Evil Eye Read online

  Blood gushing from his nose, Bert dropped to the tarmac.

  Schreck's steel-toed boot kicked again, walloping Ernie between the legs, crumpling him by his partner as the skinhead got out of the car.

  Bone Police could only be killed by crushing their skulls, so Schreck stomped his boot up and down on both heads, collapsing the bones in on themselves until each face was one black hole instead of two hollow eyes, the blood of both men mingling to stream fingers across the road.

  The skinhead tugged the handcuff key from Ernie's Pro Carry belt. He unlocked the shackles and threw them away. A coyote skulking nearby howled. Free, Schreck tossed back his head and werewolf howled, too. Then he ran east across the misty fields, toward the Co-quitlam River dividing Colony Farm, beyond which Mary Hill rose to Dora Craven's home.

  RED SERGE

  Coquitlam

  Corporal Nick Craven was telling a speeding ticket joke. The five-minute warning had summoned the Mounties to their tables, and now they stood behind their chairs in ranks across the room, parallel lines of

  Red Serge like in a barracks mess, ready for the head table to be piped in, the Regimental Dinner about to start. As they waited, the Horsemen joshed.

  "So there I am," Nick said, "fresh out of Depot, a day or two at my first post in southern Alberta, idling by a speed trap just north of the border, Interstate Fifteen crossing the line from Montana, when whoosh! this Caddy streaks by at 160 klicks an hour. Sign by the road says the speed's 100."

  "I see what's coming," the Mad Dog said.

  "This is my story. You'll get your turn, Ed. So on goes the siren and on goes the lights, and pedal to the metal I creep up on his ass. We're both barreling from Coutts to Milk River, and damn if the guy isn't waving at me in the rearview mirror. Finally, I inch alongside and thumb him over. It takes about half a mile for both cars to stop.

  "Ticket book out, I approach the driver's door and note the plate's from Texas. Big blue Caddy convertible from the gas-guzzling years. Grinning behind the wheel is Lyndon Johnson. Not the real Johnson, but his looka-like. Ten-gallon hat, string tie, steer horn clasp, the works. Beside him's a Dale Evans clone, flowery cowgirl shirt and jeans tucked into boots, heavy makeup caking her eyes. 'Sir,' I say, 'any idea how fast you were going?'

  " 'Sure do,' he says. 'Ah love yer country, son. We ain't had freedom like this Down South fer too many years.' "

  "That's a Texas accent?" the Mad Dog scoffed. "You sound like Foghorn Leghorn, that rooster cartoon. Give 'm the blue?"

  "Didn't have the heart. He was disillusioned when I explained our speed was in kilometers, not miles per hour. I warned him and suggested he drive German autobahns."

  "That's a traffic joke?" the Mad Dog sniggered. "I saw the punch line a mile ... a klick away. Me, I'm on the Lougheed a few years back, driving up-Valley for an ERT conference, when I spot this car ahead weaving down the road. First it crosses the centerline, then veers onto the shoulder, back and forth, got to be one of the best impaireds I've snagged, so on goes the wail and wigwags to pull the drunk over."

  The Mad Dog scanned the table to see if any female Members were in earshot.

  "Sitting behind the wheel is a naked broad, poking the best set of tits you ever did see, not a stitch to hide the buff before my eyes, except a flimsy G-string around one ankle.' 1

  "Don't tell me," Craven said, "you asked her to blow?" The Mounties chuckled at the breathalyzer double entendre.

  "No, she told me to give her the ticket fast. Said she had a job stripping in a local bar, and having been late three times that week, she'd been warned once more and the boss would kick her out the door. Due onstage in five minutes, that's why she was changing costume in the car. Told me to try swapping undies for a G-string with my foot on the gas."

  "Give 'er the blue?"

  "Didn't have the heart. I drove her to work Code three while she changed in my car."

  The Mounties this end of the table guffawed.

  "Her name?" Nick asked.

  "Brittany Starr."

