A Touch of Panic Read online

  A Touch of Panic

  L.R. Wright

  FELONY & MAYHEM PRESS • NEW YORK

  This book is for my friend Suzanne Zwarun

  Contents

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The author wishes to acknowledge the advice and suggestions provided by Elaine Ferbey, Brian Appleby, Jim Looney, Fred Bott and Bob Halliwell…any inaccuracies are her own. In addition, this book owes much to the continuing perceptiveness, patience and generosity of John Wright.

  There is a Sunshine Coast, and its towns and villages are called by the names used here. But all the rest is fiction. The events and the characters are products of the author’s imagination, and geographical and other liberties have been taken in the depiction of the town of Sechelt.

  WHAT WOULD REMAIN forever in memory was the chalky taste of dust in his mouth, and thunking sounds thick in his ears, and the humiliating need to pee. Underneath his terror was something telling him not to pee and not to cry, just to wait, because pretty soon it would be over. But how long was pretty soon? Could he last that long? Until pretty soon was up?

  His face was in the dust because Lester had pushed him over, and now Lester was kicking him. Instinctively, the boy curled into a ball, but when a kick landed on his back he jerked partway straight again and then Lester kicked him in the stomach.

  He heard himself breathing. Every time he got kicked, his breath was shoved out of him like a gasp, and it sounded like he was crying even though he wasn’t. He heard Lester breathing, too, and his breathing had the same sounds in it—gasps and panting, like he was crying. But it was just because of the hard work he was doing, kicking his brother.

  The boy always remembered thinking how strange that was: that being kicked and doing the kicking could make the same sounds come out of you. And at the same time he was wondering how come he was doing any thinking at all; when you were lying in the dust with somebody kicking you, there should be nothing except hurting going on.

  The hurting came later. At first, when he realized that Lester had stopped kicking him, had laughed and sauntered away, the boy was only relieved and very grateful to Lester for stopping. Then pain poured into and over him.

  He opened his eyes, which he’d squeezed shut in case Lester aimed a kick at his head, and saw the grass at the edge of the path, blades of it dusty and crooked. He’d never noticed before how grass doesn’t grow straight up at all but shoots off to one side or another.

  Maybe something’s broke, he thought, trying to sort out where the pain was coming from. It felt like it was coming from everywhere, but it couldn’t be. Lester couldn’t have kicked him on every single part of his body.

  There was some clover growing among the blades of grass, its white flowers standing up straight and tall on sturdy stems, and the boy had never noticed this before either—that the top part of the clover flower grew upwards but the smaller bottom part of it grew downwards.

  He leaned with his fists on the dirt path and pushed, scrabbling his bare knees up toward his chest. The hurting didn’t get any worse, so he sat back on his haunches for a minute and then stood up.

  Sunshine was poking down through the trees. The boy’s heart was still going a mile a minute, and his body still felt like maybe it’d been run over by a truck, but at least he was in the normal world again. He heard some birds chirping somewhere, and saw a big fat bee hovering above the clover.

  He spat dust from his mouth, wiped his hands on his shorts and picked up his lunch pail. He hadn’t cried. He hadn’t peed his pants.

  The boy trudged along the path, which led through the woods from the schoolyard to the road that went past his family’s dairy farm, three miles away. He should have taken the school bus home.

  But he liked walking. It gave him time by himself, to think about stuff. And how was he supposed to know that Lester would decide to beat him up today?

  Lester, who was ten, four years older than the boy, had always been pretty mean to him but he’d never knocked him over and kicked him before.

  The boy wondered, as he emerged from the woods onto the shoulder of the road, if he should tell his mom. Squinting against the bright sunshine, he looked for the shimmering oasis at the end of the pavement—and there it was, straight ahead. He could walk and walk, though, and he knew he’d never get to it.

  Pastures with little islands of trees spread themselves across the valley toward the mountains, which were fuzzy with heat around the edges. Everything was green or blue or purple. The sunlight was almost blinding. Any day now the strawberries would be ripe. This would be the first year he’d be picking, along with his brothers and sisters—except for Lester, who had to help out on the farm. The boy hadn’t been looking forward to strawberry picking, which you had to do right out in the blazing sun, but now he did, because Lester wouldn’t be there.

  No, he wouldn’t tell his mom, he thought, trudging along the shoulder of the road, carrying his lunch pail by its metal handle. Inside was the wax paper his sandwich had been wrapped in, neatly folded, and in the lid, an empty thermos that had held milk. By lunchtime the milk was always lukewarm, so he poured it down the sink in the boys’ bathroom. The one thing in the world that could make him throw up was milk that wasn’t really, really cold.

  It wouldn’t do any good to tell. They were always telling on Lester, all of them, and nothing ever happened. There was too much work to do. If there were marks on him where he’d gotten kicked his mom wouldn’t notice, or if she did, she’d think his dad had made them.

  He’d pretend nothing had happened, he thought, turning into the long, long driveway that led to the house. There were cracks in the walls, inside the house, and all the paint had worn off the outside.

  And he’d try to stay out of Lester’s way.

