32.

The van drove like a dream and I wasted some time driving around the industrial lots along the perimeter highway before finding what I wanted in a back lot outside a trucking firm. Parked near the back was a Dodge Caravan of the same year, model, and color, so I stole the front and back licence plates and replaced them with the ones off Walsh's van. Then I came back and went around to the driver's side and opened the gas cap. No one was around so I poured a bottle of c.o.ke from Walsh's cooler into the tank and headed back onto the highway. I felt sorry for the poor van owner, who comes back and finds his van won't start and calls a tow truck, who probably won't look at the plates. Tow truck comes and drags the van back to some garage somewhere where it is off the street. Which means the licence plates are not available to the cops. Which means confusion.

I headed down the highway until I found a small hotel for breakfast in the coffee shop. I chose a table near the front and had to wait until the waitress finally came over and stifled a jaw-cracking yawn. I put her at maybe seventeen and pretty enough in a flyblown way, blond and heavy-set with thick calves and a weak chin. She stood and slowly scratched her neck with the end of her pencil. "Whaddyawant?"

I opted for simple and scorched. That way the germs would be dead or at least stunned and easy to eat. "Scrambled eggs, bacon, rye toast, and a can of diet c.o.ke."

She went off to place the order and came back with the pop and a fresh table setting. I drank the c.o.ke and waited for the caffeine to hit.

"Hereyago."

The toast came and I ate it without thinking about what was going into my system. I needed money, but not a lot of it, maybe a grand. I thought about that for a second and then doubled it on general principles. I also needed it fast and without heat.

"Hereyago."

She delivered my eggs, which were watery, and my bacon, which was limp and tasted mildly of dish soap. I ate and thought about money, not food. Fast meant I needed cash, not something to sell. At the same time, avoiding heat meant I couldn't steal by force, which was the fastest. Fast also meant I didn't have time to run any complicated cons. I finished my food with about three good ideas and one I didn't like at all.

"Will that be all, sir?" The waitress had saved her best effort for last, good p.r.o.nunciation, a pleasant smile, and a little bit of leg. I tipped her three bucks I couldn't afford and left.

I spent the next hour driving around the city until I found a fair-sized mall leeching off a residential area in the southern part of the city. I parked in front of a two-storey house with a big FOR SALE FOR SALE sign on the yard and high gra.s.s, and then I walked to the back end of the mall, where the parking lot was blocked off by a chain-link fence. I was wearing an old black raincoat over my suit and I took off the coat and slung it around my neck before climbing over. Three kids, the oldest about ten years old, watched me in astonishment and I winked at them and then put on dark sungla.s.ses. sign on the yard and high gra.s.s, and then I walked to the back end of the mall, where the parking lot was blocked off by a chain-link fence. I was wearing an old black raincoat over my suit and I took off the coat and slung it around my neck before climbing over. Three kids, the oldest about ten years old, watched me in astonishment and I winked at them and then put on dark sungla.s.ses.

"Don't try this at home."

They laughed and took off, playing hooky, I guess, and kind of nervous. Once over, I walked around into the mall and checked out the property board in the front entrance, where it listed a big bookstore, a grocery store, one of those amateur handyman places, and a bunch of smaller boutiques selling clothing and perfumes and such. There was also one of those ubiquitous mall wart stores so I decided to start there.

Just inside the mall entrance an elderly man greeted me. "Welcome to Walmart."

I thanked him and asked where the sporting goods section was.

There were a few people wandering the aisles but I ignored them and headed to the racks of hockey equipment near the wall. The sticks were racked along about five yards of s.p.a.ce and I snagged a Bauer Jetstream with a one-hundred-and-fifteen-dollar price tag and leaned it casually on my shoulder. The store had two customer service kiosks, one at the front and the other near the entrance to the mall lot. I chose the one near the lot entrance and only had to wait in line for a few minutes before a bright-eyed young woman greeted me.

"Good morning, sir. How can I help you?"

I suspect that these stores hire pretty young women to take complaints because they figure most people won't yell at them for the following reasons: A) they're pretty, B) they're women, and C) they're young. In my experience, though, most people complaining are women who are neither young nor pretty and I think they like to yell. The who is probably unimportant. It's just a suspicion, though.

"Good morning. I bought this hockey stick yesterday and it's not what my son wants. I'd like to return it, if that's all right."

Her smile grew although it appeared somewhat brittle. "Certainly. Do you have the receipt?"

"I'm sorry, no. I seem to have lost it. I paid cash, though, if that helps."

