The Dying Detective

By Gerald Lynch

Retired Detective Kevin Beldon has left Ottawa and gone into retreat at a Buddhist monastery in California following his successful treatment for lung cancer. He’s trying to make sense of his life, but death is very much on his mind. And not just his own; he’s still trying to come to terms with the loss ten years earlier of his wife and son, victims of Dr. Ewan Randome, an evil mastermind whom Beldon had been forced to let escape. Aside from providing the occasional consultation for the California police, Beldon has happily gone into retirement, but when Global Patrol, the international police force, comes looking for his help on the Malachai case, a serial killer investigation that has them stymied, his interest is piqued. Beldon quickly deduces that the killings are related to his last unsolved case before his retirement two years earlier, a triple murder in his nation’s capital, and he suspects the involvement of his old nemesis Dr. Randome in this new round of assassinations. As events unfold, Beldon comes to realize how inevitable it was that Malachai’s killing spree would end in New York, and how inevitable his own final showdown with Randome has always been.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Signature Editions
• Release date: Oct 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781773240787

Gerald Lynch

Gerald Lynch has authored seven books and edited some dozen others, including three previously in the Reappraisals series. His critical studies include Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity (McGill-Queens University Press, 1988) and The One and the Many: Canadian Short Story Cycles (University of Toronto Press, 2001). He has published numerous short stories, essays and reviews, including a number on the writings of Munro. He is a former winner of the National Magazine gold award for short fiction, and has been teaching at the University of Ottawa since 1985.

Book preview

THE DYING DETECTIVE

THE DYING DETECTIVE

GERALD LYNCH

Doug Whiteway, Editor

Logo: Signature Editions

© 2020, Gerald Lynch

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, without the permission of the publisher.

Cover design by Doowah Design.

Photo of author by Maura Lynch: Crow Photography

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Manitoba Arts Council for our publishing program.

ISBN 978-1773240-78-7 (epub)

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The dying detective / Gerald Lynch ; Doug Whiteway, editor

Names: Lynch, Gerald, 1953- author. | Whiteway, Doug, 1951- editor.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200319361 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200319388 | ISBN 9781773240770

(softcover) | ISBN 9781773240787 (HTML)

Classification: LCC PS8573.Y43 D95 2020 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

Signature Editions

P.O. Box 206, RPO Corydon, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3M 3S7

www.signature-editions.com

for sisters

Maura and Sheila

By the Same Author

Fiction

Omphalos

Missing Children

Exotic Dancers

Troutstream

Kisbey

One’s Company

Non-Fiction

The One and the Many: Canadian Short Story Cycles

Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity

Edited

Alice Munro’s Miraculous Art: Critical Essays

The Ivory Thought: Essays on Al Purdy

Leacock on Life

Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Canadian Short Story

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, by Stephen Leacock

Familiar Ground: A Prose Reader

Short Fiction: An Introductory Anthology

The Canadian Essay

Bliss Carman: A Reappraisal

Prose Models

The Rising Village, by Oliver Goldsmith

Contents

PART ONE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

PART TWO

1

2

3

4

5

PART THREE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

PART FOUR

1

2

3

PART FIVE

1

2

3

4

PART SIX

L’ENVOI

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Lurid and lofty and vast it seems;

It hath no rounded name that rings,

But I have heard it called in dreams

The City of the End of Things.

— Archibald Lampman

It’s over, it ain’t going

Any further

— Leonard Cohen

Here is the optimal spot for looking

at Death: nixed tricks, little metrics, strict optics.

— Kevin Beldon

PART ONE

Death in America

1

Kevin Beldon was thinking about death, his own. In a million years he would never have believed that he’d return to California’s Point Conception Zen Center to think about that. Like most of the uninitiated, he’d assumed that the trick in meditating was to discipline the brain not to think, or to think nothing. That hope had been the big attraction of the monk’s life. Kevin had a lot not to think about, especially a number of deaths. Yet here he was, as per Jaken’s instructions, thinking about death, his own.

Look at you! Jaken had said two years earlier when Kevin returned from investigating the triple murder on Parliament Hill back home in Ottawa. Why are you trying so hard to kill yourself, Kevin Beldon? Are you so in love with death, with your little cigars and big crime?… Yes? Then tell me what death is!

