When the Killing Starts (3 page)

I leaned back and said, "I've got a few contacts who might be able to find out more about this group of his. I'll do some asking around. Can you give me the phone number of Mr. Broadhurst so I can check with him, and your own? I'll call if I learn anything."

She nodded. "Here's Mr. Broadhurst's card. My own number is unlisted. Will you write it down on the back of the card?"

"Sure. Can I borrow your pen, please?"
 

She handed over a gold pen, and I wrote her number on the back of Broadhurst's card, which read "Insight investigations. Discreet inquiries." I imagined his income came mostly from jealous husbands. Then I stood up, putting the card into my billfold. "I don't suppose I'll be calling before Monday. It's too late to get much official information today. The guys I want to talk to work office hours. But I'll do what I can."

She stood up with me, picking up her purse and holding it in both hands as if it were heavy. "I hope you'll be able to do something sooner than Monday, Mr. Bennett. It could be too late. He could be gone out of town by then."

"Believe me, I'll try my hardest," I said. "You're paying me a lot of money."

"It's worth it to me," she said. "And, of course, if you run into any expenses, I'll be glad to pay them.

"Thank you. I'll let you know." I nodded to her, and she did another of her tight little smiles.

"Please try," she said. "I'm counting on you."

 

 

 

TWO

 

 

I don't like apartments at the best of times. Especially in big buildings. They make me feel like a folder in a file cabinet. For the first time since coming down to Toronto, I missed the house I rented at Murphy's Harbour. Not that I stayed indoors much, anyway. On a day like this, up there I would have gotten into my canoe and headed out with Sam in the bows and my fishing rod between my knees, trolling the deep weed beds for pickerel. It's the world's best way of getting your brain into neutral so that good ideas can float in without hindrance. Stuck in Fred's Toronto apartment, I did the next best thing, pulling a chair out onto the balcony, opening a Labatt's Blue, and sitting looking down on the treetops of the quiet streets below me.

Fred has a portable phone, so I took it with me and called the detective agency. I reached the answering service, and a woman told me she would give Mr. Broadhurst my message. Fine. So I wouldn't be able to save any steps. I'd have to go the whole distance on my own steam. Question: How?

The next thing I did was to start making like a policeman. Our national police force, the RCMP, has split off a security force, mostly ex-Mounties but some new men, including a detective I knew faintly when I was a detective myself with the Metro Toronto police. I dug out the little phone book I usually kept in my desk at Murphy's Harbour and rang his office number.

"Inspector Lenchak here," he said. Bingo. Fate was smiling.

He sounded laid back. I guessed the long-term pressures of keeping Canada safe from subversion were lighter than the old grind of robberies and homicides he'd worked on in the Metro department. I introduced myself, and he said, "Hey, Reid, nice to hear from you. You're a big deal in the papers."

"Great," I said. "Maybe I can get my old job back in Fifty-two Division."

"You wouldn't like it," he promised. "All those old slums have been painted pink and filled up with yuppies. The only excitement you ever get is domestics, some trendy whacking his boyfriend with a squash racket."

We laughed and reminisced, dredging up the few cases in which we'd both been involved. Then I put my question to him. "In your new job, do you keep tabs on mercenary outfits?"

"Sure," he said. "Thinking of heading down to Nicaragua or somewhere for some fun in the sun with a gun?"
 

"Nah, but I'm trying to do a favor for some woman. Apparently her kid's joined up with some bunch of Limeys call themselves Freedom for Hire. That ring any bells?"

"Y'ask me, that's a scam," he said. "Yeah, they popped up about a year ago. Their spiel is they train you, then send you on an assignment. Only thing is, they take the price of your training out of your pay, which comes to them, anyway, not to you. Kind of like being in hock to the Mob. You never get out of debt, the way I hear it. Only you don't know until you come back from getting your ass shot off and find you still owe them money. They pay your airfare and maybe give you a week's training. Then they keep your ten grand or whatever. Big profit margin."

"And it's running out of Toronto?"
 

