The Fourth Stall Part III (7 page)

I
didn't get a chance to talk to Vince the rest of that school day. He and I didn't have a single class together that year other than homeroom right away in the morning, and that wasn't even a real class. So the only times we ever really saw each other during the day were at recesses and lunch. I was pretty sure the administration had rigged our schedules that way on purpose.

After school Vince had to rush home to babysit his little sister like usual, so I was left to track down Tyrell alone.

The trouble was I didn't really know where to look for Tyrell anymore. I started my search down at the new plastic playground, but he didn't seem to be there like he sometimes was. Then I checked the old playground on the top of the hill.

I was close to giving up when the blue mailbox on the corner right by the old playground talked to me.

“Mac!” it said.

I let out a yell and practically jumped up into the small tree next to me.

“I heard you've been looking for me,” the mailbox said. “Do you have something to mail?”

“Huh?” I wondered if I'd accidentally eaten some of those mushrooms that grow behind the Shed down near the new playground that everyone said gave you weird visions.

“Just kidding, Mac,” the mailbox said. “One second.”

There was a clanking sound from within the large blue box. Then I heard metal sliding against metal, and a hand came out from the bottom of the mailbox, followed by an arm. Then Tyrell's face appeared and grinned at me. He squeezed the rest of himself out of the mailbox and replaced the false bottom.

“You cut that hole?” I asked, once again astounded at the kid's ingenuity.

Tyrell shrugged. “Yeah, I mean, technically it's a federal offense, probably even a felony, but normal laws don't really apply in the name of deep covert surveillance, you know.”

I nodded even though I didn't really know at all. Tyrell was the best spy in the world, or at least in our school. Spies had a whole list of their own rules that I couldn't even pretend to understand fully.

“Besides, it'd be worth it even if I did get caught. You'd be amazed at how much great stuff you can witness from in there.”

I laughed and then asked, “Did you really know I was looking for you?” I wasn't sure how that was possible since Vince and I had only decided earlier that afternoon to come talk to him.

“Of course,” he said.

I waited for him to explain how he could have possibly known, but he simply left it at that and said nothing else. The kid was a marvel, and it usually was in your best interest not to even bother trying to ask how when it came to his methods. So I left it at that, too.

“So, what do you need, Mac? I thought you were retired?”

“I am,” I said. “But just the same, I'm sure you've heard about Jimmy Two-Tone?”

Tyrell nodded slowly. “Yeah, he even tried to employ me once, but I passed. I mean, I don't do garbage assignments. He'd wanted me to spy on his sixteen-year-old neighbor or something.”

“Ugh,” I said.

“Yeah, Tyrell don't do no dirty, petty missions, guy,” he said, doing an uncanny Jimmy Two-Tone impression. We both laughed.

“Yeah, well, anyways, I am retired and all, but it's hard to shake the feeling that something is up. I mean, on the surface, Jimmy Two-Tone seems to be a great businessman, but there are a few things that don't add up,” I said. I then told him about everything Vince and I had seen and heard up to that point. “I mean, Ears said he heard Jimmy wasn't involved in creating the problems but . . .”

Tyrell made a face. I'd forgotten that he didn't really much care for Ears. Tyrell didn't trust anybody who operated solely on second- and third-hand information. He always said, “Mac, the only things you can really ever truly trust are what you see with your own eyes and what you hear with your own ears.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I should have come to you in the first place. But I'm here now. Can you check it out for me?”

“Sure thing, Mac,” Tyrell said.

“Thanks,” I said as I shook his hand.

He pocketed the twenty-dollar bill that we'd exchanged during the handshake, his upfront fee, and then was gone. I had been standing right there, but I'm telling you I couldn't even have told you what direction he'd gone if I had been under oath and hooked up to a lie detector. He was that good. I shook my head in awe.

F
or the next week Staples made us go to a ton of school-related events with him as a part of the Big Brother thing. He said they made him look extra good to his counselor and the court system and whatnot. And, man, there were even more school activities than I'd thought there were. Especially once you hit seventh grade.

It started the evening after I'd gone to Tyrell to investigate the circumstances surrounding Jimmy's business. We went to a seventh-grade orchestra recital. It was actually a pretty big event. The local news was there, and so were tons of parents and some random people who must have been pretty hard-core music aficionados. And of course Vince, Staples, and I. The orchestra played lame music and they weren't even that good, but then, as much as it scared me to admit it, Staples was kind of growing on me. And I really wanted to see him get his sister back. So we didn't put up too much of a fight.

The chairs were all set up onstage in the Olson Olson Theatre so that they created a rising tower of musicians. They had the first row seated on the lowest level and then the second row of chairs was about a foot higher and so on for four rows of chairs arranged in a half-circle.

We took three seats in the back of the theater and waited for the recital to begin.

“I can't believe we're here.” Vince groaned.

Staples slugged him on the arm hard enough to make a lady a few rows in front turn around and shush us even though the concert hadn't even started yet and the stage was still empty. Vince rubbed his arm and made a face.

“What's wrong?” Staples whispered. “You guys afraid to get exposure to a little refined cultural arts? To experience some of the finest music our species has to offer?”

“I can't wait!” I said with as much sarcastic enthusiasm as I could muster.

Staples actually laughed. But then he slugged me on the arm, too. My already bruised and sore arm just pretty much felt numb, so it hurt only horribly bad instead of excruciatingly bad.

“This is going to look great on my report, though,” Staples said, referring to his Big Brother events log report that was turned in to his Big Brother coordinator each week.

Vince and I exchanged glances.