I feel like I’m dying, Jaken.

"Don’t feel, Beldon-san—think." He tapped his temple.

Why are you doing your Charlie Chan? I’m dead serious.

Jaken held up his forefinger: Man who not think—

Fuck off, fakir.

But Jaken had proven prophetic: Kevin had been incubating lung cancer.

Three times at L.A.’s Cedars-Sinai he’d taken the Swallow, at two-month intervals, sucking the oxygen-enriched chemical gunk to the bottom of his lungs, like drowning in himself. Then afterwards lying for three days in a state of near-cryogenic coma, as good as dead. But he’d risen with the three lesions in his left lung healing. After nine months he’d been pronounced clear.

The hospital’s Lazarus Club, conscientious buzzards, had instantly been on him for membership and testimonial. Grateful as he was to Cedars-Sinai for another chance, he wouldn’t join the fundraising club. The Lazarus clubbers, like the new Christ-Xers, were all about celebrating Life, if ultimately about themselves, which was inevitable, Kevin supposed. Near-death turned one increasingly inward in the honesty of terminal narcissism, as it slowly and too quickly shrink-wrapped the dying and desperate ego. Didn’t he know it. A soul-crushing experience, was near-death. Revival had shocked, turning him inside out, like pulling a translucent pipe from a tight black-rubber casing. For a short spell he’d wanted to Take it to the World! (the Lazarus motto).

Ecstasy abated.

Cancer was still cancer, and a predisposition a predisposition. No one at the Sinai had tried to deny that fact of his eventual death. Dr. Vivian Grant, recent refiner of the first wholly effective, precisely targeted, cancer immunotherapy (too late for predisposed Kevin), had said, We know the cause of your eventual death, Kevin, barring accident. She smiled like Mother Mary, and he loved her. But no one knows when. And in that respect you’re no different from the rest of us. I do recommend, though, that you use your time wisely. She leaned in and down, her platinum medium-length hair not shifting a wisp, and whispered, "By the way, and just between you and me, I concur with your refusal of the Lazarus boys and girls: those testimonials—you’d think they’d created life."

He’d shifted against his triple pillows, which still left him too low; such a drag to be weakly unoccupied below such a lovely and powerful woman.

Words to die by. Look, doctor, I’m grateful as all hell, believe me, especially to you, but those Lazarus clubbers make me feel like I’m being followed by an undertaker with a tape measure—

"Sh-sh. They’re our number-one fundraiser. And they do celebrate life, you know." She grinned pure irony.

He laughed, and it hurt, like a sudden tight hug from behind. But a wonder, this woman.

"And I do want to use my time wisely, forgetting all this as best I can, not waste my remaining time reminding the unlucky world what a lucky boy I am. Besides which, I bet most of their money goes to Macro production and cleaning bills for those silly gowns like they’d raided the hospital laundry. You guys get only the chump change."

She’d warmed up the smile, so he’d risked greater levity: "Dr. Grant, why don’t you really help a dying old man use his time most wisely—and yours, and yours, I promise—give up this silly medicine gig and run away with me to one of the more temperate Aleutians?"

The smile burst in delightful laughter: I’m afraid I’m not much for running, Kevin. Could we saunter? And hurried off to a real call.

He thought: Thank God I’m alive. And for beauty. And such women.

He still missed his small Dutch cigars, his Panters, like a dear old dead friend. Like dear dead Cynthia, his wife, who had run away with him once upon a time from a boring high-school field trip, and he’d fallen in love forever. Or like Owen, his murdered son. Kelly of course and Abiki Ali, her husband (partner my ass), who were alive and well if a continent away in Ottawa. Or like his last partner, Brigid Ertelle, also in Ottawa. Or like first-partner Frank Thu, who like himself was at least still numbered among the…the quick.

It would appear that the dying (the slow?) had much to miss. But that was pretty well the whole shopping list for Kevin Beldon.

