Sammy Keyes and the Power of Justice Jack

by Wendelin Van Draanen

  Heather must’ve noticed, because as she shoves past me on her way out, she says, “You’re such a dweeb.”

  “Better’n being you,” I call after her with a laugh.

  And what’s so funny is, she actually turns and sputters like she wants to say something but can’t figure out what, and then she storms off mad at me.

  Whatever. I fall in step with Billy on the way over to drama and say, “Nice picture in the paper.”

  “I can’t believe everyone’s recognizing me!” he says, obviously thrilled that everyone’s recognizing him. Then he drops his voice and says, “Justice Jack told me to meet him at headquarters after school. I think he’s got something big planned. Maybe we’ll be on the news!”

  Now, I really want to ask stuff like, Did your parents see the paper? What did they say? Do you think being Justice Jack’s sidekick is such a good idea? What is the deal with the reality show anyway?

  But I don’t want to choke off his happy mood. I don’t want him thinking, Oh, brother, here comes that downer Sammy again.

  Besides, when did I become the voice of caution?

  So I just walk alongside him and let him be Happy Billy, and the only question I ask is if he could relay a message to Casey and tell him I’d pay-phone him after school.

  “Sí, sí, Sammy-keyesta,” he tells me with a goofy Billy Pratt grin, and whips out his phone.

  I do kinda go Uh-oh when I see Marissa waiting outside the drama room, but Billy just walks past her with a “Cheerio, Marissa!” like nothing in the world has happened between them.

  Marissa watches him go by like he’s a-hunk, a-hunk of burning love. And it hits me how funny it is that yesterday she looked at him one way, and now she’s all googly-eyed and drop-jawed over him.

  And why?

  Because other girls are.

  Mr. Chester’s usually pretty lax about students talking during drama. Probably because the class is huge and we work in groups, practicing our lines or making props. Every once in a while he blows a fuse—usually when he figures out that nobody’s actually practicing, they’re just talking—but mostly he’s too caught up in one group to pay much attention to another. So during class it was easy to catch Marissa up on Pair-a-Dice and Buckley’s and the whole Secret Agent Man thing, but it took longer than it should have because she kept interrupting me with questions and saying, “You’ve got to be kidding!” every seven seconds.

  Anyway, I did a pretty good job of painting a picture of everything she’d missed, but when the dismissal bell rings, I find out that that’s not good enough for Marissa. She latches onto me as we leave Mr. Chester’s room and says, “You’ve got to take me there.”

  “What? Where?”

  “To Pair-a-Dice!”

  “Aw, come on. No. I was there on Monday and Tuesday. I’ve kinda had enough of the place.”

  “But I haven’t seen it!”

  “Look, I just told you all about it.”

  “That’s like saying I don’t have to see the Mona Lisa because you described it to me!”

  I roll my eyes. “Trust me. Pair-a-Dice is not the Mona Lisa. It’s a shed in the woods, okay? Not the kind of place you would ever want to go.”

  “It’s in the woods?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.” I eye her as we leave Mr. Chester’s room. “Bugs, snakes, spiders … you know.”

  “Did you see spiders and snakes?”

  I laugh. “Oh, they’re there. They’re just hanging out waiting for you to show up so they can pounce.” Then I add, “And Pair-a-Dice is not exactly down the street. You have to go past the junkyard to get there.”

  “There’s a junkyard? Where?”

  I do a little mental slap of the forehead, because of course Marissa McKenze doesn’t know where the junkyard is. Her family lives out on East Jasmine. In a mansion.

  I shake my head. “Look. You don’t have a bike or a skateboard.… It took Billy and me almost an hour to walk there, and besides, I need to go to math lab.”

  “Math lab? Why?”

  “Because I’m behind and I need help!”

  She frowns. “Well, fine. I’ll wait. And I don’t care how far it is, I want to go.”

  I stop and stare her down with a scowl. “Well, I don’t want to go.”

  “Pleeeeeeease?”

  I keep scowling.

  “Did I mention you’re the best friend ever?” she says in a squeaky little voice.

  “What?”

