In the Barren Ground Page 21

  She shouldn’t trust him.

  He glanced over his shoulder, as though he’d felt her watching, assessing. As though he could read her thoughts about his body. Heat washed into her face as his gaze held hers. And his eyes darkened.

  She cleared her throat. “You need to come clean with me first. About those Devil’s Angels tats. About who you really are, what you did to land in prison, what you’re doing here. Or it’s no deal.”

  His eyes narrowed. A defiance set into his stubbled jaw.

  “Right,” she said. “Forget it.” She turned and exited the shed, moving fast into the snow and cool air.

  CHAPTER 28

  Crash splashed cold water over his face, and braced his hands on the crude basin in his work shed. He stared into the rust-pocked mirror above the sink. He knew what Tana was seeing. She was seeing what he wanted people to see—a badass, jaded, washed-up shit. Fuck. It’s what he was. What he’d become. Not a good man. A man who’d lived too long in a world of extreme violence and corruption, where good guys and bad guys changed places in a heartbeat. Where justice was not black, nor white, and sometimes was written in blood.

  And he’d been good at that life.

  He swore bitterly.

  Now he was being forced to make a decision. Help her, and maybe screw up five or six years of waiting. Watching. But waiting for what, exactly? His taste for blood revenge had dulled. Oh, he wanted retribution alright, but maybe not in quite the same sharp, deadly way he’d first come for it. But he still wanted it.

  He could let her go, stick with the order of things, carry on with his plan. But if she and that unborn child of hers got hurt—it made no sense. It cut right back to the heart of why he’d come out here in the first place. To avenge the deaths of a mother and unborn child.

  He grabbed a towel, scrubbed his face dry, tossed the towel over a bench, and unhooked a fresh shirt he’d left hanging beside the basin. He pulled it on, snagged his jacket, gloves. Shoving his arms into his jacket, he went after her.

  “Tana!” he yelled as he saw her disappearing around the side of his house. He broke into a run, caught her by the arm.

  She swung around, eyes sparking. Her mouth was close. She was breathing heavily, their breaths clouding together. Snow settled like confetti on her fur hat. He wanted to kiss her. By God, he just wanted to kiss that full mouth, bury himself in her freshness and youth, cover himself in it. His eyes burned, heat seared his chest. And suddenly he ached—to start again, a second chance, just to try. But he didn’t dare. He could not do that to her. She was young, idealistic. He was far too jaded, carried too much dangerous baggage. She was going to be a mother, and there was no way in hell he could realistically be there for her, or a kid, so why in hell was his head even going there?

  “Information,” he said slowly. “A way to pass under the radar.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s what I’m doing here, with the bootlegging, the dope running, because I want underground information. I want bigger jobs from the lodge. And they’re starting to come. Bigger jobs equals more, better information.”

  She blinked. Wind gusted, sending flakes dancing and laughing about them. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She shook his hand free, turned and walked away.

  He watched her go.

  Just let her go … let her go, let her go …

  She was stubborn. She’d do it—find that hide on her own, confront Damien and his gang. He thought of her whiteboard, the dog poisonings, the sabotage, the isolation of the town—her. The deer eye skewered to her door, very possibly stolen from his deer …

  Fuck!

  “Tana!”

  He caught up to her again under his bedroom window. “Stop, just listen—hear me out. I was UC.”

  She blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Until five years ago.”

  “You … were an undercover cop?”

  “For almost four years I was part of a joint FBI, RCMP, Interpol, and Canadian Security Intelligence Service task force—Project Protea—formed to track laundered diamonds that were being used to finance organized crime, drugs, human trafficking, prostitution, terrorism. I was seconded to the joint team from major crimes in Edmonton, because I was uniquely positioned at the time to move deep undercover—I had particular experience in diamond trafficking and the infiltration of Asian organized crime into the local diamond industry.”

  She swallowed. Her gazed dipped over him, as if she was taking him in anew, weighing the odds of him lying.

