Marked

by Norah McClintock

  The first job on my list was the utility control box that stood just behind the boulder. It was a big gray box with two flat surfaces that were like blank canvases—at least they must have looked like that once upon a time. Now they were covered with tags. Mostly the tags were boring. Each one was done in one color, either blue or black. There was nothing creative about them. They were just big squishy initials. I don’t know why they even bothered. I mean, what was the big deal? Besides the tags, there were letters and numbers in neon pink between the arms of a big cross.

  I stared at the neon pink letters. They were wide and slanted, sort of like the lettering on the tags. But they were different too, not like the rest of the stuff that covered the utility box. I wondered if they were some kind of official markings put there by the utility company.

  Stike told me to remove any markings I saw on utility company property. These were markings. They were on utility company property. It seemed simple.

  But what if they were official markings, like you see painted on the street sometimes when the city is planning to do some work? And what if I got in trouble for removing them?

  On the other hand, what if they were graffiti? And what if I left them there and Stike fired me? My mom was so proud of me for getting this job. I thought about how disappointed she would be if I got fired on my first day.

  Time was ticking by.

  I had three pages of work to do. Stike was going to inspect not just how well I had done the work but also how much I had done. I had to get moving. But first I had to decide what to do about the neon pink markings.

  I pulled my sketchbook out of my pocket and flipped it open to a clean page. I copied the cross and the letters and numbers in it—2N 3W—each number or letter in one of the four spaces made by the cross. If it turned out they were important, I could at least tell Stike what they were. I could even put them back if he wanted me to.

  Then I got out my spray bottle and rags and I started to work. It took more applications of the spray and a whole lot more scrubbing than I had expected. I started to worry that I would run out of spray before I got through the first page of work. I waited for a few minutes until the surface dried, and then I sprayed it with the second spray bottle.

  I was loading my supplies back into the milk crate when I spotted her.

  She was holding three leashes in one hand and two in the other. The leashes were those kind with the big plastic handles that pay out the leash like a tape measure, so her hands were really full. She had light brown, shoulder-length hair with streaks of gold in it. She was wearing a backpack. Even with all those dog leashes in her hands, she had a way of walking, tall and straight, that made me think she was loaded with confidence. Well, why not, if she lived around here? I bet at least half the girls in this neighborhood went to private school. I bet almost all of them would end up in university. So why not stroll down the street like you owned it? Why not have five dogs? Three of them were big—a German shepherd, an Airedale and a chocolate Lab—and probably cost as much to feed as my mom spent on me.

  She glanced at me, that’s it. Just glanced and then turned her head away again, like she had better things to look at. I wasn’t surprised. I was wearing beat-up jeans and sneakers.

  I swung my bike around, rode off the traffic island and into the street and headed in the opposite direction from the girl. I had a job to do. I couldn’t fool around with a bunch of dogs before going to the tennis club or the yacht club or whatever she had planned for the day.

  Stike was standing out in front of the garage when I got back.

  “You’re late,” he said. He didn’t sound happy.

  I stared at him. I had heard of people getting in trouble for being late getting to work. I had never heard of anyone getting in trouble for being late leaving work.

  “What were you doing?” he said. He thrust out a mammoth hand. It took me a few moments before I realized that he wanted my work sheets.

  I took the papers from my pocket, unfolded them and handed them over.

  “Hmph,” he said after he had flipped through all three sheets. “You did all this today?”

  I nodded. I had finished the jobs on the first two sheets and a few of the jobs on the last sheet. But by then it was almost five o’clock. I started to worry that Stike would be gone by the time I got back to the garage. I worried that that could mean trouble.

  Stike shook his head.

  “You get paid for eight hours, no matter how much time you put in,” he said.

  “That’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay. Ray don’t like it when you cost him money,” he said.

  “But you just said that I don’t get paid more—”

  “I’m your supervisor. I have to go out and look at what you did. I’ve been waiting for you a couple of hours now. Ray’s gonna have to pay me overtime for waiting around and then for going out to check on you. You better be worth it, kid. You better have done an A-one job.”

  He folded up my work sheets and headed for a pickup truck.

  “Do you want me to come back tomorrow?” I said.

  “We’ll see,” Stike said. He swung his heavy body in behind the steering wheel. He turned the key in the ignition and started to back up the truck. “I’ll let you know.”

  He was gone before I remembered the neon pink letters and numbers on the utility control box. I should have mentioned them. I should have told him what I’d done. I wondered if he would be mad.

  chapter four

  My mom opened the apartment door when I was still halfway down the hall.

  “I thought I heard the elevator,” she said. “I thought it might be you.” She looked relieved.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” I said. “I should have—”

  “There’s a man on the phone. He wants to talk to you,” she said.

  I hurried into the kitchen and picked up the phone.

  It was Stike.

  “A couple of places, you can still see some of the tags,” he said. He sounded gruffer over the phone than he did in person. “One place you checked off looks like you did a sloppy job.”

