A Stolen Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

Anyway, the idea was that if I could get close to her…I mean, it was so hard to keep track of these guys. They were always on the move. But if I could help pin them all down on a buy, you know, a definite place and time. We’d nail them.”
    “So what happened?”
    “Nothing. The guy died on his motorcycle, just about tore his head right off his body. The woman lived for a few days before she finally died, too.”
    “So no bust. They never suspected you were a cop?”
    “I don’t think they ever did, no. I guess I was pretty good at it.”
    That was the night, the first night I heard about Natalie’s talent for undercover work. I had no idea, although it shouldn’t have surprised me. If there’s anybody I’ve ever known who could pass as a biker chick…
    Yeah, I would have paid to see that one.
    I could tell she was tired, so I let her go. She told me she missed me. I said the same. She told me she was going to work crowd control at some big summer festival the next day. The most boring assignment you can draw, moving crowds of people around like cattle, except cattle have better manners. It’s even worse than writing parking tickets.
    Little did she know, the next day she’d hit the cop jackpot.
     
     
    In Paradise, it was the second day of a summer that hadn’t arrived yet. In Toronto, it was the biggest day of Natalie’s professional life. I thought about her all day, as I finished the roof on the cabin. I sat in the Glasgow and watched the clock, and I said to myself, this is not a good thing. You sitting here and waiting for it to get dark so you can go home and wait by the phone. This is not the right state of mind.
    I couldn’t help it.
    She called at ten o’clock that night. I could tell something was up. There was a certain energy in her voice. Something I hadn’t heard since she moved out there.
    “I told you, I was just going to do crowd control today,” she said. “I was ready for the longest day of my life.”
    “I remember.”
    “I get to work, and my CO says I need you to go up to the Mounties’ office on Yonge Street. I’m thinking, what the hell is this? What did I do wrong now?”
    “The Mounties…I thought they only worked in provinces without their own police.”
    “No, they have a regional office here. For anything national. Or international.”
    “What did they want with you?”
    “That’s what I’m getting to. I go up there, and they take me to the operations room. There’s about thirty people in the room, all sitting in chairs. There’s a podium up front, a big projector screen. The whole works. They’re obviously right in the middle of something. They’re showing pictures of people on the screen. But as soon as I go in, everything stops and they’re all looking at me.”
    She paused for a moment. I didn’t say anything. I listened to the faint hum on the line, the sound of the distance between us, until she spoke again.
    “The man up front, his name was Keller. He’s some kind of special operations commander for the Royal Mounted. He introduced himself, and then he says to everybody in the room, he says, this is Natalie Reynaud of the OPP. She has a certain talent I think you’ll all be interested to hear about. I’m thinking, what the hell is going on here? I felt like I’d been called down to the principal’s office.”
    “I imagine.”
    “He says to me, tell us about your previous undercover experience.”
    “The stuff you were talking about last night.”
    “Yes. He says tell us all about it, so I gave him the whole story. How I had hooked up with these bikers in Hearst. First through the woman and then the leader and everyone else…How it never amounted to anything.”
    “Because they ended up dead.”
    “Exactly. But somebody I was drinking with last night, they must have tipped off Keller, because he got on the phone to the Mountie who had run that operation up in Hearst, way back when. That guy must have given me quite a recommendation,