LITMIR.BIZ

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Not only that, but by the time the hotel finished putting the place back together again there was a long list of reservations from tourists and honeymooners wanting to stay in the rooms formerly occupied by the infamous Richard Davies. In other words, the suite had seen a variety of traffic. But Shorty had to start somewhere.

      They examined every lock in the place, in desks, closet doors, armoires, even the gramophone case. They looked for strong boxes, trunks, grips, wall safes, and loose floorboards. Whenever there was a break in the action, they discussed the Guard and whether or not they could trust Olive. Paranoia became the hardest currency. They found nothing and came to no conclusions.

      “Don’t you think someone would have found it by now?” said Mud.

      “Maybe they just didn’t look in the right place,” said Thom.

      “Or maybe whoever found it absconded to South America,” said Mud. “What now?” He continued kicking the ball back into Shorty’s end.

      “Yeah, what now?” said Lapointe.

      Shorty stiffened. What was it Three Fingers said after he found Jigsaw’s body? Always the last place you look. He turned away from the window on the Avenue to find Three Fingers staring at him. The Indian was always doing that and it always threw him off. What Shorty didn’t know was that the Huron believed answers were found in people’s faces, regardless of whether they knew it, and not in hotel rooms or in spoken words that might as well have been written in blowing sand or melting snow. He saw something in Shorty’s face. The others came back from taking one last look around the place and gathered around their leader.

      “Maybe we should take the key to a locksmith and hear what he has to say,” said Thom.

      “No, not yet,” said Shorty. “Let’s try the house.”

      Shorty led them back down the service elevator and this time straight through the front lobby. Sure, they were turning a few heads but Shorty didn’t care. The five bucks he gave Olive burned him. So did the boys’ attitude up in the suite. He paused at the cigar shop and asked the tobacconist for a box of White Owls. The tobacconist pulled the box out of the humidor and set it down on the counter. Shorty opened his jacket to his waistcoat, exposing the butt of the revolver he had in his holster, and then picked up the box and pushed his way out and through the revolving doors onto the Avenue. He didn’t even smoke. He just wanted to walk away with something. The gang followed without saying a word.

      It was treacherous along Riverside Drive. Frozen ruts kept stealing the wheel away from Shorty while parts of the road exposed to sun were smooth as glass. Just yesterday, one of the city’s leading barristers and his wife were driving along this very same stretch when, in an effort to avoid an oncoming vehicle that had veered into their lane, the barrister hastily applied the brakes, causing the car to skid and topple down a thirty-five-foot embankment, landing on its side on the frozen Detroit River. The barrister had to kick a hole through the ragtop so that he could drag himself and his fainting wife to safety. Now that’s someone I’d like to have in my corner, thought Shorty.

      When they reached the house, he pulled up Esdras, the nearest side street, and parked a few doors up from the Drive. The boys climbed out of the Studebaker and traipsed through the snow toward the entrance. It was set back, nearer the water’s edge. The first thing they noticed was the fresh tire tracks in the driveway.

      “Cops?” said Shorty.

      “No,” said Three Fingers.

      “What interest would they have in this place any more?” said Mud.

      Shorty pulled his coat lapels tighter around his neck. “C’mon.”

      The snow had drifted against the hedge along the driveway. Three Fingers leaned into Shorty and said, “Look — footprints where the tire tracks stop.”

      Gorski noticed too. “That’s a big pair of boots.”

      “I don’t like this,” said Lapointe.

      As they made their way carefully up the tiled stairs, Gorski picked up where he had left off and told Irish Thom and Lapointe how Davies had been running a smuggling operation from this house, and not just liquor either but guns and munitions too. Davies, he said, was arming strikebreakers on the other side of the border, trying to stop the spread of socialism in every blue-collar town between Detroit and Chicago. What Gorski didn’t know, what didn’t make it into the papers, was that Davies was also fanning the flames of racial unrest. He sold the whole thing as a package deal. He had been a man on a mission.

      The front door was open a crack with icy snow wedged in the gap. Davies had been renting the property from a businessman in Detroit. This businessman never stood up to claim the property after the incident. Clearly he wanted to distance himself from the whole affair. He probably wrote it off. As with the hotel suite, the police and the Mounties had taken turns scouring the residence. No one on the street had heard whether or not they had turned up anything of interest. There was a fallen section of ceiling behind the door. Thom carefully forced it open.

      The place was a disaster area: bloodstained walls, broken windows, crumbling plaster, and cold and snow blowing in from every crevice. Shorty started having flashbacks to that fateful night. Memories he thought were lost and forgotten were resurfacing, just like Jigsaw.

      “You okay?” asked Mud.

      “Yeah, sure.” Shorty started to think more about the police. If the police had found anything pointing to Davies’s working capital, someone in the department would have spilled. How long could someone keep money like that a secret? On the other hand, a dirty cop might have kept it to himself. But if he did, why would he have stuck around? While Jack was recovering from his wound, Shorty and the boys kept had close tabs on all the Border City Blues. No one had voluntarily left the force in the last several months, and no one had been discharged. The Mounties were a different story, however: an unknown variable.

      Being the only ones who had ever set foot in the place before, Shorty and Mud split the group.

      “There’s two or three rooms down the hall as well as the way to the cellar. The kitchen and the dining room overlook the river.”

      They started poking around. More fresh footprints, damp with snow; handprints on dusty, overturned furniture; and recently exposed wall frame where sections of plaster had been pried off. It was bad enough that no one knew exactly what they were looking for, but to be sifting through a mess like this made the venture that much more challenging. Three Fingers examined the fresh hand and footprints.

      “The Guard was here,” he said.

      A few heads popped around corners.

      “Recently?” asked Shorty.

      “Not sure,” said the Huron, “but they have been here.”

      “Someone was here, but what tells you it was the Guard?” asked Mud.

      “They probably know about the key,” said Gorski.

      “How’s that possible?” said Shorty.

      “They were always one step ahead of everyone else,” said Gorski. “They have this sixth sense. They anticipate, they see, they know.”

      He sure could tell a story.

      “Weren’t they also supposed to have gone through this place last summer?” said Shorty, sounding more and more like a believer.

      “But when they failed to turn up the money,” said Gorski, “they probably figured all they had to do was wait until a certain snake lifted his head out of the grass.”

      “Who’s the snake?” asked Thom.

      “Charlie Baxter,” said Shorty. He needed to sit down. He righted one of the chairs.

      “And who would that be?” asked Lapointe.

      “The guy who shot Jack,” said Shorty. “Davies’s bodyguard and the only one from his inner circle still unaccounted for.”

      “Some

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