  "Why do I get the feeling there's more to the tale than—"

  The wheeze of bagpipes filling cut Craven short as all eyes turned to face the entrance hall. The droning noise became tunes of glory to pipe the head table into the banquet room. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has its roots in the British Colonial Army. As with so much Canadian history, the origin of the Force lies in fear of the States. Canada as a country was two years old when Yankee whiskey traders crossed the border to build Fort Whoop-Up in Alberta. From Winnipeg to the Rockies, the plains were unsettled, so after the British Colonial Army crushed the Manitoba Rebellion of 1870, Lieutenant Blake mushed west by dog sled to report on conditions. To keep Americans south of the 49th Parallel, he recommended forming the North-West Mounted Police. The Force was recruited in 1873 and dispatched on the Great March West to wipe out Fort Whoop-Up. Because the trek was through Indian land, the Mounties were issued the scarlet tunic, since both the Cree and Black-foot respected Queen Victoria's Redcoats. Whoop-Up

  traders hightailed it before the Force arrived, and Fort Macleod was hewed to raise the Union Jack. After a war campaign, Scottish regiments hold a dinner at which commanders are piped in to show they survived. The North-West (Royal Canadian) Mounted Police maintains that kilted tradition.

  Inspector Jack MacDougall was the officer blowing the bag. He wore the red-and-black tartan of his Highland clan. Because Coquitlam Detachment was hosting this Regimental Dinner to honor the new deputy commissioner of t4 E" Division, the OIC of the local Mount-ies should have followed the piper. The officer in charge, however, had been called out to Colony Farm where two sheriff's deputies were stomped to death two hours ago, so following MacDougall were Deputy Commissioner Eric Chan, Chief Superintendent Robert De-Clercq, and Inspector Zinc Chandler.

  Special X—the Special External Section of the RCMP—had grown to become the elite unit in the Force. Special X cops investigated crimes with links outside Canada, so cases took its Members around the world. Chief Superintendent Robert DeClercq was in command. Before his promotion to commanding officer of all Mounties in B.C., Inspector Eric Chan was head of Special X Administration. Inspector Jack MacDougall was head of Special X Operations. Inspector Zinc Chandler had just returned from sick leave, having been stabbed in the back during the Ripper case.

  The stirring shrill of the Scottish march filled the vaulted lodge, rising from the banquet tables lined with Red Serge, up beyond both balconies on the second floor, through cedar beams and arched trusses to echo down from the peak. The procession wound by a red brick fireplace surmounted by the huge, stuffed bison head of the Force, flanked by RCMP flags and red-and-blue banners. Up and down the standing ranks they snaked, past the Mad Dog and Corporal Craven, until they reached the head table along one side of the room. The music wailed through Dutch doors across from the fireplace, over the stone veranda outside and the turquoise swimming pool, down the rocky knoll to Oliver Road where Evil Eye sat listening in a parked car.

  Listening to the bagpipes and the African voice in the box.

  The box on the passenger's seat of the Ford.

  When Harry L. Jenkins left the United States in 1904 to make his fortune as a lumber baron in B.C., he named his 1650-acre Coquitlam farm "Minnekhada" for the Minikahda Golf Club in Minneapolis. The Sioux Indian term means "beside running waters." In 1932, another lumber magnate bought the farm and nearby knolls to build a Tudor-style Scottish hunting lodge. He became lieutenant governor in 1936, so royalty—including the queen—graced the banquet room of tonight's Regimental Dinner, back when a pet monkey fetched bananas from a fruit bowl on the table. Nestled between the broad reaches of the Pitt River and the sweeping slopes of Burke Mountain, Minnekhada was the perfect marsh shoot. In 1958, a second lieutenant governor bought the lodge. Guests supplied with walkie-talkies blasted waterfowl, while drinks mixed in a cabin extended bar service into the great outdoors. Donning black ties or fancy gowns after dark, the hunters dine
d in style on game prepared by starched cooks and maids. The province acquired this retreat in 1975, so except for dress-ups like tonight's Red Serge Dinner, Minnekhada, tucked away in northeast Coquitlam, was now the sanctuary of beaver, bear, deer, fox, bullfrog, and eagle.

  A low-slung sliver of moon smiled a reflection off the misty Pitt River.

  Evil Eye scanned binoculars across Addington Marsh to Minnekhada Lodge.

  The black hump of Burke Mountain loomed behind the knoll.

  Under the Jacobean roof and wall dormers, Mounties stood inside the Dutch doors and veranda windows, Chan and MacDougall having locked arms to snap back drams of Scotch, the traditional way the Mounted's CO "pays the piper."

