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  "And just what does it do for me?" the woman asked.

  The male cop who had spoken looked her over from head to toe. "Depends what part of your body you want to put at risk," he said, winking in conspiracy with a couple of the men. Spann turned back to the bulletin board, ignoring the taunt.

  Beside the plastic sealed photograph and note from the Headhunter, MacDougall had just pinned up the duty roster. Spann scanned the list of assignments and began to hunt for her name. She found it under the list heading:seven flying patrols.

  "Anybody here know a guy named Rick Scarlett?" she asked.

  "You're looking at him," the man said who had just given her the visual once-over.

  "Oh, great!" the woman said. "Just great!"

  Scarlett was tall, just under six two, and in his late twenties. His hair was short and light brown with just a hint of redness, the color the same as that of his clipped military moustache. His eyes were a muddy brown. The features of his face were clean and sharp as were the other lines of his body. His muscles were tightly knit, and he moved with fluid motion. Athletic was the single word that best summed him up.

  "I'll see you downstairs," Katherine Spann said, then she turned on her heels and made for the locker room.

  Behind her someone whistled.

  Locker rooms—even coed locker rooms—are the same the whole world over. There is that universal smell of sweat. There is the certain knowledge that the fungus of athlete's foot is lurking in at least one of the corners. And—if males are present—there is sure to be a jock mentality to the level of conversation. Men in locker rooms always relate that way.

  When Katherine Spann came down the stairs at 4949 Heather Street, two men and a woman were talking at the foot of the steps.

  ". . . he was a bum-face all the way," one of the men was saying.

  "A bum-face? What do you mean?"

  "You know, one of those guys with big fleshy round orbs for cheeks, skin stretched tight as it goes. Always got a little mouth pursed together like a twitching sphincter. Guy looks at you, ya think he's hangin a moon."

  "Do you always talk about judges this way?" the woman in the group asked.

  "Always," Ed Rabidowski said.

  "Mad Dog" Rabidowski at thirty-two was a Charles Bronson type: square shoulders, over-developed muscle tone, latent violence. His face looked like a piece of rough-cut stone. His cheekbones were chiseled high with an Oriental slant, his nose chipped fine and his mouth slashed thin. He had Clark Gable ears, jet black hair, bushy black eyebrows, and a drooping black moustache. His eyes were colored gun-barrel blue.

  The Mad Dog's father had been a trapper in the Yukon and by the age of six Rabidowski was able to take the eye out of a squirrel with a .22 at 100 yards. It was Rabidowski who had picked off the Albanian sniper in Ottawa sent from China by way of Hong Kong to assassinate Soviet Premier Kosygin on his Canadian state visit. The incident had kicked off the Mad Dog's rise to fame. Then for the last five years straight he had taken the trophy for both pistol and rifle marksmanship in the RCMP annual competition. When he wore his uniform jacket, both rifle and handgun insignia—each surmounted with a crown to denote a distinguished marksman—were displayed prominently on one sleeve. At the present moment, however, Rabidowski was stripped to the waist.

  "Mark my words," the Mad Dog continued, "a lawyer with a bum-face always goes to the bench."

  "Come on!" the woman said.

  "Excuse me," Katherine Spann said, interrupting the conversation. "May I please get through?"

  "Oh no, not another broad," the Mad Dog sighed in disgust. "This place is crawling with them!"

  "Makes you long for the old days, don't it?" Spann said sarcastically.

  "Don't it ever," Rabidowski replied, being completely honest.

  Spann let it go. Just as she had with Scarlett. For the truth of the matter was that since her initial day of training in Regina in 1974, this internal attitude had come along with the job. And that was to be expected. 1974 was the first year that the Force had recruited women: for a hundred and one years previously it had been an elite male club. Even today most men did not want to work with a female partner; for in the back of their minds they feared being caught short if there was something physical needed or there was a firefight. A woman just couldn't cut it. Every man knew that.

  It was not, of course, as though in day-to-day police work this anti-female attitude was blatant in its manifestation; indeed most of the men bent over backwards to accommodate the women. And that, more than anything else, was the real root of the problem.