"Not exactly. We're just one of their fishing holes. We don't like it, you can guess, but there isn't anything illegal, as you know. They just assemble a bunch of misfits and ship them out. Personally, I think it sucks, but since when did a copper have any say in the way things are run?"

We agreed on that one, but I had other questions to ask. "Any idea where I can find them?"

"We don't have an address. The guy in charge, he usually calls himself the Colonel, by the way, his name is George Dunphy. He was a sergeant with the British paras one time. A sergeant, not a colonel. They court-martialed him for brutality to a guy in his outfit. I don't have the details, only that he got a year in the brig, or whatever they call it over there, then he was dishonorably discharged."

"Sounds like a rounder," I said.

"For sure. We saw a psychological profile on him. He's a head case. Sadistic, ugly. But he's also cute as hell. Never takes a permanent address. When he's in town, which he is maybe every two months, he moves to a different hotel every day, no forwarding address. Checks in at night so we can't search his room while he's out or anything sneaky. Carries his gear with him."
 

"A moving target. The Brits train their guys well. Tell me, does he have any kind of circuit, any pattern?"

"It's not a circuit," Lenchak said. "He hits the bars, loser's bars mostly. You won't find him at any place there's a wealthy clientele. At least not until he's found a pigeon. Then he usually wines and dines the guy, taking him to better places than he's used to, you know how it goes."

"I see the picture. Yeah. So if I wanted to contact him, I should start making a circuit of the rough spots, down around Queen and Sherbourne, and out Queen West."

"That's it." Lenchak laughed. "I figure you'd better start at the redneck places. Anywhere they play country music is a good bet."

"Don't be hard on us rednecks; I like country. Anyway, what's this guy look like?"

"Not big, around five nine, one seventy, but it's all muscle. He moves like a soldier. And he usually wears a leather coat. He's thirty-eight this year, short fair hair, blue eyes, little brush of a mustache. Like when he calls himself Colonel, guys believe him."

"Should stand out in a redneck bar, among all the ponytails," I said. "But his recruiting sounds a bit hit-and-miss. Don't these outfits usually advertise in Soldier of Fortune?"

"No, those ads were outlawed some time back. But what Dunphy does is hit the help-wanted ads in the Toronto papers. "Wanted: strong, capable young men who want to earn big money. Strictly legal."

"And there's a box number, what?"
 

"No, a phone number. It's different every time. We've checked it; it's always a pay phone in a bar. He has different guys answering it; he calls them and picks up names and arranges the contacts."

"Have you shaken any of these guys down?"
 

"Losers, all of them. One's a guy in a wheelchair, another is a veteran of the big war, around sixty-five, heavy boozer. He's always half-corked, doesn't know anything. Says the colonel comes in early in the evening and buys his beer all night to take the phone."

He didn't have any more to add, so I thanked him and hung up. A scam, he'd said. The name of the outfit suggested that. It was the kind of thing you'd expect a TV series to be called, something to appeal to the average misfit sitting in front of the set with his cigarettes and his dreams. He would need to be pretty unsophisticated to bite, but that isn't a requirement that will exclude many young men. No, it looked to me as if Lenchak was right; young Michaels had gotten himself into deep trouble.

I wondered what their training would consist of. Not much, probably. A few lectures on field stripping weapons, firing, learning how to use captured weapons. Some nod in the direction of fitness, just enough to make the guy feel he was being subjected to discipline, not enough to do him any good.

That was what reminded me that it had been two days since my last run. Living with a woman after years spent mostly on my own had cut into the workout ritual I've built for myself. I dug out my running gear and headed out with Sam at my heels.

It was hot on the street, the slow, soaked-in heat of late afternoon when the sidewalks smolder with stored warmth. Beautiful weather to be on vacation with your girl. Ah, well. Fall for an actress, plan to spend a lot of time on your own.

I didn't push too hard but kept it down to three miles in twenty-five minutes. Sam enjoyed it. City life didn't suit him. He was happy to be moving, clicking along behind me as if we were tied together.

I got back and showered and then fed Sam and made myself some supper. Fred had been doing most of the catering, running a lot to salads and things in woks. I was relieved to find she had a can of Fray Bentos bully beef in the cupboard, and I parboiled some potatoes and fried up a solid meal of corned-beef hash, heavy on the onions. Why not?

