Crang Plays the Ace Read Online Free PDF Page A

pole was a chain-link fence. It enclosed four or five acres of asphalted property. The fence stood as tall as the pole with the sign and had a thick trimming of barbed wire at the top. I didn’t bother checking for a welcome mat.
    I pulled beyond Ace’s land, made a U-turn, and parked on the other side of the street in front of a bar and restaurant that advertised exotic dancers from noon to midnight. Just the ticket to pass the hours while your car is getting a lube job up the street.
    There were two gates in Ace’s fence. Both were closed. One gate was for people and the other for trucks. The people gate led on to a cement path that crossed a patch of brown grass to a long rectangular one-storey building. The building was glum and red-brick and had air-conditioning units sticking out of every second window. No doubt typists, bookkeepers, and various office workers laboured on the other side of the air conditioners. If I wanted to chat up Charles Grimaldi or Wansborough’s cousin, Alice Brackley the headstrong, that was where I figured to find them. But I didn’t want to chat up Charles or Alice. Not yet. I didn’t have the right questions. I was on a reconnoitring mission. Reconnoitring was a word that made me feel efficient.
    In the middle of the property, a bigger grey-brick building had a small office area at one end. The rest of it opened up in large bays for servicing trucks. There were eight bays, and four of them were in business. Six or seven men in mechanics’ overalls swarmed around the trucks. The asphalted surface that surrounded the buildings had painted-in spaces for at least two hundred trucks, but only ten spaces were occupied. The rest of the trucks must have been out on the job. Whatever precisely that was. Maybe reconnoitring would enlighten me.
    The trucks in the parking spaces were uniform in appearance, big and blunt, a dusty red colour, and looked like they’d been put together from a giant set of kids’ Lego blocks. The largest piece of Lego sat on the back. It was a bin, a good ten feet deep and probably that much across. If I read correctly the series of bars and chains that led from it to the cab of the truck, the bin could be hoisted on and off the truck when you pushed and pulled the right buttons and levers in the cab. As toys go, it was probably a lot of fun.
    I sat in the Volks for fifteen minutes. A man came out of the office end of the grey-brick building and walked toward one of the parked trucks. From the distance, all I could make out of the man were jeans riding low on a bulging stomach, a black T-shirt, and a face covered in a thick, dark beard. He swung into the cab of the truck with a nonchalance that said he’d done it more than once before. He started the engine and steered the truck slowly toward the larger of the two gates. A man in a security guard’s outfit stepped from a small hut near the gate, pulled it open, and waved the truck through. The driver turned left and the truck rumbled up the street toward Dundas. It had me for company.
    I followed the truck on a route that took us back to the centre of the city. We came off the Lakeshore at York Street and headed north toward Queen.
    The Ace truck slowed down a block and a half short of Queen, just south of Osgoode Hall, the elegant nineteenth-century building that houses Ontario’s Supreme Court. It turned into the opening in a construction site that was surrounded by smart orange hoardings. There were glass and chrome skyscrapers on either side of the construction site. If I knew my downtown Toronto developers, there’d soon be a third of the same. Three identical skyscrapers in a row. The guy who’d designed Osgoode Hall wouldn’t have understood.
    The orange hoardings had a dozen glassed-in viewing spots for interested citizens to catch the action. I parked in a tow-away zone and took up position at one of the viewing spots. The excavation dropped fifty or sixty