  “Is that the place with the skull and crossbones?” I said. “Because whoever threw that up there must have used a different kind of paint. The stuff you gave me didn’t work so well and—”

  “Relax, kid,” he said. “I figured that out.” There was a pause, and I started to worry that he was going to say something about the neon pink markings on the utility control box.

  But he didn’t.

  Instead he said, “You gonna waste my time and Ray’s money again tomorrow being some kind of brown-noser?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  I heard a rumble on the other end of the phone, like the beginnings of a cave-in. It took me a moment to realize that it was the sound of Stike laughing.

  “See you tomorrow, kid,” he said.

  The line went dead.

  “Who was that?” my mom said.

  “My boss.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  I glanced at the phone. I had done a good job—that’s what Stike had meant even if he hadn’t come right out and said it. I’d done a good job. He wanted me back tomorrow.

  “Everything’s fine,” I said. “What are we having for supper?” Suddenly I was starving.

  I stared at the work sheet Stike handed me the next day.

  “Isn’t that the same utility box I started with yesterday?” I said.

  “It’s the same utility box you’re gonna start with every time someone calls in a complaint,” Stike said. “It’s right out there in the open. Every doctor, lawyer and stockbroker who lives around there drives by it every day. The taggers know it. You start with that—it should go easier now that you treated the surface—then you move on.”

  Stike was right. I didn’t have to use nearly as much spray or elbow grease to get the marks off the box this time. The whole time I worked on it, I kept an eye out for anyone watching me. I wanted to do a good job, bu
t I didn’t want to end up in the hospital on account of it.

  I moved to the next item on my list—a utility pole on one of the residential streets. For some reason, this particular pole had attracted a lot of attention. There were maybe five different tags on it, not counting a neon orange one that reminded me of the neon pink tag I’d taken off the utility box the day before. If you ask me, it was done by the same person, only this one wasn’t a cross. This one was a triangle, with numbers and letters next to the three sides. On the left side of the triangle was the letter E; on the right side, the number nine; and underneath, the letter N. It was completely different from the tags and pieces I had removed the day before. It looked kind of official, like the cross on the utility box. I decided to copy it down, just in case. Stike hadn’t said anything about the one I’d removed the day before, but maybe that was because the city hadn’t noticed that it had been erased. I also wrote down where I found it, just in case. Then I got out my sprays and my rags and set to work.

  I had half the pole clean when a cop car rolled up the street. It slowed down as it passed me, and I felt myself freeze up. I had to remind myself that there was no way they were here for me. I hadn’t done anything wrong. For once I was the good guy.

  I didn’t look at the cop car as it rolled by. I concentrated on my work.

  But out of the corner of my eye, I saw it come to a stop up the street. A man came down his front walk and pointed to the house next door. Two cops got out of the car. One of them talked to the man. The other one walked up the driveway of the house next door.

  I finished cleaning the pole I’d been working on and moved to the next one, which was near the house the man had come out of.

  The cop who had been talking to the man went up the driveway of the house next door to speak to his partner.

  Pretty soon another cop car arrived, and then a police van with the words Forensic Identification on the side.

  People started coming out of their houses to see what was going on. I heard the first man say, “I came out to get my paper and I looked over at Neil’s house, and I saw that his suv was gone, the new one, the Lexus.”

  “I thought Neil and Melanie were in France,” a woman said.

  “They are,” the man said, nodding. “That’s why I called the police. That SUV was there last night. I saw it myself. I—”

  He stopped talking when the first two cops came back down the driveway. He went over to them. I guessed he was asking them about what had happened, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. A few minutes later, as I was getting ready to move on again, the man came back.

  “Just as I suspected,” he said to the other people who lived on the street. “Neil’s suv was stolen.”

  That caused a buzz.

  “But I thought he had one of those new vehicles, you know, with a key that has a computer chip in it. You can’t start them unless you have the key.”

  The man nodded somberly. “They broke into the house,” he said. “I told the cops Neil keeps his keys hanging near the phone in the kitchen. You know what the cop told me? There’s no key there now. They’re going to try to get in touch with Neil and Melanie and see if they can figure out if anything else is missing.”

  “Poor Melanie,” a woman said. “She’s been looking forward to this trip all year. This is going to ruin it for her.”

  Yeah, poor Melanie, I thought. She’s off there in France, and someone broke into her house and stole her car that costs more than my mom probably makes in a year, maybe in two years.

  I packed my gear into the milk crate and was just getting on my bike to ride to the next job when a cop came toward me.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said. “Come here.”

  I told myself again that this time I was the good guy, that I was doing this neighborhood a favor. But that didn’t stop me from feeling sick inside.

  I started to push my bike over to the cop. But he said, “Leave the bike where it is.” He said it in that bossy way cops have. I don’t think a cop has ever talked to me without ordering me around, letting me know who was boss.

  I put the kickstand down on my bike and walked toward him. My knees were shaking. My mouth was dry.

  “What’s your name?” the cop said.

