A Life Betrayed (Montreal #2)

Chapter Thirteen

“ B rake. No, the other one’s the brake.”

Rayan pressed his foot down a little too hard on the left pedal, and the car lurched.

“Jesus Christ!” his brother yelled, one palm splayed against the dashboard to steady himself.

“Sorry.” Rayan laughed, buzzing with excitement.

He’d played wingman whenever Tahir boosted cars, and it was finally his turn behind the wheel. There came a series of honks from behind them. Rayan pulled the car over to the side of the road.

“Don’t cause an accident,” his brother said grimly. “Or we’ll really be in the shit.”

The SUV was practically new and fitted out with plush leather seats and a touch-screen monitor. Its well-heeled owner was probably wondering where it was by this point.

“Take it easy. Slow to accelerate, slow to stop.”

Tahir’s eyes were glazed. From what, Rayan couldn’t be sure. It was happening more often, the slack features and unfocused pupils making it hard to separate his brother from the person he was when he was high.

Rayan continued down Sherbrooke West, deriving a cheap satisfaction from the powerful pull of the car as it sped forward. “It’s not so hard.”

“You drive like a granny who escaped the rest home,” Tahir jeered.

Rayan eased to a stop at a red light, and a man in faded overalls and combat boots approached them, gripping a bucket in one hand and a dirty sponge in the other.

“No, no!” Tahir called out, winding down the window. “Fuck off!”

Out of habit, Rayan scanned the man’s features, shadowed beneath the lowered brim of a baseball cap. As he scuttled away, Rayan’s eyes followed his retreat, trying to assemble a face in his mind that he could barely remember.

“Green, it’s green!” Tahir snapped, and Rayan flew back to the present, gunning the car and speeding through the intersection. “It wasn’t him, you know.”

Rayan started and glanced over at his brother, who was staring at him with a guarded expression. “Yeah, I know,” he said, covering his momentary lapse with a short laugh.

They continued through the city, killing time to delay the inevitable, the night stretching out before them.

“You knew when he put on his boots it was trouble,” Tahir muttered into the darkness of the cab. Every Sunday, their father cleaned and polished a pair of black army-issue boots. He kept them on the top shelf in the hallway closet. “When he was done with us, he used to go after her.”

Too many nights to count, they’d lain on their sides in the dark, whipped and shamed after a beating, eyes meeting across the yawning divide between their two twin beds as they listened to the steady thump of his boots down the hall.

“If that had been him,” Rayan said, gripping the steering wheel, “I’d have run him the fuck over.”

Tahir laughed, turning and socking him hard on the shoulder. “Like hell you would. You’re all talk, Rayan. You don’t have the stomach for it.”

Rayan glared at the city as it sped past through the windscreen. For his father, he would make an exception.

“Head to the overpass—I have to meet someone,” Tahir instructed.

Rayan changed lanes and turned onto Saint-Laurent Boulevard. He knew who his brother was meeting.

They were several meters from the turnoff when Tahir leaned forward in his seat. “Here, pull over.”

Rayan brought the car to a stop, and his brother jumped out, his head swiveling anxiously before he started to cross the road. Rayan watched as Tahir waited, noting the nervous jerk of his brother’s foot and the way he kept crossing and uncrossing his arms. Evan appeared from the shadows, removed a brown paper bag from his jacket, and held the bag out to Tahir.

Rayan looked away. He hated seeing his brother like that—the gleeful shine in his eyes, his hands trembling with anticipation. Or withdrawal. It was hard to tell at this point. Rayan kept his gaze fixed on the shuttered hardware store up ahead, whose sign above the entrance was so faded it was barely legible.

The passenger door opened, and Tahir slipped into the seat beside him.

“ Akhi …” Rayan began quietly.

“Don’t call me that,” his brother said, the words curling viciously. “You’re just like her—too fucking soft. Now, drive. I want to see how much Lenny’ll give us for this ride.”

Mathias sat in his car in the parking garage beneath his building, phone pressed to his ear. Through the windscreen, he could see a couple arguing by the elevator. She was young, a redhead, with a designer purse clutched to her ample chest. The man stabbing a finger in her face was much older and should have known better.

Mathias had returned to his apartment the previous evening after mustering enough sense to leave the safe house before he really lost his temper. He’d stood fuming on the other side of the bedroom door, fighting a deep-rooted urge to show Rayan exactly who he was dealing with. But something had stopped him. There had been a rawness to Rayan’s pain that he hadn’t seen before, and Mathias wasn’t sure how to approach it.

