’

‘Incisions, Staff Sergeant. The cuts he made to get into the heart and remove the genitals.’

Craig looked at him, unblinking, forcing himself to believe what he was hearing. Yes, this was Joe they were discussing. Joe, who should have been in here glowering at Brenner, looking at his watch and making doe eyes at Craig to let him away for his bowling night. But Joe was never going to dog off early to go bowling with a cold beer in his hand again. Right now, Joe was the collection of meat cuts lying four doors down the corridor on a table covered in polythene sheeting, and how he died wasn’t making sense.

No witnesses except maybe whoever drove through the pass after Joe. They were on that one already. It wouldn’t be hard to find the driver that made the tracks Craig saw. It could only have been a truck, and there were three constables phone-bashing every trucking company in the book right now.

‘And the crash?’

‘Happened after death. The lesions and breakages incurred by impact with the falling truck all occurred after he died. The way the blood clots always reveals that. The truck must have been pushed over the edge by whoever carved him up.’

The doctor drained his cup, and met Craig’s horror-filled gaze full-on.

‘What about the mutilation?’

‘Looks like the murderer had plenty of time on his hands. The heart was so tightly compacted up the anus, even with the tiny incision he made to get it in, it implies someone took great care to make sure it would stay there. It’s a big organ. I’m amazed how the assailant achieved it. Must have been a turkey-stuffer.’

Brenner grinned at his joke, receiving nothing but silence, and continued more coldly as he lost his smile, ‘The penis was torn off rather than cut, and it appears to have been in the mouth, although it had fallen out by the time you guys finished hauling the body up.’

‘How do you know it was in the mouth?’

‘His teeth closed on it. Left tissue inside. I reckon if you guys send a climber down there you’ll find his pecker where it fell.’ Brenner stuck his nail into the styrofoam cup, making a popping sound that delighted him sufficiently to make him do it again. ‘Yeah, it’s an X-rated one this, all right.’

Craig responded coldly. ‘When will the full report be ready for our inspection?’

Brenner caught the coldness in his voice, and smiled. ‘The report will be ready soon as I get back to Edmonton to write it, but I’ll wager with a murder like this you boys will be playing host to a bit of city help. Guess they’ll read it first. Tell you everything you need to know.’ He stood up to go.

‘Sit down, doctor.’

He continued to stand.

‘Until we hear who will formally head this investigation, I’m the officer in charge and the sole officer to whom you make your report. There are plenty of facilities here for you to have your taped report transcribed and printed out before you leave. Now, I understand you must be tired, so if you like we can arrange for some hotel accommodation for you while we organize the paperwork.’

Brenner glared at Craig. ‘I was planning on getting back tonight, Staff Sergeant, if that’s okay with you.’

‘No, I’m afraid it’s not okay. Not until I know all the facts and can question you in detail about the autopsy. If that takes for the rest of the week then so be it.’

‘With all due respect, I work out of Edmonton. I’m not at your beck and call.’

‘In the time it takes you to get back to the city, doctor, our murderer could be hundreds of miles from here. Even worse, he could still be here ready to strike again. I’m sure as a senior member of the Edmonton forensics team you hardly need me to remind you that police work is a race against the clock. Now, can I organize that hotel for you while you give your tape to Holly?’

Brenner looked at Craig for a few seconds and smiled. ‘Very well, Staff Sergeant. I’ll just call my wife, then I’ll call my superior officer in Edmonton. Just to let him know what’s happening of course. May I use your phone?’

Craig waved a hand. Brenner came forward a pace and picked up the receiver and punched out the number.

‘By the way, I think you’ll find the murder weapon’s going to prove problematic.’

‘In what way?’

‘No traces to indicate any metal instrument whatsoever. There are usually tell-tale signs that can lead us to identify at least the nature of the weapon. You know, serrated or unserrated, steel or base metal and so on. Everything leaves minute particles behind. In this case, nothing. Yet the incisions were as fine as scalpel cuts … Barbara? It’s Larry.’

Craig waited expectantly, until Brenner put his hand over the receiver and turned to face him. ‘May I?’

‘Sure. Go ahead. I’ll be right outside.’

Craig McGee closed the door on his own hessian-lined office and poured himself a drink from the water cooler. From the other side of the door came the sound of Brenner laughing on the phone.