  Chapter 1

  BRITISH COLUMBIA’S SUNSHINE Coast stretches from Langdale to the village of Lund, a distance of about eighty miles. It is reached by ferry from Horseshoe Bay, a few miles northwest of Vancouver. The three largest towns on the Coast are Powell River, at the northern end; Gibsons, next door to the ferry terminal at Langdale; and Sechelt, which is roughly in the middle.

  Those who live on the Sunshine Coast live with blue-edged islands tumbling across the seascape, mountains rising from dense coastal forests, and a climate that is the most congenial in Canada.

  Like the rest of the world, they also live—sometimes obliviously—with a certain amount of crime.

  ***

  “So are you having any fun?” said Karl Alberg. It was early morning on the last Friday of May, and he was pouring coffee into a big white mug. The telephone was wedged between his head and his shoulder so he could have both hands free.

  “Fun? Fun? Hey, it’s all work and no play up here,” said Cassandra Mitchell.

  “Do you miss me?” he said, smiling. Now he had one hand for the phone and one hand for his coffee.

  “Yeah,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  “Don’t sound so surprised.” He noticed that he was studying the calendar, which displayed four months per sheet. He took a ballpoint pen out of his shirt pocket and printed “sailing” through the week of July 31 to August 6.

  “Do you miss me?” she asked him.

  “Yeah,” he said, gazing happily at the calendar.

  “Good.”

  He hung up, still smiling, and took his coffee out to the sunporch. From here he could see down the hill into Gibsons, and the small harbour where he kept The Sea Nymph, his twenty-seven-foot sailboat. He almost hadn’t bought her because of the damn name. He couldn’t change it, either, because that would be unlucky.

  It was a cloudless day, bright and summery, and Alberg had half an hour to enjoy it before he’d have to leave for work.

  It was good to miss somebody. But at the same time he was actually enjoying Cassandra’s absence, too. Having the place to himself again. It was, after all, a small house, and she’d brought a hell of a lot of stuff with her when she moved in with him more than eight months ago. And he had been right about the closet: it wasn’t nearly big enough. They had had to buy wardrobes. They’d found a matching pair that had once belonged to an elderly couple who lived in a big old house on Garden Bay, about sixty miles up the Coast. They were nice pieces of furniture, with mirrors on the doors, big drawers in the bottom and a shelf inside, above the clothes rail. But they were colossal, and there was no room for them in the bedroom now that Cassandra’s dresser and night table were in there, along with Alberg’s, so one of the wardrobes was in the living room and the other took up half the sunporch.

  He’d had to get a second medicine cabinet, too, which now stuck out from the bathroom wall right where a watercolor of an old Bristol Channel cutter used to hang; he had moved
the watercolor to his office.

  Carrying his coffee, he went down the steps from the sunporch into the backyard and admired his new cedar fence, which was five feet high around the back and three feet at the front. The house had new eavestroughs, too, and the front porch had been replaced, and the back one repaired. The handyman was returning next week to start constructing a small brick patio off the sunporch. The roses, cut back when the work on the fence was done, had already recovered from this trauma by sending out new shoots and a second crop of buds.

  Alberg wandered over to the southwest corner of the backyard, where Cassandra had planted some vegetables before she left for her librarians’ conference: tomatoes, cucumbers and two zucchini plants. Yeah, he thought, it had been an eventful spring. Lots of stuff taken care of around the house. He and Cassandra working hard at getting used to living with each other. He patted his stomach and figured he’d lost a little weight, too. He hadn’t done any sailing yet, but he was going to go off up into the Gulf Islands during the first week of his holidays. By himself, because Cassandra didn’t really like to sail. He complained loudly about this, but he was actually looking forward to getting out on the water alone.

  Looking around the yard, he found himself wishing that it was September, because by then he and Cassandra would have been together for a year and he was hoping they’d get married, then, and buy a house together—a bigger house, spacious enough for both of them and all their things. This one was a squeeze, no question. So far they’d both been very polite and considerate, but it was hard. A sunporch was no place for an oak wardrobe.

  Alberg went back into the house, rinsed out his coffee mug and drove the twenty miles from Gibsons to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment in Sechelt, which was halfway between Gibsons and Earl’s Cove, where ferries crossed Jervis Inlet to Powell River.

  Half an hour later he was in his office, with a copy of the local paper spread on the desk in front of him. He turned to the column that dealt with court cases. It contained twenty items this week, including Robert Steven Coyne, eighteen, fined $450 for driving while disqualified; Gerald Mark Filewich, thirty-four, sentenced to three days in jail for being unlawfully at large; Cecile Edith Laliberte, thirty-one, fined $350 and given a three-month suspension of her driver’s licence for driving with a blood-alcohol level over 0.08; and Paul Roger Middleton, twenty-three, who’d received a $150 fine and twelve months’ probation for assault. Wow, Karl, pretty exciting stuff, thought Alberg, tossing the paper aside—and a qualm of doubt, a murky splotch of dissatisfaction, muddied the waters of his life for a moment. But it was a fleeting sensation. He told himself frequently that he preferred the Gerry Filewiches and the Paul Middletons of this world to kidnappers, rapists and killers, and he knew this to be true.

