My father was the first one in, and Luke was right on his heels. The only light in the room was coming from a computer screen. I ran my palm down the wall until I found a switch and flicked it on just in time to see a young guy charging at my father with a knife thrust out in front of him. My father just stood his ground, ready to defend himself with the crowbar, but my brother charged forward, kicked the knife out of the guy’s hand and then delivered a powerful kick to his stomach. The creep toppled forward and fell to the floor.
Luke pushed him down flat and then kneeled on his back, putting all his weight to good use.
I looked around the room. Empty bottles, trash, old pizza boxes. But no Maria. There were two doors off this main room, both locked. I thought I could hear muffled cries, but it could have been anything. My heart was beating loudly.
My father pried open the first door. Inside were two frightened teenage girls. They stumbled out into the room, their mouths taped and their hands locked behind them with plastic zip ties. I took my pocketknife and cut the plastic off one girl and then the other, but before I could help them with the tape over their mouths, one of them pushed me away and they both ran. In an instant they were gone.
I dropped my baseball bat, grabbed the crowbar and started to pry open the second door. Then I noticed it had some heavy kind of bar across it that wouldn’t budge. It was held in place by a padlock. A couple of good smacks with the curved end of the crowbar, and the lock broke free. I pushed on the door, not knowing what was going to be on the other side.
Inside was Maria. I couldn’t get the door completely open, but I could reach in and touch her. I shoved at the door with my shoulder and tugged her out of that horrible black hole. She was bound too. I carefully cut the plastic until her hands were free.
Watching this all play out, Luke must have lost his focus, because the guy on the floor somehow toppled Luke and got up. My father tried to grab him, but he weaved out of his way and headed for the doorway. Oscar tried to stop him but got shoved onto the floor.
“Let him go,” my father said. “And let’s get the hell out of here.”
Luke and I helped Maria into the front of the truck, which Dalton had kept running. I carefully removed the tape from over her mouth as Oscar, my father and Luke piled into the back of the truck. We looked around for the other girls, but they were nowhere in sight.
Maria took a deep breath, sobbed, but said nothing as we sped through the night.
Chapter Twenty-Two
It’s safe to say none of us slept much that night. Maria and I sat in my bedroom and talked.
“I went back for my birth certificate,” she said. “That’s when they found me.”
I opened a drawer, took out the envelope and handed it to her. “I went there first looking for you. I knew something was wrong.”
“You found it!” she said, taking it from me. “Thank you. You know, I’m not sure I want to stay here in the city anymore. I don’t feel safe. I think I should go find my parents.”
“I’ll help you do that if you want,” I said, although I felt sad already at the thought of losing Maria again.
“But there’s something I have to do first.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I need to go to the police and tell them everything I know about those men. If I don’t, they’ll keep doing what they’re doing.”
She was right, of course. But I still wasn’t sure I trusted the police.
Maria rubbed her wrists where they had been tied together with the plastic zip tie. She lifted her sleeves, and I could see the bruises on her arms as well. “Jake, all my life I’ve expected bad things to happen. And they usually did. My parents were always afraid they would be caught.”
She paused and looked up at me. I saw something different in her face. She wasn’t scared anymore.
“While I was trapped in that room, I started to believe this had happened to me because I was a bad person.”
“You’ve never been a bad person!”
“I think I know that now. But I’ve always felt like a victim. I’m not going to be a victim anymore. And I need to do something to help other girls like me.”
I understood all too well what she meant. She and I had tried to fly under the radar at school. Tried to stay invisible. We’d watched out for each other, but we’d never gotten involved when anyone else was in trouble.
“All right,” I said, smiling. “Everything changes tonight.”
“Everything,” she said, smiling right back at me.
Chapter Twenty-Three
My father was already up and cooking eggs when we walked into the kitchen. It wasn’t like him to make breakfast for anyone, including himself. Luke was sitting at the kitchen table, dressed for school like it was an ordinary day.
My father nodded to the chairs at the table, and we sat down with Luke as the eggs were slipped onto plates and set in front of us. Toast popped up from the toaster and was promptly delivered to us in a kind of dance. This wasn’t like my father at all.
“So?” he said, leaning against the kitchen counter as we began to eat.
I was about to say, So what? but Maria spoke first.
“I’m going to talk to the police. Tell them everything.”
He looked at Maria. “Your idea?”
“Yes,” she said. She didn’t have to say any more. “Somebody has to stop them. They could ruin the lives of a lot of people.”
“You want me to go with you?” he asked.
“Maybe,” she said.
“But first we’re gonna talk to Mr. Lotz, the teacher at school who tried to help us before,” I added. “He’s got a lawyer friend. It might get complicated, but I don’t care.”
“Complicated is right,” my dad said. And I almost thought he was going to try to talk us out of it. But he didn’t. “Eat up,” he said. “You got a big day ahead of you.”
