taken shotgun from me. Not surprised in a bad way, I just hadn’t figured her for the steal-shotgun-from-your-Sergeant kind. Of course the backseat of a police cruiser was never the cleanest place. It didn’t matter how many times it had been wiped down, sprayed out and sanitized, it always smelled like a mix of puke and piss.
I sat in one position, hands on my lap and unwilling to move. The female end of the seatbelt was stuck under the removable cushion (police cruisers generally have one long cushion across the backseats that can be pulled out leaving just the bare metal) and I refused to try to fish it out. Under the seat cushion was a favourite spot for criminals to hide everything from weapons to drugs to, the worst by far, uncapped needles.
“Buckle up, Sir.”
“I’ll take a pass, Kara. But thanks.”
“I’m going to be going full out, Detective, probably not a bad idea.” Lights and sirens made sense, and thereby he had a point.
“Seatbelt’s buried, I’m not going digging.”
“I searched the car this morning, it’s clean.”
I looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror. “You sure?”
“Hundred percent.”
The germophobe in me was showing. It was too late to try to play it cool. “Got a glove?”
Dave laughed as he reached into his pocket and handed me a blue latex glove through the four-inch wide partition in the glass separating me from them.
“Thanks,” I said as I stretched the glove over my fingers and carefully, cautiously, paranoidly dug out the seatbelt. Once I was buckled up, the glove came off and made its way to the floor behind Kara.
“Happy?”
“Yes Sir, let’s roll.”
“You sure you’re good for this? You just worked a full shift.”
Dave smiled into the rear view mirror then reached for the dashboard. My answer came as the lights and sirens switched on, likely waking many of the town’s residents and tourists. I felt for them. There was nothing worse than being woken up by a loud, repeated and annoying noise.
Highway Six was free and clear, only very light traffic at this time of morning and Dave took advantage of it, crossing into the oncoming lanes frequently to overtake cars. It was a narrow highway, one lane in each direction, with not much of a shoulder. Cars pulled over for us, but most of them couldn’t completely clear the road.
Once we were well on our way I had to ask. “How’d you find the boat?”
“Well, I checked the credit cards and found nothing. He didn’t rent it. So I called Stefanie back, woke the poor girl up.” Was David developing a crush on the wealthy widow? I hadn’t noticed a ring on his finger. “She thought about it for a minute and clued in that Lester has a friend with a cottage on Big Tub. You know the place?”
With great envy.
Big Tub was another natural harbour, behind Little Tub which the town had formed around. There were two wrecks in Big Tub, the heavily damaged City of Grand Rapids and the intact Sweepstakes. The City of Grand Rapids had caught fire in 1907 in Little Tub and was towed out into the bay to protect the wooden docks. The bay had other plans apparently since a strong wind blew the flaming ship into Big Tub where it ran aground and burned to the waterline. Parts of the boat were still sticking out of the water.
The Sweepstakes on the other hand was towed into Big Tub in 1885 after being stranded in the bay but it ended up sinking in the harbour. Now it lies amazingly intact in calm, shallow water, the bottom at only twenty feet deep, the top shallow enough to stand up on. It was the wreck everyone who visited Tobermory had to see, whether it was by scuba, snorkel or glass-bottom boat.
But that wasn’t what Dave was asking if I knew. He was asking if I knew about the cottages along the harbour, especially the ones on the south side. These were places I would probably kill to have—if the person deserved it enough, of course—multi-million dollar cottages perched atop a natural rock wall overlooking the harbour. And the way that Georgian Bay often went, where there was a cliff above the water it just kept going down underneath.
And that was one of the main reasons I wanted one of those cottages—to wake up in the morning and swan dive off the ten-foot or higher cliff into the cold, crisp, deep water.
“Yeah, I know the place.” He must have figured he’d lost me for a second.
“Well, buddy owns one of the cottages on the south side, and he’s got a boat to match. It’s a pleasure craft, so hopefully it won’t be able to match our boats for speed.”
“So you got a hold of the friend?”
“Yeah, once he found out what happened to Lester he was happy to help, logged into his account and gave me the GPS coordinates. Said he’d keep an eye on it and call if the boat moved.”
“Perfect. Well done.”
