“Yeah. Like you could be trusted with a soldering iron right now.”
“Hey, I’m fine.” He held up a hand. “Look. Rock steady.”
It did look steady, but steadiness wasn’t all that mattered.
“Yeah, but touch your pointer to your nose.”
Jack demonstrated.
“Easy.” But when Steve tried he missed by half an inch. “Aw, who cares anyway? I ain’t soldering my nose.”
Jack was losing respect for Steve. He’d been a smart, funny kid until he’d returned from soccer camp. Since then he’d been sprinting down the road to Loserville. Maybe he couldn’t help it, maybe something had gone wrong in his brain. Nothing Jack could do about that.
Weezy’s words from this morning echoed back to him: So what are you going to do, stand by and watch him go down the tubes?
No, Miss Know-it-all, he thought, I’m not.
But right now, other than ratting him out, Jack didn’t see that he had much choice.
No, that wasn’t true. There were always choices. Steve could choose whether or not to take one of his mother’s pills, and Jack could choose yes or no as to getting him some help. He decided on yes. Easy to make a choice. The real problem was figuring out how to help without Steve feeling he’d been ratted out by a friend.
Jack needed to give this some serious thought. He was sure he’d find a way.
As Steve’s eyelids started to drift closed, Jack shook his head.
Well now, this was exciting. He’d be better off watching TV at home.
He headed for the stairs.
“Later, man.”
Steve mumbled something that sounded like, “Yeah.”
Upstairs, as he was passing the den, he spotted the black humidor. Mr. Brussard had been holding it when he’d said good-bye to Vasquez. Why? They hadn’t been smoking.
Did he dare?
No. Too risky.
But he hurried into the den anyway. Quickly he lifted the top and found an oddly shaped little red container about the size of a jewelry box for a ring; it had six—no, seven sides.
What was in them? What was the “it” that had to be “used” at dawn with your back to the sun?
He had to know.
As he was reaching for it he heard footsteps hurrying down the stairs. Too heavy for Mrs. B—had to be Steve’s dad. With panic tightening his chest, Jack snatched his hand out of the humidor, replaced the lid, and leaped behind a high-backed upholstered chair.
Immediately he realized what a stupid move he’d made. If Mr. B came in and spotted him, what could he say? That he and Steve were playing hide and seek?
Yeah, right. That would fly—like a penguin.
Looking around he spotted Mr. Brussard’s stack of stereo electronics. He jumped up and stepped over to it. With his hands behind his back, he stood before it and pretended to be studying all the neat-looking equipment.
He heard Mr. B come in behind him and stop.
“Jack?”
He turned. “Oh, hi, Mister Brussard. Just looking at your disc player here. I’d love to get my father to buy one, but he’s not all that into music.”
“Really liked the sound, did you?” His smile looked forced, like he had something else on his mind
“Awesome.”
He picked up the humidor and looked inside.
“Well, I’d play some for you now, but I’ve got a little work to do. Why don’t you get cracking on that computer. I’m really looking forward to seeing it in action.”
“I’ve got to get home.” Jack started for the hall. “We’ve still got a ways to go.”
“Uh-huh.” He seemed to be only half listening.
“See ya,” he said and headed for the door.
When he reached the hallway he looked back and saw Mr. B pull a key ring from his pocket and lock the humidor in the liquor cabinet.
What was in that little box that needed to be locked up?
11
He suspects something, Jack thought as trotted toward home.
He’d have to be careful.
He was a block away when he realized he’d just missed a perfect opportunity to expose Steve’s problem. He could have said something to his father, something like, I don’t think Steve’s feeling so hot. That would have sent Mr. B down to check on him. Or at least he thought so. He knew his own dad would be downstairs in a flash. But the terror of almost getting caught had blanked his mind.
Which meant the Steve problem remained. Jack had done nothing to solve it.
He’d think of something. And soon.
Night was falling by the time he reached his house. He noticed that Tom’s car was gone, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t left a little surprise for Jack. He waved to his parents as they watched Falcon Crest. Family drama was not Dad’s favorite by a long shot, but Mom loved it—Jack had even heard her humming the theme music now and again.
“That was a quick trip,” Dad said.
“Yeah, well, Steve wasn’t in the mood.”
He laughed. “You guys better get cranking. Once you start high school you’re not going to have much spare time.”
It occurred to Jack that tonight might have been a good time to try his new lock-picking skills on Dad’s lockbox, but things had turned hectic at USED and he’d forgotten to bring home the picks. Maybe tomorrow. Anyway, he wasn’t in a lock-picking mood.
Like last night, he checked his bedroom door for booby traps. Finding none, he stepped inside, turned on the light, and looked around. Unlike last night, he had no sense that the room had changed. Everything seemed just as he’d left it.
Then he remembered the Xeroxes of the tracings Weezy had given him for safekeeping. He’d stuck them in the top drawer of his desk before running off to USED this afternoon. He’d been running late and hadn’t hidden them as he’d promised.
He quick-stepped to his desk and yanked open the drawer. Relief—still there. Then he wondered why he was relieved. Why would they be anywhere but where he’d left them?
But he’d promised to hide them, and his top drawer wasn’t exactly hidden. Had to find a safer spot.
