The Darkly Stewart Mysteries: The Woman Who Tasted Death Read online

  The problem was that the guys didn’t want the girls seeing them throw the coins into the fountain. Dmitri, being the clever Greek he was, placed the women’s toilets inside the club, and the men’s in the foyer. The coat check girls were never short of entertainment, though they were also the ones who had to dredge out the collection well each night, which supposedly went to Dmitri’s son’s college fund. Dmitri’s wife had met her husband while working as one of his coat check girls.

  Leaving the foyer, the guest had a choice of entering two large rooms. One was known as The Orgy. The floor was covered in wide, backless couches overflowing with plush, multicolored cushions. The walls were painted with Roman aristocrats depicted indulging in numerous sins.

  The other room was the Temple of Venus. Fake torches lined the textured foam stone walls, and in the center of the room, there was the large statue of the immodest Goddess Venus emerging from an oyster shell. Small granite-top stools were dotted around the room for the ladies to sit on while the men did what they were there to do: buy the drinks and harass Darkly’s alter ego.

  Once six o’clock rolled around, Juan wheeled in the dolly full of water bottles. There were three bartenders in the Temple: Darkly, Chad, and Samantha, Darkly’s blonde double.

  Juan dropped eight cases of water at each one of the bars. Darkly pulled out two-hundred and twenty bucks from her pocket and handed it to the cheery Mexican. She always gave him twenty bucks extra. He was the only genuine person who stepped foot in the place. He reminded her that none of this was real. She even envied him. He was happy just to live in a safe city and enjoy a little job security.

  The Senate was not a pub. People did not come here to drink and chat. They came here to dance and to pick out a partner for the night. The first thing they did before getting out of their cars, was inhale or swallow something illegal. The girls would order one cosmo, the fellas, a crown and coke, and then it was water for the rest of the night.

  That’s not why Darkly was here. Her superiors couldn’t care less about youthful excess and ecstasy. What did keep them up at night was the disappearance of five women in under a year, all of whom were last seen at The Senate. Darkly was assigned to determine if The Senate was the headquarters of a trafficking ring, and if so, to shut it down.

  The deal with the water was simple. The bartenders paid for their own bottles, then charged whatever they wanted to the customers. Dmitri took home half the take, the rest went to the staff. This was the busiest night of the week, and the 905’ers, those souls unfortunate enough to live in the area code beyond sight of the phallic CN Tower, would be out in droves and eager to impress their dates.

  “Five a bottle?” Chad yelled out.

  Darkly and Samantha gave Chad the thumbs up. They could get that much on a Friday night. With sales and tips, Darkly should clear as much as $800. That was most of her rent. And the RCMP let her keep it. She referred to it as her hazard pay.

  Among the 905’ers, were the Italian men in their tailored black slacks and white shirts, as well as too much expensive cologne. Their girlfriends wore black with red accents, and always two sizes too small for their body type. Together, the couples looked like they were all attending the same convention. None of them ever seemed to notice this fact.

  The Russians, still stigmatized by the label of communism, had to wear the most noticeably-branded Western clothing they could find. Everything --from their running shoes, to their jeans, to their t-shirts and sunglasses-- displayed large shiny initials, and you could bet they weren’t knock-offs. The combination of so many separate items of ostentatious clothing reminded Darkly of old SNL sketches about “wild and crazy guys.”

  Finally, there were the Asians. They wore the latest in hip-hop casual wear, with emphasis on the shoes, ball caps, and gold chains. They traveled in large groups that Darkly and the other bartenders referred to as “triads.”

  Thanks to these cooks, dishwashers, secretaries, insurance brokers, make-up counter girls, waiters, and nurses, a bartender only had to work two to three nights a week to make a decent living.

  It was just as the doors opened at 8pm on a Friday night, and the first group of date-less girls walked into the Temple, hours before any man they’d crave would show up, that Darkly received the text from her partner.

  Lawrence was Filipino and worked The Senate crowd from the other side of the bar.

  Darkly looked down at her beeping phone and opened her inbox. I’m in.

