False Witness Read online

  FALSE

  WITNESS

  SCOTT COOK

  Copyright 2014 by Scott Sakatch

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email the author at [email protected], addressed “Attention: Permission Request.”

  For Janine

  Because she believed

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of a lot of wonderful people. To my family and friends, thank you for not thinking I was crazy, or at least for keeping it to yourself if you did. Thanks to everyone who provided feedback, especially Kassie and Terry for their invaluable editing help. I couldn’t have done it without you guys. Special thanks to Dave and Judi, for the healing powers and solitude of the lake.

  I believe (or at least I hope) that every person has one teacher in their life who made a difference. For me, that was Richard Powell, who taught me that imagination is more important than memorization. That’s a debt I can never repay.

  Anyone who knows Calgary and the Kootenays will realize that I’ve taken some liberties with geography in the story. There is no actual town of Lost Lake (though I’ve been to a few places that feel like it) and the Badlands Institute for Men doesn’t really exist. And yes, I know Kiprusoff and Iginla don’t play for the Flames anymore. The story takes place before Kipper retired and Iggy was traded. And, in my world, they’re still there.

  PROLOGUE

  Tom Ferbey was missing his son’s hockey game. Again.

  Not that Josh would mind, God love him. He knew they needed the money, especially with him growing two inches a year for the last two years, and being in goal to boot. He wanted to play goal – hell, he practically had to, the rest of the little bastards all a bunch of showboaters – and those pads and masks didn’t come cheap, even when you took a gamble and bought the next size up when Canadian Tire put all the equipment on for half price at the end of the season.

  It didn’t help that the economy was in the shitter, even here in Calgary. A few years ago, you could have walked down any street in the city and seen more HELP WANTED signs than there were windows to hold them. Tom had taken overtime for granted in those days, picking up two or three extra shifts every weekend under the table for extra cash that he invariably spent on Josh: a PlayStation 3 (Kathy had really busted his balls over that one), or Flames tickets behind the net so Josh could watch Kiprusoff up close and pretend he was the one between the pipes, plucking the puck out of the air and smacking Iginla on the butt as he glided past.

  Overtime had all but dried up these days. The young slackers who used to call in sick every weekend to nurse their hangovers had been replaced by middle-aged construction workers, who needed to work so they could feed their families and make the payments on the king cab pickups they bought when the building boom was in full swing and the city was sweating money.

  Just my luck Josh is playing a shutout tonight, Tom thought glumly as he swung his boots off the old steel desk. He picked up the key ring and his big steel flashlight in one hand, and the small but heavy watchman’s clock in the other. He thought about grabbing his nylon jacket, the one with Stampede Security embossed on the left breast, but decided against it. It was early October but the mercury was still in the low teens, even after sunset, and Tom, a big man, always preferred to be a little cool rather than a little warm.

  Gravel crunched under his boots as he stepped out of the trailer that served as Stampede Security’s headquarters. Tom took a quick scan of the Highland Storage Yard: six dozen small warehouses of various sizes, set up in a grid that ran outward from his office. The orange arc-sodium lamps overhead, combined with the setting sun behind the Rockies, gave the compound the slightly jaundiced look of the inside of an ice arena, casting deep shadows between the buildings. He flipped open his log book and marked the time: seven p.m. The first period was probably over by now. As he began his patrol, he thought of Kathy, sitting on the rink’s old wooden benches that smelled vaguely of moisture and forgotten farts, drinking homemade tea from Josh’s old Transformers Thermos, and bitching with the other hockey moms about how their husbands all spent too much time at work and were never there for the games.

  Kathy had been a real shrew the last little while. It had only gotten worse when Tom lost his cell phone the week before. She really lit into him: If you think you’re getting one of those Blackberries, you’re out of your mind. And you know how much it’s costing us for you not to have a cell phone, don’t you?

  “I’m the one paying the fucking bill every month, I know how much it is,” he grumbled. He also knew how much trouble he’d be in if Stampede’s owner, a retired Mountie hardass, tried to call him on it and didn’t get an answer. He would have to bite the bullet in the next couple of days and get a new one.

  He pointed the flashlight at the window in the door of the first storage unit. The blue LCD light penetrated the dark without reflecting back, giving him a clear view of the interior. Nothing. Like always. Tom took a small steel cylinder, about the size of a cigarette, that hung from a chain on the wall, slid the end into the clock box, and turned it. Inside the box, a mechanism stamped the time in red ink on a piece of ticker tape. He repeated the ritual at nine more buildings, scanning with the flashlight, turning the key, checking the door. It was the only way the company could prove the guards were making the rounds every hour, thus justifying what Tom was sure worked out to a hell of a lot more than his sixteen bucks an hour.

  Highland’s owners could have installed cameras in every warehouse, but what would be the point? The capital cost of a camera system would significantly increase the rent, and they’d still need someone to monitor the screens twenty-four-seven, so why not pay that guy to walk around and inspect them instead?