At least Frank in retirement was comparatively nearby, consulting with Global Patrol’s Aqua Crimes Division in Nevada. After having heard about his latest case of Las Vegas intrigue—a story involving gangs commandeering the old slot machines—Kevin had wondered in an encrypted text if the antique one-armed bandits had been rigged as some form of hand pump. Frank returned only a howling emoji holo, which had appeared above Kevin’s tablet. But next day Kevin had received another encrypted text:

they were siphoning it from the casino’s underground reservoir. straight into tanker trucks. right again, my old friend: young gangbangers do not play novelty slots round the clock in Vegas. i’m way too old for this job.

Since then, Global Patrol had twice dispatched Frank to talk to him about the latest serialist, this Malachai. Twice he had sent Frank away disappointed. He would do so twenty-times-twice if need be! He was too old for this. His life was not some vid cliché of getting the old dick out of retirement for one last hurrah—yet again!

Jaken was sure—forget medical science—that Kevin’s first mutating cells had bundled to cancerous life two years before with the resumption of detective work and cigar smoking. The smoking had coincided with Kevin’s third un-retiring return to Ottawa, on the Mandrake Bledsoe murder (again at Chief Brigid Ertelle’s request), the triple murder on Parliament Hill, which had included the deaths of Kevin’s old friends Judge Johnson Mender and his wife Lucy Morningstar-Mender. The Menders’ adult son, Michael, working security for Chief Ertelle, had been abducted. Ertelle had set Kevin on Michael Mender’s—and the abducting terrorists’—trail. But Kevin could follow only so far before abandoning the case. Michael Mender hadn’t been heard from since.

All those ghosts from home—and smoking again—had spooked Kevin into cancer, so Jaken believed.

Dr. Grant had smiled tightly at Jaken’s theory. "Kevin, despite what the so-called Neo Homeopathists claim, cancer is not a malignant spiritual response. It’s a disease, and disease, like nature, has no morality. That news is only about 200 years old."

On being told of the good doctor’s dismissal, eighty-one-year-old Jaken, nobody’s Neo Homeopathist, had said, Perhaps the young lady would like to make a pilgrimage up Mount Baldy on her knees? And jiggled his crotch. The Mount Baldy Zen Center in California’s San Gabriels was their parent centre.

But that’s just another strike against Jaken, Kevin thought: the old monk never tired of making puerile jokes. On no provocation whatsoever—standing in his potato patch, or halfway through a bottle of Chianti, or apparently meditating—Jaken would reach into the zipperless fly of his loose pants and whip it out. Just like that, like a pale plump tongue too long shut up. Talk of getting the old dick out of retirement!

But Malachai, yes: a serial killer who targets only the owners of Mandrake’s Hall Optimum Population clinics. A serialist whose weapon of choice is the globally outlawed Lucifer, which requires a deep cortical implant that works with a Plazbar in a think-link that almost equally endangers the life of the user. So, daring, willing to risk all. Malachai hadn’t been killing the abortion-providers themselves but their wives—never the husbands of female providers—and always on the twenty-fifth of the month. A serial killer who has established a clearly defined MO and is crossing the country (west-to-east, thank God—away). So Frank Thu continues to report, despite Kevin’s refusals and poor pretense of disinterest.

Most recently this Malachai had killed a young mother of two on that island off South Carolina. She’d been handing her doctor husband a beer at day’s end. Later, calm in shock, he had told the world it was like her eye had turned transparent, then opened a clear tunnel through her head. The alert vid jock had tried to get the doctor to repeat the graphic image. The doctor had only stared.

In Georgia the month before, it had been a pregnant older woman nearing the end of the second trimester, a black woman who’d waited to have her child until her husband had secured their future with the region’s only Mandrake’s Hall Optimum Population franchise.

Macro jock: Sir, you fought for a long time to win Georgia’s first Mandrake’s Hall franchise. Do you think the two events are connected?

The husband had answered as if from increasing distance, and not the question asked: We were so looking forward to our child… And buried his face in his hands. The jock had managed his own face, keeping it dead serious for the camera, somehow washing his eyeballs in tears and even squeezing a fat drop from the corner of his left eye. He was young, he would go far, as he’d likely accepted the implant of a Macro affectapp.

