Black Rock: An Eddie Dougherty Mystery - Softcover

From Chapter One

Late on a Saturday night at the end of May a car coming across the Champlain Bridge into Montreal exploded as it passed the Nuns’ Island exit, just past the tollbooths. There were already two squad cars on the scene when Dougherty got there, working alone because Gauthier was taking all his sick days before his retirement kicked in, and he ran up to a cop he recognized, Bergeron, who was dropping a road flare a good two hundred feet from the smouldering car.

“What’s out here?”

Bergeron pointed and it took Dougherty a few seconds to make out the severed arm on the pavement. They closed the road, traffic backed up across the bridge and for miles past that, and walked around with flashlights showing the detectives and the tech guys as much of the debris as they could find. It looked like there was only one guy in the car, which looked like an Oldsmobile, a Cutlass, Dougherty figured, by what was left of the roof and the pieces of the front grille.

Dougherty watched the police photographer, Rozovsky, take a hundred pictures of the wreckage and dozens of every body part they could find and then stop and change lenses on the camera and then turn and aim it back towards the skyline of Montreal.

One of the detectives said, “What’s that for?” and Rozovsky said, “It looks like a postcard.”

“You can’t sell a picture you take while you’re on the clock.”

Rozovsky snapped off a few more shots and said, “It’s for my personal collection.”

“Yeah, your personal collection on the rack in every drugstore in town,” and Rozovsky said, “From your lips . . .”

Dougherty was thinking it did look like a postcard; the ships in the port, the big old Sun Life building, the shiny aluminum Place Ville Marie, the black tower of Place Victoria, all of them under the big cross on Mount Royal.

The detectives finally arrived and one of them asked Vachon if it was the FLQ and the bomb squad guy said, “Non, c’est la mob.”

“Certains?”

One of the other bomb squad guys handed Vachon a piece of debris, and Vachon explained to the detectives that it was a radio receiver and that probably the transmitter was in a car behind the Cutlass. “Or over there,” he said, pointing to the row of tollbooths on the southbound lanes.
The detectives talked among themselves for a while and Dougherty overheard a little of what they were saying, trying to figure out who would take the case as most of the organized crime squad was working terrorism cases and the homicide squad was also stretched pretty thin.
One of the detectives looked at Dougherty with that what are you still doing here? look on his face, and Dougherty walked back to the other uniformed cops, wondering if anyone was ever going to investigate this.

The bomb squad wrapped up at the scene about four in the morning. Dougherty was moving his car to open up the road and let them head back to their offices at police headquarters when Vachon rolled the window of his station wagon down and said, “Westmount, right away. Number five Lansdowne Ridge, let’s go.”

Dougherty turned on the flashing light on top of his car and peeled out, driving fast through the city. He took the next exit off the expressway, Atwater Street, and headed up the hill. He didn’t know exactly where Lansdowne Ridge was. Westmount had its own police force right there in the middle of Montreal, no way all those Anglos, the richest of the rich, were going to let Montreal cops in their business. When he got to Sherbrooke, Dougherty turned left and saw the Westmount police car waiting to lead them up the winding streets on the southwest side of Mount Royal.
Number five Lansdowne Ridge was a big stone house over a hundred years old and it looked like the bomb had been placed in a basement window well. The explosion had blown into the house, destroyed some furniture and a big colour TV but didn’t seem to have done much damage to the building itself.

An ambulance and a bunch of Westmount police cars were on the scene.

While Vachon and the rest of the bomb squad guys went to check it out Dougherty hung back with the Westmount cop, an older guy, looked to be in his fifties. Dougherty said, “Anybody hurt?”
“The wife’s in shock, they’re taking her to the hospital. The kids, too. If it had gone off a couple hours earlier,” and he motioned to the smoking rubble in the basement, the rec room, and Dougherty said, “Yeah.”

A few more Montreal cop cars pulled up, and Dougherty said, “Since when did you start letting us in here?”

“Only for bombs,” the Westmount cop said. “Back when they were in mailboxes we’d call in the army, they’d take them out to a field and blow them up — one guy had his hands blown off, you remember that?”

