Howard Shrier - Buffalo jump

At least following a truck on a highway was relatively easy. We could hang back a good number of cars and keep its tall white box in sight.

When my cellphone rang, I checked the caller ID and groaned.

“What?”

“My boss,” I said and pressed Talk.

“Jonah!” Graham McClintock barked. “What the hell is going on? You blew out of here yesterday with barely a word and you skip out today of all days?”

“I’m onto something, Clint. To do with Franny.”

“Not that you’ve seen fit to share with me. Or Homicide.”

“I’m chasing it down now. By tomorrow I should know the whole story. Who killed Franny, everything.”

“Forget tomorrow,” Clint said. “Get down here now.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes you can, if you want to keep your job.”

“Clint, I-”

“You and I need to talk, Jonah. You get to my office now, look me in the goddamn eye and tell me what’s going on!”

I had to buy time. I resorted to an old trick I’ve used on my mother when she gets into one of her “Why isn’t Jonah a doctor/lawyer/husband/father/chief rabbi of Toronto” rants. I turned the radio on and moved the dial between stations, then turned up the volume so the interior of the car was filled with static. I held the phone close to one of the speakers and shouted, “What’s that? I couldn’t hear that last part.”

“Get down here now!” he bellowed.

“Clint? Clint? Are you still there? You’re breaking up.”

“To the office!”

“Clint? Damn this phone! Clint? Can you hear me?”

“Yes, I can hear you perfectly.”

“Clint?”

“You can’t hear me?”

“Are you there?” I asked.

“Ah, fuck!” I heard him say.

I had to face it: there would be no happy ending to this. If I didn’t get killed I’d almost certainly be fired. What then? Hook up with another firm? Strike out on my own? Work for-God forbid-my brother’s law firm? I stared out the window at nothing in particular. The little devil on one shoulder suggested asking Dante Ryan for a cigarette. The angel on the other said, Who’d blame you if you did?

Some little angel.

While I had my phone out, I called Information and got the number for Beth Israel. I asked the receptionist for Ed Johnston’s room but the call was transferred to a woman with a pronounced Caribbean accent who told me I’d reached the nursing station on his floor.

“Can you tell me how Mr. Johnston is doing?” I asked.

“Are you family?” she asked.

I should have said yes. Instead I said, “I’m his neighbour.”

“You’ll have to speak to a family member then. His daughter’s in his room. Should I transfer you?”

I remembered how Elizabeth Johnston had glared at me, blaming me, this investigator who’d brought trouble to her father’s door. “Could you just tell me if he’s alive?” I asked. “Please. Let me rest easy.”

“He’s doin’ well as could be expected, precious,” she said. “Now do you want his daughter or not?”

I said I’d try again later, thanked her and hung up.

“He hanging in?” Ryan asked.

“From the way the nurse sounded, just barely, I guess.”

For a while I watched wooly grey clouds the size of destroyers stack above each other over the middle of the lake. Then Dante Ryan said, “Want to hear something funny?”

“Please.”

“Or maybe ironic is the right word.”

“What?”

“First time we met, you were driving a truckload of contraband and I was riding shotgun behind. Now these goons are driving a truck half the size, worth five times the profit, and you and me are the ones riding behind.”

“That’s not funny or ironic. It’s plain fucking weird.”

“So I have two questions about that caper,” he said.

“I don’t know, Ryan.”

“What?”

“I can’t tell you company tales. When this thing is resolved, we go back to our respective sides of the fence.”

“I told you plenty about my business. More than I ever told anyone outside the life, my wife included.”

“True.”

“So?”

“Tell me the two questions first.”

“One: how you cracked our gang. And two: how you… how should I say it…”

“Blew the case?”

“Blew the living shit out of it, I was going to say.”

“It’s a long story.”

“We’re an hour from the border.”

“It’s not a bad story,” I allowed.

“Then tell it, brother,” Ryan said. “Let it unfold with the miles.”

I let a minute tick by while I thought about where to begin. “All right. About a year ago, the federal finance minister pushed through a huge tax hike on cigarettes.”

“Six bucks a carton,” Ryan snorted. “I was pissed off and I don’t even pay for mine.”

“He said it would protect the youth of the nation by making smoking hard to afford.”

“Bullshit. The youth of the nation just steal more out of their parents’ wallets.”

“Plus smokers of all ages instinctively started looking for ways around the tax. It’s the Canadian way,” I said. “Tax us if you can.”

“And naturally your criminal element stepped in to provide courteous black-market service,” Ryan grinned. “Christ, everyone and their mother got involved. Natives, bikers, Asians and of course your

… ah, traditional organized crime types.”

“Of course. The problem was that smokers didn’t just want cheap cigarettes. They wanted cheap Canadian cigarettes.”

“You blame them? You ever smoke an American brand?”

I nodded. “I used to be a smoker. I tried Camels once.”

“And?”

“Didn’t even taste like the best part of a camel.”

“There you go.”

“Anyway, getting the product into the U.S. was easy. The manufacturers ramped up production for the export market, supposedly because more Americans suddenly wanted to enjoy their products. Truckloads-convoys-were lined up at every land border crossing from the Thousand Islands bridge to the Windsor Tunnel. But packages destined for export have a seal that says they can’t be sold in Canada. So they had to be smuggled back.”

“Which is where the Akwesasne Reserve proved so convenient.”

“It was practically designed for smuggling,” I said. “Only one narrow stretch of the St. Lawrence River separates the Canadian and American sides at Cornwall. Every Mohawk with a boat was bringing cartons across the river.”

“And wholesaling them to us.”

“And buying bigger, faster boats with the profits. The OPP and RCMP together couldn’t stop more than one in ten.”

“Ten?” Ryan said. “That’s what they told the media. They were lucky if it was one in twenty.”

“The government finally had to roll back the tax because the only people profiting from it were you criminals.”

“A sad day for us because cigarettes were an attractive product. Big markup, steady market, and they don’t break if a truck rolls. But,” he said, “there’s always other commodities. Booze, guns, people, perfume, knock-offs, dope and now, as we know, basic drugstore crap.”

“The tobacco companies would have gotten away with it too,” I said.

“But?”

“An investigative journalist uncovered documents that left them with a lot of ‘splainin’ to do. To the RCMP in particular.”

“That’s what you get for writing shit down.”

“An investigator told me one executive from Ensign Tobacco couldn’t take a crap without leaving a paper trail.”

“But Ensign turned out to be your client.”

“And you know why.”

“That stupid court order. Thirty million cigarettes, consigned to an incinerator. Going up in smoke for nothing.”

“They were marked for export, with no export market to send them to. And the feds looked at it as a way to punish the companies and take the heat off the finance minister for the flip-flop.”