“She hasn’t got approval from the Crown to tap phones, but you’re under intermittent monitoring,” Gagnon said on the other end of the line. “There are cameras.”

Mathias had been on his way out when the cop had called. He’d known Alexandre Gagnon for years, first as a corruptible rookie with the metropolitan police and now as a sergeant at the RCMP’s Quebec divisional office. He’d proven an invaluable resource when it came to intel on the Feds’ activity in the province and beyond. Gagnon’s biggest flaw had always been easy for Mathias to exploit: the man could not keep his dick in his pants.

“Where?” Mathias asked as the woman by the elevator reached into her purse and pulled out a tissue to stem the blackened streams pouring from her eyes.

Gagnon cleared his throat nervously. “Several of your offices have been targeted. The club. Some of the regular meeting spots. She’s trying to put together a schedule of your activities.”

That explained how Allen had managed to ambush him at Gino’s. “Good luck with that,” Mathias said scornfully, irked by the woman’s nerve. “And Nadeau?”

“They’ve lost eyes on him. Either he’s holed up somewhere in Toronto, or he’s left the city. But he’s still in Canada. Allen has alerts set up. She’ll know if he tries to leave the country.”

Mathias rapped his knuckles against the steering wheel in agitation. “She’s building a case against him?”

“It’s likely—she’s looking into everything. Went to talk to his father yesterday, to find out what he knew. Came back with a pretty damning character reference.”

Mathias snorted, incredulous. “His old man? What would he know?”

“Seems he had a lot to say, actually. I’ll send you a copy of the write-up. It’s a common tactic. She puts a case together against Nadeau, scares him enough to get him to roll over, and then she uses his testimony against you.”

“And if he doesn’t roll over?”

“Then she’ll probably trial him anyway,” Gagnon said. “Allen is ruthless. She has something of a reputation.”

Does she? Mathias seethed.

The cop swallowed audibly, and when he spoke again, his voice was strained. “I may have to keep communication brief in the next few days. There’s additional scrutiny with HQ involved, and they’re keeping a close eye on the office.”

“Brief?” Mathias mocked. “You’ll answer when I call, Gagnon. Unless your wife would like to know about the apartment I bought for your new mistress.” He hung up and absently tapped his phone against his knee. Allen was going after Rayan. At least she didn’t know that he was here in Montreal, hiding out under her very nose.

In his hand, his phone gave a short buzz, and Mathias pulled up the file Gagnon had sent through. He scanned the document on the screen, a spike of anger lodging in his throat. Then he dropped his phone onto the seat beside him and gunned the engine, startling the couple by the elevator as he squealed out of the garage. He had an errand to run.

Maskinongé was just over an hour’s drive from Montreal. The landscape changed rapidly the farther out of the city Mathias got, buildings giving way to long stretches of empty farmland punctuated by the occasional gas station. He didn’t often venture this far into the province. He’d always found rural Quebec more dreary than idyllic.

The town itself consisted of a main street lined with weathered-looking stores housing an array of local businesses: grocer, drug store, butcher. Farther down the street was a small school with a rusted jungle gym out front. From there, the road led out of town, and the houses became more spread out, set on blocks of empty land speckled with the odd piece of farm machinery or the remains of a stripped-out car.

Several miles along this road was where André Nadeau lived. Mathias pulled the Bentley into the gravel driveway beside the house as spatters of rain crowded the windshield. The place was a dump. The paint had long since peeled off the cladding, and the front yard was littered with all manner of trash and debris. Both of the windows facing the road were covered with what looked like black plastic. He tried to imagine a young Rayan growing up here, a boy slipping through the broken slats on the porch railing and dodging the minefield of glass bottles strewn across the snow-dusted lawn. But try as he might, he couldn’t.

Mathias got out of the car, fastening his coat against the increasing downpour, and made his way up the path toward the house. He sidestepped the holes in the rotting wooden steps and raised a gloved hand to knock loudly on the front door. From inside, he could hear someone shuffling about, the creak of floorboards, and the methodical unlatching of locks.

A man eased open the door. He looked older than he should, his sagging face crisscrossed with angry red spider veins, his skin a jaundiced yellow. And the smell—it was enough to turn Mathias’s stomach, as though the man were being pickled from the inside.

“Who’re you?” André Nadeau glowered. “I don’t want nothing to do with Jesus, you hear?”