  Lawrence was in his early thirties, but looked in his twenties. With years more undercover experience, he called the shots on this operation. He was responsible for Darkly’s well-being.

  Weeks before Darkly found her way onto the club staff, Lawrence was spending a night a week at The Senate. He chatted up other clubbers until a group accepted him as one of their extended family. To the bouncers and staff, he was indistinguishable from the other triad members. He’d have been pretty crappy at his job if he wasn’t. But, Darkly had been an employee now for over a month, and still they were no closer to presenting a warrant.

  At three in the morning, after she’d closed down her section of the bar, she would walk alone along the quay, presenting herself as easy prey, confident in her own self-defense training, Lawrence’s close proximity, and the lipstick-size canister of bear spray Darkly kept strapped to her thigh. No one had considered her appetizing yet.

  It was ten at night, during the busiest point of the evening, when the girl walked in. Teased blond hair, pretty, but a face aged by years of contempt, and the kind of lips that were either set in a scowl or the occasional forced smile. Her clothes were outdated and a mishmash of several decades: her leather pants were out of the eighties, her ripped t-shirt from the 90’s, and the scarf around her neck looked like a prop from a 1970’s production of Grease.

  “You are a mess, girl,” Darkly said under her breath.

  Marielle scanned the crowd. She spotted a group of young men huddled in a corner. They were the typical university freshmen who hadn’t yet outgrown their awkward high school years. Marielle walked right up to the shortest of the three and smiled.

  “Buy me a drink?” she asked rather forcefully.

  “Sure.”

  Shorty separated himself from his herd. His stutter exposed his lack of confidence.

  “I’m- I’m Tom.”

  “Marielle.”

  They made their way to the bar, as they were supposed to.

  Tom looked downright virginal and out of his depth. Darkly had seen it before and knew exactly how this would go down. Marielle’s boyfriend probably cheated on her, and now she’s come out hunting for revenge sex. Tom will fall madly in-love, but in the morning, it will feel like a huge mistake for Marielle. Oh well, it was the kind of education Tom went to university to receive.

  “What do you like to drink?” Tom asked, pulling out his wallet.

  “Whatever you’re having,” Marielle replied.

  Tom ordered two Bud Lights from Darkly and disappeared into a corner with Marielle.

  The rest of the night went smoothly despite a couple of the usual incidents where someone got too high and threw up on the floor. But, as the crowd thinned out, Lawrence winked at Darkly and left The Senate to take up his position outside by the quay. An hour from now, he’d keep pace with a streetcar that wound its way alongside the curve of the lakefront until reaching Darkly’s home.

  Darkly counted her money, handed Dmitri’s cut to one of the bouncers, and made her way to the toilets. It had been a hot night, one of the hottest of the summer. Darkly wet some paper towels and patted herself down with cold water, wiping away the make-up that covered the blue spider veins in that shallow valley between her breasts.

  It was then she heard the heavy breathing behind her. The breathing quickly evolved into the sound of a man moaning and climaxing. Darkly banged on the toilet stall.

  “Do it in y
our car, for Christ’s sake. It’s time to go home.”

  “Sorry.”

  She recognized the voice that was accompanied by the banging around that getting dressed involves in tight quarters. Tom unlocked the stall and rushed past Darkly and out the women’s room.

  Marielle and Darkly faced off.

  Darkly was about to tell the other girl to grow some self-respect, but was stopped dead in her tracks by a sight she never would have imagined she’d see on any body but her own. Marielle’s scarf lay on the ground in front of the toilet. She pulled her t-shirt down over her breasts, and pulled her hair free. There on her body was the same pattern of blue spider veins that Darkly had been marked with so long ago. There was no pendant.

  Marielle also recognized the same veins on Darkly. Her eyes expressed confusion for a moment, analyzing from a distance the necklace Darkly wore. Then her eyes turned blatantly hostile.

  Darkly broke the silence with, “Who are you?”

  Marielle responded with a hard punch to Darkly’s gut, taking her by surprise and knocking her backwards into the sink, completely winded.