  He straightened the photograph of his daughters that hung on the wall next to his desk, above the Bristol Channel cutter. It was reasonably up to date—they’d sent him a new one for Christmas. Gone to a photographer’s studio, too, had it done right.

  Sid Sokolowski tapped on Alberg’s office door and pushed it open. “Two things. Remember the coke dealer went missing last week? Kijinski? His folks filed the report?”

  “I remember.”

  “The boat crew’s been noticing this van up on a little point where they were pretty sure no road goes. It’s there one day, it’s still there the next day, and on and on.” The sergeant eased himself around the door and into Alberg’s office. “So I sent Michaelson to check it out. There’s this logging road, that’s how it got in there.”

  “Kijinski’s?”

  “Yeah,” said Sokolowski, nodding.

  “No sign of him?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Let’s get an area search going,” said Alberg. “And check the van real good. What’s the other thing?”

  Sokolowski looked blank.

  “You said, ‘Two things.’ When you stuck your head in.”

  “Oh yeah. Almost forgot. We got an old fellow out there, says he wants to see the head honcho. That’s what he said. ‘The head honcho.’ ” The sergeant shook his head. “Funny old guy.”

  Alberg followed him into the reception area, where an elderly man sat on the bench next to the door.

  “Mr. Dutton,” said Isabella Harbud, the detachment’s secretary-receptionist, “this is the person you want to see. Staff Sergeant Alberg, this is Reginald Dutton, Mr. Dutton, Staff Sergeant Alberg.”

  “Hi, Mr. Dutton,” said Alberg.

  “I gotta have a word with you,” said Dutton, who was completely bald. He was about five feet eight, stocky, wearing grey polyester pants, a pink shirt and a dark green jacket with an old Finning Tractor emblem on the pocket, and he was leaning on a cane. Alberg figured he was in his late seventies.

  “Sure,” said Alberg. “Come on through into my office.”

  “Not on your life,” said Dutton. “I want witnesses to this.” He jabbed a thumb in the direction of Isabella and, looming behind her, Sid Sokolowski.

  “Okay,” said Alberg agreeably. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Rent,” said Reginald Dutton. “That’s what’s on my mind. Rent.”

  Alberg looked at Isabella, who was sitting with her chin in her hand, rapt. “What’s this about?” he muttered to her.

  “Listen to the man,” said Isabella, turning her golden eyes upon him, then back to Dutton.

  “What’s this about?” said Alberg again, to Reginald Dutton this time.

  “You’re on my land,” said Dutton. His eyes, magnified by his glasses, were immense and angry. “This is my land,” he said, banging his cane on the floor. “And you guys, you’ve never paid me a penny of rent. I’m here to evict you.”

  Isabella sat up with a little sigh. “Mr. Dutton lives at Shady Acres,” she said, referring to Sechelt’s new nursing home.

  “But I used to live here,” he said. “Right here.” He banged the floor again. Then he looked out the window. “No. Not right here. Over there a ways, the house was. Down the hill a bit. Right here I think was the barn.”

  “You want a cup of coffee, Mr. Dutton?” said Alberg.

  The elderly man looked at him sideways, suspicious.

  “I can see we’ve got a lot to talk about,” said Alberg. “So we might as well have a coffee. Right?”

  Dutton thought about it. “I guess. Two creams, two sugars.”

  Alberg poured, added cream and sugar, stirred, handed it over the counter to him. “How long’s it been since you lived here?”

  “I lose track.” Dutton sat down carefully, laid his cane along the bench next to him and held his coffee mug in both hands. “Forty years. Maybe three.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We’re gonna need my lawyer here.” Reginald Dutton drank some coffee, looking up at Alberg through his glasses, his eyes huge.

  “Right,” said Alberg. Through the window behind Dutton, he saw a young man wearing a white uniform moving briskly up the walk toward the detachment. Moments later the young man came through the door into the reception area. He nodded at Isabella and sat down next to Dutton.

  “I’ve been looking all over for you, Reginald.”

  “Have you, now,” said Reginald Dutton, sipping at his coffee.

  The man in white sat back, crossing his arms. “I’ll wait while you finish your coffee.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then I’ll take you home.”

  Alberg, Sokolowski and Isabella watched while Reginald Dutton raised the coffee to his mouth three more times. Then he handed the mug to the male nurse, who stood and gave it to Isabella.

  Mr. Dutton struggled to his feet, leaning on his cane. “Next time I come,” he said to Alberg, “I want to see a rental agreement. It’s that or you’re out. Definitely.”

  “Gotcha,” said Alberg.

  “Okay, Reginald,” said the nurse, offering Dutton his arm, “let’s go.”

  “I’ll be back,” Dutton called over his shoulder, as the nurse shepherded him through the door. “Definitely.”

  ***

  Gordon Murphy slapped on aftershave and looked at himself in the hotel-room mirror for reassurance—and got it. He smiled at his mirror-self. Raised an eyebrow. Made his eyes into bedroom eyes. Gave a little growl, from deep in his chest.