  “Colin Watson.”

  “You live around here?”

  “No, sir.”

  The cop looked hard at me, like he was trying to decide if I was trying to be smart, calling him sir like that, or if I was just a nice kid.

  “I saw you over at that utility post,” the cop said. “What were you doing?”

  “Cleaning up graffiti,” I said. I unclipped my id from my belt and handed it to him. He studied it.

  “What time did you arrive here?”

  I told him.

  “Did you see anyone enter or leave that driveway?”

  He pointed to the driveway where all the cops were.

  “No, sir.”

  He wrote down the information from my photo ID, asked me for the name of my supervisor and told me I could go.

  I was glad to get away from there.

  A couple of hours later, I found a shady spot in a small park and sat down to eat my sandwich and drink my juice box. I pulled out my sketchbook. But instead of sketching what was in front of me, I sketched some graffiti. I even played with turning my initials into a tag. Then I looked at what I had done.

  Dave Marsh was wrong. This wasn’t art. It was territory marking, like what dogs did. The markings said, Hey, look at me, I was here. It wasn’t even nice to look at. For sure the letters and numbers were stupid. Why did kids—I was betting most of the taggers were kids—get such a charge out of spraying their initials everywhere? What was the big deal?

  I scrunched up my empty juice box, tossed it into a garbage can and went back to work.

  chapter five

  A couple of days later I was studying the utility control box in the middle of that traffic island. It was like the thing was lit up or something, the way it attracted tags. I recognized a couple of them—the same tagger, marking his territory over and over again with his initials, the style as recognizable as handwriting. That made me nervous. If the same taggers kept coming back, then they knew that someone was removing their tags every day. That made me think about the kid who had ended up in the hospital. I looked all around, but I didn’t see anyone.

  Also on the box that morning were numbers and letters around a neon pink cross. I recognized that writing too. The same person who had put a cross there that first time had put another one there. But I still didn’t get it. It wasn’t initials, like most of the tags I was removing. It wasn’t a piece, either. It was different. I copied it into my sketchbook, just in case. Then I sprayed it and was about to wipe it with a rag when something zipped past me, grazing the backs of my calves.

  I spun around.

  It was a dog, one of those little ones, a Jack Russell terrier. My mom calls them Jack Russell terrorists because of all the trouble they can cause when you leave them alone. A woman she works with left her Jack Russell puppy alone at home and when she came back at the end of the day, her sofa had been torn to pieces. Those dogs have a lot of energy, my mom said. If you don’t tire them out, they’ll find some way to tire themselves out. Mostly they find destructive ways.

  This little Jack Russell was sure energetic.

  It raced past me, trailing a leash, and kept right on going.

  Someone yelled, “Buster, stop!”

  It was the girl. She was wearing a tank top and tan pants, and her gold-streaked hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was struggling to hold back the rest of her dogs. The German shepherd and the chocolate Lab were yanking their leashes in the same direction that the Jack Russell had gone. The Airedale was pulling in a different direction. A fourth dog, a pug, was sitting on its butt.

  “Buster, come back here!” the girl called. She glanced around, like she was looking for something to tie the dogs to. But there wasn’t anything.

  I
dropped my spray bottle and my rag and took off after the Jack Russell. He was moving so fast that he was practically a blur. But he was trailing that leash, and that worked to my advantage. I ran flat-out, and I dove for the plastic reel at the end of the leash.

  Got it.

  I held fast.

  The leash kept paying out. The Jack Russell darted around a corner.

  Then the leash went taut. I had a good grip on the handle, otherwise it would have been jerked out of my hands. I started pulling the leash in, like a fisherman reeling in his catch, until finally the Jack Russell darted back around the corner.

  By then the girl and the rest of her dogs had caught up to me.

  “Buster,” she scolded. “Get over here right now.”

  Buster looked at her with lively eyes. But after a moment, he trotted back to her.

  “Good boy,” she said, holding four leashes in one hand so that she could scratch Buster behind the ear.

  As soon as I put out my hand to give her Buster’s leash, the German shepherd growled at me. His ears stood straight up. He barked and lunged at me.

  “Cody! Sit,” she said firmly. “Sorry,” she said to me. “He’s a good dog, but he’s a guard dog. He’s very protective. He listens to me, though. I helped to train him.” She took the leash I was holding. “Thanks,” she said in a breezy kind of way, like she wasn’t all that grateful. “If I’d had to run after Buster with the rest of these guys, I don’t know what would have happened.”

  “That’s sure a lot of dog power,” I said. “You must really like dogs.”

  “Buster is the only one that’s mine,” she said. “And, really, he’s my brother’s. I’m looking after him for a while.”

  “So, the rest of the dogs...”

  “I walk them. It’s my job.”

  I guess the surprise showed on my face, because then she said, “What’s the matter? You never heard of a dog walker?” Like I was a moron or something.

  “Sure,” I said. “I just thought—” I shut my mouth. I didn’t want to say anything that she might take the wrong way.