  As Marielle raced out the door of the toilets, Darkly caught her breath and chastised herself for letting her guard down. In pursuit, she hightailed it out of the toilets and through the club entrance into the parking lot. The last of the clubbers were piling into designated drivers’ vehicles. Tom and Marielle were nowhere to be seen.

  Darkly pulled out her phone to text Lawrence.

  Something’s happened. Heading your way.

  She didn’t send it. How was she supposed to explain what happened? What would it even mean to say she’d been punched in the gut by a girl with the same identical birthmark as her? This was a missing persons’ investigation, not an episode of The X-Files.

  Lawrence had first met Darkly during her training. The recruits were required to take on an experienced officer in hand-to-hand combat. Most of the male officers went easy on the female recruits. Not Lawrence. Darkly was sore for a week, and she thanked Lawrence for it. He followed her career from that point on and recruited her to his division at the first opportunity.

  Darkly put her phone away and began making her way to the quay.

  An old ferry permanently docked at the quay had been converted into a fish restaurant. The fact it could no longer move under its own engines earned it a place on the tourist maps. The RCMP had alerted the owner to this operation and had a key to the eyesore. This late at night, all the staff were long home, but Lawrence, his car stashed behind a nearby liquor store, stood in the wheel house, binoculars glued to his face, watching Darkly’s every step.

  Darkly first spotted the van out of the corner of her eye. It was a white, nondescript delivery van, with no company markings. The driver drove at a steady pace and quickly passed Darkly. At the next traffic light, she watched the van make a U-turn and drive back towards her. Talk about bad timing.

  She was under two hundred yards from the ferry, when she saw the wheel house door swing open and Lawrence make his way down the gangplank to the dock. The van picked up speed and skidded to a stop, blocking Darkly from her route to the quay.

  The man who jumped out of the passenger side was big. A lot bigger than Darkly. But she had used that size difference to her benefit before. Once she got him on his back, getting up wouldn’t be so easy.

  He was on her fast. Surprisingly, his size didn’t inhibit his speed. Darkly lifted the bear spray in the palm of her hand to firing position, and the lug knocked it flying. Darkly ducked the grab that followed and slid her foot under her assailant’s left leg. He was immovable, like a mountain. Darkly steadied herself into a defensive position. The man smiled through a bushy goatee beard and lunged. She successfully dodged and retaliated with a slam of the palm of her hand into the man’s nose. He grunted, but didn’t move.

  Suddenly, he charged like a linebacker. As Darkly side-stepped, he countered, forcing her to back up into the arms of what she could only guess was the driver. When those arms lifted her off the ground and tossed her to the side, Darkly saw it was Marielle.

  Were they a team? She looked at the van, where the driver’s confused reflection in the side mirror matched his partner’s. Darkly guessed not. Marielle was clearly a stranger to them both. She crouched down and circled the big man, as he chuckled. Was she trying to save Darkly? She felt like the trophy at a prize fight.

  With the agility of an animal, Marielle now charged her challenger, grabbed hold of his right hand, and used it to pull herself quickly onto his back. She slammed both of her open palms against the man’s ears, and he screamed out in pain. She then bit into one of his ears. He collapsed to his knees.

  The driver leapt out of the van, and at that moment, Marielle pulled a knife from her back and speedily slit the mountain of a man’s lifeline. She turned to the driver, blood dripping from her mouth and knife. He scampered back into the idling van, locked the door, and put it into drive.

  As the van sped off, Darkly got to her feet and approached the man she had been waiting to capture for months. She wasn’t sure how much use he would be to her dead. His last breaths were a gurgle of air and blood. What the hell just happened?

  Lawrence was still fifty yards away, when Marielle lowered her head and caught Darkly’s stare in her own. She approached Darkly slowly. The blood dripped down Marielle’s chin and found its way into her cleavage, racing the blue lines of the spider veins. A few inches from Darkly, she stopped, bizarrely sniffing the air in front of Darkly. Her gaze then fell to Darkly’s pendant.

