Howard Shrier - Buffalo jump

“How did Kevin Masilek become involved?”

“You know about-”

“Oh, yes. Keep going, please.”

“Mr. Silver called one day to say we had to get our orders from Kevin. No more direct deliveries or trips to his store. We didn’t like it. It cost more and we missed dealing with Mr. Silver. He was so much nicer. But he said we shouldn’t contact him anymore and that was that.”

“And what happened to Kevin?”

“He moved, I guess.”

“Just up and moved?”

“We don’t know. We can’t get in touch with him.”

“I’ll bet you can’t.” Staples tapped her pencil absently against the knuckles of her other hand. “So how did you come to take over?”

“We were… we were asked to.”

“By whom?”

Blood was draining from Amy’s face as if she’d been fatally gored somewhere below the neck. “He didn’t say. He just… just offered our medications free and we jumped at the chance, that’s all.”

Staples didn’t look like she was buying that-not at market price anyway. “Did Mr. Silver ever mention partners?”

“No.”

“No one else in Toronto?”

“No.”

“Did he ever mention a Steven Stone?”

“No.”

“A Stefano Di Pietra?”

“No.”

“Any Di Pietra?”

“No.”

“What about the men who made the delivery today?”

“The driver is Frank. The big one never talks.”

“They ever mention anyone else in Buffalo?”

“No.”

Staples made some notations in her book. “Where’s the rest?”

“What?”

“Only part of today’s delivery came here,” Staples said. “Where’s the rest?”

“I don’t know,” Amy said. “We just took what was ours and they went on their way.”

“You’ll have to do better than that if you want to stay out of jail.”

Amy glared at her. “I have no idea. They could have gone to Mars for all I know.”

I said, “Maybe I can help.”

Staples looked at me expectantly.

“There’s a warehouse on the west side,” I said. “We followed them there and saw them unload the rest of the goods.”

“We?”

Shit. Dumb mistake. “I did. I followed them.”

“Then why did you say-”

I had to get her back on track. “They’re probably still there as we speak.”

“You should have told me this before,” Staples snapped. “You might have cost us a chance to catch them in the act.”

“I needed to know you were being frank with me,” I said, throwing her own words back at her.

“Where exactly is this warehouse?”

“Everything square with Ms. Aiken?”

“Yes, yes,” she said.

“And me?”

“The address, please?”

I gave her the address. She wrote it down, then opened her briefcase and stowed away the yellow pad and pen.

“What happens now?” Amy asked. “Am I going to be charged?”

“No,” Staples said. “I can personally guarantee it.”

She reached into her briefcase, pulled out a pistol with a silencer threaded onto the barrel and shot Amy twice in the chest.

“ I wish you could see the look on your face,” Staples said. “It’s priceless.”

Amy Farber lay dead on her kitchen floor, the front of her white blouse soaked in blood. Her eyes stared lifelessly at the ceiling.

Staples sat in her chair, aiming the pistol at my chest. “You were right about one thing,” she said. “You were never going to get within a mile of the Federal Building. Not where anyone could place us together.”

“You knew you were going to kill me.”

“Once I saw how much you knew, yes. Or did you think I invited you out for the pleasure of your company?”

“It’s been known to happen.”

“Not this time.”

“Are you really an FDA agent? Or is the real Christine Staples lying dead somewhere too?”

“I’m the real Christine Staples,” she said.

“The one nobody knows.”

“You got that right,” she said, nowhere near prim now, her smile ugly, almost lascivious. “Let’s face it. A girl can only go so far on what the FDA pays. Steven was able to take me a whole lot farther.”

“So you’d look the other way when the shipments came through.”

“Which is what you should have done. You should have stayed in Canada. You’re in the U.S. of A. now and we do things different here.”

The gun looked like a 9-millimetre. Now-finally, Ryan might have said-I wanted a gun in my hand, my own Beretta Cougar with the slide racked and safety off. But as Ryan had predicted, I was caught empty-handed.

The silencer on the end of her gun was about three feet from my chest. I wondered if I could grab the end of it and twist before she fired.

“You going to shoot me here?” I asked.

“Yes. Then I’ll wait until Hubby gets home from the movies and shoot him too.”

How had this hellish piece of work passed any kind of employment screening?

“When the police find me here, it’ll all blow open. Too many people in Toronto know what I’m working on.”

“But they won’t find you here,” she said. “Frank and Claudio will collect you and dump you elsewhere. Nothing will connect you to the Aikens or their house.”

“Except my blood, my fingerprints and the thirty people who saw me here tonight.”

For a moment she looked less sure of herself. I made my move, lunging across the table to grab the gun barrel. But she pushed her chair back and jumped out of reach. She stood well back of the table, her thin lips stretched in a sick-looking smile. “Nice try, Geller. Quick and decisive. I like that in a man.”

She levelled the gun at me, gripping it in both hands. She looked like she was ready to fire so I kept talking.

“It’s quite an act you put on,” I said.

“You bought it,” she said. “So does everyone at the FDA. I’m the wallflower who jumps if someone says boo. That’s why no one will ever connect me to this.”

“Don’t be so sure. The Toronto Homicide Squad knows about Stone and Bader. How do you know they won’t talk?”

“I know Steven won’t.”

“And Bader?”

“Not a problem.”

“You’re going to kill him too.”

“Me personally? No. Someone else will handle it.”

“Ricky Messina?”

“Oh, you are industrious,” she said.

I felt a surge of pure hatred for this woman, this animal, who could talk about killing people like we were bugs who had made it through her screen door.

“That’s quite a look,” Staples said. “So angry. So vindictive. I think I liked your dumb look better.”

She levelled the gun and I saw the knuckle around the trigger start to pull. I flinched as a sudden roar in my ears made them ring-a noise that came from behind, far too loud for a silenced pistol. Staples’s chest exploded in a cloud of red and she stumbled backward against a butcher-block counter. Another shot and her throat burst open. She made a coarse strangled sound and slumped down to the floor, leaving a thick bloody smear on the cabinets behind her.

I turned around and saw Dante Ryan at the kitchen door, his Glock 20 in hand.

His first rule of a fast exit had been: make sure there’s no one left alive to chase you.

He’d held up his end. I just had to get my ass out the door without kicking Christine Staples’s dead face.

We made it to the Peace Bridge in under ten minutes, melting into the long line of cars inching toward the border. It was getting dark, and not just because the sun was finally starting to set on a long June day. Thunderclouds were building in the northwest, gunmetal blue, stacked high like rearing horses. The heat wave was nearing its end.