Free The Code by Gare Joyce Page A

courses are open.”
    She golfs. I don’t. Not anymore. No fun for Arthur. Yeah, it’s that bad. I drive the cart and tell her how beautiful her swing is.
    â€œI guess you’ll just have to relax and be treated like a queen and lose yourself in some fine dining,” I said.
    â€œSugar, it’s small-town Ontario, not the south of France,” she said. “You’d be more believable pitching me on roughing it.”
    â€œOkay, let’s rough it.”
    This well-practised routine continued for a couple of minutes, mostly for our own amusement and, I think, for an eavesdropping garbageman’s. Eventually she acquiesced.
    â€œPack your bags and then pack mine,” I said.
    That got her. “So it’s legit,” she said. “You were really ambushed.”
    I pushed the sympathy button. She has always been a suckerfor helping out and has thrown me a life preserver I don’t know how many times. She probably figured I had ulterior motives. Close. I was still trying to figure them out. No matter. The road trip was on.

11
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    I checked into the Best Available Bunkhouse Offering Points. Staying in Peterborough would spare me three hours of driving, and the price of a room was about a wash with the mileage. I thought it was a more effective use of my time. Being on the ground in Peterpatch would give me a chance to small-talk my way to wisdom re Billy Mays Jr. Go around town. Go to the gym. A coffee here. A beer there. Watch a game in a sports bar. Act like just another fan. Mention that I was in town for the Hanratty funeral. If pushed, I could say that Hanratty was a friend of my father’s. Next stop I could say that the old doctor used to snap on the rubber glove when my father walked into the office. I could have fun with that stuff and then mention Mays. There’d be no more than two degrees of separation in Peterborough. It would be more like squeezing tangerines than oranges, but squeeze enough of them and you’d still get a Pitcher of Real Juice.
    First stop: the local gym, the House of Pain where the Peterborough juniors lift and where buff young puck bunnies and not a few cougars window shop. Ten-dollar guest pass withreceipt for wishful expense filing. I threw a couple of plates on a bar at the bench and asked a likely offensive tackle from the local high school team to spot for me. The kid was three bills, soft as a pillow, painfully red-headed, and speckled with freckles. Beef struck me as the type of jock who’d envy the local heroes and resent their trespassing on these two thousand square feet of rubber mats, what he would have considered holy ground and his rightful domain. And, of course, they would get the girls and Beef would be left behind. I tossed 225 like a salad—I didn’t remotely need the spot. I just wanted to make sure that I had his attention and respect.
    â€œPretty good,” he said.
    â€œYou gotta be doing that with three plates,” I said with a straight face.
    â€œOh yeah, for sets,” he lied.
    After the second set I mentioned that I was in town for the funeral and that I used to be Red Hanratty’s accountant. With a teenager there’d be no follow-up to that line—he wasn’t going to ask me for a business card. I told Beef that Hanratty used to send his stuff to our offices in Toronto but felt that he needed a CA closer to home. I kept going until I made sure he was fully tuning me out and would talk just to hear me shut up. A teenager is too easy to flim-flam this way. Pretty soon he was singing.
    â€œThey come in all the time … they’re really loud. Shitheads. And they’ve got nothing. They’re not that strong and they’re not serious about it …”
    The resentment flowed, as I’d fully expected. Message to self: Factor in Beef’s animus with any intel he volunteered.
    â€œâ€¦ They walk around school like they own it …”
    Perfect fit. Beef