  With hesitant fingers, she reached out to within a couple millimetres of the silver necklace. She brushed it with her fingertips. It was like a jolt from an electric socket.

  Marielle leapt back, and hugged her hand. She sucked on her fingers, as if soothing a burn. Seconds later, she leveled her gaze on Darkly again and whispered, “Heretic.” She then raised her knife into the air, ready to stab down into Darkly’s breast, and screamed.

  Darkly had not tasted death on this one earlier in the night, but she knew that was her intent. A shot rang out, and Marielle was thrown back onto the ground, dead.

  Darkly looked behind her. Lawrence stood twenty yards away, his gun raised in the kill position. It was over. Or so Darkly thought.

  The driver of the van had not been far away. She heard him gun the engine and watched helpless as he barreled down on her and Lawrence. Of course, he was coming back for the other man’s body. The body would lead them right to him.

  Lawrence caught up with Darkly, and they both now ran for their lives, with the van gaining ground behind them.

  “Keep running,” Lawrence yelled at Darkly. “That’s an order.”

  Lawrence stopped, turned, and began firing into the cab’s windshield, as Darkly veered off to the right, racing back to the relative safety of The Senate. Seconds before the van was on him, one of Lawrence’s bullets found its target. Blood rained down inside the van, as the front grill struck Darkly’s partner full on. Running over Lawrence’s broken body, the lifeless driver of the van collapsed onto the wheel, involuntarily turning the vehicle towards the quay.

  Darkly stopped running, and looked back. To her horror, Lawrence was in the fetal position on the ground, not moving. She ran faster than she ever had in her life. She kneeled and turned Lawrence onto his back. He was still gripping his gun.

  She gently lifted his head into her arms and looked into his eyes.

  “You’re not alone,” she told him.

  She repeated this phrase over and over, until she saw the light in his eyes go dull. She pulled Lawrence into her, holding him as tightly as she could, then looked up at the moon hovering above them both. The tears she wept for Lawrence had been pent up inside her for a lifetime.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was routine procedure. Darkly was required to be examined by a physician, and it was a good thing, too. Des
pite thinking she had come through last night’s bloodbath scathed only in the mind, she had, in fact, suffered a couple of bruised ribs. A little rest, some painkillers, and no heavy lifting were what the doctor prescribed.

  That was nothing compared to what was coming. She’d be debriefed, and then ordered to take a holiday with pay. Your partner’s dead, and you’re told to go on vacation, for Christ’s sake, where you can brood for hours over what you could have done differently. The system didn’t make any sense.

  Darkly sat on the hospital bed, while her mother sat in a chair to her left, occasionally reaching out for Darkly’s hand, squeezing it and smiling without saying anything. Her dad sat at the end of the bed, watching the television.

  The news showed the white van that ran Lawrence down being pulled out of Lake Ontario. Water poured out of the windows, and the cameraman gave his audience just a glimpse of a face resting against the steering wheel, before a plain-clothes officer walked into shot and blocked the view.

  “Jesus wept, William. Turn it off.”

  Darkly’s father did as his wife said, but gave his daughter a knowing look. He knew she would have preferred it left on.

  “You’ll be told to take some time off.”

  “I know.”

  Her mother reached over and squeezed Darkly’s hand again. “Oh, you could come visit your father and me. Wouldn’t you like that, darling?”

  “Maybe she wants to be alone, Elizabeth.”

  “There’s a guest room. She can close the door if she wants to be alone.”

  This got Elizabeth out of her chair, hovering over her daughter.

  “If the door’s shut, I know not to bother you. I just think you should have someone to talk to. Close by.” Before he could reply for Darkly, Elizabeth cut her husband off. “That’s all I’m going to say about it.”

  “I’ll think about it.” Darkly tried to sound enthusiastic for her mother’s sake.

  At that moment, the man who Darkly and Lawrence received their orders from, Sergeant Vincetti, knocked and entered the room. He wore his dress red uniform and carried his Stetson hat. His longer than regulation hair indicated a general distrust of the rules born out of many years of undercover duties well before Darkly’s time.