Live Bait (7 page)

Louise was watching TV when I got to her place. She looked tired. Her ex was a TV producer for the advertising agency where she used to work as a copywriter. After eight years of marriage he had taken a tumble for some model he'd met while filming a brassiere commercial. After a year of wrangling that ended when I had a nice brotherly talk to him about responsibilities, he had given Louise the house and moved in permanently with his girlfriend. Louise had gone back to copywriting, and with long hours at the agency and playing single parent she had her hands full.

She got up when I came in and clicked off the set. "Hi, Reid, can I get you a beer?" I guess I can say it, even though she's my sister, she's a looker. She has Mother's black hair and Dad's blue eyes and she's two years younger than me. I didn't figure she would be alone for too long but she tells me straight guys willing to take on a couple of kids are a rarity in Toronto, she's not having any more luck with relationships than I am.

"Cup of coffee would do me more good. I have to go out again later."

"Okay, I'll put the kettle on." I followed her out and sat at the counter while she brewed up, enjoying the domesticity. She nagged me gently as the kettle boiled. "You don't get enough sleep," she said. "You ought to take a whole night off sometimes."

"Maybe I will. I made some real progress today. I just have to fill some people in and then I'll come home, unless they want me to prowl around their sites for them again."

She put the coffee in front of me. "Yeah. Well take care. Nobody can live forever on nerves and work. Okay?"

I winked at her and after a while we watched TV and then she went to bed and I drove down to the Bonded office.

Fullwell was there with a coffee and a map of the city with flags on it at the points that Bonded Security was covering. He waved and blew smoke. "Hey, Reid, Barbara told me you got a name."

I sat and put my size elevens on his desk which was war-surplus oak veneer, like the one in my police station. He winced and pushed a coaster at me. I stuck it under my heel. "Tony opened up like an oyster. Tells me the word came from a high-priced lawyer down on Bay Street, man by the name of Cy Straight."

Fullwell frowned. "Just like that? Or did you have to play rough."

"Just handed it to me, on a plate, just for being underfoot while he was trying to do business." And as I said it I realized what had been in the back of my mind the whole time. "It was a touch too easy," I added.

We sat and looked at one another without focussing, wondering why a slippery character like Tony would break Rule One of the jungle he lived in and talk to the law, in any form. "You thinking what I'm starting to think?" I asked.

Fullwell said, "Well, I hate to rap on a free melon, but you wouldn't expect anything for nothing from a loan shark, would you?"

I yawned. "No, I wouldn't. He must have something of his own in mind—he's sure not doing it because he likes me. Anyway, do you have any idea who Straight is?"

"Never heard of him." Fullwell coughed and beat his butt to death in an ashtray that already held too many of them. "He could be a partner in some big outfit downtown. I'll get on the phone in the morning."

"It wouldn't hurt to go and see him, feel the vibrations," I suggested.

"No, it wouldn't. But I'll brief the boss first. We're skating close to the edge on this one. If this guy's a wheel he can shout harassment and cause trouble. The boss has to know."

"Why not, he draws the big dollar." I was wondering what else Fullwell had in mind for me. I was enjoying the investigation after a leisurely summer at the Harbour. It was good to be part of a team again, even an unofficial team like this one. He filled me in.

"I'm worried they're going to keep the pressure on," he said. "And there's too many security companies in town for us to be able to keep on taking falls. It'll put us out of business if we can't do our job properly."

"So you want to run some surveillance?" It wouldn't be hard, I figured: a night spent driving from one site to another, finishing around four a.m. Punks like the two I'd caught don't work really late.

He stood up and indicated his map. Toronto is split neatly in two by Yonge Street, which is pronounced "young" and is in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's longest street. It happened that the Bonded sites were divided almost equally, east and west. Fullwell indicated the colored flags. "We've got forty-seven fulltime sites, plus a couple of casuals that we hit once or twice a night. If we divide the sites we might just get around them by morning. Are you up to it?"