In Foxworth, Mississippi, it had been a childless woman of sixty, wife of the owner of the region’s two Mandrake’s Hall franchises. That had been a sloppy kill, with the husband’s right hand, which had been cupping his wife’s head for a homecoming kiss, also filled with a hole of light.

Macro jock: "We all know what losing a hand must mean to a dedicated surgeon, and we sympathize, sir. Is biotech fine-manipulation now advanced to the point of supplying a feasible substitute hand for a surgeon?"

Wha…

"Or is a hand transplant a non-starter for you? Or is what you do even considered surgery?"

I… I… What?

"Would you consider buying a hand on the black market?"

No, I’m afraid…

I think our viewers have the right to know.

The right…?

The jock had stepped in front of the gurney wheelers. The doctor’s face, as he stared down, looked as lifeless as the shrouded shape of his partner.

Commandingly the jock waved them on. Are you aware, Doctor—of course you are—that Mandrake’s Hall franchisees take an oath not to deal in the buying or selling of EESC? He shot his serious smile at the viewers: That’s ‘Essence of Embryonic Stem Cell’ to you and me, folks. But isn’t it true…Doctor?

I am.

"Pardon? Would you repeat that, please?… And are you aware, Doctor, that EESC has recently overtaken fetal pituitary as the world’s most valuable commodity? And that it’s been suggested that some Mandrake’s Hall clinics are harvesting…"

Malachai: He who serves, as the Macro jocks in tight shot always earnestly ended their reports (then giving their own names and locations).

Ordinarily a run-of-the-mill serialist wouldn’t have occupied so much of the Macro’s attention. But population control had become more serious than war, certainly more newsworthy than Global Patrol’s skirmishes with the terrorist cells operating out of rogue state Haiti. America had to set the example. In just a few months North American pregnancies had increased significantly, with the abortion rate decreasing proportionately. For no sane reason Third World regions were already following suit.

There’ll be hell to pay for this mini population boom, Kevin thought, especially in those still-populous hot spots where we’ve long since sucked dry the planet’s aquifers. But no one really cared about the poorer-than-poor, wherever they are. Perhaps we really do live in what the Macro talking heads called a post-Christian world. I know I do: I’m for Zen and the art of thoughtless retirement.

Kevin Beldon really should not be wasting his time worrying about any of the world’s troubles, especially thinking about this Malachai and his illegal Lucifer. Perhaps Mr. Malachai would manage to off himself, accidentally or otherwise; early—and even recent—experiments with the Lucifer had often backfired, literally, and fried a few brains, annihilating all cortex in a puff of light, and in a couple of instances the whole head (gossiping Frank had sworn Kevin with an entre nous).

Besides, cynicism is an old man’s indulgence, believing the whole show closes with his own final curtain. The young would find their own way, new openings. Cold fusion was again showing promise, and a supply of near-free energy would make desalination cheap as…well, as water used to be! Hydrogen fuel too. Ditto anti-grav. The world’s climate would right itself in time, if lots of time, much more time in any event than he, Kevin Beldon, had remaining to him. Age is just a number, Frank Thu had said defensively, even shyly, when Kevin half-teased him that it was high time to retire fully. Kevin had drawn a snort of assent from his oldest friend with this: Sure, age is age and numbers are numbers. But your ever-increasing numbered age is still inversely proportional to the numbered days you may have left to live.

But yes, the world would have to get along without Detective Kevin Beldon, fully retired. His job now is to think only of himself, and of not being himself for eternity. His Zen priest’s orders.

Also on Jaken’s orders, Kevin has actually been trying to write poems about death. "Poetry, the old pervert had said, again holding up his forefinger. You even know what poetry is, Beldon-san? And Kevin had answered, Sure. Roses are red, your skin is tan. Fuck off, Charlie Chan."

Jaken, more racist than most, could still be heard hooting when Kevin was out of sight.

But obedience was a cardinal rule of the monastery, so Kevin was trying. This day he was having to start over yet again (Jaken had merely glanced at the first efforts before flinging the pale copybook into the weeds bordering his garden and forbidding Kevin’s favoured limerick form), with a new scribbler open on his lap like a pet dove. He’d written

Here is the optimal spot for looking

at Death. Death could never be far enough…

and got stuck. Quick, that’s a poetic word. He should use it…somewhere. He jotted it down on the last page. But Jaken had also insisted that there are no poetic words. But of course there are: wert, thee, ere, anon, lo, etc. Quick.

