Crang Mysteries 4-Book Bundle. Jack Batten

said, “I’m gonna need ten minutes to take my wire off the alarm box and hook up the system the way it was before.”

      I looked at my watch. Almost five-forty. The sun was above the line of buildings to the east.

      “By six o’clock,” I said, “we’ll see traffic out there.”

      “What’re you talking about?” Harry said.

      “The guys who drive Ace’s trucks,” I said. “Six is starting time for some of them.”

      “Jesus, we’re cooked,” Harry said. The nervous Harry had resumed ascendancy over the confident accountant. “A goddamned employee’s going to come through the gate before those cops move off.”

      “Something might hurry them on their rounds,” I said. “Maybe a disapproving taxpayer.”

      I went downstairs and opened four of the half-lockers until I found what I was looking for. Inside the fourth locker there was a dirty maroon windbreaker with “Ace” written in yellow across the back. The lettering was the same as on the sign in front of the building. I put on the windbreaker and a John Deere cap that was hanging on the hook underneath it. The windbreaker made a tight fit. A wooden box with a handle lay across the top of two adjoining lockers. It held a collection of wrenches and hammers and soiled rags. I used one of the rags to give my hands and face a wipe of grease. The tool box was heavy, but I hoisted it in my right hand with a jaunty swing and walked upstairs.

      “Master of a thousand disguises,” I said. James said nothing. Harry’s eyes rolled back in his head.

      I opened the front door and started down the path, trying like hell to look like I belonged to the tool box. The cop with the cigarette nudged the cop with the lunch. He was working on an apple. Both followed my forthright progress along the path. At the gate, I lifted out the padlock, stepped through, and locked the padlock in place. I tested it with an authoritative yank.

      “Hey, you guys got the soft life,” I said to the two cops when I was partway across the street.

      The cop eating the apple stopped chewing.

      “What’re you doing around here this hour, Jack?” he said.

      I said, “Working, which is more than I can say for you and your buddy.”

      I let the tool box drop to the pavement. The cop with the cigarette flinched at the bang and the jangle of the hammers and wrenches.

      “Working?” he said. “At what?”

      “Couple of trucks needed servicing before they go on the road this morning,” I said. “Took all fucking night.”

      The cop threw the cigarette on the road and butted it out with his boot.

      “How’d you get here?” he asked. “Car or what?”

      “Parked over there,” I said. I pointed at the Dart under the trees in the Majestic lot. “I came on around midnight and the only key they gave me is for the lock in the little gate. That satisfy you hotshots? I had to leave my car outside.”

      Both cops thought over my answer.

      “Ask more questions, why not?” I said. I put my hands on my hips and worked my mouth into a lopsided grin. “Make you feel real big-time, hey guys?”

      The cop with the lunch put his half-eaten apple in the brown paper bag.

      “That lip’s gonna get you run in one day, Jack,” he said.

      “What for?” I said. “Doing my job like an honest citizen?”

      The cop who’d been smoking took a turn.

      “Don’t lean too hard,” he said to me.

      “So radio in,” I said. I was grinning like a fool. Let the law know it had a crazy on its hands. “Tell the dispatcher you got an innocent bystander needs his ticket punched.”

      The cop who’d been eating tossed his paper bag through the cruiser’s window. He motioned to his partner with his hands, palms up, thumbs pointed out. The gesture had its own eloquence. It said the morning was early, the shift was almost over, and a loudmouth was hassling two tired cops. Time to toss in the towel.

      “Your lucky day, fella,” the first cop said to me. He opened the door on the driver’s side. The other cop walked around to his side.

      “Look at me,” I said. “Trembling in my boots, Officer.”

      The driver started his engine and squealed his tires as he pulled down the road.

      “Hey,” I shouted after the car, “have a nice day.”

      James and Harry came out of Ace’s front door on the run. Harry ran like Danny DeVito. They reached the gate.

      “You’re absolutely nuts, Crang,” Harry said.

      “Only in emergency situations,” I said.

      James applied his thin wire to the padlock and sprang it open for the second time in six hours. I went through the gate with the tool box. Harry headed in the opposite direction with his briefcase, bound for the safety of the Dart. I returned the tool box, jacket, and cap to the basement locker room and cleaned my face and hands, and when I got back upstairs, James was standing on his stool and working on the alarm box. He untaped the wire he’d used to bypass the box and fit in new wires running into the box and leading out of it on the other side. It was eight minutes to six. A car drove up the street. James didn’t hesitate at his task. The car kept moving past the Ace property.

      “Anybody studies real close, they’re gonna see what I did here,” James said. He was taping the wires into place. The tape made a matching pair of lumps in the otherwise even line of the wiring.

      “Not your concern, James,” I said.

      Three more cars passed in the street.

      “Also,” James said, “I left a couple of marks where I picked the lock on the door.”

      Two fine scratches showed where James’ pick had missed the keyhole.

      “Never 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