by James Leck
“Put Mike back on the phone,” the big boss said. I handed the phone over, and Mike did a lot of nodding and frowning. Then he hung up, whipped out his little black book and a silver pen from his pocket, made a few notes and handed it over to me.
“Just sign at the bottom.”
I read the page over. The printing was tiny, but incred-ibly neat. The long and the short of it was that if Iona lost, I was out my laptop, my cell phone and my iPod if I couldn’t pay the twelve hundred dollars within twenty-four hours.
I have to admit, I was feeling a little in over my head, but I couldn’t back down, so I signed on the dotted line. What else could I do?
Friday, March 13, 3:42 p.m.
13 Oort Cloud Court, The Poe Residence
Standing outside Tobias’s shed, with only a few hours until game time, I was feeling the crunch. Twelve hundred smackers was a heck of a lot of cabbage, and I didn’t think Dave (the butter-and-egg man who controls my dough back in Cali) would pump that kind of cash into my account without asking some serious questions. But worrying wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I needed to take care of business and get Tobias back to Iona High before the trivia questions started flying and Jennifer found herself on center stage without the team ringer. So as soon as school let out, I made my way to Tobias’s house, crept around back and hunkered down below the window. For a few seconds, it was dead quiet, and I was sure he’d found a new place to crash, which meant that yours truly was up the proverbial creek without a proverbial paddle. Then the soft clickety-clack of the keyboard started up, and I could practically smell all that money just on the other side of the shed wall. I stood up and threw the window open.
“Don’t move,” I yelled.
The poor sap was so surprised he fell backward in his chair, taking the desk down with him. The laptop hit the floor with a crash.
“I said freeze,” I yelled again, starting to hoist myself into the shed, but my orders were falling on deaf ears. Tobias was in panic mode, and there was no stopping him now. He scrambled to his feet and flew out the front door.
I bolted around the side of the shed and spotted him running through the neighbor’s garden. I plowed along behind him, getting closer and closer with every step. I have to admit, Tobias was fast for a pinhead, but twelve hundred clams is a great motivator. When he came to a shoulder-high fence about four lawns away, the chase was over. He’d just managed to get to the top when I grabbed one foot and yanked him to the ground.
“Don’t make me go! Don’t make me go!” he was screaming. I pinned him down and waited until he wore himself out.
“Are you through with the kicking and screaming?” I asked.
“I don’t want to go,” he squealed.
“Well, you’re going, tough guy, and there’s no way around it. You might be book smart, Tobias, but you don’t have any idea how the real world works. This is more than just fun and games. There’s more to it than that, bucko, a whole lot more. Now, are you going to come along like a man or a mouse?”
“I won’t go,” he said, starting to struggle again.
“Tobias, one way or another, you’re going back to school and you’re going to win Iona that championship banner. We can do this the easy way or the hard way, but we’re going to do it, capiche?”
The struggling finally stopped and Tobias nodded. In the end he understood just fine.
Friday, March 13, 6:58 p.m.
Iona High, The Auditorium
Tobias resigned himself to his fate and walked into the auditorium without so much as a peep. Of course, Jennifer was thrilled. As soon as Tobias was settled in his seat, she came down and gave me the kind of hug that could melt a Popsicle in a deep freeze. I wish I could say that hug was the beginning of a wonderful evening, but that would be a lie. Not only was Tobias less than inspiring, he was downright bad. I’d give you the play-by-play, but it doesn’t matter in the end; Iona lost by forty points. I got out of there before the dust had settled and went back home. I wasn’t avoiding anyone; heck, I knew when it was time to pay the piper. I just wanted some time to think about what I was doing traipsing around town pretending to be some sort of detective instead of delivering newspapers like a regular kid. All that thinking just got me a big fat headache and another long, sleepless night.
Saturday, March 14, 6:09 p.m.
A street with no name, Grandma’s House
Mike paid me a visit Saturday evening with a couple of heavies from the football team who waited at the end of the driveway, looking tough. If they thought I was going to kick up a stink, they were dead wrong. I handed over my iPod, my cell and my laptop and said good riddance before they had time to look smug.
Of course, my grandma, who’s nobody’s fool, found out about the whole fiasco. She made a few quick calls to California and cut off my tidy little allowance faster than you can say poorhouse. From then on, the money would be put into an account for my education. She even threatened to call Principal Snit and let him know that a gambling ring was operating right under his nose at Iona High, but I begged and pleaded with her until she gave up. The last thing I needed was to be known as the school snitch.
I tried to call Jennifer, but she didn’t pick up. For some silly reason, I thought talking to her might heal the pain.
Sunday, March 15, 10:37 a.m.
13 Oort Cloud Court, The Shed
On Sunday, I went to pay Tobias a visit. I felt like I owed the poor sucker an apology. I had him pegged for a pretty fragile kid, and I’d put him in a bad situation for my own greedy reasons. So I wanted to let him know that I would back him up if he needed a friend.
I figured he might be holed up in his shed, so that’s where I headed. This time, I decided to skip the back window and use the front door. The place was pretty much cleared out; no more desk, no laptop, no textbooks. The whiteboard was still up, and the bookcase was still there, but everything else was gone.