Broadhurst hadn't returned my call when I finished eating, so I went out to start searching, taking Sam with me. Toronto's a law-abiding city, but I was on an ugly hunt, and I might need some backup. If Sam was within whistling distance, he'd provide it.

He settled comfortably on the front seat, and I opened all the windows and left the car outside one bar after another on my circuit. In every place I did the same thing, first checking for the colonel, who was never there that I could see, then looking around for anyone who might be his answering service. It was like following a very slight trail over very stony ground, but it was all I could do. I'd checked the newspaper, and there were no ads that might have been placed by Freedom for Hire. I'd even dug through back issues of the Sun for the past two days, as far back as I could find on a Saturday evening, when both the library and the Sun office were closed. Nothing in any paper to guide me, so I kept slugging around, leaving a single draft beer going flat on all the bars. Even one beer in each would have slowed me down too much for my own safety if I did run into the Freedom for Hire boys.

It must have been a little after ten when I finished the first circuit of all the likely places. On Queen Street West there's a country bar called the Chuckwagon, well enough known in the country-music crowd that the Saturday nighters were mostly in western gear, blue jeans—national dress for the under thirties, anyway—but with check shirts and Stetsons. The music was deafening, but it was Waylon Jennings, so at least it was telling a story.

I got myself a beer and looked around. No sign of the colonel. That would have been too easy. I looked for his phone jockey, someone old or out of place in this young crowd. Nobody answered that description, either. But there was one guy on his own who interested me. He wasn't on the make, which put him in a class by himself in there. He was nursing a beer and doing his best to look at a magazine in the limited light that was available. Killing time, glancing up now and then, trying not to look obvious.

I left my beer on the bar and sauntered past his table as if I were heading for the john. His head was down, and he was studying a picture of a guy in combat fatigues holding an automatic weapon. It had the curved magazine of the AK 47. He looked up and caught my eye and closed the magazine. Soldier of Fortune.

He stared at me, coldly. Getting himself psyched up to show how tough he was. He was already working at it, high-crowned baseball cap dead center, crisp haircut, clenched jaw. A recruit waiting for his army.

I nodded at him. "That's a good magazine." He kept up his stare, not sure I wasn't sending him up. "How would you know?"

"Used to read it all the time," I said, and then set the hook. "When I first got back from 'Nam."

"You were there?" His face changed. "No shit, were you?"

"U.S. Marines. Two years." Fred would have been proud of me. I didn't follow up right away. I nodded again and went on to the washroom. It was busy, and I had to wait, watching a young guy slamming the contraceptive machine with the heel of his hand because it had eaten his quarters and left him unprotected. He was taking some heavy joshing from his buddies about his possible sexual preferences.

I walked back out past Soldier of Fortune. He was waiting. "Hey, got a minute?" His voice was as gruff as he could shade it without picking a fight. Anxious to talk but not at the cost of losing face, I figured.

"'S on your mind?" I smiled to show I was playing nice.

"You a vet, really?"

"No big deal, there were a million guys there. Most of us came back."

"Yeah, but you're Canadian, eh? Like I figured you had to be American."

I leaned my knuckles down on the table so we could talk without bellowing over George Jones and Tammy Wynette. "There were lots of Canadians there, thousands of us. I was marines."

His jaw had come unclenched. He looked as close to pleading as he could allow himself to get. "Were you in the boonies?"

"Most of the time."

"Listen." He looked around, at the bar, where I'd left my beer. "You with somebody, or can I buy you a beer, shoot the shit?"

"Kinda boring," I minimized.

He said it. He honestly did, like a school kid. "That's easy for you to say."

I grinned and dropped into the chair opposite, waving at the waiter, who was plowing through the crowd with his aluminum tray at arm's length over his head. I hoped somebody didn't tickle him.

He stopped at our table and dropped four draft. The Soldier of Fortune would have outdrawn Billy the Kid to get his cash on the table. He tipped a quarter. The waiter sniffed and left.