Something in the Pacific breeze lifted Kevin’s poorly musing head with its white—once red—hair cut to the bone, and blew his thoughts off course again.

… Malachai? Kills on the twenty-fifth of every month? Our boy is entertaining ghosts of unhappy Christmases past. If he’s calling his own shots… Don’t even think about it! Poem poem poem…

The it Kevin did not want to think about was Dr. Ewan Randome, former head psychiatrist at Omphalos, the one-time global philanthropic NGO that had been headquartered in Ottawa. Seven years earlier, Kevin had spoiled Dr. Randome’s cozy set-up there. That had been the Omphalos-Widower case, Detective Beldon’s last official case. Randome, the Widower, the killer of nine women, had likely found sanctuary in rogue state Haiti, his native land. Going from suspicions Chief Brigid Ertelle had let slip, Kevin suspected she had evidence that Randome had been behind the abduction-for-ransom of Michael Mender (bankrupt Haiti was always in need), so likely behind the triple-murder on Parliament Hill itself two years earlier. Dr. Ewan Randome, through powerful post-hypnotic suggestion, had also been behind Cynthia’s, Kevin’s wife’s, apparent suicide. And similarly the cause of son Owen’s death by his own hand. Dr. Ewan Randome was back of everything bad in Kevin Beldon’s life. There was no real reason for Randome’s murderous interference, no reason but evil’s madness. So:

He must not think about Randome—or any of that ancient business. He’d finally turned away from it all two years ago. It had no business anymore with permanently retired Detective Kevin Beldon, nor he with it.

"Don’t think of it as poetry, Jaken had seriously advised in his real voice. You are to speak the plainest, simplest, and most complex truth to yourself about the event we call death. I am not your reader. Your immortal soul is your only reader."

Jaken drank a bottle of contraband Chianti a day. Such a Master (which Kevin refused to call him), such a guru (ditto), could not be the last word on anything. And poetry? The event we call death. Sweet Jesus! That’s some event, that event we call death. … Still, Jaken had him drinking sensibly again, and not smoking. Jaken had somehow settled the raging spirit Kevin had brought back from Ottawa two years earlier. Jaken reminded him of Frank Thu, whom he still loved, as he loved Jaken, which he’d only ever said to himself, of course.

He shut the pale copybook and placed his long bony left hand on its neatly hand-printed label (Jaken’s work): ____ Ways of Looking at Death. The blank was to be filled in on his deathbed with the number of poems he’d written. Jaken’s orders. He closed his eyes and concentrated only on drawing the passable seaside air to the bottom of his larcenous lungs.

After a spell, eyes still closed, he opened the book and trailed fingers down the page. No screen or monitor could ever prompt him like the feel of a real page. Popping his lids he took the silver pen with the black grip. He wrote rapidly, striking words and writing above them, drawing lines to marginal circled phrases, crossing out the new phrases, writing as much on impulse as in thought, continually counting syllables with fingers tapping his thigh, and revising. Then copying out the whole on a clean page.

Controlling his breathing, he pressed the heels of his hands to his temples and read what he’d committed:

1. Here and Death

Here is the optimal spot for looking

at Death. Death could never be far enough,

you think, a nothing forever lurking.

That cannot be, unless you’re young enough.

Soon enough you will be up close with Death;

Soon enough, you, face-to-face, soon enough.

Enough is right. Now, no one in his right mind would call that poetry. Good, a start. Jaken will be… Who cares what Jaken will be! … Jaken would also be pleased with this independence.

He sat back, comfortably lotused after a first year of pain trying, and took in the ocean view. The Pacific was true to its name. If only there were seabirds, some sign of marine life. The Atlantic coast was more of a roaring beast with each passing season. He knew of its bad weather because he’d secretly been surfing the Macro for updates on Malachai…who would be there now. Here, though, the weather was always tolerable-to-good. And here was where he was staying put, spending wisely what time he had left. Doctor’s orders.