I strolled over to the bookcase and started pushing on the panels, looking for the secret door. When I got to the bottom row, closest to the desk, the panel popped off and I found myself looking down a long narrow room. There were crumbs on the ground, an empty can of Coke, and a few nails and tacks sticking out of the wall with scraps of paper still attached to them. I spotted a small black filing cabinet squeezed into the far end with the drawers still open, so I slithered in to see what I could find. The hanging files inside were all empty, but I spotted a yellow sticky note lying at the bottom of the cabinet that read
Call Mike re football scores.
Call Mike? Was that the same Mike that Jennifer had introduced me to? Why would an egghead like Tobias know a punk like Mike? And if Tobias did know Mike, and he was involved in the gambling ring, then —
That’s when a lightbulb went on in my head. It came on with a white-hot light that made the back of my eyeballs hurt. I slipped back into the main part of the shed and rushed to the whiteboard. One of the grids I’d ignored the other night was titled AATT. Could that stand for Academic All-Stars Trivia Tournament? I looked over the grid. This was no math project; the letters down the side were probably pseudonyms for people who were laying down bets (to protect the identity of the guilty), the numbers were the amounts of each bet and on the top row were the odds. Tobias had been running the gambling operation at Iona High all along! This whole thing had been a setup, and he’d left it all there, right under my nose. I’d been duped, hoodwinked, bamboozled.
Monday, March 16, 8:22 a.m.
Iona High, The Cafeteria
I stormed into Iona High first thing Monday morning looking for Jennifer. I wanted to warn her that Tobias was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I wanted to protect her from getting hurt. But when I stepped into the cafeteria, I realized that she already knew all about Tobias Poe. You see, Doc, she was sitting with him and Valda and Mike.
“Jack! Come on over!” Tobias yelled across the
cafeteria when he spotted me. “I have to thank you for the new laptop. Mine was broken when you stormed in on me yesterday. That’s my own fault, though. Valda called to let me know you were on your way, but I got caught up adding a few last-minute bets on tonight’s basketball game. Say, would you like to place a bet? Maybe you can win a little money back.”
Gone was the squealing, sniveling pinhead who was terrified to get up in front of the school. Instead, Tobias was acting like a suave stockbroker celebrating his latest acquisition. “Or if you don’t want to do it now, you could always give me a ring on my cell.” He paused for a moment and then said, in the same deep, menacing voice I’d heard on Mike’s cell phone. “Is this Lime?”
Everything made perfect sense. Tobias was obviously the ringmaster of this dirty three-ring circus. Valda was always popping up at the worst time because she must have been tailing me to let the others know where I was headed. And then there was Jennifer; she was the one who’d come to me in the first place, who’d identified Valda as a possible suspect, who’d tried to talk me out of investigating Max, and who’d set up my meeting with Mike from the betting pool. They’d all been playing me like a fiddle, and I’d been squeaking in all the right places.
“Why’d you do it?” I asked in a hoarse voice that sounded far, far away.
“Do you remember taking some pictures a couple of weeks ago?” Valda asked. “Of a guy named Ryan Morrison kissing a girl, only the girl wasn’t his girlfriend?”
“I remember,” I said.
“Good,” she said, “because I don’t want this next bit to confuse you. See, I remember those pictures, too, Jack, because my last name’s not Pernickle, it’s Morrison. Making any connections yet?”
“And Valda happens to be my girlfriend, Jack,” Tobias added. “So when she needed me to exact some revenge for her little brother on the town’s new peeping tom, I was more than willing to oblige.”
“It was genius, darling, pure genius,” Valda said with a chuckle.
“You’re too kind,” Tobias said, standing up and bowing slightly. “But really, it was all too easy. I mean, Jack, it wasn’t very difficult to pick out your Achilles’ heel.”
“Was any of it true?” I asked.
“Well,” Jennifer started, “we exaggerated some of the details. Tobias doesn’t have the top GPA in the school.”
“I’m in the top ten, though,” Tobias smirked.
“And he wasn’t the captain of the robotics team,” Jennifer added.
“But I did lead the chess team to the city cham- pionships,” he said. “I’d love to play you sometime, Jack. You make me feel so clever.”
My heart was pounding. I could feel the blood pumping in my temples. I was ready to kill someone, and I didn’t care if it was a boy or a girl. Somebody was going to pay, big time. And that’s when, for the very first time, my condition kicked in — and I fell asleep.
Friday, September 27, 8:03 p.m.
Iona Hospital, Room 234
“Finding out that the world isn’t always what it seems was a hard pill to swallow, Doc. Harder than anything you’ve ever given me. But when I woke up that day, all by myself in the cafeteria, I vowed I wouldn’t let that happen to anyone else. Not if I could help it. So, that’s why I’m still in this dirty racket.”
“That’s a tall tale, Jack,” Potter said.
“But it’s all true, Doc. And the more I learned, the more I became certain that Tobias was behind a lot of the shady deals that were going on at Iona High, and I vowed to stop him and all of his cronies. But that’s a story for another day.”
“That’s very noble, Jack,” Potter said, getting out of his seat. “And I’m sure your parents would be proud.” He was halfway out the door when he stopped and turned around. “Just try to keep your nose clear of any fists for a few days. And get some rest.”
“You’re the doc, Doc.”
“See you soon, Jack.”
“I doubt it, Doc. I think I’ll take it easy for a while, stay on the straight and narrow, maybe take a vacation from this P.I. gig.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it, Jack. I wouldn’t bet on it.”
The End
The names of the people and places haven’t been changed to protect the innocent. Everything is exactly as it happened.