"Sure, you can take the extra one. And, because I'm a nice guy, I'll let you take Sam with you, he'll run interference in case anybody wants to play rough."

Fullwell looked at me gratefully. "I'd appreciate that. I'm not handy like you are with your karate or whatever."

I didn't correct him but I don't know karate. What I am is a well-trained scrambler, versed in the unarmed combat techniques they teach in the U.S. Marines. I can hold my own against any untrained brawler but I'm no match for a classically trained martial artist. But most people don't understand subtleties. If you hit anybody hard enough they call it either karate or kung fu. I've given up arguing.

"I left him in my car." I stood up. "Come on down with me and I'll turn him over to you, and give you the proper words of command. He's one hell of a good dog, but he's not a machine. You need to know the rules."

"Great," Fullwell said. "I'm not chicken but I don't like this." He picked up his hat off the top of a filing cabinet and placed it on his head as carefully as if it were a crown, then opened his desk drawer. "This is a list of the addresses, I had it typed up ready. You take the East end, I'll take the West, some of the spots out there are hard to find first time."

We went out, past the same girl, reading a new paperback with openmouthed concentration. I ordered Sam to go with Fullwell. He wasn't happy about it, but he's perfectly trained, if I do say so, and he went without a whimper. Then I briefed Fullwell thoroughly on commands and left, driving out to the first of my sites.

I had a hunch that any trouble that occurred would be on their in-town sites. Most of the other locations were remote enough that a lone car cruising up and stopping nearby would be conspicuous. If the guard was alert he could see it and call for support right away. The exceptions were a few warehouses, like the one that had been hit the night before. The car could arrive out of sight of the guard and an intruder could come close without being noticed. I decided to concentrate on these spots, plus in-town places where someone could walk up without being seen. Towards morning I would take a quick pass at the others.

I went first to the plant where the Sikh had been hit. The guy inside was a middle-aged loser, happy to have any kind of job. He sirred me to death so I figured he'd been in the army at one time. But he was fine. So were the next couple of guards I visited. I told them all the same thing. Watch for action on the perimeter, cars driving up, lone men coming close to the fence. And keep alert! Most of them had access to weapons of some crude kind, crowbars or boards, and I advised them to have something handy. They're not much use against a trained fighter but they would deter the kind of cheap hoods I'd collected on the construction site.

And then I went to that site. By now it was after two. I was listening to Charlie Pride on the country music station and was relaxed, but when I got to the gate and left the car the cool September air woke me up properly as I let myself in.

The patrol hut was empty. There were two lunch-pails there so I realized that Fullwell had doubled up the coverage this night. I went and stood outside for a moment but nobody challenged me, so I took out my big flashlight but didn't turn it on and started around the circuit I'd made the first night.

While I was in Nam I learned about night patrols, the hard way. As a result I can move like an Indian, with no sound. My eyes snap into night vision quicker than most people's so I don't need the flashlight. And that's how I came up on the two guards before anybody heard me. I heard them first, one of them anyway, he was groaning. I stopped in my tracks and checked all around, at ground level and above me, on top of the machinery and shack that stood there. I couldn't see anything or hear anything else. So I flicked on the light and saw the two men, muddy and bloodied, lying in the frozen, accidental postures of corpses or the critically wounded. Then I heard a sudden padding of feet, running. I followed the sound on tiptoe, around the end of the shack in time to see a couple of men at the fence, scrambling up it hand over hand.

That was when I missed Sam. He would have covered the thirty yards between me and the fence in time to jump and hold on to the leg of one of those men. But I was too slow. In the four seconds it took me they had rolled over the wire and dropped cleanly to the other side. They didn't look back but I got an impression of neatness, of suits and white shirts and dark hair. Then a car, a late model Olds Toronado, pulled up and let them in without putting on the inside light. I was at the fence by that time but the light was out on the rear license plate and I swore and threw a rock after them. It landed twenty yards behind them. If they were bothering to look back they probably had a laugh over that.

