The Glass Harmonica by Russell Wangersky Read Free Book Online

it was a hockey game they’d all been talking about, a sloppy outlet pass or bad penalty killing. “Like he was catchin’ a bank robber or sump-thin.”
    When they finished their interviews and got ready to leave, the police stopped for a moment in the lunchroom to tell Wally in front of everyone else that they would be keeping an eye on him. And Wally shrugged, a big, slow, over-exaggerated shrug that telegraphed “Who gives a shit?” as clearly as if he had said it out loud, right there and then.
    As soon as the police left, Wally told the guys that they’d taken the suitcases more as a game than anything else, because “most of the time it was just old clothes ’n shit, ’n half the time we’d just flick ’em out the door onto the highway anyway. Big old suitcases, spinning off into the ditch. Burstin’ open. Ya should’ve seen it.” But he didn’t seem to regret any of it, not even the idea that the police were now looking at him as a suspect. “You make a choice and jest go from there,” he said, and went to get more coffee.
    Tony sat with his drink at the bar and stared across at where Helen was sitting, and it seemed to him that he was suddenly aware that he was hearing something urgent being spoken in a different language, a language that he didn’t fully understand but that he needed to hear.
    He was sure that everything important was happening right there in front of him, right then, if only he could figure out what all the various pieces meant, and how they all fit together. Like a chain with one important link missing. He looked around the room, trying to see if there was a secret code written on the walls or hovering over any of the five people up at the bar, huddled close together as if they were freezing cold. Looking for the switch that was just waiting to be thrown.
    And Helen’s purse was open, the lights from the lottery machine playing across the front of her blouse again so that it seemed as if her clothes were magically changing colours, flicking from one shade to another.
    With her hands barely moving, she was threading twenties into the thin slot in the front of the machine, over and over again without even looking, a motion so practised that it seemed to take no effort whatsoever, that it seemed to take neither aim nor concentration. It looked for all the world as if she was just holding her hand in front of the machine while the money magically disappeared from her grasp, and she didn’t even look away from Tony as the money simply vanished.
    He noticed the expression in her eyes didn’t change when she turned to look at him—in fact, her eyes didn’t move at all, her gaze holding his in one simple and straight line. And the whole time, he could feel her eyes on his face, staring straight across at him, and when he looked up and back at her, she smiled that familiar smile, her eyes widening just enough. And Tony fell hard, just like he always did.
    He fell, but he also knew.
    Two days later, he got the keys for a city backhoe from the sign-out locker and two hard men from downtown did all the rest without him, driving the piece of heavy equipment straight out through a chain-link fence without stopping and onto a low-rider flatbed already parked just outside on the street. And even though it must have taken them more than a few minutes to chain the backhoe down, no one admitted to seeing anything. And there was money in a plain white envelope in the mailbox when he got home, his name on the front in pencil in block letters, as if it could just as easily be erased and replaced by someone else’s.
    That same week, he managed a mitre saw and a set of air chisels, and that was despite the fact the city had hired a private firm to beef up security, and there were strange new serious faces in the lunchroom and strolling through the equipment yard at odd times.
    Once they caught him with the plywood, Tony was