Free Buffalo Jump by Howard Shrier Page A

through my media clips and forward anything pertinent to Clint and his department heads, then boot back out and try to get a look at Jay Silver and family in the flesh. I figured I could do all that and still be back at my cubicle by the time Franny reeled in.
    Clint’s black Pathfinder was in its reserved spot when I pulled into the Beacon lot ten minutes later. I had no idea what time he arrived in the morning. In five years I had never yet beaten him in to work. The smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the office when I swiped my way in. I was in the kitchenette pouring myself a mug when Clint appeared. He made a show of looking at his watch and feigning shock at my early arrival. The good humour seemed a little forced but I appreciated the effort.
    “You’re in early,” he said.
    “I’m helping Franny out on his nursing home thing.”
    “Good. I told him to call on you if he was overloaded.”
    “Oh, he was overloaded.”
    Clint smiled. He had known Franny a lot longer than I had, had no doubt witnessed many a late entrance. “Never mind, smart guy. How you doing otherwise?”
    “Fine.”
    “You sure?
    “Yeah.”
    “Bring your coffee to my office,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something. Now’s as good a time as any.”

CHAPTER 10
    I first met Graham McClintock at the Dojo on Danforth, where I taught the evening adult class in intermediate
shotokan
karate. Most of the students were in their forties or fifties, from professional women concerned about the city’s rising crime rates to film producers who wanted to look as buff as the younger actors and techies they hired. Clint was close to sixty then: an inch taller than my six feet, with broad shoulders, a narrow waist and thick, powerful legs. Photos of a younger Clint show him with flaming red hair but it was grey by then and cropped close to his skull. His eyes were a piercing blue that made Paul Newman’s look flat.
    From the beginning he stood out in both his degree of fitness and his aptitude for combat. He sparred with an intensity that intimidated other students, who tried hard to avoid being matched against him. If he sparred against me, he’d compete as if I were trying to make him my jailhouse bride. After class he’d hang around and ask questions about stances, weight shifts, feints and blocks. We developed a good rapport, Clint and I. My father had been dead more than ten years, and I enjoyed having him to both learn from and teach.
    One night after class, he asked me to join him for a beer and a bite, his treat, so we cleaned up and went to Allen’s, a Riverdaleinstitution with more than 300 beers and many a fine whisky on hand. We washed hamburgers and sweet potato fries down with Dragon’s Breath ale, then ordered shots of the Macallan.
    When the drinks arrived, he said, “You’ve never asked what I do for a living. This town, it’s usually the first thing people want to know about you. That and how much you paid for your house.”
    “It’s not how I define people, so it’s not how I get to know them.”
    “I’m not going to ask what you do, because I already know,” he said. “But can I ask what you did before?”
    There was no short answer. I wasn’t like my brother Daniel; my academic past had been checkered at best. I was smart enough to know I wasn’t stupid, but I had never been able to harness it in school. I was in my own world most of the time, mourning my father, insulating myself in a haze of hash smoke. When I was fifteen, sixteen, I used to sneak over to the adjacent apartment building to smoke dope with Kenny Aber, and from his bedroom window we could identify my family’s unit by the one constant: my brother’s silhouette against his blinds as he studied into the night. “Is that a cardboard cut-out or what?” Kenny would ask. “I swear he never moves.”
    No one ever said that about me. I was always moving, just not getting anywhere.
    I told Clint a little about the things I had