Page 31 of The Murder Inn

“Hey.”

“’Sup.”

“What’s the purpose of your visit to Canada tonight?”

“Just dumping a bunch of construction material.” Fullersniffed as he dragged his nose across the back of his hand. “We’ll be back through again in a couple of hours.”

“Why do the job in America and dump the materials in Canada?” the officer asked. “That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?”

An itch worked its way up Driver’s spine. He didn’t like nosy customs officers. He washed his hands and listened to Fuller and Chiat describing the long day they’d had, the early start in the morning on a new job, the instructions from their overbearing boss.

Driver could see the officer’s flashlight picking its way around the cabin of the truck. Driver’s back teeth locked together, tension balling in his chest.

“We’re dumping asbestos,” Chiat said. “Nastiest shit on earth. It’s basically cancer in a bag. Landfills get paid by the government to dispose of it. This place we’re goin’ to near Sutton cut a deal, I guess.”

Driver watched the screen as the silence ticked by. He said a silent prayer that the whole notion of why the Canadian government would pay one of their own landfill operators to take US-born asbestos seemed too complicated for the kind of dunderhead who spent all day looking for smuggled fruit and vegetables at a customs checkpoint. For months, Driver’s guys had been crossing back and forth over the border without being glanced at twice. Now this.

“It’s a bit late in the day to be dumping stuff, isn’t it? Couldn’t it wait until morning?”

Don’t ask to take a look,Driver prayed. If this guy decided he wanted to look in the back of the truck, he’d find enough fentanyl to kill an army of elephants.

“Can I take a look?” the guy said.

Driver stabbed the cutting board with his carving knife.

“Go ahead.” Fuller shrugged, as Driver watched on his phone. “It’s your funeral.”

More silence. The officer’s flashlight beam, which had settled on the dashboard, didn’t move.

“OK. You can go on through,” the officer said finally. “Take your ‘cancer in a bag’ with you.”

Driver exhaled in relief. Chiat and Fuller nodded and waved as they drove on through the checkpoint. Driver tugged the tip of the knife from the cutting board and set it aside. After a few moments, the men in the truck looked at each other and started laughing.

“What are you two idiots laughing about?” Driver asked. “You just stared down twenty years in prison.”

“Yeah, right.” Chiat lounged back in his seat. “You wouldn’t let us get all the way to prison, boss.”

“You’d have us snuffed in the first holding cell we ever got to,” Fuller said.

“That’s the smartest thing I’ve heard you two say all day,” Driver said as he started arranging the chunks of potato on a paper-lined tray. “Text me when you’re back through the border.”

Driver hung up. Darkness had fallen outside. His thoughts about getting a border-patrol officer on his payroll competed with the Marris puzzle. He tried to remember if Mark Bulger had a son. If so, perhaps the son had a hand in all this. Or maybe some cop friend of the old man. Driver was so distracted by his problems, he didn’t see the distant light at the end of his driveway that appeared and then immediately snapped out as the cabin light of a car went on and off.

Then the window in front of him exploded.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

DRIVER CURLED INTO a ball on the floor of his kitchen, listening to the sounds around him. Gas hissing out of the refrigerator at his back, which had been struck by the bullet that came through the window. Stray pieces of glass tinkling down from the upper edge of the window onto the countertop. Crickets and night forest sounds, suddenly louder now than they had been through the glass.

Most of what Driver felt in those first few moments was pure confusion, rather than rage. It didn’t compute in Driver’s brain that the gunshot had been deliberate. No one in their right mind would attack him in his own home. Not anybody from around here, anyway. Not after his murderous display upon arrival, and the whispers of his reputation that had almost certainly followed it. He decided quickly that the shot must have been an accident, a stray from a hunter.

Then another shot blasted out a window in the next room.

The cell phone on the countertop began to ring, breaking him out of his stupor and yanking the fury inside him up out of its slumber.

He crouched, slipped a hand over the counter, and grabbed his phone. The name on the screen sent another shot of adrenaline through his bloodstream.

Marris.

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