  “You’re the best friend ever.”

  “What?” I say, cupping my ear.

  “You’re the best friend ever!” she shouts. Then she spins around with her arms up, calling out, “Sammy Keyes is the best friend ever!”

  I smirk and grab her by the backpack. “All right. Come on.”

  “You’ll take me?”

  “Yeah,” I grumble, “I’ll take you. After math lab.”

  I didn’t have a clue what I was getting into.

  THIRTY

  Before going to math lab, I called home and told Grams not to worry if I was late—that I was with Marissa, straightening things out. Marissa did the same thing with her mom, and then I pay-phoned Casey. And I was excited to talk to him, but he sounded so bummed that I finally just came out and said, “You saw the picture, huh?”

  “It’s so awkward. Everybody’s sending it around. What is she thinking?”

  Now, I’m sure not one to jump to Heather’s defense, but I found myself wanting to make Casey feel better. So I wound up saying stuff like, “Well, it’s not like they were naked,” and, “Look, she just did it to make Marissa cry,” and, “She probably didn’t think her friend would send it to anyone else …,” but none of it seemed to help. So finally I give up on that and tell him, “I promised I’d take Marissa out to see Pair-a-Dice. I have to go to math lab first, but any chance you want to meet us there?”

  “Are you trying to get Marissa over Danny the way you got Billy over Marissa?”

  I laugh. “Ironic, huh? I hope she doesn’t turn into a sidekick, too.” I eye Marissa. “And she promised me she’s over Danny for good.”

  “Man, I hope so.”

  “It might get kinda late if you’ve got to be back by five.”

  “I don’t care. If I get reamed for this and Heather skates for that picture …?” He fades off, then tunes back in and tries to sound more upbeat. “I’ll be there. Get your jungle whistle ready!”

  “It’s always ready!” I tell him, and hang up the phone.

  “Everything okay?” Marissa asks.

  I head over to math lab. “Heather’s picture is getting passed around the high school. Casey’s kinda sick over it.”

  She follows after me, shaking her head. “Can you imagine having her as a sister? How embarrassing.”

  “I just don’t get Heather. Why is she so …?”

  “Vindictive? Mean? Vicious? Nasty? Possessed?”

  I laugh. “Yeah.” Then I shrug and say, “Maybe someday we’ll figure it out, but that probably won’t be today.”

  Mr. Tiller runs the math lab, and he’s one of those teachers who used to tell me he’d love to see me live up to my potential but finally stopped. So when I came through the door, his eyebrows went creeping upward. “Good to see you here.”

  “It’s about time, right?” I laughed. Then I spun around. “This is me, turning over a new leaf.”

  So I concentrated on the stuff I was having trouble with and had him check my work. And when I understood one kind of problem and had a good example to work from, I went on to the next kind of problem until I knew how to do everything from three of the sections where I hadn’t turned in homework. Then I packed up, thanked Mr. Tiller, grabbed Marissa—who’d also decided to get her math homework done—and got out of there.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I tell Marissa as we set off for Pair-a-Dice. “Heather did you a big favor.”

  “She what?”

  “Think about it—how long would Danny have strung you along if she hadn’t ta
ken that picture?”

  Her head quivers like it’s shivering cold. “Can we please talk about something else?”

  “Okaaaay.” I think a minute. “How about your parents—what’s going on with them?”

  She groans like she doesn’t want to talk about that, either, but then launches into a blow-by-blow of their fights and her mom’s crying and her dad’s storming out and Mikey’s sleeping in the extra bed in her room. “They’re a mess, he’s a mess, we’re all a mess. I keep thinking it’ll get better, but it just seems to get worse. I heard Mom tell him that we have to move into a smaller place, but Dad said he could fix everything if she’d just give him a chance.”

  “Uh-oh. Does that mean gambling?”

  “Probably,” she says, all disgusted-like. “Why doesn’t he get that he’s never going to win?”

  I shrug. “Because people do win.”

  “Oh yeah? Name one.”

  “Uh … Mrs. Wedgewood?”

  “Wait—your neighbor?”