The look she gave me said plainly that, no, it didn't. "I'm sorry. The store policy is that we can't accept returns without receipts."

She waited while I digested that and then I perked up.

"Well, can you do a trade, then? I can bring my son back later to choose for himself but I do have one or two other things to pick up today."

She agreed that that would be okay and I turned over the stick and got a voucher for one hundred and thirty-one dollars, which I pocketed. As I left, she piped up, "And have a great day!"

I did. In the jewelry section of the store I found a woman's Timex with a price tag a little more than the voucher, so I bought the watch using the voucher and most of my remaining cash and then headed towards the other customer service kiosk.

"Good morning, sir. How can I help you?"

It was another bright-eyed young woman, although this one had red hair.

"Good morning. I bought this watch and it's not what my wife wants. I'd like to return it, if that's all right."

"Certainly. Do you have the receipt?"

"Yes."

I handed it over and she glanced at it and put it in her till. "You understand that it's our policy that we can't accept a return without a receipt."

"Of course."

She paid me slightly more than a hundred and fifty dollars and I walked out into the mall.

Of course, that kind of hustle wouldn't work in small places, I needed a big, busy store with set policies and indifferent management; still, it gave me some working capital and that was what I needed. My next stop was at a shop specializing in work clothes, where I bought a generic baseball cap, a pair of cruddy steel-toed boots, and a set of coveralls, all for slightly more than a hundred dollars. The bookstore provided me with a clipboard, blue and red ballpoint pens, and a pad of legal paper for ten bucks. On my way out, I stopped at a big hardware store on the other end of the mall and picked up one of their complimentary catalogs. Then I went back to the van and drove around to park beside a name-brand, chain-operated steakhouse near the mall. There I changed into the new clothes and waited.

Most restaurants do the basic cleaning at night and more during the morning just before they open and the steakhouse was no exception. Many managers wait until morning to do the bookkeeping and then dump the records, and that was what I wanted, the credit card receipts.

Sometime after 11:00 the back doors opened and two Filipino kids came out, carrying big plastic bags, and dumped them into a steel bin near the kitchen vents. When the door was closed, I walked over and found that the first was leaking fluid but the second crinkled when I touched it and so did the third. I tossed those in the van and drove back to my original parking spot.

I opened each bag separately and went through them. Anything I didn't want went into the bags that had held my new work clothes. The first bag was full of old menus, order slips, and paperwork but the second one had what I wanted near the bottom.

"Gotcha."

The strips of paper were yellow and crumpled and I smoothed them out and looked them over carefully to be sure. These days no one uses the old-style carbon slips for credit cards, the numbers get run through computers rented from the bank and those computers eventually spit out these long, narrow, double strips of white and yellow paper with all the information neatly printed on them. The accountants take the white copies, and the yellow copies get tossed, which was fine by me. I found two readable sheets and put them in my pocket and cleaned up the van, then I went over the sheets until I ended up with two complete credit card numbers and the expiry dates attached to good-sized sales. My stomach growled and I checked the dashboard clock.

"Time for lunch."

Out of kindness and a sense of fair play, I went back to the steakhouse for lunch, it was the least I could do. They had a pretty waitress who brought me a rare roast beef sandwich and a spinach salad with hot bacon dressing and I said goodbye to my diet. The girl had a small tattoo of a crucifix above one eyebrow and something metal in her nose and we flirted gently back and forth while I ate my lunch and drank my iced tea. Eventually I asked her the name of the manager and she looked a little concerned.

"Gee, I hope everything's all right."

"No, it's all fine. I'm a general contractor and your place here needs some landscaping right away if it's going to look good for the summer. Mebbe I'll bid on it. So, who's the boss?"

She scratched her head with the nub of a pencil. "Well, the main manager's Peter Dalrymple, but he's off today. Would the a.s.sistant be able to help?"

"No, I want the head honcho. It always works better that way, I'll call tomorrow."

After I ate, I went over the hardware catalog and wrote down the items I needed along with their cataloged numbers and costs. On the way out I stopped at the bar in the lounge and bought three dollars' worth of quarters. No one noticed when I pulled around back and slung the repacked pillaged bags back into their bins.

At the outside phone booth, I looked up the corporate number of the steakhouse in the Yellow Pages and asked to talk with someone in the accounts department. When a woman named Arlene-something came on, I cupped my hand around my throat to change my voice slightly and spoke louder than normal.

