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crude kind, crowbars or boards, and I advised them to have something handy. They're not much use against a trained fighter but they would deter the kind of cheap hoods I'd collected on the construction site.
    And then I went to that site. By now it was after two. I was listening to Charlie Pride on the country music station and was relaxed, but when I got to the gate and left the car the cool September air woke me up properly as I let myself in.
    The patrol hut was empty. There were two lunch-pails there so I realized that Fullwell had doubled up the coverage this night. I went and stood outside for a moment but nobody challenged me, so I took out my big flashlight but didn't turn it on and started around the circuit I'd made the first night.
    While I was in Nam I learned about night patrols, the hard way. As a result I can move like an Indian, with no sound. My eyes snap into night vision quicker than most people's so I don't need the flashlight. And that's how I came up on the two guards before anybody heard me. I heard them first, one of them anyway, he was groaning. I stopped in my tracks and checked all around, at ground level and above me, on top of the machinery and shack that stood there. I couldn't see anything or hear anything else. So I flicked on the light and saw the two men, muddy and bloodied, lying in the frozen, accidental postures of corpses or the critically wounded. Then I heard a sudden padding of feet, running. I followed the sound on tiptoe, around the end of the shack in time to see a couple of men at the fence, scrambling up it hand over hand.
    That was when I missed Sam. He would have covered the thirty yards between me and the fence in time to jump and hold on to the leg of one of those men. But I was too slow. In the four seconds it took me they had rolled over the wire and dropped cleanly to the other side. They didn't look back but I got an impression of neatness, of suits and white shirts and dark hair. Then a car, a late model Olds Toronado, pulled up and let them in without putting on the inside light. I was at the fence by that time but the light was out on the rear license plate and I swore and threw a rock after them. It landed twenty yards behind them. If they were bothering to look back they probably had a laugh over that.
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    Chapter 9
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    I didn't waste time climbing the fence and racing down the street after the car. I ran back to the guards and checked them over. They were alive but they both looked bad. One of them had a walkie-talkie and I blipped the button and called but the girl at Bonded must have been turning the pages on her thriller, she didn't respond, so I belted back to the shack and called the police emergency number. "One-fifty-one Shuter Street, construction site. Two security guards assaulted. Suspects escaped in dark Olds Toronado, no light on rear license, likely an eighty-two model." Then I gave them my name and asked for an ambulance.
    The dispatcher made me repeat it but he was on the air as he spoke and within a minute a scout car was at the gate. I was there to meet them. They wanted to come in but I told them to drive west towards Church Street, then on to Yonge, north-south streets where they might have caught a glimpse of the getaway car.
    They left and I went out to the injured guards and waited for the ambulance. They seemed to be bleeding from the nose and mouth, from internal injuries, not the usual kind of cuts and bruises men get in fights, the kind you can give first aid to.
    When the ambulance crew put them on gurneys they were alert enough to moan in pain, and I tried again to ask them who had done it but they were beyond talking. They were stunned, the way most people are by sudden violence. It changes your whole perspective of life. You can be four years old or forty, it makes no difference. In that first vivid flash of deliberately inflicted pain all your previous experience is cancelled. You realize the darkness is