My dad walked us to school. He was worried that the goons might come looking for us.
Maria, me, Luke and my dad—all walking down the street together like a family. My dad still had his gun with him, tucked under his coat. I had my pocketknife in my pocket. Luke had his martial-arts skills that he’d been working on for years. And he also had a newfound confidence. You could see it in the way he walked. The only things missing were the crowbar and the baseball bat.
No, the only thing really missing was Cole. I missed my brother and decided I was going to stay in touch with him. I was going to be there to help him when he got out as well.
“They’ll be looking for me at work,” my dad said as we arrived at the school. “Call me at the Shit Shack if you need me.”
We went in quickly and went straight to Mr. Lotz’s room. School hadn’t started yet, and he was sitting at his desk, grading some papers. He lit up when we walked in the room.
Maria told him her story. Our story.
I think his jaw kind of dropped and just stayed there. “You’re not making this up, are you?”
“No,” Maria said. “It’s all true.”
“And you want to go to the police?”
“We want you to help us,” I said. “You and your lawyer friend.”
He blinked once, twice, and looked confused. I almost thought he was going to turn us down. He swallowed hard and said, “Okay. I will.”
Then he made a call to Mrs. Warren and asked for someone to take over his morning classes again. He phoned his lawyer friend and did his best to explain the situation, ending it by saying, “We need to do this now. This morning.”
I think his friend must have tried to put him off, because Mr. Lotz looked a little ticked. “Derrick. Remember that time back in college?”
There was a brief pause, during which this Derrick dude must have remembered whatever had happened back in college. Apparently, he owed Jim Lotz a favor. And lucky for us, this was it.
Then there was a cab ride to an office downtown, where we were introduced to the lawyer. He seemed pretty unhappy about getting invol
ved. Nonetheless, he reluctantly agreed to go with us to the police station.
After a fifteen-minute wait we were ushered into a room with a female officer. The lawyer spoke for us at first and began by saying that Maria’s parents had been deported. The officer tried to brush us off at first. “I think this is a matter for immigration, not the local police.”
“Maria was born here,” I said. “She’s a citizen. I think you should hear the rest of the story.”
Maria’s voice was kind of shaky at first, but as she began to tell the officer what had happened to her, she became more animated, more assertive. I listened and watched as she looked the officer in the eye and said what needed to be said.
Something slowly changed. The officer’s eyes grew wide, and she said nothing at first.
She turned to her computer and started to type on the keyboard. “You got an address?”
“Yeah—1532 South Street,” I said.
She turned back to Maria. “You willing to file a complaint? Willing to testify in court?”
“Yes,” Maria said.
“Where are the other two girls who were with you?”
“I don’t know,” Maria answered.
“Would you try to help us find them?”
“Of course.”
“Where are you living now?”
“She’s living with me,” I said.
“Are you family?”
“She’s my cousin,” I lied.
“I’ll need to talk to your parents.”
“You can call my father,” I said. “He works at the Fish Shack on Henry Street.”
She nodded.
It did get a bit complicated after that. We spent most of the day in the police station. Mr. Lotz and the lawyer stayed with us. And my father was called in. I’d already called him to give him a heads-up that Maria was now part of the family.
At the police station my dad was back to being his old belligerent self. He just couldn’t help it around the cops. When asked about his relationship to Maria, he blurted out, “I’m her uncle, goddamn it. You think I’d be down here wasting my time if she wasn’t family?”
Things didn’t exactly work out as we hoped. Before the day was out, someone higher up in the police department insisted that Maria “go into protection” until the kidnappers were brought in. It was for her own safety, they said. And none of us could argue against that.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I didn’t see Maria at all after that for what seemed like a really long time. I knew the cops had nabbed the three creeps, but they hadn’t gone to trial yet. I’d go down to the police station where they knew me now and talk to that police officer, who I now knew as Jill. Jill told me Maria was fine and being looked after, that I’d be the first to hear when it was safe.
I talked to Cole a couple of times a week, thanks to Ron Charles. I worried that news of Cole’s involvement—his snitching—would get around in prison and someone would try to punish him for it.
“Don’t worry about me, Jakey. I’m holding my own here. I’m just glad I could help out. You gonna let me meet this Maria sometime?”
“You bet,” I said. Cole sounded a whole lot more positive now than he had when he lived at home. I’m not going to say prison did him good. But he was changed.
In fact, I guess a lot of things changed after the night we rescued Maria. My father quit his job at the Fish Shack. Yep. Just walked in a couple of days later and quit. Walked down the street to the Royal Diner and asked if they had work. He got hired that day. It’s not exactly a four-star restaurant, but it was a step up in the world.
Dalton started to get more steady work cleaning out people’s attics and basements and hauling their junk away. Oscar worked with him some days, and occasionally they did the bottle roundup together, carrying the goods across town to avoid Dirty Dave. I tagged along some days just for the hell of it.
