When the Killing Starts Read Online Free Page B

place I did the same thing, first checking for the colonel, who was never there that I could see, then looking around for anyone who might be his answering service. It was like following a very slight trail over very stony ground, but it was all I could do. I'd checked the newspaper, and there were no ads that might have been placed by Freedom for Hire. I'd even dug through back issues of the Sun for the past two days, as far back as I could find on a Saturday evening, when both the library and the Sun office were closed. Nothing in any paper to guide me, so I kept slugging around, leaving a single draft beer going flat on all the bars. Even one beer in each would have slowed me down too much for my own safety if I did run into the Freedom for Hire boys.
    It must have been a little after ten when I finished the first circuit of all the likely places. On Queen Street West there's a country bar called the Chuckwagon, well enough known in the country-music crowd that the Saturday nighters were mostly in western gear, blue jeans—national dress for the under thirties, anyway—but with check shirts and Stetsons. The music was deafening, but it was Waylon Jennings, so at least it was telling a story.
    I got myself a beer and looked around. No sign of the colonel. That would have been too easy. I looked for his phone jockey, someone old or out of place in this young crowd. Nobody answered that description, either. But there was one guy on his own who interested me. He wasn't on the make, which put him in a class by himself in there. He was nursing a beer and doing his best to look at a magazine in the limited light that was available. Killing time, glancing up now and then, trying not to look obvious.
    I left my beer on the bar and sauntered past his table as if I were heading for the john. His head was down, and he was studying a picture of a guy in combat fatigues holding an automatic weapon. It had the curved magazine of the AK 47. He looked up and caught my eye and closed the magazine. Soldier of Fortune.
    He stared at me, coldly. Getting himself psyched up to show how tough he was. He was already working at it, high-crowned baseball cap dead center, crisp haircut, clenched jaw. A recruit waiting for his army.
    I nodded at him. "That's a good magazine." He kept up his stare, not sure I wasn't sending him up. "How would you know?"
    "Used to read it all the time," I said, and then set the hook. "When I first got back from 'Nam."
    "You were there?" His face changed. "No shit, were you?"
    "U.S. Marines. Two years." Fred would have been proud of me. I didn't follow up right away. I nodded again and went on to the washroom. It was busy, and I had to wait, watching a young guy slamming the contraceptive machine with the heel of his hand because it had eaten his quarters and left him unprotected. He was taking some heavy joshing from his buddies about his possible sexual preferences.
    I walked back out past Soldier of Fortune. He was waiting. "Hey, got a minute?" His voice was as gruff as he could shade it without picking a fight. Anxious to talk but not at the cost of losing face, I figured.
    "'S on your mind?" I smiled to show I was playing nice.
    "You a vet, really?"
    "No big deal, there were a million guys there. Most of us came back."
    "Yeah, but you're Canadian, eh? Like I figured you had to be American."
    I leaned my knuckles down on the table so we could talk without bellowing over George Jones and Tammy Wynette. "There were lots of Canadians there, thousands of us. I was marines."
    His jaw had come unclenched. He looked as close to pleading as he could allow himself to get. "Were you in the boonies?"
    "Most of the time."
    "Listen." He looked around, at the bar, where I'd left my beer. "You with somebody, or can I buy you a beer, shoot the shit?"
    "Kinda boring," I minimized.
    He said it. He honestly did, like a school kid. "That's easy for you to say."
    I grinned and dropped into the chair opposite, waving at the waiter,