A sharp pain in my wrists made me wince. I made an effort to relax my arms. I’d been straining at my handcuffs. Crazy, I know, but I was just starting to realize how mad I was.
These hoods had hijacked my morning, scared a bunch of innocent people witless, robbed a bank using me as a dumb accomplice, and now were getting clean away. And who knew what they planned to do with me now? What if their cruel tricks weren’t over?
At Satellite Road, five miles outside the Bayport city limits, the cruiser slowed to a stop. The gunmen got out, pulled me out, and uncuffed me. “Start walking,” the hefty one said. He pointed back into town. “That way.” They got back in and drove off in the opposite direction.
I followed them. Admittedly, not very fast. But I was jogging along well enough.
Ahead of me, the cruiser stopped. The reverse lights came on. They backed up until they were beside me again. The driver’s-side window rolled down.
“What do you think you’re doing, kid? We told you to walk the other way.”
I stared back at them without answering. I didn’t open my mouth. I didn’t even blink. I was done cooperating with these clowns.
They looked at each other and shrugged. “He’ll never keep up on foot,” the skinny one said. “Not if you gun it.”
The hefty one nodded and stomped on the accelerator. The cruiser spit gravel and shot away. Within ten seconds it was gone from my view.
I sighed, turned, and began the slow walk back into town. Oh well, at least it had stopped raining.
When I got home, dirty and tired, the real cops were waiting for me. Luckily, after I told my story I avoided the booking, the mug shot, the taking the laces out of my shoes. I was told I wouldn’t be charged with anything, and they left.
After they were gone, waiting for me on the kitchen table was a treat from Aunt Trudy: some kind of delicious sauce on top of homemade, ribbony pasta. I didn’t know what it all was, but it was terrific.
Aunt Trudy lived in a little apartment above the garage. We called our aunt Green Thumb Trudy because she was crazy for gardening. She went to meetings on the subject of gardening and belonged to several gardening societies in the area. She also had a wicked sense of humor. My late lunch had come with a note attached: For the Jailbird.
Frank sat with me and gave me the final pieces of the puzzle while I ate.
After all I’d been through, here’s the kicker: It all turned out to have been some sort of prank!
Mrs. Steigerwald was never under any threat. The woman I saw in the van must have been a double who’d gotten hold of a similar baseball cap and sunglasses. She may have even been wearing a bright-red wig. I’d been completely fooled.
All the loot from the holdup was found in the alley next to the bank in a cake box with a note that said, Just kidding! LOL! The police would return all the personal items and cash once they’d had a chance to dust for fingerprints.
Frank watched me as I finished up my lunch special and rinsed my plate. “Are you okay?” he asked after a moment. “You must have had a crazy day. I was worried about you.”
Sometimes it’s nice to have a brother.
CONSEQUENCES
3
FRANK
AFTER THE FIFTH SIGH, I PUT THE photos down. “Okay, what’s wrong?”
Joe had been looking through the Frank Hardy Known Criminal Index, a collection of mug shots and wanted posters I kept in my briefcase. But his eyes had glazed over, and his leg was bouncing in place.
“Did you ever stop and ask yourself why, Frank?”
“Why what?”
“Why people do the things they do . . . Why the Earth revolves around the Sun . . . Why we get involved in every kind of crazy trouble that crops up around here . . .”
I couldn’t hear the rest of his answer. The decibel level in the Bayport High cafeteria was, as ever during lunch period, at the hollering point.
Joe toyed with his meal for a bit. He’d ordered his usual: the special of the day. I don’t think he actually prefers one dish over another. He just likes variety.
I knew something was bugging him. After the cops left Saturday, he’d been in typically high spirits. But later, his mood had shifted, and he’d barely spoken two words since.
My blond-haired, blue-eyed brother is an unlikely one to sulk. In fact, he’s one of the sunniest people I knew. But every once in a while something would get under his skin. He wouldn’t bring it up right away. First he’d talk about something else. Finally he’d work his way around to what was really going on in his head. I knew I didn’t have long to wait.