 

 

 

 

Chapter 9

 

 

I
didn't waste time climbing the fence and racing down the street after the car. I ran back to the guards and checked them over. They were alive but they both looked bad. One of them had a walkie-talkie and I blipped the button and called but the girl at Bonded must have been turning the pages on her thriller, she didn't respond, so I belted back to the shack and called the police emergency number. "One-fifty-one Shuter Street, construction site. Two security guards assaulted. Suspects escaped in dark Olds Toronado, no light on rear license, likely an eighty-two model." Then I gave them my name and asked for an ambulance.

The dispatcher made me repeat it but he was on the air as he spoke and within a minute a scout car was at the gate. I was there to meet them. They wanted to come in but I told them to drive west towards Church Street, then on to Yonge, north-south streets where they might have caught a glimpse of the getaway car.

They left and I went out to the injured guards and waited for the ambulance. They seemed to be bleeding from the nose and mouth, from internal injuries, not the usual kind of cuts and bruises men get in fights, the kind you can give first aid to.

When the ambulance crew put them on gurneys they were alert enough to moan in pain, and I tried again to ask them who had done it but they were beyond talking. They were stunned, the way most people are by sudden violence. It changes your whole perspective of life. You can be four years old or forty, it makes no difference. In that first vivid flash of deliberately inflicted pain all your previous experience is cancelled. You realize the darkness is out there waiting to take you in and all this time you've been a baby, ignorant and lucky.

I thought they might be able to talk by morning, with luck, but that was all. I went back to the shack when the ambulance left, reaching it as the phone rang. It was Fullwell, who had been called on the radio when I turned in the alarm. "I'll come down there and check. You stick around on the site and I'll head to the hospital and check what I can find out from Bates and Cornish."

"Fine. But it's locking the stable after the horse is gone, I don't think those guys are coming back."

"I know," he agreed. "But it's all we can do. I'd like you to check the site carefully, maybe one of the attackers dropped something."

He hung up, just as the detectives arrived from 52 division. This time I was lucky. One of them was Irv Goldman, my old partner from two years before, when I was one of Toronto's finest. He recognized me under the big work-lights at the site gate. "Well, hey, Reid Bennett. What in hell are you doing here. I thought you were the marshal of Dodge City on the Lake."

"Irv, you still peddling the same fish?" We shook hands and slapped one another on the back like a couple of visiting dignitaries. He was a good buddy and we'd been through some adventures together. The other guy cleared his throat and Irv introduced us. "Reid, this is my partner, Jack Robinette. Jack, this is the famous Reid Bennett I've mentioned a time or two."

Robinette laughed, a friendly chuckle. "A time or two! I'll say. Tell me Reid, did you and Irv get up to all those stunts he's always blowing about?"

"Trust him," I said as we shook hands. "He's good people." I didn't feel like clowning but it doesn't pay to get steely-eyed with policemen. They see enough mayhem that they're impervious to suffering; they like to kibitz.

Irv said, "So what's with this security crap. I thought you were working steady, keeping the peace up at Mouse's Armpit somewhere north."

"Murphy's Harbour, and I still am. I'm just lending a hand to one of the Bonded Security guys. He helped me out once, this is tit for tat, plus a little coin."

"Nothing for nothing." Irv wrapped up the last of the kidding in one sentence. "Now what happened here?"

I told him quickly, mentioning the previous assaults and Tony. Irv sniffed. "I think I've seen that guy around. He's smalltime. You figure he set this up?"

"Could've. But I think it's over his head. This looks as if it's an international job."

"Anybody in dutch with the Mob?" Robinette asked. "This is about their speed, although so far we haven't had much of it in town."

"If anybody is, they don't know about it at Bonded," I told him. "They went through the list of contractors; the only thing we found was this penalty clause in the finish date. Everybody seems clean." I didn't tell them about Cy Straight. That was a lead I wanted to follow personally; a bunch of detectives sitting in his office would turn him off like a tap. I'd have more chance to get the feel of the guy if I went there alone.

"And these guys you saw. They look Italian?" Irv asked.