  But then Rabidowski was different: his thoughts on the subject never went unspoken. "You're Scarlett's partner, aren't you?" the Mad Dog asked of Spann. "Do the man a favor, eh. Try not to distract him. He'll have work to do."

  As he finished speaking Rabidowski put a cigarette to his lips and lit a match with the nail of his thumb.

  As the phosphorous flared Spann turned to the other woman in the group and said: "This guy's a 'matcho' man."

  The other woman grinned and asked: "Is he always such a jerk?"

  "Always," Rick Scarlett answered. He had just come down the stairs to join the bottleneck at the bottom.

  "Hi. I'm Monica Macdonald."

  "My name's Katherine Spann."

  "This is Rusty Lewis. We've been paired as partners on one of these flying patrols."

  "So have we," Spann said. "Me and the guy who just

  came down the steps."

  "My name's Rick Scarlett," Scarlett said, shaking hands all round. "How you doing, Mad Dog? Long time no see."

  "As well as a working cop can when he's inundated with broads."

  " 'Inundated,' " Spann said. "That must be a pretty big word for someone like you."

  "I see you've met the Mad Dog," Scarlett grinned.

  "Where'd he get the nickname?" Macdonald asked.

  Katherine Spann said: "It must be all the hot air—it makes him foam at the mouth."

  "Broads!" Rabidowski snorted.

  "We used to shorten Rabidowski down to Rabid," Scarlett said. " 'Mad Dog' came from 'Rabid.' And believe me, he acts it."

  "I'd never have guessed."

  "Don't sell the man short," Rick Scarlett added. "He just might be the best marksman this Force has ever had."

  "I doubt that," Spann said. "I hear DeClercq was better."

  Rabidowski guffawed. "You call a bow a marksman's weapon!"

  "A crossbow," the woman corrected. "They say at one time he almost made runner-up to the Olympics."

  "Yeah, well crossbows went out with the Middle Ages."

  "Amazing!" Spann said to Monica Macdonald. "The guy knows history too."

  "When it comes to weapons, lady, I know a lot more than you."

  "Try me," Spann said sharply.

  "Don't make me laugh."

  "Hey, wait a minute," Monica Macdonald said. "What's this about DeClercq? You mean our Superintendent?''

  "Of course," Rick Scarlett said. "Come on. You must know the story. The man's almost a legend."

  "Is a legend, I should think," Spann corrected.

  "All right. Is a legend."

  "Will someone fill me in?" the other woman asked. Beside the blonde woman she looked positively plain. Her hair was brown and tied back in a bun. Her eyes were brown and warm and her figure was round. She stood five inches shorter than Spann. Physically her only striking feature was her full and sensual mouth.

  "Broads!" Rabidowski repeated, as if all this was to be

  expected. What did women know about the glory of tradition? What, indeed?

  Rick Scarlett said, "The year was 1970, a bit before our time. The Quebec October Crisis. Anyway, by then DeClercq was recognized as the best homicide man in the entire Force. In terms of success, his name was up there with Steele and Walsh and Blake. When the FLQ kidnapped Cross and Laporte and then killed the Labour Minister, DeClercq was called in. It was he who located both the Chenier and Liberation Cells."

  "How
did he do that?"

  "No one knows. But he had a lot of contacts in the Montreal underworld. A lot of informers. But in light of what happened subsequently he never revealed his source."

  "What happened?"

  "A gang of punks got both his wife and daughter," Katherine Spann said.

  Macdonald turned to her. "Killed them you mean?"

  "Do you really not know any of this?"

  "No, I don't."

  Spann was a bit surprised, but then the legends of the Force had been in her family for years. "You tell her," she said, speaking to Scarlett.

  "Two weeks after Cross was released and the Chenier Cell went to Cuba, three men invaded DeClercq's home while he was up in Ottawa. They murdered his wife on the spot, ripped her up with a machine pistol. Then they carried off his daughter. She wasn't very old. Five or so, I think.

  "At the time everyone assumed that it was an FLQ revenge operation. But in the end it turned out to be just a group of Montreal thugs caught up in the groundswell of the Quebec independence movement.

