The Code Read Online Free

about a player I’m not interested in, circling his number just to make it all the more obvious to rubberneckers. I keep my cards close to my vest.
    You’d think that everyone in the business would maintain a similar embargo on advertising his intentions, but such is not the case. A sizable contingent of hopelessly insecure and underqualified guys in similar positions can’t resist the urge to share their work. Either they want to look like they’re a big deal to their peers or they’re fishing for some sort of confirmation of their flimsy opinions.
    I come by the stealth honestly. I grew up in a none-of-yourbusiness culture. My father’s approach to parenting, as with all aspects of his life, was of a piece with his work. I grew up watching him asking questions but fielding none while he took notes. He retired from Metro Toronto’s force after more than thirty years and had high hopes that I’d go the same route.
    He wasn’t a detective, never got on that career track on the force, though I don’t doubt that he could have. He ended up as the staff sergeant of the mounted division, but his other role made him something of a legend, known by everyone from the greenest rookie right up to the commissioner: He was the coach of the cop hockey team. He was a player-coach, on the ice right up until his fiftieth birthday, when he made it clear that he felt he could still play but could no longer tune out my mother’s ever more vocal protests.
    I was in grade school when he brought me to practices to work as a stick boy and play deaf when the guys swore a blue streak. Bythe time I was fourteen, he was letting me skate with the team in Saturday-night pickup games. He convinced me that I should go to college rather than to major junior when I was in my teens. Sarge figured a college man with some sort of useful specialty could make officer in a hurry. He never said a word to me about my major until I declared it: criminal and social justice.
    When Minnesota drafted me in the third round back in ’86 after my freshman year at Boston College, things became complicated in ways I’d never imagined. Minnesota had a big fat contract waiting for me after my sophomore season. It was impressed on me that the contract might not be there after I graduated or even in a year’s time. My agent gave me the song and dance about finishing my degree by correspondence, but truth was always the first casualty of his commissions. It turned out criminology just wasn’t going to fly as my major if I was doing courses by mail, so I had to switch to history, to my regret and my father’s. Not that it mattered. Before my pro career passed me by, the window for joining the force slammed shut on my fingers.
    I eventually did finish my degree, six years after signing away my life to Minnesota, but I’ve never really had a chance to put my knowledge of pre-Confederation Canada and Elizabethan England to good use. My two years of criminology eventually did help out, though.
    After I hung up my skates, my cash flow vanished and my net worth vaporized. I had to watch as the receiver catalogued each and every thing I owned and threw it up on the internet to attract bidders and amuse those in the league who had me on their hate lists. I was thoroughly destitute and wouldn’t have had a car but for the old Beemer that my father lent me.
    Starting your life again in your mid-thirties: I don’t recommend it, especially when you’re starting in a hole up to yourhairline. I had to work a square job to make my child support payments, so my father made a call to an old friend who had taken early retirement from the force and established a privateinvestigation business. I was qualified to snoop around gathering intelligence for divorces and other miseries. I had been through my own and knew what to look for. I picked up insurance work. My favourite: I was a one-man tree-hidden gallery for a guy with a