  The muffled voice from the box on the passenger's seat grew more insistent.

  rex Lancelot craven was carved into the ebony lid.

  Engraved on the plaque below was rorke's drift.

  The African voice from the box urged Evil Eye to club and gut a Redcoat.

  KU KLUX KLAN

  Every Mountie has a reason why he or she became a cop.

  Rachel Kidd's reason was the Ku Klux Klan.

  Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Rachel was a fetus in her mother's womb that horrible night in 1957 when her father was abducted by four racists in ghostlike sheets and pointed hoods. They drove him to a deserted waste and lit a burning cross. The Klansmen castrated her dad with a razor blade, then passed his severed testicles around in a paper cup so each could raise half his hood ashed gray by the burning cross to spit on the emasculated black's manhood. They staked him to the ground to pour kerosene on his wound, and left her dad screaming at the foot of the cross.

  The cops who investigated were Klansmen, too.

  Soon as her dad could travel, the Kidds moved to Seattle.

  Rachel's mom was from a nine-kid family. To have a similar brood was her maternal instinct. Within a year she left her eunuch husband for a Boeing technician who played baritone sax. Rachel spent every Sunday with her deserted dad.

  In July 1970, father and daughter picnicked at Peace Arch Park on the weekend after both Independence and Dominion days. Marking the border between the States and Canada was a towering white arch etched children of a common mother flying both flags. North and South were on parade for a joint celebration with all the hoopla, color, and folderol each nation could muster. The honor guard on her side was blue, and looked like those shown on the evening news about My Lai, Kent State, and the gassing and clubbing of blacks demanding civil rights. The mounted guard on their side was red, dressed in the snazziest uniform Kidd had ever seen: brown felt flat-brim Stetson hat, high-neck scarlet tunic

  with a white lanyard and cross-chest Sam Browne belt, blue breeches with a yellow stripe, brown riding gauntlets and boots with spurs, gleaming buttons, badges, and insignia with all the glamour and dash of the high noon of Empire and dominance of the British over "lesser breeds without the Law."

  "What's over there?" Rachel asked, pointing across the border.

  "That," said her father, disgust in his voice, "is where those against establishing the American Colony of Vietnam are going. That was the end of the Underground Railway for fugitive slaves."

  Rachel was twelve and searching for something true to believe in.

  Dazzled by the Redcoats, she thought, I'll become one of them.

  The grass is always greener . . .

  The first problem she encountered was females were barred from the Force. But by the time she came of age that had changed. The next problem she encountered was recruiting standards favored a college degree. So Kidd applied to Simon Fraser University and enrolled in the School of Criminology. The last problem she encountered was citizenship: to keep Yankee traitors out, only Canadians may recruit. The Force has its roots in the British Colonial Army.

  Attending SFU on the outskirts of Vancouver, Kidd shared a basement suite with two undergrads, a Jamaican woman majoring in English, and a Caucasian gay studying Biology. A Canadian Caucasian gay.

  'Tony," she said, one day while they were cooking spaghetti. "Ever thought of marriage?"

  Tony blinked. "No," he replied.

  "I've been thinking of a marriage of convenience, so I can join the Mounted Police. Know any countrymen whose marriage prospects wouldn't be ruined by marrying me?"

  "Uh-oh," Tony said.

  The marriage was a sham to get her citizenship, so it was ironic the marriage became a moral union in fact when Tony contracted a virus on an Amazon trek, disease turning him into a living skeleton as doctors scratched their heads and friends shunned the plague, j

  only Rachel—"in sickness and health''—to see him to the end. A month after she scattered Tony's ashes on his favorite mountain, the Force—on a "visible minority'' recruitment drive—selected her for the next troop into Depot Division.

  Kidd was in the Mounted.

  "So what's the occasion?" her father asked, dining with Rachel last night at the Oyster Bar on Chuckanut Drive in Washington State, halfway between Seattle and Vancouver.

  "You're shucking oysters with Corporal Kidd of the Mounted Police."

  "Sounds like you're in the army, not a cop."

  "Dad, I'm the first black to get this rank."

  "But are you happy?"

  "It was rough when I first joined, but the Force is changing fast. The white prairie boy recruit days are history. Women made it into the commissioned ranks last year."

  "What's that?"

  "Inspector and above."

