Now, with the Orioles’ record at 12–0 and his team one win away from competing for the championship, Coach told them his philosophy: Please don’t let me screw this up. With the Orioles playing so well, he was determined to keep them loose. Yes, he wanted them to focus on their next play-off game against the Twins and their great pitching. But more than anything, he wanted them to enjoy what they had accomplished to date. And he also wanted them to have fun.
So, when the Orioles gathered for practice on a humid Wednesday afternoon when there was no school—due to a teachers’ conference—Coach greeted them with this announcement: “Men, I know this will break your hearts, but no drills today. Today we’re playing an intra-squad game. You guys choose up sides. Make ’em fair. I’ll pitch for both teams.”
As the Orioles cheered and began talking excitedly about who would be on each team, Coach held up his hand for quiet. “Oh, and one more thing,” he said, grinning. “Trash talk is not only encouraged, it’s mandatory. Just keep it clean.”
What followed was seventy-five minutes of barely controlled chaos. Cody quickly decided it was probably the most fun he’d ever had playing baseball in his whole life. They played with six players on a side, positioned wherever they wanted to position themselves. Coach let the players run their own game. He wouldn’t even call balls and strikes, or “safe” or “out” on the bases. The Orioles had to work it out for themselves.
“This is what baseball was like when I was growing up!” Coach shouted at one point.
“That was around when, the Civil War?” Willie yelled. Coach waggled a finger at him and flashed an okay-you-got-me smile.
“Point is,” he said, “it was before adults became over-involved and started screwing things up!”
The four-inning game between Willie’s Wildmen and Jordy’s Jammers was a hoot. Each time a player whiffed on one of Coach’s slow, tantalizing curveballs or let a ground ball roll through his legs in the field, he was ragged unmercifully. Yet amid all the hooting and hollering, there were great plays: Connor going deep in the hole at short to backhand a grounder and nip Yancy at first; a diving catch of a sinking line drive by Dante; a soaring home run by Jordy high enough to draw rain.
But the highlight, everyone agreed, was the comical sight of Marty chugging around the bases on a disputed triple—it was later ruled a single and a two-base error by Gabe—before collapsing in an exhausted heap after what was possibly the ugliest slide in the history of organized baseball.
“There are glaciers that travel faster than that boy!” Willie said.
Marty, flopping and gasping in the dirt, responded with a single word: “Oxygen!”
Nobody knew who won the game or what the final score was. And nobody seemed to care, either. When it was over, Coach gathered his still-giddy players in front of the dugout and told them to settle down.
“Uh-oh, fun’s over,” Marty murmured. “Coach’s got his game face on. We could be here a while.”
But Coach kept his remarks short and sweet.
“Now it’s time to start thinking about the Twins,” he said. “They’re a good team. Their pitching is excellent. It won’t be an easy game. Be here early Friday so we get in some good batting practice and infield.”
As the Orioles gathered up their gear and Cody changed out of his spikes, a voice behind him said, “Perfect timing.”
It was Jessica. She was wearing her red-and-white softball uniform, with her bat slung over her shoulder and her glove dangling from the knob. Cody grinned and quickly glanced around for Dante. The sight of Cody and Jessica together would probably have the big dude vibrating like a gong. But Dante had already left.
Jessica plopped down on the bench beside Cody, took off her cap, and began fanning herself.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“We just finished practice on the other field,” Jessica said, breaking into a mischievous smile. “How did I do? Thought you’d never ask. Hit three homers in batting practice. Fielded my position flawlessly, as usual. And catcher, as you know, is only the most critical position in softball. So all in all, I’d say, pretty typical practice for blondie here.”
Cody rolled his eyes. One thing was for sure: Jessica was never at a loss for words when she was competing in sports. He could definitely see her becoming a lawyer someday. Possibly by the age of fourteen, if they’d let her take the bar exam.
“Anyway, you’re coming with me, Wisconsin Boy,” she said now.
He looked up from tying his shoes. “But my mom is picking me—”
“All taken care of,” Jessica said. “I called earlier. Both your mom and my mom said we could walk home. Today I’m introducing you to another Maryland culinary tradition.”
She glanced up at the broiling sun and began fanning herself even more furiously. “Perfect day for it too,” she said, rising to her feet. “You’re in for a real treat. Follow me.”
Cody slung his equipment bag over his shoulder, and they set off in the direction of town. As they walked, he told Jessica all about the raucous practice the Orioles had just had, and Jessica told him about one of her teammates, Amanda, who’d been hit in the face with a bad-hop ground ball in the middle of their practice.
“She started crying!” Jessica said, shaking her head. “And all the other girls are around her, going ‘Awww, poor Amanda, are you okay, babe?’ Can you believe that?”
Cody started to answer. Then a tiny alarm bell went off in his head. Better not say anything. Let’s see where this is going.
“It made me want to puke!” Jessica continued. “So I used that famous line from that old movie. You know the one: ‘There’s no crying in baseball’? And now all the other girls are like, ‘Jessica, how can you say that? Don’t you have any feelings? Can’t you see she’s upset?’ Which made me want to puke even more.”
