LITMIR.BIZ

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“No sir, they don’t make things like they used to. It’s a setup. Everything you buy self-destructs on deadline, otherwise known as warranty expiration. Right, Evie?”

      “Absolutely,” said Evangeline from her armchair. She pulled a knee up and embraced it, smiling at Dion.

      He returned the smile briefly. He was running on an empty stomach, and even a few sips of beer, combined with the relief at having his Smiths back in running order, made him feel light, happier than he’d felt in months. He said to Rourke, “Are you really incorporated?”

      “In a manner of speaking.”

      “Watch it, Scottie,” Evangeline said. “He’s a cop.”

      “You could say I’m incorporated,” Rourke said. He was tinkering with something at his bench, back turned on his guest. “In the broad sense.”

      “He doesn’t even know what incorporated means,” Evangeline told Dion. “Leave the guy alone. It just sounds good. Like you tack ‘esquire’ behind your name, when you’re for sure no squire.”

      “Oh, I’d never do that,” Dion said. He swallowed beer, taking in the environment, feeling present. Integral. Evangeline’s arm moved and her bracelet caught the light, shooting turquoise sparks into his eyes. “So, are you Scottish?” he said to Rourke’s back. Rourke wore overalls and a tank top, neither flattering his ribby frame.

      “Sort of Norwegian-Mohawk strain,” Rourke said. “Bit of this, bit of that.”

      “He’s a mongrel,” Evangeline said. “But no Scot in Scottie. You can ignore the name.”

      Rourke said, “And what kind of a name is Dion, anyway? Dion. Sounds girly.”

      “It’s my surname.”

      “Well, obviously,” Evangeline said. “You got a regular name?”

      He downed more beer, watching her watching him, safe enough at the moment, with Rourke’s focus down his magnifying glass. “No, I don’t have one, actually.”

      “Like hell you don’t have one,” Rourke said. “Everyone’s got a first name. It’s the law.”

      “It’s probably a really goofy name he’s embarrassed to say,” Evangeline said, eyes gleaming. “Like Jasper, or Stanley. To go with the haircut.”

      Dion checked his watch once more and compared it with the satellite-perfect time on his cellphone. Dead on. “You fixed it, Rourke,” he said. “Guess that means I’d better pay you.” He pulled out his wallet and riffled through it. Not that there was much to riffle. His pay rate had been chopped since November, since vehicular triple somersaults and crash landings and diminished capacity. The short-term disability payments had stopped the moment he’d been cleared to return to full-time employment, and none of it mattered a bit anyway, now that he was back in working order. “How much do I owe you?”

      Rourke turned around. “Honestly, the time it took me fixing that thing, you’d owe me your next ten paycheques. But give me thirty and we’ll call it even.”

      “Scottie’s such a shark,” Evangeline said and lazily noodled an index finger around her temple, for Dion’s eyes only.

      “Thirty-five,” Rourke said.

      Dion gave him a fifty and said to keep the change.

      Rourke snapped the bill and held it up to the light. “No, come on, fifty?”

      “Keep it. It’s worth it to me.”

      “Boy, you really are attached to that ticker, aren’t you? I guess you being a cop, I’d better give you a receipt, right?”

      “Forget it.” The mean northern wind had blown up over the last little while, gathering force, and was now rattling the trailer. The windows were pitch black. Dion looked at the pitch-black windows and thought about a pickup truck with a black rear window. He could hear something outside, sounded like those voices again, trying to tell him something, and his transient sense of well-being began to slip away. “I should get going.”

      “You should have another beer,” Rourke corrected, scribbling a receipt. “Evie, get our guest another cold one.”

      “So long as he knows he’s going to have to arrest himself for DUI,” Evangeline said but did as told, rose from her armchair and wandered to the kitchenette.

      Next to Dion the wall was covered in photographs, the ones he’d seen on his first visit, all stuck up with pushpins. Now he threw caution to the wind and had a better look, thinking of Sergeant Giroux’s remark. Who does the snapshot thing these days? But Rourke was a bit of a throwback, didn’t belong in the digital age. Many of the snapshots here were old and faded anyway, he saw, their colours washed out to blue. Quite a few newer shots of Kiera, but Kiera was a celebrity, and the camera loved her, and he didn’t think obsession could be read into it. Kiera on stage, singing, backed up by her group. Kiera embracing friends, including this old greaseball, Scott Rourke. Kiera crouched down chatting with a toddler, riding a horse, grinning at the camera. There were pictures of Frank Law, too, one person of interest Dion hadn’t met, other than seeing him down there on the stage last fall.

      There was a recent-looking shot of Evangeline, and several of the Law brothers over the years. This was Lenny, probably, as a boy, couldn’t be more than four or five, which meant Rourke had known the brothers at least a dozen years. There was a more recent picture of Rourke standing between the two older Law brothers, Rob and Frank, an arm hooked around each of their necks and pulling them to him, like an affectionate dad with two grown sons horsing around in the backyard.

      There were even more faded shots, probably from Rourke’s childhood, and some of his years as a young and not-so-bad looking man, before the scar. None of Rourke’s dead wife, though. Naturally enough.

      Evangeline delivered the fresh bottle of Kokanee to Dion’s hand and stood so close for a moment that he could smell the soap and perfume and the slight mildew of a dress grabbed from a pile on the floor. Rourke was talking about what he’d do to the bastard responsible for Kiera’s disappearance when he got his hands on the sick piece of trash. Rourke was 99 percent certain the Pickup Killer was responsible. “And let me tell you,” he was saying. “It’s not just me. There’s a whole posse of us ready to hang him high. You can bet your cotton socks on that, my friend. And there’s nothing you bleeding-heart cops are going to be able to do about it. Somehow or other, that sonofabitch is going to get himself strung up from the tallest tree in the valley.”

      “I wouldn’t talk like that if I were you,” Dion said, not quite serious, but not quite joking either. “Not with me around. I’ll have to remember this conversation when we’re cutting that sonofabitch down.”

      “Yeah, Scottie, keep your big mouth shut,” Evangeline said, back in her chair. And flapping a hand at Dion, dismissing the death threats, “Don’t listen to him. He talks big, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

      Oh, he’d do a lot worse, Dion thought. Not quite twenty years ago, Scott Rourke had come home a day early from a hunting expedition and caught his wife with a lover. He’d grabbed a baseball bat and clobbered the shit out of the man. The man had lived, but like Dion, he was left with a badly altered trajectory. And the wife, well, she was collateral damage: jumped in a lake and surfaced dead. Dion had heard mention of it in the Wednesday night briefing, and had checked his computer for the details on his own time. If Evangeline was unaware of the violence in her boyfriend’s bones, somebody ought to tell her, and soon.

      “You live in this area?” he asked her. “I get the feeling you’re not from around here.”

      She rested her chin in her palm and challenged him with a stare. “What gives you that feeling?”

      She looked and moved and talked and smelled like city, that’s what. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just —”

      “Just quit chatting up my woman,” Rourke interrupted with mock menace, arms crossed,

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