  “The tats—”

  “I infiltrated a chapter of the Devil’s Angels in Vancouver. They held control of the port. They were the intermediary, and we needed to crack them first.”

  “The scars?”

  He gave a soft snort. “I was shot. Knifed. Tortured at one point. Left for dead in a bust that went sideways. Got addicted to heroin as part of a test to gain entry to the Angels’ inner sanctum.” He hesitated. “My UC gig, my policing career, ended when the Vancouver city police force—unaware of the international deep-cover Project Protea operation—moved in on a major deal I had going down with a human trafficker. I was shot in the head while attempting to flee with the conflict stones that I was trying to get into the system for laundering. It left me in a coma for almost a fortnight. I went in for over a year of extensive rehab—for the heroin, brain damage. I had to learn to walk again. To feed myself again. I was put out to pasture on disability.”

  Something changed in her features as she regarded him. And he knew what she was thinking: Is he sane now? How is that gray matter functioning now? And yeah, he sometimes asked himself those same questions.

  “What you said about your wife, your daughter—”

  “I lost them because of the job. Whenever I went home for a break I was like a K9 who was not happy until he was back on the scent. It became like crack. I was in too long, too deep. I …” Crash dragged his hand over his wet hair. “My family was collateral damage, Tana. And I regret it.”

  Her eyes tunneled into his, an intensity crackling around her. “And you’re here, looking for information, because?”

  “Because that deal that went bust was supposed to help net us the international syndicate that controlled the illegal diamond trade—the laundering of conflict stones—among other sophisticated criminal enterprises. We had to cut our losses after the bust. We never got to finding out who comprised the syndicate, and who controlled it. But while I was going through that year of rehab, it became an obsession for me. I didn’t stop looking. I couldn’t stop trying to piece together every little thing I’d learned over those four years undercover that cost me everything, including my career. I think I know who runs it now. And I think he’s here, Tana.”

  “Who?”

  A noise sounded above them. Both Crash and Tana glanced up. Nothing. Just a small gap open in the bedroom window, the breeze billowing a drape.

  “Come,” he said, watching the drape for a moment. “Let’s go finish this in my workshop.”

  Mindy scurried around to another window from where she could watch Crash and Tana returning through the snow to his outbuildings. He was a cop? Fuck. Men were such liars. All of them. She’d thought he was super cool with his plane and his liquor runs, and the dope. He was nothing but a fucking liar, duping them all.

  She saw Crash place his hand on the back of the constable’s jacket, guiding her into the doorway of the workshop attached to his shed where he dressed game. Like they were now fucking soulmates-in-blue, or something equally pathetic. Her eyes blurred.

  Her chest hurt. Really hurt. He’d even had a wife and a daughter. Fucking, fucking, fucking liar. She swung her heel, and kicked hard at the base of the bed. Pain screamed through her toes. And she didn’t care. She hobbled to the kitchen, and dug through the drawer for the meat thermometer. She found it, yanked up her shirt, and began stabbing the sharp tip of the thermometer into the fat flesh of her stomach. Stabbity, stabbity, stabbity. Stab. Blood swelled in shin
y red beads from the small holes. It started to dribble down into the waistband of her pants. She loved him. She hated him. Hated Tana for coming here. She wanted to kill Tana Larsson. Kill, kill, kill.

  Crash had been the only one there for her in a way that she’d needed. He’d saved her from that shed in which she’d been sleeping, and he’d sobered her up. Mindy figured she’d have him some day. He’d have made love to her eventually, if not for Tana coming into town. Mindy had believed that the only reason she and Crash hadn’t had sex yet was because he cared, and he was waiting for her. Until she was older. Mindy, you’re too young. You need to find a good man your own age. You need to go to school … Tears streamed down her face.

  CHAPTER 29

  They sat in Crash’s workshop on two small stools, facing each other. It was where he kept his little red AeroStar, adjacent to his meat shed. He’d closed the garage door behind them, and put on a bar heater. It glowed orange and warm near their feet. Outside, snow thudded as it slid off the roof.