Craig McGee couldn’t phone home and laugh because there was no Mrs McGee any more to pick up the phone and smile at the sound of his voice. The phone would ring alone and unanswered on the blue painted table by the front door, secure in its secret plastic knowledge that Sylvia wasn’t ever going to come running out from the kitchen again, wiping her hands on a dishcloth and pick it up. Why phone home when your wife is dead? In fact if he didn’t have to feed her cats, Craig sometimes wondered why he went home at all. Everything there had her mark on it, her smell on it, her touch to it. Her absence mocked him, from the coffee jars full of shells she collected on holiday in Scotland, to the ridiculous carved magazine rack she bought at a heart foundation sale. Sometimes he woke in the night and stretched out to touch her neck, only to find the empty strip of bed as cold as marble.

He wondered if Brenner knew how lucky he was to be able to perform that simple but delicious act of phoning home.

Staff Sergeant McGee let his forehead rest against the wall above the cooler. He crushed the waxed paper cone in his hand and let it fall to the floor.

* * *

‘Don’t know why they don’t just send us out in a carton pulled by a sow. Be as much use as this heap of shit in the snow.’

Constable Sonny Morris was not enjoying trying to control the Ford Crown Victoria in the thickening blizzard, and his partner Dan Small made a nasal sound in agreement. Highway patrol was a joke in conditions like these. They’d be lucky to find anyone moving, never mind speeding.

‘You got to drive fast to keep control. I keep telling you. Drive fast.’

Sonny glanced sideways at Dan.

‘Uh-huh?’

‘Sure. It works. You see, the slower you go the more traction you lose. Tried it last winter in my wife’s Honda. Got the thing all the way up to Ledmore in one go. Three feet of fresh fall, and I made it in one go. You have to drive fast.’

The driver remained unimpressed, and maintained the stately twenty miles per hour that was taking them back to the detachment in Silver.

‘Like to have seen that.’

‘God’s truth. In one go.’

‘Nah. Not the driving bit. Just the fact you were in Moira’s Honda.’

Dan squirmed.

‘Hey come on. The pick-up was bust. I had to get to Calgary. What was I goin’ to do? Walk?’

‘Better than being in Moira’s Honda.’

Dan gave him the finger and was formulating a riposte when they saw the truck. Ahead, a tear in the white curtain of snow revealed an eighteen-wheeler sitting in the viewpoint parking bay. By the depth of the snow on it, and the fact that no tracks led from the highway to its current position, it had been there a long time.

Sonny brightened considerably, moving forward in his seat as though the action would turn the Crown Vic into a Land Cruiser.

‘Lookee here. Some rough-neck’s sure going to be glad to see us.’

They glided to a standstill behind the truck, and Sonny reached for his hat on the dash. Dan got on the radio. ‘Two Alpha Four Calgary. We’re ten-seven on the Trans-Canada, ’bout two miles west of Silver. Over.’

There was a crackle, a long pause and eventually a female voice. ‘Calgary Two Alpha Four. Read you. Over.’

Dan looked at Sonny.

‘Nice to know they care, huh?’

Sonny made a wide-eyed expression of horror. ‘Oh no! Could it be that here in Alberta we’re not as professional as the detachment you worked with in BC? Now I don’t think I’ve heard you mention that before.’

Dan grabbed his hat. ‘Yeah, well you’ll eat shit when you pull over a maniac one day and no one knows you’re out here or what the plate is. That’s all I’m saying. They should make you tell them. Run it through the computer. This could be a stolen truck. That’s all I’m saying.’

Sonny looked sardonically towards the Peterbilt. ‘You know you’re right, Dan. Guess we just don’t know the half of it way out here in the sticks. Never heard of a joy-rider stealing an eighteen-wheeler for kicks. Still, police work is a learning experience. Now shall I go fetch the poor stranded hauler, or do you think we’d better call for assistance? Could be a gang of Hispanic drug dealers using a twenty-ton trailer as cover.’

‘Fuck off, Morris.’

Sonny laughed and opened the car door to a flurry of huge snowflakes. Dan followed him from the passenger door, battling to open it against the wind.

