“What else did you find?” he asks Muriel.
“Well, both planes belonged to Delta Air Lines, the one on the runway had arrived from Miami twenty minutes before, and the other was coming from Lincoln, Nebraska.”
The word Lincoln echoes in the reporter’s mind. He’d said the name of this street on the air a few minutes ago... And what had Létourneau told him earlier? I’ve been listening to you for a year, Hugues, I can predict every piece of advice you give...
In his last update, he’d told drivers to take Lincoln. Suddenly he understands: Létourneau hadn’t wanted him to feel responsible for his suicide, but for something much worse. The reporter swallows the scream that rises in his throat and spits into the cell phone: “Tell Valérie to put me back on the air, right away!”
“Oh come on, not again! You pulled this on us earlier and it wasn’t even urgent!”
“Damnit, Muriel, it’s...” But what’s the point? Létourneau is dead, he can’t deactivate the bomb. He’d killed himself before the reporter could deliver his last update, the one that would’ve warned people of the explosion. He’d killed himself because Hugues was sure he’d succeeded.
If you say you succeeded, then it’s all over.
He lets out a gasp so disturbing that Muriel starts to ask, “Hugues, are you...”
The sound of the explosion is distant, but loud enough to drown out the voice of the fact checker. Hugues’s cell phone slips out of his hand and flies to the back of the vehicle; the earth shakes for a moment as he watches the hysteria rising around him. And he sees, from two hundred meters away, the immense black cloud rising and spreading across the sky, all the way to Rue Sherbrooke, toward him, filling his nostrils, invading his soul, where it will remain for as long as he lives.
Such a Pretty Little Girl
by Geneviève Lefebvre
Translated from French by Katie Shireen Assef
Ville-Marie
The Girl
The kid had been easy.
The heavy door of the former convent creaked open at dusk. Amid the swarm of novice ballerinas rushing down the stone steps, the little one emerged, bareheaded, coat unbuttoned, into the biting February wind.
Beautiful like her mother, she was. Vain like her mother too. A doll who would rather freeze to death than pull a stocking cap over her silky blond bun. How stupid they were, little girls, always wanting to please, to entertain, begging to be watched. Didn’t they know they were headed for a massacre? That in a few short years they’d end up on the scrap heap?
The blond child scanned the crowd of silicone-breasted mothers and exhausted Filipina nannies, and seeing the hand that waved at her, she ran cheerfully toward it. All that was left was to pluck her like a little spring crocus.
“Marisa’s not coming to get me today?”
No, not Marisa. Marisa had been neutralized with vermouth and a handful of sleeping pills — and out went the nanny. It had sufficed to let the pills dissolve in the bottle she nipped at all day; Marisa had slumped in her chair like a wheel of Camembert left out in the heat. When she woke up — if she woke up — she’d be out of a job. Too bad. What mattered was to get everything done before the parents reported the girl’s disappearance.
“Marisa’s busy with your brother.”
An incredulous look from the girl. “My brother’s at his friend’s house.”
“Your brother threw one of his tantrums. Marisa had to go pick him up.”
Impromptu lies were always the best.
“What a moron,” the kid retorted, jumping at the chance to insult the brat who plagued her seven-year-old existence. She had a viper’s tongue, which she got from her father. She knew how to smile in your face and stab you in the back. Cute as she was, her shitty genetic baggage was showing.
The door of the SUV slid open and the kid held out her arms, letting herself be pulled in, already comforted by the warm breath of the machine. Ten minutes later she was asleep, her frail body wiped out by the same cocktail as her nanny. When she woke up the next morning, it would be easy to distract her until the plan was fully executed. A plan whose success hinged on one simple fact: there was no escape route.
Géraldine
Géraldine Mukasonga wakes in the freezing dawn to the sound of her phone ringing. A moment later, David Catelli’s voice is in her ear.
“Gérald, it’s Dave. I’m coming to get you. We have a body.”
No hello or how are you — David didn’t bother with niceties. They’d catch up later, in the Dodge, if there was time between the briefing and the crime scene.
Géraldine takes a shower and dabs her neck with a few drops of a Serge Lutens perfume, which she wears as a courtesy to offset the smell of death. She pulls a merino wool sweater on over her head, enveloping her soft skin in a cocoon of warmth. She fastens her duty belt around her waist, reassured by the weight of the Glock against her hip, and turns on the alarm system that now protects only her bed, coffeemaker, and books. Her apartment has been bare since the breakup, as unsettling as a blank page when no words will come.
Anne-Sophie had left with all she could fit into her truck, everything down to the bottle opener. Nothing remained of their untimely love affair, only an unfortunate truth: Géraldine’s promotion to sergeant detective had gotten the better of their relationship. It wasn’t just men who struggled with a woman’s independence.
Géraldine rushes down the stairs and climbs into David’s Dodge Caravan with a quick grunt of relief, as if coming home at the end of an exhausting workday. Putting the van in gear, David casts a sidelong glance at her.
“That bad?” she asks.
“That bad.”
He doesn’t ask her about the breakup. Not yet. For the thousandth time, David tries to tell himself that he’s used to her beauty, to the glow of her skin, the delicate curve of her neck, the fluidity of her movements. But when Géraldine smiles at him, he wants to die.
“What do we have on our hands this morning?”
“A body full of bullets, found in a restaurant parking lot on Rue Ontario.”
“Who called it in?”
“A couple of swimmers training at the pool nearby, stopped at the Palace for lunch.”
“The Palace?”
“It’s the name of the restaurant.”
Géraldine glances at her watch. The truck’s dirty windows block out the already weak light of dawn struggling through clouds.
“Hell of a time for a swim,” she says.
Yes, Géraldine, people are crazy. They wear swimsuits in the dead of winter, and they have passionate feelings for inaccessible, forbidden women. If one day I had nothing left to lose and I stopped being afraid of hurting innocent people, I’d tell you what I feel when I see the light reflected in your dark-brown eyes. That would be a day of darkness, a day of despair.
David steps on the accelerator, defying the traffic light that changes to burnt orange.
Krazynski
It’s barely daylight and the first one, that dirty pig, has already been wiped off the map, executed point-blank in a parking lot. Who’d have thought that revenge could be so easy?
Raymonde Krazynski puts up more of a fight. As soon as the barrel of the gun presses into her soft, fat belly, she starts running at an astonishing speed for a bowlegged Ukrainian journalist. Her breath is ragged from emphysema, and she flails about like a shrew, screaming and stumbling over an orange tabby cat. Krazynski tries to crawl away, desperately grasping at the latch of the glass door that opens into the garden. She wants to live.