And there was the matter of Bobby’s business. Botero Food Service Supplies was a self-evidently successful enterprise: goods flowed from the warehouse in a reliable stream and invoices were paid promptly and in full. But from her position at the account desk it seemed to Mouse that something was—well, off.
“Because it isn’t entirely a legitimate business,” Trev explained as I shrugged into a jacket and borrowed the keys to Lisa’s five-year-old Accord. “Botero uses it to launder money for some local guys with a trade in stolen vehicles and connections to the ’Ndrangheta—the Calabrian Mafia.”
“Mouse figured this out?”
“Mouse noticed some irregularities in the invoices, but she found solid evidence in Botero’s desk one afternoon when he was out talking to a corporate buyer. And there’s more to it than that.”
This was what I learned on the way from the back door to the carriage-house garage where Lisa’s Accord and Loretta’s ancient Volvo brooded together in wintry silence:
Mouse had asked for a divorce. Bobby refused her request and threatened her with a beating or worse if she so much as glanced at a passing trial lawyer. He explained that he himself was thoroughly lawyered-up, and if she insisted on starting proceedings she would come out of it with nothing to show but an aching hollow where her self-respect used to be. And, he insisted, he loved her, and he wanted to prevent her from making a terrible mistake.
Mouse bowed her head and meekly agreed. The next day she left work at noon, drove home, packed a few essentials, and moved to a motel room on the Queensway strip. She emptied a bank account she had never told Bobby she possessed and sold to a pawnbroker the few items of gold and silver she had inherited from her mother.
Over the course of the next six months Mouse managed to find herself a new clerical job, moved into an apartment in the basement of a midtown row house, humanized that space with a selection of funky thrift-shop furniture, and saved as much as she could from her weekly paycheck. As soon as she had built up a useful surplus she did two more things: consulted a divorce lawyer and signed up for Affinity testing.
Before long she was a registered Tau with a pending application for divorce. Bobby was well-lawyered, but the law left little room for maneuver; in the end he chose not to contest the proceeding. Mouse had brought very little personal property to the marriage and wanted nothing from Bobby, which made it easier.
“You in the car?”
“Yes,” I said. “But, Trev—”
“Good. I’ll let you know when I’m at the corner, then you pull out of the garage. Come at Botero’s car from behind, park up close to his bumper. I’ll be right behind you, and I’ll cut him off from the front.”
“What happens then?”
“Then I have a conversation with him. That’s all.”
Mouse, though shy by nature, thrived in her Tau tranche. She had almost convinced herself that her bad marriage was behind her when a series of envelopes without return addresses began arriving in the mail. Sometimes the envelopes contained brief hand-scrawled messages. WHORE was a repeat favorite, as was SICK FILTHY CUNT. Sometimes the envelopes contained photographs of Mouse taken without her knowledge: Mouse coming home from work in a yellow summer frock, Mouse dressed up for a tranche party, Mouse fidgeting in the line outside the restroom at a local movie theater.
There was not enough evidence linking these threats to Bobby Botero for the police to get involved, and although Mouse’s lawyer applied for a generic restraining order, Mouse wasn’t convinced that it would change Botero’s behavior. He was obviously nursing a massive grudge, and Mouse knew he was capable of engineering acts of vengeance beyond her power to avoid.
She moved across town, which was how she ended up attached to our tranche. She requested and obtained a transfer from the Ministry office where she worked to a location closer to downtown. She invested in industrial-strength locks for her doors and windows and signed up for a free tae kwon do class at the local community center. And when, despite these precautions, the letters began to arrive again (CUNT, WHORE, FILTH), she accepted Lisa and Loretta’s invitation to move into the Rosedale house, where she wouldn’t be alone.
“And now he showed up again.”
“Again,” Trev confirmed. “But this time it’s different.”
“How so?”
“This time Mouse has friends on her side. Us, plus everyone in her old tranche, plus all the local Taus we’ve ever networked with.”
“Strength in numbers.”
“Yeah, and more than numbers: experience, skills, connections.”
“Even so, you really think it’s a good idea to get up in the face of a guy with Mafia connections?”
“Well, that’s the interesting part. Like I said, Mouse has friends in two Tau tranches, and the Tau network in this city is pretty big. For instance, there’s a woman, a Tau, lives out in Scarborough, who works for a cleaning service called Daily Maid. And ever since he split up with Mouse, Botero has been a Daily Maid customer. The upshot is that we managed to acquire copies of the contents of the backup drives of Botero’s home computers. Including some very ineptly encrypted financial records, which indicate that Botero has been inflating expenses and skimming some of the cash he launders for his mob friends. He puts this down as ‘transaction expenses,’ but it’s a blatant skim. That’s our leverage.”
“You’re still talking about confronting somebody with money and dangerous friends and an obviously unstable, uh, personality—”
“I’m not talking about it, I’m doing it. Or I will be in about sixty seconds. Get on out here, Adam.”
We can’t live in fear of this guy forever, Trevor said at some point in our conversation, and I thought, We? But he was right. Mouse was a Tau, and one intimidated Tau was one too many.
The street was slick with snow and the Accord chunked into anti-lock mode as I left the driveway. Botero’s car was still parked where I had seen it. Probably he was waiting for Mouse to come home, either for reconnaissance or to frighten her by advertising his presence. When I pulled in behind him, almost kissing his bumper with the grille of the Accord, he gave me a sour look in his rearview mirror. His brake lights lit up as he started the Venza’s engine and put it in gear.
But Trev came up fast in his Subaru, cutting off Botero and making it impossible for him to move. The Venza’s brake lights went dark. A moment later, Botero opened the driver-side door.
He was tall, lean guy. He got out of the car like a flick knife unfolding. He wore a Canada Goose jacket over a logger shirt and faded jeans, a blue-collar-guy-made-good look. His jaw was thrust forward, his mouth bent into a perfect bell curve.
Trevor left his car at the same time. Not as tall as Botero, but broader across the chest, big arms, sure of himself.
“You need to get out of my way,” Botero said.
“I’d be happy to do that,” Trevor said. “Soon as we have a talk about Mouse.”
“I don’t know anybody named Mouse.”
“I think you do. I think you know a lot of people. Like Jimmy Bianchi? Carl Giordano?”
The names meant nothing to me, but they could only have been Botero’s mob connections. Botero’s breath hissed into the cold air like steam from a defective radiator. “If you know those names, you know you’re playing out of your league.”