  "Anyway, DeClercq, of course, was banned from the case because of personal involvement. Shelved with a leave of absence. He didn't like the orders and he didn't follow them. He went on his own and did a rogue investigation. Using the same underworld grapevine that had helped him find Cross and the murderers of Laporte, he managed to discover where the gang was holding the girl. It was in a cabin out of the city in the Laurentian backwoods. DeClercq went out alone, determined to get her back."

  Monica Macdonald's eyes squinted slightly. "And he didn't," she said.

  "No," Scarlett stated. "Not alive."

  Rabidowski said: "Story is he killed five people getting into that cabin. Picked off the first guy when he came out for some wood. Got three more when they came out looking for him. Took them all down with a crossbow, if you believe it. Because it's silent, I guess.

  "They say he killed the last man with his hands as he was coming through the door and after the guy had stabbed him. But he didn't save his daughter. Two other punks had joined the original three, and there had been a dispute over what to do. The winning group in the argument had broken her neck that morning."

  Monica shook her head.

  "So that's why DeClercq was retired," Rick Scarlett said. "He'd contravened orders and you know what that means."

  Katherine Spann added: "There was an internal investigation into his conduct. As usual he couldn't have a lawyer and so they appointed a member to present his defense. The guy they appointed was Francois Chartrand."

  "The Commissioner?"

  "He was an Inspector back then."

  "What happened?"

  "DeClercq was never charged. He had a legal defense under protection of his family and public sympathy was on his side. Besides, the odds were five to one no matter how you cut it."

  Spann said: "Now Chartrand is Commissioner. And Robert DeClercq is back. I wonder if he really is as good as they say."

  "Well, we're going to find out," Rick Scarlett said.

  Rabidowski nodded. There was a smirk on his face.

  Spann turned on him: "You know something, Ed? You're a first class pain in the ass. You're a mental dinosaur. Come to think of it, I know what the four of us are doing here. What's your job on this Squad?"

  "Firepower," the Mad Dog said bluntly. "Lady, I'm a one man SWAT Squad. I'm our Emergency Response Team. Believe me, if the chips are down I'm more important than you. I won't go into detail. I'd be talking over your head."

  "Try me," Spann said quickly—and as sharply as the last time.

  "Gimme a break."

  Rabidowski walked over to his locker and removed a clean shirt from inside. He began to put it on.

  Monica Macdonald glanced at Spann and picked up something in her look backed up by intuition. She said: "What's the matter, Ed? Are you afraid to try her?"

  Rabidowski turned. "Put your money where your mouth is and it might be worth my time. Or better yet, with lips like yours I can think of somewhere else to put your mouth if your sister cop here loses."

  "Ten bucks," Macdonald said.

  "Who holds the pot? Who decides?"

  "Not Scarlett," Spann said. "You're in bed together." She sized up Rusty Lewis. "Let's take a chance with him."

  Lewis took the money.

  "Okay," Rabidowski said. "Let me pose a problem. We're talking firepower."

  Katherine Spann nodded.

  "You got a four man Emergency Response Team and you gotta cover all the angles. We're talkin' shots per second and we're aimin' for accuracy. Arm it," the Mad Dog said.

  "You first," the woman replied. "And give me your reasons."

  Rabidowski grinned. "Okay, long-barrels to start with. I'd give two guys pump-action Remington Model 870 twelve-gauge shotguns. Why is obvious. We're talking scatterforce. The third guy gets a sniper's rifle, the Remington Model V for Varmint, heavy-barreled, caliber.22—250. There you've got a small bullet with high velocity, so that means pinpoint accuracy with a flat trajectory. No compensation needed. The last guy gets your Heckler and Koch Model HK 93 assault rifle in caliber .223 with telescoping stock. There you've got high-class German manufacturing technique—which by the way is becoming standard in this state of the art—and a roller-locking mechanism. I'd take semi- over fully-automatic. More target control.

  "And finally," Rabidowski continued, "I'd top each guy off with a whiz of a short-barrel. Each man gets a semiautomatic Beretta Model 92 S pistol, caliber nine-millimeter Parabellum with a magazine capacity of fifteen rounds plus one in the chamber. Your Beretta's double action. The whole trip means Kapow! So top that, lady. And Lewis, hand me the cash."

  "James Bond used a Beretta," Rick Scarlett added.

  Spann almost laughed. Her mind weighed the man up and found him a couple of ounces short. "My turn," she said.

