“Two and a half hours might be all this guy has left. Let’s get back up there.”

Childress was shouting into the phone, but Hazel couldn’t make out what she was saying. She hoped there was someone on the other end. The constable hung up and pocketed the cell. She lifted the headset’s mic to her mouth. “There’s one guy there, not attached to our case. But he’s going to nose around and see what might be ready. He’s going to call me back.”

“Thank you,” said Hazel. Childress just nodded.

Quinn passed high over the town of Mandeville. The ’copter dipped down over the treelines and burst out over Pickamore Lake. Wingate pressed the binoculars to his face again as they began their sweep. At 4 a.m., at about four hundred metres off the northern shoreline, he saw a shape outlined in dark violet: unmistakably a canoe. There was a form in it. The middle of the form glowed pale orange and then began to fade to light purple at its extremities. He lowered the thermal binoculars to his lap and pulled the mic up over his mouth. “There he is,” he called, pointing toward the rain-wreathed island. “That’s him.”

35

There was a faint glow coming from the east, a pinkish light that seemed to drive the rain away and limn the early morning darkness with a phosphorescent edge. Quinn was descending toward the lake surface, creating an undulating target of waves beneath them. From within fifteen metres, they could see the form of a man in the canoe, wound in white cloth like a mummy, only his face exposed to the elements. The rainwater had filled the boat to his chin. The bloody sides of his head and the bloom of pink where the stump of his wrist was bound up in cloth confirmed for them that they had found their man. Eldwin’s eyes were closed and he had not reacted to the sound of the helicopter or their voices calling to him. Calberson suited up and pulled on a mask, but went in without a tank: it would be a simple-enough operation. He hit the water like an arrow and surfaced right away, making strong strokes for the canoe. At the same time, Tate was harnessing the rescue basket and lowering it down with the aid of an on-board winch.

Calberson reached the side of the canoe and put an arm in, feeling along Eldwin’s torso with two fingers. He pressed his fingers in hard under the man’s chin, then signalled the helicopter to slide the basket over. It drifted over the surface of Pickamore Lake toward him. The four other officers were crowded on one side looking over, no longer feeling any fear at all. Quinn had to bank back slightly to his right to keep the craft level. “Is he alive?” shouted Hazel, but Calberson couldn’t hear her over the massive drone of the rotors. He dragged the basket toward him, gripping the hook and pulling it down. He detached it from the rope and affixed it to the metal loop at the front of the canoe and then swam to the stern and with his hands on either side of it, he lofted himself up and in. Ripples moved crossways through the concentric waves made by the blades. Eldwin had not reacted to the sudden weight of another body on top of him, and Hazel looked away. A dead guilty man was considerably better than a dead innocent one, but no call had arrived and she dreaded now knowing the outcome.

They watched Calberson sliding his way along the inside of the canoe, keeping his balance and straddling the wrapped man. The water in the boat sluiced over the sides as he made his progress. Hovering over Eldwin’s midsection, the officer leaned forward and felt for a pulse again, but they still could not tell what he’d learned. “He’s not going to be able to get him onto the stretcher from there,” said Tate. “It’s too dangerous.”

“Stay in the bird,” called Quinn in the headphones. “You don’t have the gear.”

“No, I’m going down,” said Tate, and without another word, he yanked the headset off and jumped from the helicopter.

“He worries too much,” said Wingate.

“Worries?” said Hazel.

“You weren’t in that boat with them on Gannon. He was practically in tears.”

“It’s a stressful business,” she said, watching Tate swimming over to the canoe. They could just barely hear him calling his partner’s name.

“My guess is, there’s more to it than that.”

She turned slowly to him. He shrugged faintly. “Well, I suppose you’d know.”

Tate was at the boat and Calberson was yelling at him, gesturing with his hands. Then he shook his head and unhooked the basket from the front of the canoe and Tate pushed it against the side of the canoe and held it steady. His partner unhooked his leg from around Eldwin and lay down in the water beside him. Then they saw Eldwin sit up, as if in a horror-movie coffin, and Calberson was behind him, levering him over the side of the canoe. Tate threw his arm out and grabbed the front of the white cloth and held the man steady as Calberson got the rest of Eldwin’s body up on the stern of the canoe. Hazel watched, riven. This was one of the ways you threw a body out of a boat. But there were others.

Tate was reaching across the stretcher, Calberson a counterweight in the canoe, and between the two of them, they gentled Eldwin within his cocoon onto the basket. Quinn lowered the rope for the men to rehook the harness again, and, with a thumbs-up, he began to winch the apparatus off the lake surface.

“Let me bring him in,” said Wingate, his arm on Hazel’s shoulder. She stepped aside as, inch by inch, the white form ascended on the end of the rope. She smelled burning oil as the onboard motor strained to bring the weight up.

Quinn’s voice buzzed in their ears. “Let’s get you folks not involved in receiving the package on the other side of the cabin, please. Even things out and let’s get this guy inside.”

Wingate held tight to the inside of the door and leaned out, pushing against the rope to keep the stretcher clear of the skids. He wondered at his newfound ability to hang out of a hovering aircraft. David would have been proud of him. As Eldwin got closer to the helicopter, Wingate’s heart fell – the man’s face was white. He was surely dead. He held the rope at arm’s length, getting ready to lean down and grab the basket once it cleared the skids, but then there was a flash against one of the skids and the sound of a metal ping and Wingate felt a searing pain in his cheek. He fell back into the cabin, his hand pressed against his face, and he heard the metallic sound again, louder this time, and Quinn’s voice was in their ears, panicked: “Someone’s shooting at us -”

The sentence was barely out of the pilot’s mouth when the windshield exploded and the whole craft sheered sideways, giving them a view of the lake beneath them through the door. Eldwin’s form in the basket swung wildly in the air between the helicopter and the water. Wingate felt himself sliding toward the open space as it fell away from them – Quinn was rapidly climbing to get out of gunfire range – and the sheer drop grew to fifty metres. He flung his arms around in a slow panic and felt a hand clasp him on the forearm and hold him tight. He looked behind him and it was Hazel, her teeth gritted, her other hand in Childress’s, who was braced behind one of the bolted benches. He looked down and saw the rain falling in a cone past Eldwin’s inert form and vanishing below them into the churning dark. “Hold on,” cried Quinn as he tried to come level, and Eldwin swung up loosely at the end of the rope like the little toy Wingate remembered from childhood, the one where you tried to catch a little wooden ball in a cup. The man looked like he was floating, and the moment was frozen in Wingate’s vision, it was something beautiful and strange… and then gravity took over again and all two hundred pounds of man and basket jerked down hard on the rope. The sudden yank fried the winch motor and it let out the spool with a high-pitched squeal. They watched helplessly as Eldwin plunged back toward the lake: five seconds of falling through space and then he hit the surface with a white explosion.