Dave’s nod was only slightly visible in the mirror, but it was there—a quiet and modest showing of thanks and respect. I wondered if there was a way for me to recruit him to come with us back to Western Region HQ.
Seventy-six kilometres were covered in a little over half-an-hour. A little faster than I would have liked to have been going, especially as a passenger, but we had a job to do and had to do it fast. Still, zipping and weaving down the highway at ninety miles an hour—almost a hundred and fifty kilometres—it was worse than being on a rollercoaster.
And now I had to get on a boat. At least the water was calm.
I hated climbing onto a boat in a three-piece suit. Suits were one of the things I hated most, an outfit I wouldn’t wear if I didn’t have to. With the sun shining down, the gentle rolling waves sparkling as they approached the shore, the warm breeze in the air, I wanted to be wearing as little as social norms would allow.
“Munroe. Jameson.” The tall, intimidating man moved toward us with confident strides, then took our hands in turn and shook them with a grip unlike anything I’d ever felt. He was old, seadog old, and probably able to retire any minute. The short-sleeved shirt he was wearing showed a tattoo of an anchor on his forearm, one that had long ago begun to fade.
“Sergeant Karl Dunlop. We’ve got two in the water and another ready to slip any minute. Just give me the go ahead.”
“We’re ready,” I said.
“Then let’s go.”
He was already halfway to the dock, those long, tree-trunk legs carrying him fast and far. I felt like a Chihuahua walking next to a Great Dane—I was taking ten steps for every one of his, my feet a flurry of movement. For someone pushing sixty—at least—he was still built like a brick shithouse.
Kara and I clambered onto the boat with the grace of newborn deer. Even for a large boat, the rocking from our captain moving back and forth inspecting every last detail was enough to make us unsteady. Missing the boat and falling in was not an option, not unless I wanted to be the laughing stock of the entire OPP.
Safe and dry we took our seats on the boat. It wasn’t huge by any stretch of the imagination, but it was clear that it was going to be fast. The twin outboard motors off the back and the mere shape of the boat conjured up images of spy movie boat chases. I didn’t think that would be the case here, the two boats already in the open water had radioed back—our target was adrift, a slow and steady pace away from shore.
“What’s the plan, Sergeant?”
The constable at the wheel turned around and looked at me, a look on his face I couldn’t quite decipher. Condescending? No. Sarcastic? I didn’t have a clue.
“It’s Captain, Detective. When we’re on the water, it’s Captain. And I’ll be your helmsman. Constable Adam Chang.”
He outstretched his hand which I shook, preparing to wince at the pain of another death grip. It never came. Chang seemed a little too gentle to be working alongside Dunlop, but looks could be deceiving. If he hadn’t given me his last name, I never would have suspected he was part Chinese. I wondered how far back he went—a Chinese grandparent, or parent?
I could already see in my kids that my African-American features were slowly disappearing. With my Dad marrying an Irish wom
an and me marrying a Polish one, they seemed to take a lot from the women and less from me and my Dad.
But wait, seriously? Captain? I could tell the old man was a Navy vet, but come on. As long as Gilligan didn’t turn this into a three-hour tour…
“Sorry. Captain? Can you give me a sitrep?”
Situation report—but sitrep is much more fun to say.
“Aye-aye. We’ve got two boats in the water, each ahead and offset, two knots away from the target. We’ll be coming up on the target’s stern.”
He pointed to a chart he’d laid out, a boat marked in red in the approximate location of the boat Lester had borrowed and two marked in black where the other OPP boats were. When we took up the rear, two knots out, our three boats would form an equilateral triangle around the target.
“Our boats are barely in visual range, just enough to see if he starts moving. Hopefully if he sees two coming in from the east he won’t try to cut between them and go further out. I’m hoping he’ll turn around and head right to us.”
“You think he’s still aboard?”
“I’d bet on it.”
“Then he’s an idiot.” Not that this was new information.
The ride out was spent in near silence, all of us considering what was going to happen once we came upon the boat. I’d been in a few high speed pursuits in the cruiser, a number of foot pursuits, but never one by boat. With a stolen car, you could set up around it and leave them nowhere to go. A boat in the middle of Georgian Bay could go just