  “My wife’s name was Leah,” he said, then smiled in a way that looked sad. “Still is. Ex-wife. My daughter’s Gracie. I imagine she prefers Grace now. She’s twelve. Like I said, we’re estranged.” He dragged his hand through his wet hair, making it stick up, which lent him an oddly vulnerable air. He flashed a deeper grin, a glimmer of the old Crash in his eyes. The one who wore a crazy World War II flight suit, and whose plane was probably just as old. And as Tana listened, she was learning him. He hid behind that smile and all that bravado-badassery, but she understood broken men, and this man was that, too.

  “Because of the complexity, the breadth of the operation, the links to international terrorism, rules were bent. I was allowed to go in deeper and for far longer than usual. And the deeper I infiltrated, the more my isolation increased, because the more there was to lose if I was pegged as a cop. My trips home grew less frequent by necessity. The line between my identities began to blur. I grew my hair, acquired the tats, met the tests. I learned how to survive in that other world, formed relationships there.”

  “Is Cam O’Halloran your real name?”

  His eyes tunneled into hers and he was silent a moment.

  “Partly.”

  Shit. Tana got up, paced in front of the small chopper, turned to face him. “You’re still playing the game, aren’t you? You still think you’re undercover, but you’ve gone rogue. That’s why you’re messing with illegal liquor, and dope and whatever else.” That’s why she could find nothing when she searched the Internet for him. “What’s your real name?”

  He swallowed. “Dave O’Halloran. Sergeant Dave O’Halloran—you’ll find a record.”

  She stared at him, brain spinning.

  “You don’t look like a Dave.”

  The one side of his mouth twisted up in a rueful grin. “Use Crash. I’ve been called Crash since I was a kid. Bit of a wild child.”

  Slowly, she reseated herself opposite him, leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees, her eyes boring into his. “So, when you were shot by the VPD cops, you went into the hospital with a coma as who?”

  “Sten Bauer, member of the Devil’s Angels.”

  “And what did everyone on the street think happened to you?”

  “It was leaked out that I’d become a vegetable. That I was being moved into an institution where I’d probably live out the rest of my life drooling in a wheelchair and sucking food through a straw.”

  “How did you earn the Devil’s Angels’ trident tattoo—I was told you need to kill someone to wear one of those?”

  “It was a setup. A low-level drug dealer who’d been messing on the Angels’ turf had been shot dead by UC cops involved in another operation around 2:00 a.m. that day, no next of kin. He was placed in an alley where I shot him again before 4:00 a.m., took the credit.”

  Tana rubbed her chin, trying to process.

  “By that time Leah was having an affair with a banker named Kev Simms. When I found out, she gave me an ultimatum—quit the UC work and go into rehab for the heroin, and she’d leave Kev. We’d try and start over from scratch. I couldn’t. Rehab had to wait—I was managing the heroin addiction, or so I thought, and the big deal was about to go down. I had a haul of rough blood diamonds from West Africa that had been secured by the FBI and Interpol—stones that had been chemically marked by the FBI lab with a brand-new technology. I was to meet with a guy from Europe, and pay with these diamonds for a shipment of women and weapons. He said he had a way of laundering the rough stones. I’d been infiltrating this group for four years, Tana, and if I didn’t show with the stones, they’d smell a ruse. People would die. The whole fucking operation would fall apart. So I asked Leah to wait. She said no go. Gracie needed a father, and Kev was offering relocation to New York where he had a new job. She was going to take Gracie and start a new life.”

  Tana held his gaze. She saw sincerity in his eyes. She heard it in his voice. Pain, too. It cut her. She felt for him, and his wife and daughter. If there was one thing she’d learned from her own messed-up life it was that bad shit happened to good people. They became things they didn’t want to be.