There was little sign of life from the truck, which sported a two-foot crown of undisturbed snow. The blizzard whipped mini-storms under its belly, blowing the snow out between the axles in random but concentrated blasts.

Sonny approached the driver’s door and stepped up on the foot plate. The window was more ice than glass, impossible to see through. He shouted and tugged at the handle. Frozen. Dan walked round the front, kicking his way through a drift that had built up round the front wheels, while Sonny continued to tug uselessly at the handle.

Fishing in his breast pocket, Dan found his lighter and put it to the handle of the passenger door. The ice gave way in ungracious rivulets and when he pulled on the metal the door creaked open reluctantly.

It had been a man. Now it was ice. The eyes were swollen horribly, the result of their moisture freezing and expanding, and they stared, boggling, out of the windscreen into nothing. The tongue protruded like a gargoyle, long and pointed and white, and the hands still gripped the wheel as though this man of ice was shouting maniacally at a driver who’d just cut him up bad.

Dan stared at it for a long time, his own mouth open, almost aping the frozen figure he beheld. Sonny, unable to open the driver door, joined Dan at his elbow.

‘God almighty.’

Dan stepped down, still staring at the nightmare, and let Sonny in. He climbed up and touched the figure gingerly with a gloved finger. It was hard as rock.

Sonny looked round the cab. Full of snow. Snow on the floor, snow banked up on the seat against the door, snow in a cornice along the windshield. What the hell had this guy been doing?

Why would you let the cab fill with snow, shut the doors, and then sit at the wheel until you froze to death? He cleared the dash with the back of his hand and found the driver’s ID.

Ernie Legat. Fifty-five years old.

He sighed and backed out of the cab. Poor Ernie. The guy must have planned it like this. Probably had gambling debts or something. Sonny had seen plenty creative suicides, but they never got any easier to deal with. Poor Ernie.

9

Keeping the yard from clogging with snow was impossible. That was probably why Wilber Stonerider had been given the task. Flakes the size of golf balls were driving through the chicken wire in the compound as though his shovel were their sole target. No big deal. He would have a drink soon. He felt the half-bottle of whisky in his jacket pocket bumping against his thigh with every thrust of the shovel and let himself imagine the moment when he could slip behind one of the dismantled buses in the compound and take a long, delicious mouthful. Inside the shed, the engineers were clattering around their machines, shouting to each other and playing the radio loud, their noise echoing round the huge tin building as though they were in a drum.

The buses that ended up here were like sick animals. They stood passively inside the shed and out in the yard, waiting to be attended by the gang of mechanical surgeons who would strip back their bodywork and probe their insides. Wilber, meanwhile, got to sweep the yard. But then Wilber was not exactly a regular employee of Fox Line Travel. Wilber was putting in some community service hours, penance for being drunk and disorderly in the Empire Hotel when he managed to smash three chairs and assault a waitress called Candy.

He’d figured this would be preferable to a couple of days in the slammer but now, with the snow making his task Herculean, he wasn’t so sure. The RCs didn’t dare touch you these days. No way. The band had hired that fancy lady lawyer from Edmonton who’d throw the book at them if any Kinchuinick Indian came out of their custody with so much as a scratch. Sure, they would call you every name in the book and some that didn’t make it into the book, but they couldn’t break your face. She was the best thing the band ever bought. Even looked after off-reserve Indians like Wilber. All you had to do was use your one phone call to her and, bingo, she’d get you off the hook. Of course from Silver, calling the band office was long distance, but that didn’t matter none. So far Wilber had called the lady lawyer four times. He was really getting value for money. Okay, value for the band’s money. Except this time, he wished he’d taken the days in pokey. You got food and sleep, and it was warm. Of course there was no liquor or tobacco, and that was hard to go without for three days. He felt the bottle again on his leg and decided that he’d made the right choice. He ran his tongue over dry lips, catching a flake as it tried to fly into his mouth. Now was as good a time as any to step quietly behind the bus and have a small refreshment. He shovelled noisily towards the bus and slipped behind its great frozen flanks, out of sight of the open shed door. With his back to the chicken wire, he propped the shovel against the bus and fished in his light blue parka for the bottle. Even the warmth of his body hadn’t made any impression on the whisky, and it was as cold as a beer straight from the ice-box when he put it to his lips and threw his head back.