Mission Road , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Ron Corbett

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172 pages

English

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'From the Edgar Award and Arthur Ellis Award nominated author of Ragged Lake comes the third installment in the Frank Yakabuski series In the final scene of Cape Diamond, millions of dollars worth of diamonds went missing, which is where Ron Corbett s latest novel begins. When rumors spread that they were buried on Mission Road, an old logging trail outside the town, people swarm to the area, setting up temporary camps and searching for fortune. But when a known murderer shows up, the real mystery begins. Detective Frank Yakabuski must juggle a 21st-century diamond rush, killers on the run, and his ex-cop dad, in this third book in the series.'

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	09 juin 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773054674
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0450€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Mission Road
A Frank Yakabuski Mystery
Ron Corbett

Contents Dedication Author’s Note I: Money Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen II: Murder Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four III: Mission Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Chapter Thirty-Seven Chapter Thirty-Eight Chapter Thirty-Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty-One Chapter Forty-Two Chapter Forty-Three Chapter Forty-Four Chapter Forty-Five Chapter Forty-Six Chapter Forty-Seven Chapter Forty-Eight Chapter Forty-Nine Chapter Fifty Chapter Fifty-One Chapter Fifty-Two Chapter Fifty-Three Chapter Fifty-Four Epilogue About the Author Copyright

Dedication
For Millie Patten and the adventures ahead

Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction. All places and characters are imagined. While the story takes place somewhere on the Northern Divide, there are no literal depictions of any city or town on the Divide.

I: Money

Chapter One
Frank Yakabuski looked at the man seated the other side of the kitchen table and couldn’t decide what to think of him. Calvin Jayne. He wore grey sweatpants and a ribbed t-shirt that had slid up his stomach far enough to reveal three rolls of pale mid-winter skin and tufts of sweaty black hair. It was too hot in the apartment. He was overcompensating, although he wasn’t the only one. Winter had been late arriving on the Northern Divide, but when it came it was bitter cold. The salt trucks couldn’t run most days because of the cold, and there was black ice everywhere. Highway fatalities were common. So were morning sightings of animals, standing in some distant field with fog swirling around them — scrawny black bear, teetering moose, awoken from their hibernation and not sure what to do next.
It was a winter of ill-fated wonders. The first fortune hunter arrived the second week of February. His name was Jason McAllister, and he was a postgraduate mathematics student from Syracuse University who checked in to the Grainger Hotel after arriving on a direct flight from Toronto. Because he showed no sign of needing to be in Springfield — he didn’t check in with the gear of a hydro worker or a tree-marker; didn’t seem to be looking for work at the sawmills or the truck yards — he was noticed.
During the next two days, McAllister was seen shopping at Murphy’s Sporting Goods, where he purchased packets of dehydrated food and some propane tanks, and Stedman’s department store, where he purchased wool socks, long underwear, and several toques. He used the business suite on the second floor of the Grainger several times, where there was free Wi-Fi. Many of the staff in the hotel recalled him working on a laptop.
On his third day in Springfield, he checked out of the hotel and took a cab to Mission Road, a hiking trail west of the city. His mother reported him missing two days later.
Calvin Jayne — forty-eight years old, drove a cab for Shamrock Taxi, was a mill-hand before that — said he remembered the fare. McAllister gave him a twenty-dollar tip, but he claimed he would have remembered the fare even without that. “I told the kid he was nuts, no one did the Mission Road trail in the middle of winter, especially not a winter like the one we’re having. But the kid said he’d done Mount Robson last year, and he knew what he was doing. That’s what he told me. He’d done Robson.”
“Did you see him start down the trail?”
“Yeah. I still thought he was nuts, so I waited to see if he was going to back out. I think it was minus forty or something that morning with the wind chill.”
“You watched him for how long?”
“Till I couldn’t see him.”
“Then you drove home and didn’t think about him again?”
“No. I kept on working.”
Yakabuski glanced around. Jayne lived in a one-bedroom walk-up on Derry Street. No signs of a wife or children. Cases of Old Milwaukee stacked by the back door.
“Did you think you should have told someone about him? Like you said, it was forty below that morning.”
“Kid knew how cold it was.”
“He was alone. Not from around here. Might have been nice if someone knew he was out there. That never occurred to you?”
“Might have been nice? Do you want my list of might-have-been-nice, Detective? Look, I’m sorry the kid is missing and everything, but have I done something wrong here?”
Yakabuski thought about it a minute. “Criminal negligence? I know you can’t cut off a person’s hydro in weather like this. Maybe you can’t drop anyone off in the middle of the bush either. Did McAllister tell you what he was doing on the Mission Road trail in minus-forty-degree weather?”
The cabbie looked surprised by what Yakabuski had asked. His eyes narrowed a bit. “No. He didn’t say anything about that.”
“What did you think he was doing?”
“Well . . . I didn’t give it much thought. He was just another fare, you know?”
“No thought at all?”
“Not at the time, no. Some people like winter camping? What the fuck do I know.”
“What do you think now?”
The cabbie gave Yakabuski another stare that lasted a second longer than it should have, a man lacking the wit to conceal what he was doing. Deciding right then just how truthful he needed to be. “Well, knowing what I do today, sure, I guess I’ve got an idea.”
“What’s come to you, Calvin?”
“The kid might have been out there looking for those missing diamonds.”
“There’s a thought. Did you tell anyone, after dropping him off, that Jason McAllister might have been doing a thing like that?”
The cabbie started to speak, but before he could Yakabuski held up his hand to silence him. He left his hand there for several seconds before saying, “I’ll canvass the taverns. I have you pegged for O’Keefe’s, so that’s where I’ll start. You would have been there last Tuesday night. Maybe Wednesday . . . though I figure you couldn’t wait to tell someone about it, so Tuesday.”
The cabbie was starting to look sick. His head was resting in his hands and he was making small sounds that might have been moaning, might have been prayer, Yakabuski wasn’t sure. If there hadn’t been more than a billion dollars in lost diamonds hidden somewhere in Springfield, Calvin Jayne could have stayed under the police radar the rest of his life. Never quite honest. Never crooked enough to notice. Those diamonds were almost entrapment for people like Jayne, though Yakabuski supposed you could say that about any kind of greed, and maybe that wasn’t saying much.
“Get your coat,” he said, having come to his decision. “Let’s finish this conversation downtown.”
“You’re arresting me? On what charge?”
“Not the right one, I’m willing to bet, but I’ll think of something. Do you have a coat, Calvin, or are you going outside in that shirt?”