  I take a deep breath and let it out in a great big gust. “She’s not my neighbor anymore.”

  “What happened? Did she finally fall off the toilet so hard no one could help her?”

  I eye her. “She died.”

  “What? Oh! I’m sorry. That was mean of me.” She studies me a minute. “But you hated her, right?”

  And it hits me that it is kinda strange how you can call someone the Wedginator and the Mighty Wedge and the World’s Biggest Wedgie when they’re alive, but after they’re dead?

  Well, it does seem … wrong.

  But if it’s wrong after they’re dead, then it was wrong when they were alive, right? It’s just you’ve run out of time to take it back. Or say you’re sorry. Or give it any more thought.

  It’s like you’ve been swimming around in a pool of tomorrows and suddenly, whoosh, it’s drained.

  Thinking about that made me really glad I hadn’t just told Mrs. Wedgewood off like I’d wanted to. I’d had that little last chance to take things back. Or at least explain things.

  “Wow. What is going through your head?” Marissa asks. “You look so serious.”

  I try to wave it off. “It’s a funny story, really.” Then I launch into Mrs. Wedgewood’s disappearing and the Prune Patrol and the Senior SWAT Team out to get her with screwdrivers and credit cards. I go into all the details, too, and kind of jump around and act out the things Bun-Top and the others had said.

  But the whole time I’m talking, there’s a little voice in my head telling me to be careful. Telling me not to tell Marissa about the candy money.

  Telling me that telling her might somehow … backfire.

  So I kept mum about the money.

  “You weren’t kidding it’s far,” Marissa says when I’m winding down about Mrs. Wedgewood. “And it’s already getting kind of dark.”

  It was, too. Not dark dark. Not even dusky, really. But it was kind of cloudy and the sun was definitely saying See ya for another day.

  “Well, there’s the junkyard,” I tell her. “We’ve got to go about halfway down those eucalyptus trees, take a right, then another right back up this way through the trees.”

  “A right and a right? That’s like doing a giant U-turn. Isn’t there a shortcut?”

  I look at her and bust up. “You want to take a shortcut?”

  “I want to get there already!”

  I think about it a minute. “Well, Casey and I cut out through the trees and along the junkyard fence thataway, so you’re right—it would be way shorter if we cut in through the trees on this side.”

  “Trees?” she says, like she’s suddenly worried.

  “Yeah, you know, those living logs that shoot up from the earth?” I give her a little shove. “You’re the one who brought up taking a shortcut.”

  We’re nearing the entrance to the junkyard now, but the gate is rolled closed and locked up tight. And all of a sudden the dogs I’d seen in the office when I’d stopped in before come charging at us, barking and growling and snapping like they’re going to tear us apart.

  “Ahhhhhh!” Marissa squeals as they slam against the chain-link. “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod! That one’s got devil eyes!”

  We run ahead, and the dogs do chase after us for a minute, but turn around well before we get to the end of the property.

  “Why do junkyards always have vicious dogs?” she pants.

  “You didn’t even know we had a junkyard!”

  “Well, I’ve been to the movies, you know! And why would anybody own a junkyard? Broken cars, mean dogs … Talk about stupid.”

  “Maybe they’re actually smart. Maybe they had a bunch of dilapidated cars and the neighbors complained about the mess but it was too big to clean up so they put up a fence and a sign and started making money instead!”

  “Maybe not,” she snaps.

  “You know,” I tell her, “you always get testy when we’re about to take a shortcut.”

  “I’m not being testy,” she says in a totally testy way.

  I laugh. “Oh, right. But the point is, we don’t have to take a shortcut.”

  “Look, I want to get there already. This is taking forever! If I had known—”

  “I told you it was a long way!”

  “But why’d you have to go to math lab!”

  “See? Testy. I’m not the one who wants to go here. I’ve already been here twice. I know all about it. I’m also not the one without a bike or a skateboard. So if you want to go back, I’m all for it!”

  “Sorry,” she says with a little frown.

  We’re nearing the end of the junkyard property, so I say, “What’s it gonna be? Shortcut or no shortcut?”