  Tom liked his job because it didn’t take a lot of brainpower, he got his exercise and, for the most part, nobody was on his ass. He patrolled the complex every hour on the hour, and as long as each door was secure, he was off the hook. The rest of the time he could read his Stephen King books (which he often cursed himself for on midnight shifts: Way to go, dumbass – read Pet Semetary and then go wa
lk through a windy warehouse complex in the middle of nowhere) or watch television. The latter wasn’t much of an option because the old set only got Peasant Vision, but it made Saturday night shifts bearable because he could at least watch Hockey Night in Canada on CBC.

  Hockey. It seemed to be all Josh lived for these days, and it gave Tom a reason to hope for his son’s future. Lord knew the kid wasn’t going to make it on his brains – he took after his old man in that department – but he seemed to be born to tend goal. Even at thirteen, he was showing real potential, working his glove like a pro and dropping to his knees with no hesitation. His coach had told Tom to think about sending Josh to the Sutter brothers’ hockey school down in Coaldale over the summer. A little flexibility training would go a long way toward his chances of making it to the minor leagues in a couple of years.

  Tom stopped at the first of the three largest buildings next to the parking lot and front gates. He pulled out his key ring. The bigger units cost almost twice as much to rent, and the customers expected a higher level of security, so Tom made sure to patrol inside the buildings at least twice a shift. He unlocked the main door and hit a switch inside, bathing the interior in white fluorescent light. Nothing out of the ordinary. He checked the cargo bay’s rolling metal door. Secure. The same four dozen wooden crates sat in the middle of the floor, just like they had every other day for the past three weeks. They came in on trucks, and a few weeks later went out on different trucks, forever and ever, amen.

  Tom’s footfalls echoed from the high ceiling as he strolled around the interior perimeter. The crates were all stamped with PIPE FITTINGS in reddish ink, and CRANESTEEL – SCARBOROUGH, ONT. in black ink underneath. Tom had never been to Scarborough – had, in fact, never been east of Alberta in his life. He wondered what the weather was like in SCARBOROUGH, ONT. tonight as he slid the cylindrical key into his watchman’s clock.

  The key had just begun to turn when a gloved hand reached out of the night and jabbed something hard under Tom’s ribcage. By the time he heard the clicking sound, every muscle in his body was screaming, and his face made a dull, wet smack as it connected with the concrete floor.

  #

  Tom’s world slowly filled with light. It seemed to invade his mind from every direction, like his eyes were made of it. He could hear something that sounded like static. At least, he thought he could. Am I dead? Am I supposed to go to the light? He thought of Josh, saw his son’s smiling face, the bedhead hair, the chipped front tooth in his awkward half-smile. He couldn’t bear to leave his boy.

  “Tom.”

  The light got stronger until it seemed he could actually feel heat in his eyeballs. Is this what death was supposed to be like? And why could he still feel his mouth? It felt like it was full of Chiclets. Were there Chiclets in the afterlife?

  “TOM!”

  The word exploded in his ear and seemed to jump-start his heart, flooding his system with adrenaline. With it came awareness and pain – monstrous, unrelenting pain in his head and neck and face and balls. His nose seemed full of angry wasps. Worst of all was his mouth. It felt like he’d sucked on a live wire. The light was even brighter now that his eyes were open.

  “Whunh-hunngh?” As he spoke, Tom felt the Chiclets shift in his mouth. A few threatened to slip down his throat. He lolled his head to the side, bringing a fresh wave of agony that escaped his mouth in a groan, along with an alarmingly large clot of black blood and what he now realized were several of his teeth.

  “Fffuughhk,” Tom breathed.

  “Sorry about that, Tom,” said a low voice from behind the light. Tom’s heart jumped again and he turned, squinting, to face the voice. “Really, I am. Tried to catch you, but you went down like a pile of bricks. I bet your mouth hurts like a sonofabitch.”

  It did. So did the rest of him. As if the symphony of pain in his head wasn’t enough, his muscles felt sprung somehow, as if they’d been yanked past the breaking point and then left to lie there, like hyper-extended elastics. Tom felt a sudden, stupid slash of hope through his fog: he had a bottle of Percocet left over from when he’d separated his shoulder playing beer league hockey last year. That would help, if he could just get home to take it. Then his addled brain turned to wondering how much his health plan covered for dental work.

  “TOM!” the light barked again. It moved, a quick waggle back and forth, and Tom finally realized he was looking into the business end of a flashlight. His flashlight. The haze at the edge of his vision was getting sharper now, the world around him becoming more solid. He could feel cold concrete under his back, see the black sky framed behind the flashlight’s glare.

  Jesus, how long was I out?

