mind the perfectionism,” I said. “The job’s done.”
“Almost,” James said.
He stood down from the stool. Cars were moving on the street in a regular rhythm of traffic. Four minutes to six. If I were Jimmy the Greek, I’d shorten the odds on an Ace employee showing up. James pulled the front door shut. No bells rang.
“Okay,” James said. “The alarm’s operational.”
“Operational?” I said. “Any chance of putting me up for membership in your word-of-the-day club, James?”
James slung the cloth bag over his shoulder and picked up the stool. We were almost to the gate when a blue Cutlass stopped at the truck gate into the Ace property. The Cutlass’s driver put on his handbrake and got out of the car. He was rotund and middle-aged and had a cigar in his mouth. He wore a security guard’s uniform and carried a ring of keys in his hand.
“Hell of a great day for it,” I shouted over to him. My voice resonated with the hearty sycophancy of Ed McMahon buttering up Johnny Carson.
The rotund man stared at us.
“You bet,” he said. He had the look of an instinctively friendly old boy, but the presence of James and me was giving him trouble. We didn’t belong to his daily routine. The signs of a small inner struggle showed on his face. Quizzical. That was his expression.
“Everything’s shipshape inside,” I said. James and I kept walking.
“Oh, hell, this shop turns over like a clock,” the rotund man said. He took the cigar out of his mouth and gave us close scrutiny. He had piggy eyes.
James and I reached the pedestrian gate.
“What d’you think?” I called to the rotund man. “Lock this thing up or leave it for the others?”
“Office staff don’t come in Saturdays,” he said. “You guys office people?”
“Consulting job,” I said. “One shot and we’re gone.”
“Yeah,” the rotund man said. He was jingling the ring of keys in his hand. “Wondered why I didn’t recognize you and the kid.”
“In and out,” I said. “That’s the way it is in our game.”
“Well, hell, you might’s well lock the gate,” the rotund man said. “I’m only supposed to look after this here one for the vehicles.”
He pronounced it vee-hick-els.
I snapped the lock and waved to the rotund man.
“See you next year around the same time,” I said. My smile was as radiant as Wayne Newton’s. And as false.
“Where’d you say you two guys were from?” the rotund man asked. “Like, what company?”
The smile must have been too close to Wayne Newton’s.
“Didn’t say,” I said.
“Maybe I better take a look at who sent you people,” the rotund man said. He put the cigar back in his mouth, the keys in his pants pocket, and took a first step toward us. “I mean, what’s the kid doing with that there stool anyway?”
A horn honked behind us. The rotund man turned. A pickup truck had pulled behind the Cutlass, and back of the pickup a bright yellow Honda Civic was stopping. The pickup’s driver leaned out of the window. He was wearing a maroon and yellow Ace cap and a pair of wraparound sunglasses.
“You gonna jaw all morning, Wally?” he shouted. “Or you opening the fucking gate?”
Rotund Wally looked at the driver and back to us.
“Stay right there,” he said to James and me. “Just my duty, you understand, but I gotta check who you are.”
“No problem, Wally,” I said. The grin made my cheeks throb.
The driver in the pickup sounded another blast of his horn.
“Hold your water,” Wally said. He got the key ring from his pocket and unlocked the padlock on the truck gate.
“Soon as he moves his car,” I said to James, “we walk over to the Dart.”
Wally swung open the gate, secured it in place, and climbed back in the Cutlass.
“Now,” I said.
James and I stepped between the rear of the pickup truck and the front of the yellow Honda. I gave a friendly flick of my hand to the man behind the Honda’s wheel. He smiled back. Two more cars had joined the line waiting to get in the gate. James and I crossed the road and reached the Majestic parking lot. Rotund Wally had driven his Cutlass far enough into the Ace grounds to allow the following cars room to pull in and pass him. When he stepped from his driver’s seat, dust stirred by the wheels of the cars whirled around him. By the time James and I got to the Dart, Rotund Wally hadn’t spotted us.
“This is cutting it too fine, Crang,” Harry Hein said from the back seat. The briefcase sat on his lap and he’d worked his white handkerchief into a damp ball.
I turned the Dart out of the parking lot to the right. Rotund Wally, his hands swatting at the cloud of dust that enveloped him, was looking left. We drove downtown into the rising sun. My eyes ached, and the rest of my body felt the way it should, like it’d been up all night. No one spoke in the car until I turned off the Gardiner at Spadina.
“Now we’re all square, Crang?” Harry said.
“It’s a saw-off in the favour department, Harry,” I said.
Harry thought he’d need until Monday morning to sort out the data he’d lifted from Ace’s accounting department. I let him out of the car in front of his office, then drove James to Regent Park, where I handed the kid six twenties. He raised his eyebrows.
“Bonus for efficiency,” I said.
James walked away from the Dart without speaking. I went home and stood in the kitchen and drank a quart of milk from the carton.
20
IT WAS DARK and I answered the phone on the first ring. The small black clock on my bedside table read twenty past four. Annie moaned from under a pillow. She didn’t wake up. Answering on the first ring wasn’t bad for someone who’d devoted most of the previous early morning to breaking the laws against burglary. After I’d got back from Ace, I napped for a couple of hours and met Annie at the airport. In the afternoon, we’d wandered around the Saturday antiques market at Harbourfront and eaten dinner at a restaurant called Spinnakers. It was outdoors and had a view over to the Toronto Islands. I didn’t tell Annie about the undercover operation at Ace.
“This better not be a wrong number,” I said into the phone. I was whispering.
“Mr. Crang?” a woman’s voice said. I recognized Alice Brackley. She slurred her words. Both of them.
“What is it, Ms. Brackley?”