  "Ranks between you and them?"

  "Sergeant and Staff Sergeant."

  "Sounds more like the army every second." A wry smile curled his lips. "All that effort whuppin' Redcoat butts so my only child could join and climb their ranks."

  Corporal Rachel Kidd's first shift on duty in her new rank began at seven p.m. With Coquitlam Detachment hosting tonight's dinner at Minnekhada Lodge, only a skeleton crew manned the office on Christmas Way. Every available Member called out to the killings of Bert and Ernie on Colony Farm Road, Kidd arrived at work to find GIS deserted.

  The sign on the door read 247 general invest, section. A box with items from her desk in Burglary Detail under one arm, Kidd paused in the corridor outside to savor the moment, then walked into the short entrance hall of the bull pen. To punks, the cops in GIS were "the bulls," and for a moment she wondered if that made her a "cow"? The bull pen's shape was a lopsided T: the entrance hall the stem, the stubby arm to the left the glassed-in office of Staff Sergeant Tipple, the man in charge of all Plainclothes Members. The main room oc-

  cupied the fat arm of the T angling right, with desks and chairs for nine GIS bulls. Rachel approached her new post beside the staff's overlooking window, and dropped the box on the desk to stake her claim.

  As Kidd sat filling the drawers with personal odds and ends, along the corridor outside in the Operations Communications Center, a call came in.

  "Coquitlam RCMP, GRC," the switchboard answered.

  "Something is wrong at my neighbor's," the caller said.

  The line was transferred to a complaint taker at the next post.

  "Name?" the c.t. asked.

  "Winifred Parker."

  "Address?"

  A number on Mary Hill Road.

  "Problem?"

  "I'm the local Block Watch rep. My neighbor's home and won't answer the phone. Her house backs on Colony Farm. With this nut on the loose, I'm afraid to check."

  "Neighbor's name and address?"

  The caller gave both.

  The c.t. passed the complaint to the dispatcher at the next post, and the dispatcher sent a patrol car to Mary Hill Road.

  Alone in GIS, Kidd surveyed her new digs. Her back toward the staffs window, she faced the far end of the right T-arm. Two paired partners' desks lined each side, with a ninth desk in the entrance hall. Above the bulletin board beside the face-to-face corporals' posts, a round clock ticked time over her head.

  Tick tock . . .

  Tick tock . . .
/>   Traitor, she thought.

  Of all Canadian institutions, the Mounted is most sacred. With lineups from East to West jostling to get in, Canadians want it reserved for true Canadians, not a Southern buttinsky like her. The undercurrent traitor would always flow from them. Hard to know which was the biggest albatross: being a woman, being black, or being American. Dad, on the other hand, thought her a traitor, too. American whites had taken his balls, but

  love-it-or-leave-it remained, and she had left it for a foreign frontier. Dad was flummoxed by her belief a politician should never be head of state, because every politician ends up spattered with shit. The Queen had seen Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton through, and still had her good name. Charles had dropped the Ming vase. Charles had fumbled the ball. So hopefully Charles would stand aside for his unsullied son. But meanwhile, there was the constant Queen, and the unbending ethic of her Mounted Police: Do anything to damage the honor of this Force, and we won't close ranks around you, we'll throw you to the wolves. Sorry, Dad, but if my frontier makes me a traitor to both countries, then a double traitor I will be.

  Now all she needed was a good murder case.

  Commissioner Kidd.

  It had a nice ring.

  At 7:25 p.m., in the OCC along the corridor, the dispatcher got a call from the patrol car. He conveyed the report to the radio room constable, who briefed the watch commander, then called GIS.

  A phone in the bull pen rang.

  Rachel picked it up.

  "Consta . . . Corporal Kidd," she said. "GIS."

  Coquitlam is the Indian word for "smelling of fish slime." Tourist brochures say it means "river of little red fish." When Hanging Judge Begbie arrived in 1858 to found the Mainland Colony of B.C., he was followed by Colonel Moody and 400 Royal Engineers charged with selecting a site for construction of the Imperial capital. Vying with New Westminster for the Royal City location was a hill farther upstream where the muddy Fraser joined the Coquitlam River. Moody chose "the first high ground on the north" bank instead of the second, then as a consolation named the rejected heights after his wife. Thus Mary's (later Mary) Hill.