Spoiled Rotten Read Online Free PDF

once.
    â€œListen, I don’t know what’s going on, but it definitely involves Daniel. The cops are breaking into his house now. I’m hiding in my car, watching them.”
    â€œSo you’re in your car relaxing and I’m up to my eyeballs in orders I can’t fill.”
    â€œI’m not relaxing. I’m on a stakeout.”
    â€œPlease tell me you didn’t just say the word ‘stakeout.’”
    â€œRick, something weird is happening, I’ve got to go.” I could hear Rick telling me not to hang up while I did precisely that.
    The police broke into Daniel’s house. After a few minutes, they came stomping back out. Winn snapped a few orders to the policemen, then took off in his unmarked sedan. The house must have been empty inside. Everyone left except for one cop to stand guard.
    The truth was, I half-expected to discover Daniel’s body in his car trunk. After what happened at Superior Meats, I thought there might be a serial killer on the loose. I certainly didn’t expect to see a thousand dollars’ worth of rotting steak in his trunk, which I knew didn’t belong to me. I never buy more meat than I can sell in three days because pawning off beef stew as the daily special for a week gets mighty boring, not to mention a little dicey.
    I decided to leave, but I didn’t want to head back to the restaurant just yet. Rick would make me feel guilty and I’d wind up doing the dishes or washing lettuce, an equally hideous job. The lunch rush would be over by the time I returned, so why poke my head in a hornet’s nest? I drove along Eastern Avenue for a few minutes, went south down Carlaw Avenue, and turned right on to Lake Shore Drive.
    During the horse-and-buggy days, the “Lake Shore” route may have been considered a scenic drive around Lake Ontario and still could be, except that the marshlands were filled over sixty years ago to accommodate industrial plants, warehouses, and garbage depots that have remained, changed, and multiplied over the decades. A story that my eighty-year-old neighbour, Mr. Mullen, shared with me years ago haunts me every time I drive past the spot on my way downtown.
    Mr. Mullen was born in the house across the street from mine in 1925. His story relies on his memory, which appears to be sharp as a tack. The trains still continue to speed by daily on the railroad tracks that lay behind his now fenced-in backyard. In his youth, there was a brick quarry on the other side of those tracks where he and the other children used to swim, until there was a terrible tragedy. A child drowned in the deep, muddy waters. The quarry was drained and pronounced unsafe and shortly afterwards it was commissioned for use as a city garbage dump. To make way for the new subway garage that fills the acre pit site today, the garbage was hauled out years later and buried underground. Undisturbed landfill slowly decomposes under lakeside fields covered with mature maple trees and flocks of Canadian geese. Contained by barbed-wire fencing, the grassy mounds appear to be abundantly fertile, ditto the geese.
    I continued driving west on Lakeshore Drive past unused acreage that remains between the road and the canal front that joins the Don River. A burgeoning homeless resort made up of tarps and tents that squatted on the empty land was eventually bulldozed. The irony that the property belonged to a mega department store, selling do- it-yourself home-improvement materials, wasn’t wasted on the good people of Toronto.
    Ducking under the Gardiner Expressway overpass, I ignored the small armies of isolated men working to repair the struts and spans that allowed run off rainwater to shower the cars below. Aiming directly for one of these waterfalls, I slowed down and got a mini car wash. It wasn’t clean water, but a shower is a shower and adequate enough to remove the anonymously scribbled messages from the car’s rear window.