He frowned at the sight of the latest recruit, Big Leo (as he’d been dubbed for his towering height, first by fellow acolytes, then picked up by the priests), who’d burst from the garden shed and was striding along, and behind him the awkward Jimmy hurrying to keep up, hands reaching pleadingly. Kevin focused his hearing: "Jaken said we’re not supposed to feed them! Unbeknownst to Jimmy, Big Leo was smiling to himself as he loped ahead saying, A nursing mother needs supplements, then sneered, Jimmy-san."

He will talk to Jaken about Big Leo. There was no official rule covering it (and they had rules covering everything), but the garden shed was understood to be Jaken’s sole preserve. It was stocked with his homemade Chianti. Its shelves were crowded with Skippy Peanut Butter jars half-filled with the peppered pale ashes of generations of monks. Its upper recesses were currently inhabited by a pair of raccoons tucked into the wedge made by rafters and a corner, nesting.

Kevin dropped his gaze to the page: Here is the optimal spot… Optimal or optimum?

He grabbed his pen. After three tries he settled on optimal.

For Kevin’s latest retirement, Chief Brigid Ertelle had fixed it so he was paid a generous retainer for consulting to CalPol. They’d bothered him only a few times. The first, back at the end of January, he’d sent them away smirking at his suspicion that the murder of the abortion provider’s partner just down the coast at Santa Barbara had been not the work of a deranged Christ-X protestor, but a professional kill.

Kevin presented his evidence in a rush: "No Christ-Xer could have got his hands on a Lucifer, let alone operated it without frying his own brains, unless of course he’d been linked to a satellite guide. No, not a Haitian Rogue satellite, this is not Haiti, Haiti has no interest in Optimum Population clinics. It’s likely a Hack II affair, it has all the markings of high-level extortion—that’s why the doctor himself hadn’t been killed. He’s the goose, don’t you see? It was a Mandrake’s Hall Optimum Population clinic, right? Of course it was, are there any independents left? Hadn’t Mandrake’s Hall International just declared its umpteenth quarter of record profits? What did the world expect would happen when one man—the late great Lieutenant-Colonel Dr. Mandrake Bledsoe—was permitted to patent the magic THANA-U gas and license it only to his own franchises?"

Out of breath and feeling his esophagus ache like the beginning of a cold, Kevin had looked around at his CalPol visitors, who barely contained their contempt. The goose? the youngest had said. THANA-U gas? He’d cringed as if he’d smelled bad gas. I’m lost, Mr. Beldon.

Kevin had hoped he was smiling at the young man the way Jaken smiled at his ignorance. Yes, son, THANA-U. You’d have hoped we’d learned something from the last century’s blunder with monopolies on computer operating systems. But no. Mandrake Bledsoe was allowed to patent THANA-U gas—the so-called miracle mist that makes fetuses just disappear!—and then to license it exclusively to his own franchised Optimum Population clinics, city by city, state by state, country by country, right around the time you were encouraging your first beard. The goose and its golden eggs, and Hack II wants in, is my best guess.

The CalPol team had left him without another word, though well within earshot they’d made their views loud and clear. The Great Canadian Detective? Who but a crackpot Christ-X cultist with a black-market Lucifer—busted Haiti would sell anything to anybody—would have missed the target so badly, killing the partner instead of the abortion provider? Hack II’s thing was water racketeering. What the hell has THANA-U gas to do with anything? Nothing, that’s what. Kevin Beldon had been out of the loop too long, gone loopy. Golden goose? He’d have them run off on a wild-goose chase!

The second killing of the wife of a Mandrake’s Hall Optimum Population Clinic owner-practitioner had proved Kevin right. But this one occurred in Arizona, so he’d been left alone. Not CalPol’s territory. Interstate cooperation had deteriorated in the southwest to the point of occasional regional skirmishes over water, using law-enforcement officers as soldiers.

Then the killer had returned to San Francisco and taken out two copycats, so a pro if ever there was one, if unpredictably so. Even before the first Texas kill, where he’d begun leaving markers identifying himself as Malachai, Global Patrol had again visited the Point Conception Zen Center, for the fourth time. Jaken hadn’t uttered the ultimatum, Kevin had: If anyone comes again to badger him, he will personally broadcast Global’s incompetence on the Macro!