He began to close the door, but Mathias put his foot across the threshold, pressing his weight against the panel, and found it gave way easily in André’s grip. “Trust me, he wants nothing to do with you,” Mathias said, forcing the door open and stepping into the house.

Beside him, André stood impotently, his hand still clutching the doorknob. Mathias took in the surrounding dimness, the covered windows shutting out all light from the outside. The place smelled of unwashed bodies and decay, the odor sticking to the back of his throat.

“You had a lot to say to the police about your son,” he said, his eyes flicking to the cans of beer lined up along the coffee table. In the corner, the TV was on at a low murmur. “Funny, since you haven’t seen him in the better part of twenty years.”

“I know his character,” André said gruffly. “He was always up to no good, no surprises there.”

“Especially considering his gilded childhood,” Mathias scoffed. “Did you tell them what a doting father you were?”

He felt the anger then, white-hot, simmering in his chest. The intensity caught him off guard. André Nadeau was no one to him yet summoned a hatred reminiscent of what he’d felt for his own father. Rayan didn’t speak much about his life before they’d met, but Mathias knew enough. He knew what it was like to have the odds stacked against you by your own family.

His gaze returned to André standing by the door, shriveled and diminished. “He doesn’t look anything like you,” Mathias remarked, cocking his head. “That must have been a disappointment—two sons and not a glimmer of resemblance. I’d say they both got off lucky.”

André scowled. “They got her coloring, that’s for sure. Her rabid insolence. Mongrels through and through.”

Mathias moved into the kitchen, not sure what propelled him, both curious and repulsed. It was an eternal mystery how two strangers possessed the ability to create someone so different from themselves. He’d always thought that about his own parents and felt the same thing now. He couldn’t imagine how the man who’d come to mean so much to him had sprung forth from this creature.

He took in the filth—the unwashed dishes stacked by the sink, the trash spilling from an overflowing bin in the corner of the room. On the fridge, a single cream-colored business card was held fast with a magnet. Mathias knew whose name he would find printed on the front of that card.

André had followed him into the kitchen and stood watching, his arms crossed. “So, what—you’re with the cops too? I already told that woman all I know.”

“Do I look like a cop?” Mathias’s eyes dropped to the counter, where a carving knife lay abandoned on a plastic cutting board. He picked it up and turned to André. “He might not have taken after you, but you made sure to leave your mark.”

André stumbled backward as Mathias advanced.

“What’s it like, slicing a little boy’s throat?” Mathias shoved him against the wall, bringing the knife to André’s neck. “How old was he—six, seven?” He pressed the point into the withered flesh, slowly increasing the pressure. Something in him itched to pierce the skin. “Must have been a real rush, watching him squirm.”

André’s bloodshot eyes widened in recognition, mouth opening and closing like a fish. “Who are you?” he wheezed.

Mathias thought of that first night at the safe house, how dull Rayan’s eyes looked in the dark. Rayan had shuddered when he’d climbed into bed beside him and Mathias felt the weight of something there with them, a part of the man he’d never truly known.

Making André Nadeau pay wouldn’t change a damn thing. It couldn’t undo what had already been done. Mathias released him, stepping back and tossing the knife into the sink. André slid to the floor, panting. Mathias took the inspector’s card from the fridge and flicked it down at the man’s feet.

“Call your friend, and tell her you’re a pathetic old man who makes up stories,” he said in a hard voice. “A lying drunk who left his kid for dead and hasn’t seen him since.”

André nodded his head vigorously, scrabbling for the card on the floor.

“Fortunate, in the end,” Mathias murmured, almost to himself. “In spite of you, he turned out a decent man.”

He headed back toward the front door, and his gaze was caught on the framed military commendations hanging from the living room wall. Not a single photo of his wife and children but a veritable shrine to his glory days. Mathias walked over to peer at the yellowing service certificates trapped behind glass. From the corner of his eye, he could see André standing meekly by the entrance to the living room.

“You’ve seen it, then—how much blood a dying man can spill.” Mathias turned to fix him with a steely glare. “I’ve seen it too. Buckets of the stuff. You think they’re done, but it keeps on flowing.”

The old man shrank against the wall. Mathias took down the frame declaring him the recipient of a Medal of Bravery and shook his head at the irony.

“The only thing you need to know about me is this,” he said, letting the frame drop from his hand and smash to the floor. “If I have to come back here, I will slit you ear to ear and watch until there’s not a drop left.”