  She doesn’t say a word for about ten steps, then finally grumbles, “Shortcut.”

  So we turn in when we get to the end of the fence, and pretty soon we’re zigzagging through the trees, going deeper and deeper into the eucalyptus forest.

  “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Marissa whimpers after we’ve walked awhile. “It’s really eerie in here.”

  “As long as we can see the junkyard fence, we’re fine. There’s this little, like, seam in it, and once I find that, I’ll know where we are.”

  “What do you mean, a seam?”

  “It’s this twisty thing that holds two parts together.”

  She hurries to catch up to me. “How do you know about a twisty thing that holds two parts of a junkyard fence together?”

  But then I see something.

  Something that does not belong in a eucalyptus forest.

  I stop cold and it doesn’t take long for me to realize that there’s only one sensible thing to do.

  Grab Marissa and hide!

  THIRTY-ONE

  I drag Marissa behind a big tree, and she gasps, “What are you doing? What’s wrong?”

  I peek around the tree and watch as a truck moves carefully through the forest.

  It’s a shiny red tow truck with a flatbed, and even though we’re too far away to read the fancy white lettering on the side, I know what it says.

  TONY’S TOWING.

  “That’s the same tow truck Billy and I saw the first time we came out here. The guy stopped and told us the road was a dead end.”

  “So?” Marissa says as we watch it do a careful three-point turn, and that’s when I notice that the truck has wide double rear wheels.

  Duallies.

  “So it’s going to back up to that seam in the fence.”

  We watch, and sure enough that’s just what it does. Then a big guy with curly black hair gets out of the driver’s side, and in no time flat he’s got that twisty thing twisted off the fence and has enough room to squeeze through the opening.

  Marissa shakes her head a little. “Why would someone want a secret after-hours entry to a junkyard?”

  All of a sudden the piece of buzzy meat that Casey and I had seen makes sense. “The dogs,” I mutter. “He’s trying to avoid the dogs.”

  “If he
wants to avoid the dogs, why doesn’t he just stay out of the junkyard? It’s a junkyard. What’s to steal?”

  And that’s when it hits me. The weird footprints. The gouge in the ground … Someone had dragged something heavy backward.

  My heart starts pounding in my chest. “He’s not stealing.”

  “Then what?”

  “He’s retrieving.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Come on,” I whisper, and hurry forward from tree to tree, closing in on the truck.

  So there we are running along, thinking it’s just us and Tow Truck Tony, who’s long gone inside the junkyard, when all of a sudden a door slams.

  We duck behind a tree and look at each other like two electrified owls. “Was that the truck?” Marissa whispers.

  I nod. “Must’ve been.”

  “So is there another person?”

  My heart is whacking away. “Must be.”

  “Do you think they saw us?”

  “Must have.”

  But nobody shouts, Hey, you! and we don’t hear any leaves crunching our way. So finally we hold our breath and peek around the tree, and sure enough, there is a second person.

  Someone I know.

  Like lightning, the things Officer Borsch had said about Justice Jack flash through my mind:

  Petty crime has gone way up since he’s decided to “help out.”

  Up, not down!

  There have been ten stolen bicycles in the last two weeks!

  Everywhere I turn, there’s Jack!

  I let out a little whimper. “No.”

  Marissa looks at me. “Do you know her?”

  “That’s Justice Jack’s mom.”

  “His mom?”

  “Maaaaaaan …!”

  “Why are you so upset?”

  “Because this means Justice Jack is a fraud.”

  “It does?”

  And that’s when the little puff of smoke that had been snuffed out days ago sparks to life and fireballs through my brain.

  “It was all a setup! Every bit of it! The mayor didn’t call him at Buckley’s! It was probably that guy pretending to be the mayor.”

  “Well, who is that guy? Justice Jack’s dad?”

  I shake my head. “Jack’s dad died. Maybe he’s the mom’s boyfriend?” My brain races as we watch Mama Jack do something that makes the bed of the tow truck tilt. “I should have known! I mean, what a coincidence—Jack’s at Buckley’s with the Hollywood guy and the mayor calls? What are the odds of that?”