Crang Mysteries 4-Book Bundle. Jack Batten

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?” I said. I was still whispering. Annie didn’t stir.

      “I need t’see you,” she said. She shushed the “s.” “V’ry import’nt.”

      “I don’t think La Serre is open at this hour, Ms. Brackley,” I said. “How about noon? Noon today? Sunday? That convenient?”

      “Life er death,” she said on the phone.

      “Whose?” I asked.

      The silence on the line lasted long enough for me to suppose Alice Brackley might have gone for a fresh drink.

      “V’ry import’nt.” She was still with the phone.

      “What’s the address, Ms. Brackley?” I said, louder than a whisper. “I’ll come by your house around noon.”

      “’At’s right,” she said.

      The next sound from her end was the dial tone. I eased the receiver back on the hook.

      “A client in extremis?” Annie said. Her voice was muffled.

      “Sorry,” I said. I felt for her shoulder. “Tried not to wake you.”

      “You almost made it,” Annie said. She snuggled her back against my chest. “Who called?”

      “Alice Brackley,” I said. “She seemed to be keeping company with Rob Roy.”

      “Poor thing,” Annie said. The snuggle was escalating in erotic degrees. “What’d she want?”

      “An appointment.”

      Annie rolled over on her back and put her arms around my neck.

      She said, “I won’t keep you but a few moments.”

      “We’ve got most of eight hours.”

      Annie and I surfaced from love and sleep a little after nine. The morning felt to me like wheat cakes. I made them from a box that said “jiffy” on the front. They came out lumpy, but Annie said they tasted just like the kind her mother used to whip up. I served the wheat cakes on the kitchen table with orange juice squeezed from real oranges by my own hand, slices of nut bread, some peach preserve I bought one Saturday morning at the St. Lawrence Market, and a pot of coffee. Annie said she was starved, and both of us ate without much talk.

      “I’ve done it again,” Annie said after a while.

      “Which it is that?”

      “The one where I over-research.”

      Annie went to the refrigerator and got out cream for her coffee. She was wearing a Boston Celtics sweatshirt of mine. It looked fetching with the silk panties. They weren’t mine.

      “The piece on the critics has to run twenty minutes,” Annie said. “Absolutely not a second longer. What I’ve got is enough to keep the network humming for two hours. All golden stuff.”

      Annie’s Friday in Manhattan