I was right.
He had been staring at a stack of photos of various white males between the ages of twenty and forty, but I could tell he wasn’t really seeing their faces. (We’d been hoping he would be able to identify the phony cops who had briefly kidnapped him after the bank holdup on Saturday, but so far no luck.) All at once, he looked at me in alarm and said, “Am I a major-league sucker or something? Sort of Mr. Gullibility?”
“No.”
“Do I have a sucker’s face?”
I wanted to laugh. But I didn’t. “A sucker’s face? No. Why?”
“Well, look what happened: First I got taken in by a bunch of phony bank robbers. Then I got tricked by someone pretending to be Mrs. Steigerwald. And then I let myself get busted by fake cops!”
So that was it.
I was about to tell him I didn’t think he was any more gullible than I was, whatever that was worth, but a voice interrupted our conversation:
“Dude, that was sick!”
Laughter echoed from the table next to ours. I looked up and saw a bunch of football players staring down into somebody’s smartphone screen. As I looked, one of the players—Neal “Neanderthal” Bunyan—glanced up and met my eye.
Uh-oh. Neanderthal, Joe, and I were not exactly friends.
“Yo, Frank!” he yelled now, grabbing his friend’s phone and holding it up so I could see it. “You seen this? It’s your big movie debut!”
Big movie debut? I looked at Joe, who seemed to share my sense of wariness. Last I’d checked, I didn’t have a feature film in production.
“What do you mean, Neander—er—Neal?” Joe asked.
Neanderthal got up from his table and walked over, still holding the smartphone. “Someone just messaged this link to my buddies,” he said, holding it up so we could see the screen. It was a YouTube clip. He hit play, and Joe and I frowned at each other and watched.
The second the picture came up, my mouth dropped open. It was me—at the bank yesterday. First I was shot from behind, standing in line, minding my own business. Then the screen moved to capture the “robbers” entering the bank, brandishing their “guns.” Everyone screamed, and the bank robbers yelled at us to stay calm, then that they’d shoot anyone who didn’t cooperate.
After a few more seconds, the screen dissolved to black, and then words flashed up in bright-red capital letters:
WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
And then:
PANIC PROJECT!
COMING THIS SUMMER!
I frowned again and looked up at Joe. He looked just as puzzled as I felt. “What was that?”
“That,” I replied, handing the phone back to Neanderthal, “is what I think is supposed to become a viral video.”
Neanderthal was laughing. “So, let me bet on what happens next,” he said, turning around to make sure his buddies were watching. “Frank, I’m going out on a limb to say you pee your pants. Sorry, maybe I should have said ‘spoiler alert.’ ”
I avoided Neanderthal’s eyes as I wiped my mouth, tossed my napkin on my tray, and stood up. “Let’s go, Joe.”
“Awww, don’t be embarrassed,” Neanderthal chided, chuckling. “I’m sure I would have been real scared if the same thing had happened to me. I mean, not as scared as you look, but scared.”
Joe was still working on his special of the day. “Really?” he asked. “We’re done with lunch?”
I nod
ded. “Really.”
Joe looked disappointed, but he grabbed his tray and followed me away from our table. “What’s up?”
I was looking around the cafeteria. “We need to find Seth Diller.”
Joe looked around too. “Why?”
“Because he took that video.”
I wasn’t seeing Seth anywhere around the cafeteria. Then I remembered that some of the AV Club kids ate in the AV room. And Seth, as you might imagine, was big into the AV Club. Like president-three-years-running big.
Joe looked confused. “Wait, he shot that?” he asked. “Seriously? How would he have known to do that?”
I shook my head. “Not sure. He shot it with the video camera in his phone.”
Joe furrowed his brows. “But . . . that makes it seem like Seth was involved. . . .”
“And he staged it all,” I finished. “Like one of his stupid monster videos. Come on.” I grabbed Joe’s arm and led him up the back staircase toward the AV room. I don’t usually have much of a temper—I’m a thinker, not a fighter—but I have to admit, the closer I got to Seth Diller, the more I wanted to punch him in the face. Had he really staged an entire bank robbery for the sake of some dumb movie project? Hadn’t he ever heard of actors? Hadn’t he ever heard of scripts?
