The Case of the Old Man in the Mailbox

by Brian C. Jacobs

  Chapter 19

  The Plan

  I hung up the phone and told AJ we should head back over to his place and Scooter would be there in an hour. As we closed up the shelter, AJ mentioned that his parents had bought a bucket of chicken the night before and that it was still half full. Sweet! Lunch was now taken care of.

  I hadn’t really thought about that—I couldn’t exactly walk in my front door and start raiding the fridge without getting caught by the guard. For a brief moment, I wondered if Tamara had figured out I wasn’t in my room. Boy, this plan better work; I didn’t know what I would do if I went home empty-handed. As it was, I was going to be in deep trouble, but I hoped catching some bad guys would at least earn me a little credit.

  After a very satisfying lunch of all-you-can-eat fried chicken and a two-liter of soda, AJ and me decided it was time to get back to work. We took the nicest couch from the living room and moved it to the back porch. I make it sound like it was simple, but it wasn’t. It was really heavy and hard for us to move in the first place, but then we had to turn it on its side in order to get it out the back door. Needless to say, by the time we got it on the back porch, we had no desire to do anything but sit on the couch and watch SPUD talk to himself while he slept in his house on the other side of the lawn.

  About that time, we heard a loud clang on the side of the house. We both jumped. But our jitters quickly subsided when Scooter walked around the corner. He started laughing at us as we tried to compose ourselves. The clang had come from him slamming shut the wood gate that separated the fenced-in backyard from the front.

  “Oh good, Scoot, you’re here.” I tried to play down the fact that my heart was still beating out of my chest. “Could you help me take down the clothesline?”

  AJ’s backyard had two T-shaped metal posts—one on each side of the yard—and stretched in between them was a very strong plastic-coated steel cable, which was used for a clothesline. The clothesline looked like two cables stretched between the arms of the two T-posts, but it was actually one long cable that was tied off on one end, stretched across the yard, looped through the post on the other end, and then stretched back to the starting post again. And this cable was strong, too. I won’t admit to you how I happen to know just how strong it is, but let’s just say it can suspend several bicycles and junior-high boys in mid-air as if they were nothing.

  Anyway, since inside the plastic sheath was an actual cable, it was a lot harder to “untie” than I thought. It actually required some pliers and wrenches that we were lucky to find in AJ’s garage without a lot of searching.

  While we worked to “untie” the cable from the clothesline, I explained my plan. We were going to take the cable we were currently untying and tie it around one of the roof supports on the back of AJ’s house. The other end, we would tie to a tree just outside the back fence. AJ would use this as a sort of zip-line escape route when the time was right.

  At first, though, AJ would stay outside and work on the landscaping in the front yard, waiting for the furniture truck to show up. When they did, he would explain to them that he worked for Mr. Mathisen and that Mathisen said they could come right around to the back porch and pick up the furniture.

  AJ would then lead them through the gate to the backyard. After they went through the gate, AJ would make sure to lock the gate so that they couldn’t go back out that way. SPUD of course would go crazy, but he would still be caged up in his doghouse. The men would feel uneasy, but they’d relax once they saw the dog was locked up.

  After the guys picked up the couch to take it through the gate, AJ would then use an old T-shirt or something to slide down the clothesline, over the back fence, and out of sight. Then Scooter, who would be hiding behind the back fence where the ladder was located, would somehow free SPUD, who would go crazy and scare the daylights out of the furniture movers and keep them busy until the police came.

  The police would come at the perfect time, of course, because I would be watching the whole thing from inside the house and would time the phone call just right. The guys would be trapped because the only way to get out of the backyard would be to jump the fence. But who would risk that with an angry pit bull about to bite you in the rear? We all agreed it was a pretty solid idea. If we’d only known how much it could go wrong.

  AJ crawled up on the roof to get a better angle at tying the one end of the cable to the eaves of the roof. That was the easy part. We then had to hop the fence and find a tree that had some branches high enough to tie the other end to. The hardest part was actually trying to get all the slack out of the line. It took AJ and me pulling as hard as we could to get the slack out while Scooter tightened the tie down with the wrench.