  “Stay with me, buddy,” said The Voice. It was close; whoever was holding the flashlight was hunkered down next to him. “Look, Tom, I need you to keep up with me if we’re going to get this done and over with. I don’t want to waste your time, and I’m guessing you don’t want to waste mine. Am I right?”

  Tom’s old man had been fond of saying his middle son wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and he was right. It took a few more moments for Tom to realize this wasn’t some sort of accident, the kind where you filled out a yellow form and let the bureaucrats sort out the rest of the shit. He’d been attacked, most likely by the guy who was now talking to him in a friendly, shooting-the-breeze tone. He was injured – badly, if his pain was any indicator – and The Voice was the cause. That meant whatever The Voice had done to him, he’d probably do it again if Tom didn’t go along.

  He wasn’t sharp, but he wasn’t stupid either, and he quickly decided that sixteen bucks an hour was most definitely not worth another round of whatever the hell had happened to him. Not in a million years. Tom had never been in anything more serious than a bench brawl in his life; whatever was going on here was way out of his league. Whatever this guy wanted, he could have. Hell, Tom would gift wrap it for the dude if it meant he could walk away from this with his balls intact.

  Tom nodded slowly, wincing at the dull ache it produced in his head and neck. He tried again to speak; it wasn’t easy without teeth.

  “Wight,” he said shakily. “Ooer wight. I doe wan any hwubble.”

  “Glad to hear it, Tommy,” The Voice said amiably. “This Taser is a real bitch; I don’t like using it, believe me. You believe me, don’t you, Tom?”

  Taser. That explained Tom’s strung-out muscles, and why he hadn’t been able to break his fall. “Unh-huh,” he said. “I buheewhe eeoo.”

  “That’s great, Tom. So we have an agreement? Don’t bother nodding, I know it hurts. Just give me a thumbs-up.”

  Tom raised his right thumb. Fucking-A-rights they had an agreement. He vaguely remembered reading once about hostage negotiations or some such thing, where they said if the bad guys kept using your name, they probably weren’t going to kill you. It meant they were in it for the money. The thought gave him enough strength to push himself into a wobbly sitting position with his legs out in front of him like a couple of petrified logs.

  It didn’t occur to Tom then to wonder how The Voice knew his name; that would come later. He swayed a bit and wished again for that faraway Percocet.

  “Could we please stop fucking around and get on with it?” said another voice behind the flashlight’s glare. It surprised Tom, and a heavy shot of adrenaline surged through him, prompting a fresh wave of agony in the rubble of his mouth. He groaned miserably.

  “Shut up,” The Voice told the guy behind him. Even in his addled state, Tom could hear the underlying coldness in the tone, and was glad he wasn’t Voice No. 2. “I don’t need to remind you that Tom here is very important to us. We need to make sure he’s capable of doing what we need him to do, and that means we let him get his bearings.”

  Tom felt cautious hope at the way The Voice was dealing with the other guy. The Voice was in charge, and The Voice was taking care of him. Josh’s face, so wide-open and bright, filled his mind’s eye for a moment. I’m gonna see you soon, buddy. />
  For the next handful of minutes, the only sound was bootheels clip-clopping on concrete behind the light – Voice No. 2 was pacing. Tom’s heart rate slowed to within a few beats of normal and, while he still felt like a bag of rocks and his head was still a symphony of pain, he felt in control of himself again.

  As if sensing this, The Voice said: “Okay, Tom, now we need you to do something for us. When you’re done, this will all be over. Sound good?”

  “Unh-hunh.” Truth be told, nothing had ever sounded so good to him in all his forty-one years on Planet Earth. Whatever these people wanted, he was going to do it with gusto. If The Voice dropped his pants and told Tom to gobble his disembodied crank, then by God, that’s what he would do, busted teeth or no.

  It didn’t come to that. The Voice, still hunkered next to him, dropped Tom’s log book on the concrete in front of him. The pages glowed an unearthly white in the blue-tinged glare of the flashlight. The ledger was open to tonight’s date, and the words he’d written earlier seemed to float on the page like scribbly black pinworms: 4 p.m. Foot patrol - all secure. 5 p.m. Foot patrol - all secure. 6 p.m. Foot patrol – all secure.

  “I just need you to do that a few more times, up to nine o’clock,” said The Voice. “Just let everyone know that all is secure, right as rain, peachy keen and all that good shit. Do you think you can do that? Is your hand steady enough?”

  Tom sat there stupidly for a moment. Blood trickled from his open mouth, down his chin and onto his Stampede Security shirt. That’s it? he thought, astonished. Finish my log book?

  “Tom? You all right with that?”

  “Yeth,” he croaked. Excitement over his impending freedom allowed him to ignore the pain in his mouth. “Ah can oo hat.”

  “Then write away, my good man, and we can all get the fuck out of here.”

  “Thank Christ,” muttered Voice No. 2. Tom thought the guy sounded like an asshole, the kind of person who used to bully him in school. “He can’t be more than five minutes out.”