So Global Patrol had strong-armed Frank Thu’s employer, Nevada Aqua Secure, into sending Frank to petition Kevin, twice, the second time after the murder of the pregnant wife in Mississippi—with still with no extortion demand ensuing.

Kevin had thought: If it’s not about money or contraband, it’s going to get much worse. But said nothing to Frank.

Frank’s latest email had pretended chumminess, mentioning that he’d recently been home to Ottawa and had talked with Brigid Ertelle, Kevin’s last partner, current chief of Ottawa Police. Then Brigid herself had messaged to arrange a friendly visit with him this very afternoon.

Kevin knew what that visit would be about: more Malachai. Frank should not have involved Brigid. What could Brigid say to bring him onto another serialist case? His life is not a vid cliché! … Clear remission of cancer or not, he was dying still. Like Jaken, he was not going anywhere outside the monastery ever again. Like Jaken, he had a spot picked out for his ashes urn (a Skippy Peanut Butter jar like the rest) in the Point Conception Zen Center mausoleum (Jaken’s old clapboard shed). That was now the optimal spot for Kevin Beldon.

He again looked out his louvred rattan window at the weathered garden shed. An onshore blast of wind shook it, and it withstood the tormentor, as it had been doing for 100 years.

As he watched the back end of the shed, the bottom of a soffit was pushed out like a trapdoor. The snout and masked face of a raccoon appeared, then the plump body hanging upside down. Kevin had witnessed this performance before. Whenever the raccoon returned from a foraging, it would efficiently draw the soffit up after with bandit stealth. They did have such fine intelligent hands, paws rather. But now it ventured in unusual hesitancy towards the corner of the shed, where the heavier join usually made for a smooth descent. Not today—the raccoon fell more than slid down. It always seemed to move clumsily on the ground, to waddle with un-animal gracelessness, but this drop to ground had been radically confused. When it righted itself, it appeared disoriented, even surprised to find itself where it was; and in waddling to the back of the shed it staggered. … Drunk! On Jaken’s homemade wine somehow! This would be a fine comic tale for the old monk. Jaken had named the raccoon Joey and was uncharacteristically possessive about it.

I think it’s a female, Kevin had said, then passed the bottle back and wiped his mouth on his bare forearm. Pregnant, too, maybe delivering at this very moment. I’ve heard noises like escaping air, and recently mewling from the shed. So unless it’s you running low on wine and full of farts…

Jaken had eyed him across the mouth of the bottle: In previous life, Joey kangaroo!

Ever notice how when you’re drinking you ratchet up the Charlie Chan voice?

"In previous life, Jaken great detective like Beldon-san!"

They’d both sputtered.

Jaken dropped the accent: We’ll let nature take its course. But it could be rabid. Better warn the boys.

That reminds me: Big Leo…

Kevin gave his head a small shake, and determined: Even if this Malachai did appear to have turned northwards. Even if Macro rumors have tied him to that outlaw of geopolitics, Haiti. Even if…Randome.

No: not even if. No. Never.

He drew breath deeply through his shark’s-fin of a nose, expanding his abdomen. Held it a moment. Exhaled slowly from the mouth. Again, tamping down those healed lung lesions like time bombs. He concentrated on nothing, nothing but moving air and swelling belly; for a restful spell he thought nothing.

He surprised himself to alertness with the thought of Malachai, like returning to a not wholly unattractive notion. He envisioned a holobanner map of the East Coast, and on it a gigantic shadowy Malachai striding northwards, his Lucifer on his shoulder like the shining weapon of light it was. He felt an urge to chase after, if yet controllable.

Breathe. Breathe and be.

Though it was September twenty-fifth.

Then this old ghost: I’d die for a smoke.

2

The sudden thunk of the Great Breakwater beginning its rise made his heart thump. He didn’t startle otherwise. Looking out on the turbulent Atlantic, he continued twisting his grip on the black guardrail. He’d been doing so for a bad half-hour, steeling himself.