  She broke his gaze, looked at her hands, because suddenly the connection with him was too intimate. “So … those blood diamonds from the FBI were going to be tracked, via the chemical trace, once they went into the system?”

  “Yeah. Somehow the rough stones out of Africa were coming north, here to the territories, and going into the system. They were coming out the other end cut and polished with nice little polar bears or maple leaves lasered onto them.”

  “Plus a certificate that stated they were conflict free—pure Canadian diamonds.”

  “Correct. With far more value on the international market compared to stones coming out of conflict zones in Africa and other places around the world. And clean Canadian diamonds are infinitely more attractive to the world of high-end organized crime and terrorism.”

  “What happened? What went wrong with the deal?”

  “A jurisdictional clusterfuck is what happened. A Vancouver PD officer was told by a small-level snitch that some big gang deal was about to go down. I was on my own. That had been made clear to me from the start. The VPD was not aware of our joint op, or that I was undercover, and they organized a raid.”

  “Your task force wasn’t watching?”

  “Nearby, but not so close as to give wind to the European dealers. It was a supersensitive operation at that point. And the idea was to not bust them, but to let the deal go through, get the marked stones into the system from where they could be tracked far beyond these guys. We knew who they were. We wanted to get in even deeper, all the way back to the syndicate running the show. Bottom line is, the VPD Emergency Response Team moved in as I was handing over the gems. The joint force was alerted to the fuckup, and moved in on top of them, trying to contain the fallout at the last moment. A gun battle ensued. I fled, as per my cover, with the haul of stones. I was shot by VPD cops waiting in the back alley. One bullet to the shoulder. One in the head. I went into surgery, and was in a coma for almost two weeks. Then I was moved back to Edmonton where I went into all kinds of rehab and was put on long-term disability leave.”

  He rubbed his brow. It was warm in the little shed. They were cocooned from the world in here. “The Vancouver chapter of the Devil’s Angels went down—we managed to secure convictions on numerous charges including human trafficking. The two European dealers were killed in the gunfight. But beyond that, after all those years, all that effort, we got nowhere close to the syndicate, and who was behind it. The syndicate cut ties with their Vancouver connections, and pulled up the drawbridges, going under again. We also never found the connection to whoever was running the conflict stones through the production system in the Northwest Territories.”

  “How did this low-level snitch in Vancouver know there was a deal going down?”

  “Don’t know. He was found floating in the Burrard. The leak could have come from a weak link in th
e Angels, or even via a dirty cop. As a guy in the Angels once told me, one of the most valuable assets to their organized crime operation was a turned policeman. He said undercover works both ways. At the time I thought he was testing me, fishing. But he might have been referring to someone high up in the RCMP. It would make sense if there was a dirty cop or two in the system. It could explain how a blind eye might have been turned to blood stones entering the production system in the Northwest Territories.”

  Tana studied O’Halloran’s face carefully, and she believed him. Yeah, maybe he was a sociopath, a brilliant liar—you’d have to be a little bit of both, perhaps, to go deep cover like he had, and to live a lie by your wits. No backup.

  “And because of all this, because you said you fucked up your life, you felt you had a right to lay into me about my pregnancy and my own past?”

  He inhaled deeply and looked away for a moment, and Tana knew then he was still keeping something big from her.

  “What is it?” she said. “What are you not telling me?”

  He turned back to face her. “After Leah and Gracie left, I got involved with a young hooker who’d first introduced me to members of the Devil’s Angels. We were both doing heroin at the time.” He swallowed. “Her name was Lara. She was a good person, Tana. She’d had a rough start in life, like so many others who end up on the street. And it’s a one-way track from there. That’s the thing about UC. You get to know these people as human beings. Yeah, these guys are operating on the wrong side of the law, but how they get there … it’s gray. No little boy sits on his dad’s lap and says, ‘I want to be a drug dealer when I grow up. I want to get addicted and hurt people.’ No three-year-old daughter tells her mom, ‘I want to be a sex trade worker.’”