The Devil's Dust by C.B. Forrest Read Free Book Online Page A

his silence.
    The warmth of the sun through the window feels good now, in the dead of winter, but at the height of summer the top floor of the old house will be stifling. McKelvey wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and puts the pill bottle in the medicine chest above the sink. His razor is in there, too, untouched for the third day now. The stubble is beginning to itch, especially at night with his face pressed against the pillow, but laziness wins out over discomfort. Seems to be a theme in his life these days. But it wasn’t always this way; for once he had a purpose, and drive. He can’t help but admit the waning of his energy, the slowing of that internal propeller. Is this getting old, he wonders, or is it giving up?
    It is as though a parallel universe opened up the day he left the force, stumbling inside an upside-down place where time no longer had meaning. He had given himself a period of holiday from total responsibility after so many years of increasing stress on the streets of the city. The murder of his son at the hands of bikers and a crooked Drug Squad cop, Raj Balani. The shootout with the Montreal biker, Pierre Duguay. The kidnapping of his friend Tim Fielding. And within it all, through those darkest of days, his wife gave up on them and moved to the west coast. He discovered he was a grandfather. And he also discovered he had cancer. Some people clawed their way through a tough year; McKelvey felt as though he had eaten the shit of an entire decade. It was just getting too hard to swallow.
    He often wakes in the early morning from a dream of the shootings in the old Canada Malting Company factory on the shore of Lake Ontario. The echo of the gunshots, the sounds of wounded and dying men. He shivers in the darkness, alone and confused. This weight, this guilt he carries. McKelvey came through the investigations without drawing any formal charges. There was talk of obstruction of justice, but he kept his mouth shut and there was little to go on. He knew the truth, and those who knew it with him were dead. While McKelvey accepted his role in the conclusion of events, he did not feel responsible for Detective Leyden’s death per se. That trigger had been pulled by someone else, a madman, and McKelvey had done his best to keep everyone — Hattie included — out of the line of fire. In the end, Tim Fielding had been found, he had been saved. Whether it was worth the cost was a question beyond McKelvey’s salary grade. What was done was done.
    In those days and weeks following the kidnapping and all that it brought to his life, McKelvey came to understand and appreciate the depth of his losses. His wife, Caroline, was still living in Vancouver, and her plans to return to Ontario seemed now to be on hold in light of the violent events of that day at the Toronto harbourfront. She admitted in one of their long and rambling telephone conversations that his actions seemed desperate , though she stopped short of deeming them either homicidal or suicidal. And perhaps, McKelvey believed, she was only now accepting the truth of this man she had loved and the things of which he was capable — the violence that rested there just beneath the stillness. Jessie, his son’s former girlfriend and the mother of his grandchild, had taken the little girl back to Manitoulin Island, where Jessie was right now opening a hair and beauty salon in the quaint harbour town of Little Current. Detective Mary-Ann Hattie was entirely through with him, having passed her exams to make Homicide on the country’s largest and busiest municipal police force. Tim Fielding was sleeping on the floor of a hut in some remote northern Chinese village, teaching English to farm kids and sending irregular emails that said little in their brevity, though he claimed to be at peace, finally at peace. Exactly as expected, perhaps even precisely as planned, McKelvey was finally and completely alone. He had lost everything