"Hi, this is Pete Dalrymple out of the Winnipeg Corydon store. My contact number at the bank for the customer service is coming back as out of date. Do you have a new number?"

The woman sounded worried.

"All right. Read me back the number and I'll double check that I've got it right. I just retyped the list and maybe I screwed it up."

She read me back a local number and I repeated it carefully and wrote it on my clipboard.

"... 0 ... 2 ... 2. Got it. I've got 202 written down. Thanks."

Arlene-something accepted it as a compliment and hung up.

The next call was to the bank, where I was eventually patched through to a young man with a thick East Indian accent. "Commercial Accounts."

"This is Mr. Dalrymple, manager of the Corydon Steak Academy. Account number 5-4-3-8-9."

I'd pulled that number off one of the sheets from the garbage. He tapped the number into his computer and grunted.

"Go on, Mr. Dalrymple, how can I help you?"

The most promising credit card numbers from the garbage were written on the clipboard in front of me and I picked the one that had the highest charge.

"I've got a party that wants to book twenty seats this Friday. They gave me their Visa number and I want to check the name and make sure they can pay before I reserve tables on my busiest night. Can you tell me if the card can handle a charge of fifteen hundred to two grand? Something around there." I read off the number and the expiry date and listened to some more tapping.

"That's an account for Rachel Divischuk, Incorporated. There's no problem with that amount. Is that all you needed?"

"Yes."

We both hung up at the same time and I looked up the name in the phone book.

Apparently Rachel Divischuk, Incorporated was a modeling agency specializing in "The Fresh Faces of Tomorrow!!!" Go figure.

No one was waiting for the phone so I dialed the mall's hardware store and used a non-accent. "Bon jour. I'm sending down our handyman to pick up some items right away but I'd like to use my credit card to pay for them over the phone, is that possible? He will sign for the order, of course." I'm sending down our handyman to pick up some items right away but I'd like to use my credit card to pay for them over the phone, is that possible? He will sign for the order, of course."

The young man transferred me to another department. "h.e.l.lo, order desk?"

"Good afternoon. We need some items to build a stage for our models. Can you package them up for me and I'll send our handyman Allan down to pick them up?"

"Ummm, certainly."

"Wonderful. Do you have a pencil handy?"

He did and took the order in silence.

"We need a Dremel rotary tool package, the battery-powered one with the extra bits numbered ..."

When I was done the man totaled the bill. "That'll be four hundred and thirty-two dollars, including the tax."

I gasped and he apologized.

"The most expensive piece is the Dremel, that's more than two hundred dollars just by itself. I have included our corporate discount."

"Oh dear, thanks. Well, that's why they invented credit cards. Here's the number ..."

He made sure he had it right and put me on hold. A few minutes later he came back to tell me that the bill had gone through just fine.

"Wonderful. Now, I'll send Allan over right away. Where should he go, by the way?"

"The customer service entrance."

"That's fine, should he ask for someone in particular?"

"I'm Scott, I'll pull the stuff together at the loading dock. Your driver can ask for me."

"Alrighty then. Now, Scott, can I ask you a question?"

"Sure, I guess."

I lowered my voice to a whisper. "Do you think all this stuff will be tax deductible?"

He laughed out loud and told me he thought it would be, as long as I kept the receipt.

33.

Scott was a well-tanned man in his late forties and he was waiting at the loading dock when I arrived. I backed in and hopped up onto the platform to greet him. "You Scott?"

He nodded and held his hand out in greeting and I took it.

"I'm Allan. My boss ordered some s.h.i.t."

He gestured with his head at a pile of boxes on a steel shelf. I went over what was there and shook my head. Scott was holding a clipboard and he nodded politely and handed it over. As I checked the totals I kept repeating to myself, "s.h.i.t."

"Anything else you need?"

I scratched my chin and lifted my hat a bit while I ran my finger down the invoice.

"Nope. Guess Rachel's gonna make me earn my pay. Let's see, Dremel, a.s.sorted hand tools, five pounds of a.s.sorted nails, five pounds of a.s.sorted screws, three tarps, three sets of overalls, five hundred yards of heavy-gauge copper wire, twenty yards stainless steel chain, and a dolly. Looks good."

I signed the bill illegibly and was given a copy in return.

"Thanks. I haven't used one of the Dremels before, does the battery come powered up?"

"No. You've got to plug it into a standard power outlet for about two hours to get a full charge."

I loaded the dolly into the van and lowered it onto its side where it wouldn't move. Then I put the boxes on the pa.s.senger seat and on the floor beside the dolly.