Sometimes I think reality television is ruining our culture.
“Hey,” I said, plowing through the door to the AV room. Seth sat with his AV cronies on a set of stairs near the back, surrounded by a maze of DVD players and old-school televisions on carts.
He looked surprised to see us. “Hey, Frank,” he said, looking a little nervous. I understood his wariness. I mean, Seth and I had probably exchanged five words, total, in the entire year before the bank robbery. Now I was hunting him down on his “turf.”
“My brother and I need to talk to you,” I said. “Privately.”
After a few seconds, Seth nodded. “Ah—okay.”
He got up and walked over to us, and I held the door open for him to pass through. Then I walked over to a quiet corner of the hallway, by a window, and gestured for Seth to follow.
“What’s this about?” he asked quickly, looking uncomfortable.
“It’s about the video you shot on Saturday,” I replied, crossing my arms. “Of the robbery. Remember?”
Seth looked at me blankly. I don’t think the expression in his pale-blue eyes changed at all. “What do you mean?”
I sighed. So we were going to do it this way. “I’m talking about the video you took on your phone,” I said, and then paused to wait for the recognition to spark in his eyes. But none came. “Come on, Seth. I saw it.”
Seth gulped. It was nearly unnoticeable but for the lump traveling down his throat. “I didn’t shoot anything. Is that all? Because we were kind of in the middle . . .”
Joe gestured at Seth’s pocket, where the outline of his smartphone was clearly visible. “Then you won’t mind if I borrow it for a sec?” he asked.
Seth frowned. “What?”
“Your phone.” Joe gestured at Seth’s pocket again. The top of the phone was peeking out. “I have just remembered that I need to call our aunt Trudy and remind her to buy some zucchini for dinner tonight, because I’m having a craving. Okay?”
Seth looked unsure how to react. Yes, this was a ridiculous request, but his phone was in plain sight. He was caught. “I really don’t have time. . . .”
“It’ll only take a second.” Joe held out his hand.
Seth looked from Joe to me and back again. He didn’t lose his composure, but very deliberately reached into his pocket and pulled out the phone. He looked at the screen for just a moment before Joe pulled it out of his grasp.
Joe moved closer to me and held out the phone so I could see it. The background was a particularly gory scene from one of Seth’s most popular flicks. Joe didn’t even bother pretending to make a call. He went straight to the “Videos” folder and clicked on it. A list popped up:
Roadkill cat.mov
Cool sunset.mov
Bankheistraw.mov
“That’s it,” I said, pointing.
Joe clicked on the video, and after a few seconds of buffering, it came up. The same video of me at the bank that Neanderthal had shown us just moments before.
Seth swallowed again, then looked down at the floor.
“Check his sent e-mails,” I suggested on a whim. Joe pulled them up, then chuckled.
“There it is,” he said, showing me the screen again. Sure enough, it was the same e-mail containing the link to the Panic Project trailer.
I looked up at Seth, whose eyes looked slightly buggier than usual. Other than that, he gave no outward indication of fear.
“Maybe we should go somewhere more comfortable,” I suggested. “I think you have a lot of explaining to do.”
HARMLESS
4
JOE
WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” PRINCIPAL Gorse was saying as he crossed his good leg over his bad one, “is why you couldn’t tell people what was going on. We’ve all seen movies, Seth. They have actors, scripts. If you know the ship on-screen isn’t really sinking, does that make Titanic any less sad?”
Seth took in a quick breath. He looked like he was struggling to keep his composure. “Principal Gorse, I mean . . . come on.”
The principal looked to the rest of us—me, Frank, and Officer Olaf, who had been sent in when the Bayport PD heard that we’d learned something about the bank robbery—for support.
“I think what he’s trying to say,” I jumped in, “is that real emotions are always more interesting to watch than fake ones. That’s part of the appeal—that there is no script. Anything could happen.”