Chapter Two
Six weeks earlier, the largest armed robbery in history had taken place in Springfield — $1.2 billion in uncut diamonds, stolen from a De Kirk Mines cargo plane sitting on the tarmac of the Springfield International Airport.
It happened a week before Christmas, and it still seemed like fantasy to a lot of people. Or a thing that was both real and unreal, if that made any sense. People saw that diamond robbery the way you see some distant date. Real enough — but so far away it seemed hard to imagine, almost implausible.
It stayed that way well into the new year, a shared sense of disbelief in Springfield, an odd calm in the city, as though people were waiting to see if the jewellery heist had been a seasonal fable, some shining star in the east that was no longer there.
It was hard to tell exactly when that changed. When the penny dropped and people realized, with surprise, that the story was true. One-point-two-billion dollars worth of uncut, untraceable diamonds had been stolen in Springfield and the police had not a clue what happened to them after that.
“Soon as Christmas is finished, people are going to start thinking about those diamonds, and not in a good way,” George Yakabuski had warned his son.
“I know that.”
“Whole town could go mad-trapper crazy this winter, if you don’t find them.”
“We’re looking, Dad.”
Yakabuski, senior detective with the Springfield Regional Police Service, had come to the conclusion diamonds made a robbery investigation worse in every way possible. If a dozen Van Gogh paintings had been stolen, Yakabuski couldn’t imagine someone like Jason McAllister coming to Springfield to try and find them, because what were you ever going to do with a dozen Van Goghs? Set up a private viewing room in the back of your garage? Give them away to close friends and family?
Same deal with money. Most people would figure paper currency was marked and they’d get caught if they tried to spend it, so what was the point in trying to find it? And they’d be right. Not to mention the square footage of $1.2 billion in paper currency would be a problem logistically. Even Saddam Hussein couldn’t ma