  Next came the fun part: we had to make sure it worked, right? AJ found an old, greasy shirt in the garage and came back out to the porch. There was a small stack of firewood on the back porch next to his dad’s prized barbeque grill. He stood on a couple pieces of firewood, reached up, and tossed the T-shirt over the cable. Grabbing a handful of T-shirt hanging over each side, he said, “Here goes nothing,” and jumped.

  The clothesline didn’t sag too badly, and AJ zipped across the backyard—Crash! He smacked the top of the back fence. A couple of the planks creaked and cracked with the collision. He missed clearing the fence by about three inches, so Scooter suggested he grab higher on the T-shirt next time.

  In order to do this, AJ had to sort of jump and grab the T-shirt at the same time. Much to his enjoyment, this meant AJ started with a little more height and a lot more speed. It was a good thing he cleared the fence this time, because it would’ve really hurt if he’d hit the fence going that fast.

  AJ was whooping and hollering as he climbed back over the fence. He insisted he do it one more time “just to be sure,” but I knew it was just because he was having so much fun. But he did do it once more and cleared the fence again. AJ had had his fun; it was time to move on.

  Scooter came up with a pretty simple design for springing SPUD from his cage when the time was right. The metal door on the doghouse stayed shut because of a small latch that just required someone from the outside to lift up, allowing the metal grate to swing open.

  Scooter took a piece of fishing line and attached it to the latch, ran it up to the top of the doghouse, where he had attached a small eye bolt, and then ran it through the eye bolt and straight back to the fence. He then threaded the line between two boards in the fence, and on the other side of the fence, he tied it to a small stick. Now, he had a handle with which to pull the string. He tested it a couple times while AJ and me watched.

  It was sort of spooky standing in front of the doghouse. Standing only a few feet away, you really couldn’t see the fishing line, so it appeared like the latch just popped up out of the blue, and the door sort of creaked open.

  “Now, the only thing I’m worried about is, what if SPUD doesn’t realize the door is unlatched? Oh, wait, I got it!” He ran off into the woods. We heard him crashing about, and then he appeared at the top of the fence and climbed over. He was holding a bed spring.

  People were always dumping stuff like old TVs, mattresses, and tires in the woods. I figured he must have found an old mattress and relieved it of one of its springs. Scooter scrunched up the spring and put it near the hinge of the metal grate. He then closed the latch and climbed back over the fence to try one more time.

  Because of the friction, it took a little more pull to work the latch, but as soon as the latch lifted, the door sprang open and even managed to startle SPUD out of his afternoon nap. Yes, this plan was starting to come together nicely. Or so I thought.

  Lastly came the gate that needed to be locked. After looking at the latching mechanism, we decided the only thing to do was to padlock it from the outside—the way the Seevas would when they went away for long vacations. That required Scooter or me to lock it, since AJ would be inside the fence.

  We decided that I could get from the gate to inside the house a lot
easier and quicker than Scooter could get to his spot. Plus, it was a lot more important that Scooter let that dog go free. I checked my watch: 1:30. OK, we had better get set up. Scooter went over to the doghouse and reset the spring on the door. AJ went and found the padlock and handed it to me. I am not sure what he did with the key, but it was already opened so I didn’t really worry about it. AJ put the greasy shirt on top of the barbeque grill, where he would be able to grab it quickly for his next wild ride over the fence. Scooter said good luck and then jumped up on the doghouse and climbed over the fence.

  Meanwhile, AJ and me went to the front of the house to wait. AJ went into the garage and came out with some hedge clippers and began to clip the shrubs. I decided that if I were to hide and then be accidentally seen, it would raise suspicion, and I didn’t want to do that. So I decided to just sit on the front porch and watch AJ trim the hedges—that’s what teenage boys do, right? It’s harder to pretend to be a “typical” teenager than it is to actually be one.

  I realized I should probably know where the phone was, so I hopped up and went inside quickly to find the phone. It was sitting on the kitchen counter. I moved it to the small table sitting in the entry way just inside the front door: easy access. Then, I saw the nearly empty two-liter from lunch we’d left on the counter. Why not? I thought. I put the padlock in my pocket and started chugging straight from the two-liter as I opened up the front door.