Cody thought, I feel sorry for any softball that hits Jessica in the face. She’d probably bite the ball in half and swallow it.
After about ten minutes, they turned a corner and Jessica said, “Ah, here we are.” It was a small wooden stand tucked back under a grove of trees, with picnic tables and patio umbrellas out front. A sign in front said: OASIS SNOWBALLS.
“The legendary Baltimore snowballs,” Cody said, grinning. “Shaved ice and flavored syrup, right? I’ve heard a lot about them.”
“Prepare to be wowed,” Jessica said, pulling a ten-dollar bill from her pocket. “Pick a flavor. My treat.”
The list of flavors was endless. Cody finally settled on black cherry. Jessica ordered something called Skylite, which turned out to be a neon-blue concoction she said tasted like raspberry—well, sort of. They sat in the shade, spooning the icy treats from plastic cups. Cody wondered if he had ever tasted anything so delicious in his life.
If you liked to eat, he thought, there were a lot worse places to live than Maryland.
When they were finished, they tossed their cups in the trash and said good-bye to the teenage girl behind the counter. It was then that something in the strip mall across the street caught Cody’s eye. A battered green Jeep was pulled all the way around to the side of the parking lot, right up against the woods. The Jeep looked familiar. The rear hatch was open and a half-dozen young men were peering at whatever was inside. Occasionally, they glanced nervously over their shoulders.
The driver’s door opened and a dark-haired boy of about eighteen got out. Then another dark-haired boy emerged from the passenger side.
“Hold on a minute,” Cody said quietly, his eyes never leaving the Jeep. “I need to check something out.”
Jessica stared at Cody as if his head had just exploded.
“You’re going where?” she said.
“Into the woods,” he repeated. “Be back soon.”
“Gross!” she said. “You can’t wait till you get home?”
Cody smiled and shook his head. “It’s not for that,” he said. “I have to investigate something. But there’s no time to explain.”
; “Fine,” Jessica said. “I’m going with you.”
“No,” Cody said, throwing down his equipment bag. “You stay here with our stuff. See that Jeep across the street? If it pulls out while I’m gone, write down the license plate number.”
Jessica nodded uncertainly. “Ohhh-kay. Write it down with what?”
“Ask the girl at the snowball stand,” he shouted over his shoulder. “She’s gotta have a pen and paper.”
With that he was slipping into the woods and moving south, following the tree line as it crossed the road and circled the parking lot of the strip mall. There was no path, which made for slow going. It was much cooler in there, though, the thick canopy of overhead branches blocking out the sun. Insects buzzed all around him, birds chirped, and occasionally he heard a larger animal, a squirrel, maybe, or a raccoon, scurrying off into the underbrush.
Leaping over a log, he felt something crunch under his sneakers. Looking down, he saw it was an empty beer can. In fact, there were rusty beer cans scattered all over. Someone had apparently thrown a big trash bag full of the things from a passing car, and the bag had ripped. Cody shook his head in disgust.
As he made his way through a thicket, pushing branches aside and stepping over fallen tree limbs, Cody thought about what he had just seen.
Was it the Jeep he thought it was? If so, what were they doing over there so far away from all the stores, behind the Dumpster? And what was so fascinating inside the Jeep?
It all looked very suspicious. A theory was beginning to form in the back of his head. He hoped he was wrong. But he knew it was more likely that he was right, a prospect that made him shiver slightly in the cooler air.
It took a good ten minutes for Cody to circle the woods until he was parallel to the parking lot. Finally, he heard voices up ahead and music blaring from a car radio. Quietly, he dropped down and began crawling on his hands and knees toward the edge of the tree line.
Something moved in the leaves to his right. A mouse? A snake? Cody wasn’t terrified of snakes like “Mad Max” Wheeler. But he wasn’t exactly looking forward to one slithering up for a face-to-face meeting either. What kind of snakes did they have here in Maryland, anyway? Copperheads? Water moccasins? Rattlesnakes? He made a mental note to look it up when he got home.
Or maybe it was better to say if he got home. Because if his theory was right and the guys around the Jeep caught him snooping, they wouldn’t be in a great mood. In fact, they’d probably want to use his head for batting practice. The thought had his heart hammering in his chest.
He was only about thirty yards from the Jeep now, atop a steep embankment that dropped down and ended abruptly ten feet above the parking lot. He crawled under a pine tree and peered cautiously out from beneath a bough.
The guys were still there, examining something in the back of the Jeep and talking excitedly among themselves. Cody didn’t recognize most of them. But there was no mistaking the two scowling teens leaning on either side of the rear bumper, smoking cigarettes.
It was the Rottweiler Twins. Where was Dante? Cody wondered. Still inside the Jeep?
It was hard to see what the guys were looking at—their backs obscured the view. One of them walked away from the Jeep, slapped hands awkwardly with Nick, and hurried off holding a small cardboard box. Moments later, a second one walked away carrying a plastic grocery bag.
Even this close, Cody could catch only snippets of conversation. The hip-hop tunes blaring from the radio weren’t helping matters. Neither was the sound of traffic whizzing by on the road.
It was frustrating not being able to hear them. If only I could just get a little closer, Cody thought. He crawled slowly in the direction of the scene unfolding below, dragging himself inch by inch, hardly daring to breathe.
