PEI born and bred RCMP Sergeant Waldron (aka, Gandhi) MacKinnon is an unconventional investigator with a dry wit and an exceptional solve rate. This iconic Canadian sleuth’s sworn duty is to ‘Maintain the Right’, protect the innocent and bring the guilty to justice.

Land and sea, ships and schooners, SUVs, trains and boats and planes transport hunter and hunted through an Internet savvy 21st century world. Gandhi pursues the innocents and their abductors up the St. Lawrence to Montreal (Gandhi’s last posting before retiring home to PEI) then on to the book’s nail-biter climax on a private estate on an island in Lake Champlain, upstate Vermont…

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The last place he expected to be was the Montreal General Hospital. He forgot why he’d agreed to stay the night after they patched him up.

Good enough reason to stay, he thought. If I can’t remember why I objected in the first place. Shock, no doubt.

He knew Esther had a lot to do with him being held for observation. He also knew she’d called the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Charlottetown. They’d re-attach the cut tendon, or replace it if necessary, when he got home. So long as he got to The Island within twenty four hours.

Gandhi needed Sea Cow Pond. He would rather recuperate in his own bed.

He sat up when Val Schwartz appeared at the door. If he had to suffer visitors, Val was as good as any. Gandhi was fairly certain this was not a social call.

Val was restless. Refused the seat to which Gandhi gestured.

“Jesus, Val. You’re nervous as a whore in church.”

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Bethany found it difficult to walk. It was more than the ridiculous heels. Cezar’s left arm circled her shoulder, the front of her blouse clumped in his fist.

Her worst nightmare had come true. In his right hand, Cezar held the knife she remembered from Trois-Rivières. It was pressed flat against her throat. She hoped he’d cleaned it properly, not just wiped it on his jeans. The scientist in Jason, she thought, would wonder if it still carried Missy’s DNA.

What a stupid thing to think. And what a stupid time to think it, she said to herself.

Bethany’s mouth was dry. She had no way of knowing her face was drained of colour. She knew her skin was ashen and her palms clammy. And that her heart was racing. She was light headed. She trembled in short bursts though she felt warm and unnaturally alert.

She was in shock and she knew it.

And in danger.

A fawn in the jaws of a hyena.

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One small word from Gandhi and all hell broke loose.

“Go!”…

Four simultaneous shots. Three tranquil goons kissed the pavement. One escaped and was on the run. Briefly. A dart in the ass left him tits up in the ditch.

The porch door to the farmhouse splintered. The second entrance came off its hinges entirely.

Trooper John Mitchell set his men to work on the rear door of the Annex. Its steel core resisted three attempts. Lemieux’s team burst the lakeside terrace French doors inward in a shower of glass.

The battering rams were thrown aside.

Fritzie’s voice was clear and steady. From his post at the Mobile Command Centre, Captain William Fritz relayed the all clear.

“All in.”

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The Great Room dominated all three floors of The Annex. The walkway from the farmhouse opened into the Great Room loft, which was divided into a reading nook on one side and an old style A/V entertainment lounge on the other. Wooden railings lined the forward perimeter of the loft, anchoring visitors made queasy by the sudden appearance of the arched roof and twelve foot drop to the ground floor below.

Thin metal treads welded like ribs to a central steel spine connected the loft and the main floor. The open-work stairway seemed almost to float. Narrow hand rails supported by spindly, widely spaced balusters, heightened the illusion.

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“Don’t get too comfortable, folks. This is a twenty minute up and down…

Gandhi, I just heard from Val. Fritzie’s mobilized the Northwest A Troop. Upstate Vermont’s assets are ready and waiting. To be deployed as you see fit.”

“Gotta love that Fritzie. Mind you, he owes me one. Or three.”

“Val says the Mobile Command Unit is set up, less than five minutes from Far Point. Water patrol is already in place. As is top notch air support. They’ve got one of these new noise reduced helicopters— some alteration to the rotors. Fitted with infrared. Heat sensors. There’s a full fleet of vehicles. And ten SWAT team troopers in full assault gear are standing by.”

“Good.”

“There’s an ambulance on site. The local hospital is on alert, and—”

Esther sat forward.

“Ambulance?”

“Standard procedure,” Gandhi reassured. “Strictly precautionary. Thank you Dave.”

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“I’m Griffin… Griff Saleh.”

“Gandhi MacKinnon. RCMP.”

“Gandhi? Whatever. Take a seat and hang on.”

The ambulance sped west on St. Antoine then up University en route to the Royal Victoria Hospital. Also known as the McGill University Health Centre. Internationally renowned teaching hospital. Top rated. Good but not good enough to fix the broken kid who, Gandhi’s gut, and the look on Saleh’s face told him, was unlikely to survive.