“Oh, are you guys having a moment? Do you want me to leave you alone?” Staples asked, and then laughed again, this time louder. “You and the looks you're always giving each other.”

The old lady in front of us turned around and shushed us again.

“Sorry, ma'am,” Staples said politely.

Then the recital began. I think, anyway. I'd never actually been to an orchestra recital before. The conductor came up onstage, and everyone applauded robotically. The lights dimmed and kids started filing onstage. They all got in front of the chairs and held their instruments but remained standing. Then the conductor made a motion and most of the kids, except for those who needed to stand to play, sat down all at once.

That's when it happened.

Almost every single chair broke, and the whole setup came crashing down on top of itself into a big rumbling pile of kids, broken instruments, chairs, music stands, and even a few tears. It was chaos. The audience gasped; kids shouted. Staples snickered madly.

Vince and I looked at each other in shock. No way had that been an accident. Seventy chairs don't just break all at once.

Anyways, they were eventually able to get some of it set back up, but several instruments were damaged and some kids were hurt. Not seriously injured—there were no broken limbs that I could see—but they were still in too much pain to play. So the concert recital ended up being fairly short and disjointed. The whole thing had pretty much been ruined by the chair incident.

It was humiliating for our school; the next day the local newspaper printed a photo of the pile of kids, chairs, and instruments with a caption that read:
LOCAL MIDDLE SCHOOL ORCHESTRA ATTEMPTS MASS STAGE DIVE AT CONCERT RECITAL.

Okay, so maybe that wasn't the most professional thing for them to have printed, but I had to admit it was a pretty funny headline.

Anyways, the whole thing left me in shock. I mean, chairs just don't break in unison for no reason, like I said before. To me, it was pretty obvious that it had been planned. At first I thought maybe it had been Staples, given how hard he'd laughed. But he genuinely looked surprised right after it'd happened. Plus, I didn't think he'd risk getting caught for a few cheap laughs with custody of his sister on the line.

On its own maybe the incident could be written off as some cruel practical joke that the marching band might have played on them. After all, our school marching band and orchestra had a pretty heated rivalry with each other for some insane reason. But the incident couldn't be viewed on its own. Because there were others.

The next night Staples made us go to this cake-decorating contest that took place in the school gym. That's right, a school-sponsored cake-decorating contest. That's one of the things that's sort of cool about my school: if you got enough kids and signatures gathered up, you could start pretty much any sort of after-school club you could think of.

Anyways, on that night, right before the judging phase of the contest, the school fire sprinklers in the gym all went off at the same time, drenching the entire audience (all twenty-five of us) and all of the cakes. They were all ruined, which was hard to watch. Well, Staples snickered again, as you might expect, but I was pretty heartbroken for all of those kids who had worked so hard. One kid had even made this amazingly detailed 3-D Death Star cake complete with the trench and exhaust port and everything.

So maybe that incident was just random bad luck, right? Well, I tended to think that the timing of it was just too suspicious.

Then of course there was the swim meet that our school hosted later that week. Everybody showed up to find the pool filled with blood and guts and severed hands. It looked like a cannibal holocaust had occurred in there. Not even Staples was able to laugh at that.

Of course they later found out that it was just red dye and Karo syrup combined with hamburger meat and Halloween-marketed fake hands. Of course when we found out, we all agreed that at the very least it had been a pretty brilliant prank. Nonetheless, every time I tried to sleep that week, I could still hear the screams of those moms in attendance ringing in my ears. And the incident had made our school look pretty foolish. The meet had to be rescheduled, which annoyed all of the other schools involved.

Probably the worst one of all happened that Friday, when somebody spiked our football team's Gatorade with laxatives during a game. The second half was not pretty; you'll want to trust me on that. It got so bad that our team actually had to forfeit the game and take it as a loss even though we'd been winning 28–6. Of course, when the referee had made that call, he wasn't aware that the Gatorade had been spiked. He just thought the world was ending, like the rest of us.

That was the worst one in a lot of ways. For one, it counted as a loss for the team. And now they were 3–2 after two losses in two weeks. Our school and the whole town were pretty big into football and we expected to make the state tournament every year; we hadn't missed in decades. So this stuff couldn't keep happening.

And there was more, too, than just the stuff we'd witnessed ourselves. Some of the stories I'd heard kids telling around school involved:

A school assembly for grades one through five during which the whole room slowly started to reek like rotting milk until it got so bad that Dickerson had to postpone the end.

A school dance where somebody had coated the floor in vegetable oil just before it started, so pretty much everybody took several hard spills and one kid even sprained his elbow.

Three of the school science lab animals had been dyed completely green, which was more funny than mean or bad, but still . . .

The school practice football field had a huge curse word cut into the grass so deeply one night that they basically had to strip all of the grass from the entire field to get rid of it. So we now have an all-dirt practice football field.

The school seemed once again to be falling apart. Only this time it was definitely due to direct and obvious acts of sabotage, as opposed to mysterious inner workings like what Dr. George had inflicted the year before. Plus, this time the end motive seemed merely to be to have fun at our expense, to ruin things and embarrass us. These were the sorts of things that Jimmy couldn't even possibly solve, which threw my theory right out the window that he was creating his own problems. There really didn't seem to be any grand master plan at work.

In fact, from what I'd been able to gather from kids talking at recess, Jimmy was falling behind. There was just too much for him to handle. We actually didn't even get our cut that Thursday. Our money drop was never made. And we couldn't even go ask him about it because I simply couldn't risk being seen near my old office again.

But anyways, the point was that it was pretty obvious that all of these incidents were related. The question was how. And why? Who had anything to gain from embarrassing the school and just wreaking general havoc?