Suddenly his elbow banged into something hard. It was a dirty, brown beer bottle. He froze as the bottle began to roll down the embankment. It gathered momentum and kept rolling and rolling, seemingly in slow motion. As Cody watched in horror, it reached the edge and seemed to flip in the air, like one of those Olympic ski jumpers doing a somersault.
Then it dropped straight down and shattered on the asphalt with a loud BANG!
“What was that?!” someone yelled. Cody was already up and running, crashing back into the woods like a startled deer.
From somewhere behind him, he heard car doors slam and an engine roar to life, followed by the squealing of tires. Were they trying to cut him off, up near the road where the woods narrowed? He ran even faster now, kicking up clumps of dirt and leaping over logs as branches slapped him in the face.
It seemed to take forever, but finally he spotted the snowball stand through the trees and veered to his right, almost running smack into a security fence. Just as he neared the clearing, his sneaker caught on a root and he went flying, landing face-first in the dirt, inches from a picnic table.
When he turned over, Jessica was looking down at him, waving a piece of paper. “I got the license plate number!” she said triumphantly.
“C’mon!” Cody said, scrambling to his feet and grabbing his bag. “Let’s get out of here!”
He took off on a dead run and Jessica sprinted after him. They were a full four blocks away before Cody finally slowed to catch his breath.
“Dante and the Rottweiler Twins…” he gasped, doubling over with his hands on his knees. “Can’t be sure…Looked like maybe they were selling stuff…out of their…”
Jessica stared at him wide-eyed.
“Don’t know if they saw me…” Cody continued, chest heaving.
Jessica kept glancing around, as if afraid that a green Jeep would come barreling around the corner at any minute with a bunch of ticked-off older boys inside.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“I’m not sure,” Cody said. He straightened up and wiped his brow. Then he adjusted his bag and looked nervously over his shoulder. “But I know this much: we’re getting as far away as possible.”
Kyrie Mayweather was the fastest pitcher in the league. Rumor was he could hit eighty miles per hour on the radar gun, while no one else came even close to seventy. A tall, skinny left-hander with mini dreadlocks, he was warming up for the Twins now, his fastball making the sound of a bullwhip cracking as it smacked into the catcher’s mitt. Watching him, the Orioles were trying not to abandon all hope.
“That is one nasty fastball,” Willie said, leaning against his bat in the on-deck circle.
“He’s got a sick curve too,” Jordy said. “The good news is, his dad only lets him throw five or six a game. He’s afraid the kid’s going to hurt his arm.”
“I’m okay with that,” said Connor, watching another of Kyrie’s warm-up throws rock the catcher on his heels. “Wish his dad would only let him throw underhand.”
Coach clapped his hands for attention. “All right, everybody in here,” he said. “Enough with the doom and gloom. Sure, they have Kyrie Mayweather. But we have Murderers’ Row, remember? We’re just as good as…uh, Cody?”
Everyone turned to look. Cody sat at the end of the bench staring off into the distance.
“Cody? Care to rejoin the planet?” Coach said. But Cody was still lost in thought. Coach stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly.
Startled, Cody jumped to his feet.
“Sorry, Coach,” he said, his face reddening. “Just thinking about something.”
“I see that,” Coach said. “You’ll have to tell us who the girl is later.”
As the rest of the Orioles cracked up, Cody managed a sheepish grin, his face growing even redder.
For one of the few times in his life, he was finding it hard to concentrate on baseball. His head was still spinning from the events of the past forty-eight hours, starting with the strange little drama he’d observed with the Rottweiler Twins and their Jeep—until he turned into a major league klutz and scared everyone off.
On the way home that day, he and Jessica had convinced themselves that they had solved the mys
tery of the Great York Middle Crime Wave. It was simple: Dante and his brothers were stealing stuff from school and selling it from the back of the Jeep. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.
But that night at the dinner table, when he had recounted what he’d seen to his mom and dad, Steve Parker had frowned and held up his hands in the universal signal for Whoa, not so fast.
“I agree it seems suspicious,” his dad said. “But you didn’t get a good look, so you’re not exactly sure what those boys were doing. You don’t know what was in the back of the Jeep. You’re not even sure Vincent and Nick were selling anything. You didn’t see any money change hands, right?”
His mom nodded and said, “And even if they were selling something, it could have been something perfectly legal. They could have been selling, I don’t know, their old video games.”
Cody rolled his eyes. “No, Mom. Believe me, this wasn’t what you’d call a wholesome crowd.”
“Or they could have been selling something illegal,” his dad added, “but not necessarily items stolen from your school.” He shot his wife a look before saying, “Could have been drugs. We can’t be naive about it. But we just don’t know.”
Cody leaned forward in his chair. “I just know Dante is up to something. He and his brothers—”
“Dante?” asked his mother. “Was he there too?”
“He must have been sitting in the car,” said Cody.
“But you’re not sure?” his dad probed. “You didn’t see him?”
“No, but—”
“Cody,” his mom said, her tone a warning, “are you sure you aren’t letting your feelings about Dante color your judgment here?”
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