Jason’s head was restrained by a thick neck brace, his torso and lower legs strapped to the Gurney. Griff slit open the grimy tee shirt, chasing the source of the blood which formed an in arc in the wet cotton, the patch growing pale the farther it spread from the boy’s shoulder…

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A burst bag of garbage grabbed and held his attention.

Green stalks and the wilted leaves of pared vegetables.

Colour.

He could see colour again.

Too vibrant. Almost neon.

Where was he?

In an alleyway behind a restaurant…

No. Dozens of daisies, past their best before date. Petals shrivelled. Centers a vivid Day-Glo yellow.

Behind a flower shop?

No.

He’d come back to consciousness amid the garbage behind a fast food joint. A red and yellow french fry container was hardest to look at; its interior stained with grease, the ketchup aged a dried blood brown…

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As Officer in Charge, Val had argued the case for Gandhi to the Montreal brass. Gandhi was known to be impulsive. Also intuitive. Gandhi was a reluctant team player by nature. He played it close to the vest, some said for too long, when the stakes were high and getting higher. When the team became fractious or moved too slow for him, all bets were off. Gandhi’d made mistakes in his twenty five years of service. Who hadn’t? But they were few, generally of little consequence and far between.

Off-site OPs were centred in Gandhi’s suite at the Hotel Des Gouverneur. Gandhi’d requested physical distance from the Montreal HQ and Val had seen the wisdom in the request. His colleague’s unorthodox M. O. made the brass nervous. Especially men like Dempsey, career cops ‘without a pair’, as Gandhi would say, who erred on the side of caution to protect their own asses…

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Honey and Nikos had rented the house through an anonymous third party to prepare Bethany for her passage through the border. And to reshape her image to resemble the string of girls preferred by Sextus matriarch, Maddy McGuire.

No gender has an exclusive claim on cruelty. Nor is there much variation in intensity or degree; each is equally adept when evil blooms. The variations are mainly in kind. It starts in school. Now the internet. Most bullies repent as they mature. A few of the bullied hoard schoolyard evil, transform it into a profane, high-performance art as they mature and gain power.

Maddy McGuire and her Sextus cohorts were numbered among these…

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Lemieux made for the front desk. Gandhi, with Dougie in tow, crossed the lobby toward the elevators. Joel called out from the secluded corner where he stood with Esther.

Gandhi was surprised at how happy he was to see Esther. And alarmed by the rage singeing the air around her. His slight, almost imperceptible nod told her to back off. He needn’t have worried. That morning’s law and order conversation in Gandhi’s Sea Cow Pond kitchen had stuck with her. Gandhi would not be only one running toward danger. She had work to do. She would be there every step of the way come hell or high water.

And she had a secret weapon. She had Joel. He had enough information to track the investigation unnoticed. Where Gandhi’s investigation led, Esther would follow…

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Sextus members took turns organizing their semi-annual gatherings. This was Hilliard’s event. A discrete dinner would occupy the first of two nights marking the thirteenth gathering of the fraternal and sororal society. He thought it appropriate conclave dinner should occur where the group had first met, twenty five years ago. Montreal. McGill University. Canada’s answer to the American Ivy League. The ‘Harvard of Canada’ some called it. McGill faculty and staff would chafe at the comparison. They might tip their mortar boards to Oxford. Or Cambridge. But not the American Ivy league colleges, to which they felt equivalent. If not superior. With good reason…

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The pavement rose and buckled, fell back in place smooth but altered: where there’d been one painted line, there were two. Now three. Now four. Then nothing. Until a second jab. Sharp. Pain pierced his twice concussed brain. Bloomed into an excruciating mass and lodged behind his eyes.

Jason careened off a chain link fence. He found his feet, fled through a derelict park. He stumbled through a short-lived, lurching stride, slid face first into a pile of rags that reeked of puke and urine. A pair of eyes emerged from the stink. Jason struggled to focus. The rags began to speak.

“S’il tu plaît, jeune mec. Un peu du monaie…”

The east-end derelict, sick-drunk from cut-rate dope, scavenged butts and too much sweet wine thrust out a grubby palm.

“S’il tu plaît, du monaie… ‘S’il tu plaît…”

Jason scrambled to his feet…

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Lemieux slalomed down highway 40, zigging and zagging through west bound traffic like a downhill skier on the day’s last run.

“Whoa… Lemieux. Bit tense there are we?”

“What?”

“You’re pushing 140 k.”

“Sorry. My mind was in Alberta.”

“Yeah well, let’s keep our minds where they belong.”