Kids at school found out about Maria and what had gone down, and about Luke busting the door down and sitting on that guy. Suddenly he had some respect around the neighborhood, and he seemed to like that just fine.
Mr. Lotz took me aside after class one day and asked, “You remember that word I asked you to look up?”
I had pretty well forgotten all about it. “Self-something,” I said.
“Self-actualization,” he said. “Big word. Big idea.”
That was Lotz of Ideas for ya.
“Well, I think it worked.”
“What worked?”
“You did. You found the thing you are good at.”
I wanted to ask him exactly what he meant, but kids were already piling into the room. I decided to let it go.
About a month after we’d found Maria I heard on the news that those three men who had been arrested had now been convicted of human trafficking. The police had even made the connection to the boss that was in Cole’s prison. I knew this was all good news, but I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever see Maria again.
I went back to the police station to ask about her, but Jill said she wasn’t allowed to tell me anything about Maria. Not yet.
And then, a couple of days later as I was walking out of the school one sunny afternoon, there she was. Waiting for me.
She gave me a big hug and said, “I’ll never forget what you did for me.”
“No problem,” I said and probably blushed. “You gonna come stay with us?”
She shook her head. “No, they know now we aren’t related. It was nice of your dad to cover for me like that though. I’m going to stay with a foster family. They’re really okay. I’ve got my own room and everything. One of the other kids there is a real jerk, but I’m learning how to deal with him. I guess I’m okay there for now. But I’ll come visit you. And you can come over whenever you want.”
“That’s cool. I will. What about your parents?”
“My foster parents figured out a way that I can talk to them on Skype every day. I can’t believe my parents can use Skype. But they go down to the public library every day at a certain time, and we talk. They really want me to stay here.”
“Are you scared?” I asked. “After what happened?”
“Yeah, I think about that sometimes. I still have nightmares. But I feel stronger now—like I can do things. Like I can help make things happen.”
Now she was smiling. Looking me straight in the eye, not hiding behind her long dark hair.
“Besides,” she said. “I can always call in the team if things go bad.”
“They’re not going to go bad,” I said.
“Yeah, I think I know that now.” We walked off to find Oscar and see what he’d have to say about how things were gonna turn out.
Lesley Choyce is the award-winning author of dozens of books for young adults, including Kryptonite and Identify in the Orca Soundings series. He has been shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal, the White Pine Award, the Hackmatack Award and the Governor Generalʼs Award. For more information, visit lesleychoyce.com.
Chapter One
Mr. Carmichael, my high-school philosophy teacher, held my essay in his hands and just shook his head. “Jackson, I can’t believe you plagiarized an essay on plagiarism.”
“I think that’s an unfair accusation,” I snapped back.
We were sitting in the staff room, just the two of us. He glared at me for the third time since we had sat down. Then he slapped the essay down on the table and started typing away on the keys of the laptop in front of him. Without looking up at me, he continued, “I asked you to write this because you had plagiarized twice already. Your first essay, you simply printed off the Internet.”
“I regret that,” I said. “I really do.” What he said was true. I had been sloppy.
“The second essay, you paid one of your classmates to write for you.”
“I just asked Davis for some help on it.” Well, actually I had conned him into doing it for me. Davis was smart when it came to school stuff but stupid when it came to most everything else. I didn’t know
how Carmichael had found out. Most teachers wouldn’t have bothered investigating.
“But this, Jackson, this was your masterpiece,” Carmichael said, turning the laptop screen toward me so I could see it.
I leaned forward and tried to focus on the screen.
“The highlighted parts are the ones you copied. Underneath each, you’ll see the sources I tracked down.”
Very little of the essay was not highlighted. And he had found every chunk I had cobbled together from various Internet sources. It must have taken him hours.
“I apologize. I guess I forgot to document those sources. I spent a lot of time doing research for this essay. I was trying to prove to you that I could be a good writer.”
“Bullshit,” he blurted out.
I kept my cool even though I could see Carmichael was losing his. I knew I was in a tough spot. But hey, it was only an essay. I tried to look hurt.
“Jackson, why didn’t you just write the damn essay yourself?”
I blinked and pretended to be confused. “I don’t know. I just thought…” I let my words trail off. The truth is, I’d thought I could outsmart this guy because he was just a high-school English and philosophy teacher. But he had nailed me good.
“There’s a word for you, mister.”
Carmichael closed the laptop and wrung his hands. I didn’t know why this plagiarism thing had pissed him off so much. I was thinking he might actually hit me. In fact, I was hoping he would. I could definitely work with that.
I looked him in the eye defiantly. “Go ahead and say it.”
He stared at me for a second and then ripped my paper into pieces and threw them in my face. Then he picked up the laptop and left, slamming the door behind him.
But he didn’t say it. He didn’t say the word. I was left wondering if he had really found out.
Titles in the Series
orca soundings
The Thing You're Good At Page 7