  "Come on, Spann. Better minds than you or me have put that team together. Go down gracefully," the Mad Dog said.

  "Better minds than you or I are also rethinking it, Ed. For the sake of argument I'll keep the long-barrels the same. Now let's chuck the Beretta and replace it with four Ruger Model Security 6.38 Special revolvers with either.38 Special + P ammunition or maybe .357 Magnum. I'd take the four-inch barrel over the two and three-quarters. So we've stepped up the Smith and Wesson, and it's also double action. And it's easily field-stripped."

  "Lady, you're a fool. Your Ruger's only got six shots compared to sixteen in the Beretta. The buzz words in this exercise are 'greater firepower.' That means semi-automatic."

  "Look," Spann said, "we're also talking accuracy and reliability. If you don't hit with the first few shots what does it really matter: all four women on the team will be dead and . . ."

  "Women! That'll be the day. We're talkin action here. Not pushin' paper."

  "... and besides, your firepower is in the long-barrels: you're not going to meet a short-barrel firepower situation. You're going to use the pistol only if you're right against it, eh? If your semi-auto misfires and jams, well then you're fucked. If your Ruger misfires you just pull the trigger again. Your Beretta you'd have to clear and that takes precious time. So your Ruger's reliable."

  "Oh, smart broad," Rabidowski said, raising his eyebrows and looking at Scarlett. "Let's look at transportation. Your semi-auto's thinner and more easily concealed and holstered than your bulky cylinder. And to reload you got speed: just eject one magazine and jam in another. What about that, eh?"

  "Irrelevant," Spann said immediately. "Have you never heard of a speed-loader for a revolver? Besides, your Beretta 92 S is fussy in what it feeds. It won't reliably take your Glaser Safety Slug. It won't take a hollow-point or flat nose. It won't take either your wadcutters or your armor piercing cartridges. With your Ruger, if it goes in the chamber, it fires. So your Beretta's got no selection of ammo. Your options are nil."

  Rabidowski went to counter this, then realized as he opened his mouth that he had run out of arguments. He blinked instead.

 
"And while we're at it," Spann said, "you're creating jeopardy. Your semi-auto will be spewing out hot casings with every shot fired. What if one of those hits the guy

  running beside you? A second can mean survival, and there the next guy is with a red hot cartridge down his shirt. And what about the floor? You want your whole team rollerskating on spent Beretta casings? Your Ruger hasn't got that problem. And anyway, for the sake of argument, why does your squad need sidearms at all? You're in a tactical response situation: it's the long-barrels that you'd use. But if you really want a pistol . . . yep, your Ruger is the one."

  "Amen," Macdonald said. And then she turned to Lewis. "Well, what's your judgment?"

  Rusty Lewis was twenty-nine years old and slightly overweight. He had drooping eyelids that made him look half-asleep. Sort of like Robert Mitchum. Above all, Rusty Lewis was fair. "Kathy wins," he said.

  "Jesus, Mad Dog," Scarlett exclaimed. "The woman set you up!"

  As Monica took the money she let out a thankful sigh.

  "You just saved me, Kathy, from having a rabies shot."

  Everybody laughed.

  Except Rabidowski.

  11:56 a.m.

  "I'm impressed," Rick Scarlett said, "with the way you handled Mad Dog."

  "Yeah sure. Nice friends you got."

  "No really, I mean it. And he's not my friend. We just spent some time together in the same detachment. Where'd you get that knowledge? I certainly didn't expect it."

  Katherine Spann gave him a long, hard look. "And just what did you expect? That I'd be reduced to tears when the subject turned to hardware? Don't be such a jerk."

  "All right. I admit it. I started out an asshole. I'm sorry. Okay? So let's change the program. We got to work together, that's orders."

  They were both sitting in the White Spot coffee shop at Cambie and King Edward waiting to order lunch. The waitress came and they ordered burgers Triple "O" with a side of french fries. Scarlett had coffee. Spann had tea.

  When they were finished eating, Rick Scarlett said: "Let's pose you another problem. You've got this flying patrol, see, that wants to get this Headhunter. Where does it start?"

  "At the beginning," Spann said. "So let's hit the files."