They’d left Trois-Rivières at seven pm with Dougie aboard. There was no divide between the front and back seats where Dougie sat slouched, grim faced and unrepentant. He resented his new status: a spoil of Canada’s drug wars, indentured to Sergeant Gandhi MacKinnon until such time as the people of the true north strong and decent deemed him fit to walk among law-abiding human beings again…

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The late middle-aged jurist was fair complected, his face broad and open and slightly flushed. Five feet eleven inches. 245 well-packed pounds. Judge Rene LeClair was a natty man, despite his bulk.

He stared at his cluttered home office desk as though he’d never seen it before in his life.

Crown Attorney Lisanne Carron broke the awkward silence.

“Sorry to disrupt your weekend, your Honour.”

“Do me a favour. Go apologize to my wife and dinner guests. Save me a shit load of trouble later.”

He tugged at a fresh bandage on the palm of his left hand.

“And shuck another dozen oysters for me while you’re at it.”

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Jason adjusted to the dark. His attention was drawn to furtive movement in a dark corner. A handsome dark-skinned Spanish boy, no more than seventeen, received the oral attentions of the fluffer. It didn’t take much.

“Here’s your competition. Say hello to Galliano.”

Galliano smirked, tipped a salute. Pushed the fluffer away.

Horacio tightened his grip on the Jason’s elbow. They stood to the side.

Galliano took his position behind the curtain.

The DJ lowered the volume, took up the mike.

“Le Bar Tattoo vous present, here to dance for your pleasure, straight… I should say direct… from Las Vegas, Nevada… Galliano!”

“Watch this guy. Do what he does.”

Galliano entered at full mast wearing nothing but unlaced high tops, a flash of tattoos and a smile. He ignored Cezar, played directly to the AFL client.

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She remembered a particular episode of what she and Jason’s called those creepy ‘animals-eating-other-animals’ shows on TV.

Nature floods the fawn or deer, the old elk or buffalo, whatever, with a natural drug. According to the narrator, a flood of hormones send it to a place of calm, even while conscious of being ripped apart. Pain disappears. The crack of its own bones becomes a curious sound, odd and distant.

Gross. Is that what will happen to me? Is God a rush of hormones? Heaven a merciful illusion?

Bethany pushed the images from her imagination.

She couldn’t erase the look of relief she’d seen in Missy’s dead, staring eyes. Or the calm that crossed her face as the knife cut deep.

It must have been horrible. But Missy seemed… not surprised so much as relieved. As though she was expecting it. Was her life so unbearable that death was welcomed, like a gift?…

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Not home.

Not safe.

He opened his eyes.

A hotel room.

His head ached. It was night. He didn’t know how long he’d slept. He wasn’t alone.

The snores from a pot-bellied, pony tailed figure slumped in a chair by the door were light and regular.

Then he remembered.

Bethany woke in the most beautiful bedroom she’d ever seen, like on Homes of the Rich and Famous. She wandered through the upstairs of the rambling house. More beautiful even than Eagle Crest, Granddad Dougie’s hunting lodge high on the cliffs over Meat Cove…

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Two chairs; one sturdy metal, one on four small casters. There was nothing on the metal desk, nothing visible at least. Maybe a whiff of lingering resistance, the smell of lies, anger, innocence, guilt, collapse, obstinacy or surrender.

High in the ceiling, a discreet CCTV camera’s status indicator blinked red.

Constable Lemieux monitored from the next room. The wide angle colour image was distinct, the sound sharp and present. He could hear the detained man breathing. Dougie Chisholm sat in the straight backed metal chair at the far side of the table, away from the door. His attention was drawn to the blinking light.

Gandhi entered the monitor room. He directed Lemieux to tighten the shot. Dougie stared at the camera. Gandhi was struck by the big man’s vulnerability. Stripped of reference. The stark room driving his thoughts inside, where reason jostled with instincts to fight or to flee…

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“So. Lemieux. Tell me everything I need to know about you in one hundred words or less.”

“Ha! Nice try Sergeant. I am a very complicated man, me.”

“A hundred words is not enough. You need a book.”

Gandhi put Lemieux in his late-thirties, early forties. Open. Easy smile. Struggling with something. Slightly off balance. Who wasn’t a tad twitchy these days?

“Give me the synopsis.”

“Well… I was born and raised in the Laurentians. St. Sauveur.”

“You ski?”

“Ah, mais oui. Nés portent les planches. Ah… we’re born with planks on out feet, as we say.”

“Oui, oui. Belle t’ville, St. Sauveur.”

“Ban oui. A little too touristique for me, eh? Always wanted to be a Mountie. I figured the RCMP would get me to where I really wanted to be.”

“Which was?”

“British Columbia. Alberta. Somewhere there’s real skiing”…

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