Seth looked at me and smiled. “Exactly. I was performing a cinematic experiment. How would people react when they were put in these crazy, seemingly dangerous situations? What would happen?”
“And what happened in this case,” Officer Olaf said, moving from his spot leaning against the front of Principal Gorse’s desk, “was awfully lucky for you, Seth. Nobody got hurt. Nobody panicked and had a heart attack.” He paused, standing right in front of Seth and looking down at him with serious brown eyes, running his fingers over his droopy mustache. “But you realize that was just luck, don’t you?”
Seth looked up at Officer Olaf, defiant. I could tell he wasn’t going to back down. “I didn’t hurt anybody, Officer Olaf. It was never my intention to hurt anybody. It was just a harmless prank.”
Frank, who was sitting next to me on a bench against the wall, huffed. “But you did kind of rob a bank,” he pointed out.
Seth glared at him, surprised. “I did not,” he insisted. “I staged a bank robbery, but we gave everything back.”
“But in that moment,” Frank said, getting to his feet, “I, and everybody else in that bank, really believed we might die. Make the wrong move, and you could have shot us full of holes. I’m sure lots of people were wondering whether they would make it out of the bank alive.”
Seth frowned. He looked down at the floor for a second, then back into Frank’s eyes. “I told them afterward that it was just a joke.”
“But what if something had gone wrong?” Principal Gorse asked. He leaned across his desk. “Seth, you don’t seem to get it here. Bank robberies are serious business. People panic. They act violently if they think it will save their lives. They feel terror that doesn’t go away just because you leave a note saying it was only a joke.”
Seth shifted uncomfortably, but his expression didn’t change. “I take risks for my art,” he said simply.
Officer Olaf sighed and turned to Principal Gorse. “Do you want to tell him what his punishment from you is? Because I’m about ready to take this kid down to the station house and straighten him out there.”
Seth frowned again. Now he was looking a little nervous. “I’m being charged with a crime?” he asked.
Principal Gorse took a deep breath and said, “Seth, I’m afraid I have no choice but to suspend yo
u for three days for cyberbullying your fellow students.”
Seth jumped to his feet. “Cyberbullying?” he cried. “What?”
Principal Gorse gestured to Frank and me. “These two gentlemen were in your video.”
Seth glared at me. “But they weren’t even—”
“I’m afraid it’s school policy.”
Seth bit his lip, still glaring. He looked from me to Frank to Principal Gorse. “This is—”
But Officer Olaf didn’t let him finish. “Now you have to come with me, Seth,” he said, standing up. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say . . .”
Officer Olaf continued to read Seth his Miranda rights as Seth looked from him to Principal Gorse, stammering. “But—but—I didn’t—”
“Criminal mischief,” Officer Olaf said, moving close enough to Seth to wave a pair of handcuffs in his face. “You created a major disruption this weekend, Seth—diverting the police force and panicking citizens. I get that you didn’t really rob a bank. But it turns out, pretending to rob a bank is pretty bad too.” He jingled the cuffs again. “I’d rather not use these. Think you can walk out with me like a big boy—no trouble?”
Seth was still glaring at Officer Olaf, but his lower lip was starting to wobble. He took one last look around the room, and when he spotted me, his face flushed with anger. “Darn it, Joe! I thought you liked my videos! I thought you were cool!”
I sighed. I mean, I did feel bad for the kid. In his warped way, he was pretty talented. “Listen, Seth, if putting me in cuffs and making me hitchhike back from miles out of town—not to mention the whole issue of having to rob my brother—if that’s how you treat a fan, I’d hate to see what you do to your enemies.” I paused and tried to smile, but Seth wasn’t having it. I gave up. “Seriously, dude. You went too far.”
Seth pulled his lips tight, then turned and allowed Officer Olaf to lead him out of the office. The officer nodded at Principal Gorse on the way out. “Thanks, Hank,” he said, glancing briefly at me and my brother. “Boys.”
Then he turned his head and walked out the door, and he and Seth were gone.
Secret of the Red Arrow Page 2
