He advances, gently clouts the moneybelt from under the pillow. It’s thick with notes-a quick riffle hints at close to fifty Ks, an unexpected bonanza. Figuring this is dirty money and its loss may not be reported, Faloon yields to temptation and takes half. He replaces the belt and floats out, down the hall, down the stairs, out the back door into the rain.
And just in time. Coming up the walk is Coolidge, huddled into a slicker. Faloon crouches behind a garbage bin. When he peeks around it, the guy is just standing there, swaying a little, like he’s drunk. Then he makes his way to the front door.
Faloon waits thirty seconds, then slips away with the night’s profits, thirty-one big ones in a zip-lock bag. The whole operation has taken half an hour, and at 2 a.m. he is on the winding path down from the Breakers Inn. The village is dark except for street lamps and the Marine Sciences Centre across the inlet. It’s raining hard, but that’s not a particularly rare phenomenon on these great Pacific shores.
There’s a fine view from here in the day, you can see the way the bay opens up to Barkley Sound, and the Deer Islands, and the green humps of hills rolling down into the endless sea, and even now there’s enough ambient light so the Owl can make out the merging misty shapes, the promontories that anchor the beaches, the white-flecked breakers.
Partway down, he detours fifty yards into the bush and stashes his profits in a hole beneath the root of a cedar tree that he’d hollowed out for this contingency. After covering the opening with rocks and dirt and leaves, he returns to the path.
The way you get from the Breakers to the Nitinat Lodge is by a forested trail, then you branch to the left where the Brady Beach sign shows under a street lamp. And quickly you come upon a cozy log building with four small rooms and a couple of cabins that leak. This property is about the first thing the Owl ever paid for. Going straight has turned out to be a disaster.
He makes for the back door of his darkened building, then pauses, wondering if Eve Winters, the jazz aficionada, enjoyed herself at the Bam Pub tonight. Maybe he should stroll down to Cotters’ Cottage and ask her about that. Just a thought.
2
The Owl rises at nine, weary but okay, and decides to stroll down to the Clayoquot Cafe for a cappuccino, this being a Saturday routine. The rain has settled to a soft mist, and fog shrouds the slopes of hemlock and cedar, strands of it drifting among the warehouses and docks across the way in East Bam, settling on the saltchuck, where fishing boats work their way out of the inlet.
No one’s around the landing pier, so he tosses the plastic gloves into the water, weighted with the duplicate key and some rocks. From there it’s a two-minute walk to the canopied deck of the Clayoquot. A tree-huggers’ coffee bar, with rustic willow-wand chairs, tables outside with umbrellas.
Usually he meets a few friends here, hippies, Greenpeaceniks, a community that for some reason has latched onto the Owl, finding him droll. One such person, who helps with whale-watching tours, is Bill Links, a stringy ponytailed guy, and he asks if Faloon has heard about the robbery. “Someone at the Breakers had forty grand lifted from his moneybelt last night.”
The Owl tries not to show emotion, but is chagrined that his night’s work has so quickly become the day’s news. He raises the coffee mug to his lips, feels the hot liquid slide down his throat, wipes the foam from his lips. Maybe he should have realized a guy who sleeps with his moneybelt checks it every morning. Forty grand? The developer wildly exaggerated his loss.
The law is already here from Alberni-Bill Links points to the RCMP boat moored at the coast guard dock. The Owl expresses eager interest in the matter, and Links says he was talking to Mrs. Galloway, who rang the bulls after a firestorm of complaints from her peeved guests-they seemed to think management was to blame, someone had to have a key.
They speculate for a while it was an inside job, maybe the new waiter, maybe the girl who cleans for them. Bill Links doesn’t know the Owl is a retired outlaw, but soon the whole town will know, because Sergeant Jasper Flynn knows.
Though rankled by the burden of hassles to come, he’ll brazen it out-there’s nothing to hang on him but the coincidence of having dined at the Breakers. But Jasper Flynn, figuring nothing will stick, might want to act out that roadkill scenario. At best, Faloon would be ridden out of town, at worst ridden over, with permanent tire marks on his ass.
As he’s settling his mind to that dire prospect, he observes a commotion racing up the boardwalk in the form of Meredith Broadfeather, a militant of the Huu-ay-aht Nation, her hair flying, her arms waving, and she is yelling, and matters turn monumentally serious as Faloon finally makes her words out: “There’s been a murder at Brady Beach!”
Faloon’s heart stalls, then starts pounding, as Meredith pulls up puffing, catching her breath. Now she is supposed to yell, “April Fool!” but she doesn’t, she shouts a name: Eve Winters, a doctor from Vancouver. “I saw her,” she says, trembling-she is in almost as bad a state as Faloon, except that he’s hiding it. Raped and murdered, Meredith says in a shocked voice.
A strange feeling comes over him, partly anguish, partly a premonition of doom, but also something heavy and confusing. He listens with no show of emotion to the tale told by Meredith Broadfeather.
She saw Jasper Flynn and two other cops heading by foot down the Brady Beach Road, and out of curiosity went with them to Cotters’ Cottage. She looked through the bedroom window before they could stop her-Eve Winters’s naked body was on a bed, and it looked like something white was stuffed in her mouth, it might have been her panties. The cops suspect the same guy who ripped off those Americans. Sergeant Jasper Flynn has summoned Forensics from Alberni, by float plane, and more cops are arriving by road.
The Owl does his magic disappearing act, takes the wooden staircase up to the back street, to his lodge, trying not to seem in a hurry. He’s not sure what he’ll do, he’s in a fog of anxiety.
His four rental units are on the main floor, and Faloon keeps the upper storey to himself, his bedroom and a kind of den and his own bath. He stares at his reflection in the mirror above the sink, and for a moment isn’t sure what he’s looking at-this can’t be him, the former seventh-best jewel thief in the world, it’s someone else. He thinks about posing as French, but he hasn’t got good papers. He decides on Gertrude. He’ll be a Dutch tourist.
He shaves off his moustache and goes over his face once again, then hauls out the trunk with his favourite old getups. He weeds through the women’s outfits-dresses, skirts, blouses, flared jeans, hairpieces, bras with felt padding, and he is having trouble deciding despite the urgency. He was arrested in a dress once, after a heist in Barcelona, so he can only pray these local bulls are not as sharp-eyed. He opts for the outdoors look, the jeans with the padding around the hips and bottom, a denim shirt, an orange scarf for flair.
He paints his lips, combs out the brunette wig with the bangs and sticks it on, then fills a backpack with food from the fridge. Frazzled, he almost forgets the passport, Gertrude Heeredam from The Hague. Other items are stuck in the pages, a driver’s licence, a health card, quality material crafted by Nellie Chin at her backdoor shop in Vancouver’s Chinatown.
He transfers money from his wallet to the pack, half a yard and change. He finds Dr. Winters’s card she gave him last night, rips it, flushes it. He pulls on a pair of boots that he hardly ever wears, then peers out the window, sees no one, and heads out, taking the staircase down, not even thinking about trying to collect the stashed loot.