Dougherty said, “No,” and the Westmount cop shrugged and said, “Now they want to treat them like a crime scene, try and get evidence, fingerprints, that kind of thing.”

Dougherty said, “Makes sense,” and the Westmount cop said, “Yeah, like we don’t know who’s doing it.”

Dougherty said yeah and started to get out his cigarettes when he heard a second blast. The Westmount cop said, “Shit, another one?” He got into his car and Dougherty got into his and followed.

They could see the smoke rising a few blocks away, but Dougherty didn’t think he would have been able to find his way on these streets, all twists and turns and up and down.
Another old stone house. Smoke coming out through smashed windows, man and a woman, both in their sixties or maybe seventies, coming out as Dougherty and the Westmount cop rushed up, the Westmount cop yelling, “Anybody else in the house?” and the old man shaking his head, saying, “No, it’s just us.”

Dougherty saw the blackened stones at the base of a retaining wall beside the house. The street had houses only on the south side, the north was a rock wall keeping back Mount Royal. Dougherty walked around the outside of the house, looking for another bomb or a package, something — he didn’t even know what, really. Beyond the house to the south was a steep drop-off and a great view of the St. Lawrence river and the South Shore. When he was on the small patio behind the house Dougherty realized that the idea behind the bomb was probably to knock out the retaining wall and have the house collapse on the ones below it down the hill, but the wall had held. He walked back out front of the house, saw the Westmount cop had the old couple in the back seat of his car, and just then Vachon pulled up and got out of his car saying, “Une autre.”

Dougherty said, “Yeah, that makes three,” and before Vachon could say anything there was another explosion.

This one was just down the street. It was set in the retaining wall on the north side and blew huge chunks of brick through windows in the house across the street. But the wall held.

“They were trying for an avalanche,” Vachon said, and Dougherty said yeah.

The next bomb exploded twenty minutes later at the back of an office building on Sherbrooke a few blocks down the hill and blew out the windows of a couple of houses on Elm Avenue.
By the time the sun was coming up a few thousand people had been evacuated and every Westmount cop and half the Montreal cops were scouring the neighbourhood for more bombs. At ten o’clock a call came in that a man had found a suspicious package under his car, and when Vachon delicately pulled it out from under the Buick and opened it he saw fifteen sticks of dynamite wired to an alarm clock. Dougherty led the way, this driving fast through city streets starting to get old, to an open field off Côte-des-Neiges Road, on the other side of Mount Royal, where the bomb was dismantled.

At noon the mayor of Westmount announced it was safe for people to return to their homes and then he invited the Montreal cops to join him at the Westmount City Hall for lunch. A couple dozen cops still on the scene took him up on the offer, and when Vachon pointed out that the alarm clock they’d taken off the dismantled bomb was stamped Made in China instead of the usual Made in Japan, the mayor decided they should have Chinese food and had his assistant call Ruby Foo’s.

There was a lot of talk about a blue sports car with four bearded men in it that a few people said they saw just before the first bomb went off. Most of the cops weren’t too surprised. The usual suspects.

“They all want to be Che Guevara.”

When they were finally packing up to leave after lunch, another call came in. A boy had found a package on the patio behind his house and when he opened it he saw, as he put it, “A whole lot of dynamite.”

Dougherty was about to get going when he heard, “Hey, Dog-eh-dee,” and turned to see Delisle, the desk sergeant from Station Ten, walking up to him.

“You know a taverne dans le Point, s’appelle Nap?” he said in his Franglish and Dougherty said, “Yeah, Nap’s — Napoleon’s. I know it.”

And Delisle said, in English, “Go down there and get Detective Carpentier.” Being in Westmount must have thrown him off.

One of the bomb squad guys standing nearby packing up equipment said, “Is he drunk again?”
Delisle said, “Bring him au dix.”

By then it was three o’clock Sunday afternoon. Dougherty had been on shift since he started the four to midnight on Saturday and he was wiped out. But he got in his car and drove down the hill to his old neighbourhood, Pointe Saint-Charles. Only a few miles away but it felt like a mill...