Safer …
Listen to me, he thought. I’m starting to think like Weezy.
As he began looking around for a hiding place, he noticed his open window. He checked the screen—still latched as he’d left it last night. Well, of course it would be. Who besides Tom would have any reason to want to sneak into his room.
Still …
He turned out the bedroom light, then pulled out the bottom drawer of his dresser and dropped the papers into the space beneath. Then he replaced the drawer. Not the safest hiding place in the world, but the best he could come up with on such short notice.
As he stepped toward the light switch by the door he remembered Weezy’s remark about seeing someone in her backyard last night. Not terribly surprising, coming from Weezy. But what if …?
He started tiptoeing toward the window, then stopped.
Why am I tiptoeing?
He walked the rest of the way, then crouched until the sill was at chin level.
The moonlit cornfield looked just the same as last night. Nothing moving. But he realized anyone standing in the corn rows would be as good as invisible and still have a clear view of his room. That had never occurred to him before, and it gave him a crawly feeling in his gut.
Thanks a lot, Weez.
He shook off the feeling. Silly. Nobody out there.
Still, he pulled the shade, then undressed in the dark. He crawled under the covers before turning on his bedside lamp. He wanted to let the Spider take him away from all these spooky feelings. The Spider’s world was safe in that if things got too weird, Jack could always close the cover.
But real life had no covers. What did you do when life got too weird?
1
“Jack! Jack, wake up!”
Jack opened his eyes in the dark. An insistent tapping accompanied the frantic, harshly whispered words.
“Come
on, Jack! Wake up!”
Where was he? He felt the pillow under his head, the sheet pulled up to his shoulders …
Bed.
“Jack, please!”
He jackknifed to a sitting position. The voice … coming from the window. He looked and his heart jumped when he saw a head silhouetted in the moonlight.
“Who?”
“It’s me—Weezy. You’ve got to—”
“Weez? What are you doing out there?”
“Helicopters, Jack! Over the Pines. They were carrying some kind of equipment.”
“So?”
“They’re right over our mound!”
A second head appeared at the window.
“C’mon, Jack.” Eddie’s voice. “We’re gonna go take a look.”
Jack glanced at his clock radio: 1:10 in the morning.
“Are you guys nuts?”
“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Nutsacious. And so are you. That’s why we’re here.”
Weezy said, “We’ve got our bikes. So get dressed. Wear dark clothes. Let’s go!”
“Do you know how dark it is in there?”
“We’ve got flashlights. Bring another. Come on. We’ve got to see what they’re doing to our mound.”
Jack thought for a second. He didn’t know how Weezy knew they were over the mound, but he did know his folks would kill him if they found out he’d sneaked off into the Barrens at night.
But what were helicopters doing over their mound in the middle of the night? What couldn’t wait until morning?
He jumped out of bed.
Well, why not? Not like he was going to be able to get back to sleep now anyway.
“Be right there.”
2
As usual, Weezy led the way. She kept her flashlight beam trained ahead as she rode, but Jack figured she knew the trail so well she probably could have found her way by the moonlight.
He stayed close behind, holding his own light in reserve, in case Weezy’s ran out. Eddie brought up the rear.
“Look,” Weezy called back, flashing her beam along the sand. “Tire tracks. And recent too.”
Jack saw what she meant. Some of the deeper sand stirred up by the tires was still dark and damp. The cars or pickups or whatever they were had to have come through within the hour.
At first the Barrens had been dark and silent, the overhanging pine branches blotting out all but a few rays of moonlight. But neither lasted.
The silence was the first to go.
They were passing the trapper’s spong, and Jack was wondering if he’d reset the traps, when he began to hear a faint, low-pitched thrumming noise that grew steadily louder as they rode. This graduated to the unmistakable whup-whup-whup of helicopters.
And then Jack began to catch flashes of bright light through the upper branches. He couldn’t imagine where they could be coming from until he realized the copters were using their searchlights to light up the ground.
Without warning, Weezy veered to the side and hopped off her bike. She was leaning it against a tree when Jack pulled up beside her.
“Why’re we stopping?” he said, raising his voice over the racket.
Weezy motioned her brother to get off his bike. “We should walk from here.”
“Bikes are faster,” Eddie said.
“And more easily noticed. We don’t want to be seen.”
Eddie laughed. “Why not?”
“Because then we’ll be chased home.”
Jack could make out Eddie’s face in the light through the branches. He looked insulted.
“No way! It’s a free country. We can watch if we want.”
Weezy rolled her eyes. “They don’t want anyone watching.”
“That’s stupidacious. And besides, how do you know?”
Jack thought the answer was pretty obvious, but he let Weezy tell her brother. She stepped closer and got in his face.
“Can you think of any other reason why they’d go to all this trouble at night when it would be so much easier during the day?” When Eddie didn’t answer, Weezy looked at Jack, then back at Eddie. “So, can we all start walking?”
“Let’s go,” Jack said. “We’re wasting time.”
He took the lead now. With the lights ahead as a beacon, they no longer needed flashlights or Weezy’s keen sense of direction. He kept to the side of the firebreak until he noticed a deer trail angling toward all the activity. He took it.
This path was much narrower … branches scraped against him as he passed. He was glad he’d worn full-length jeans instead of cutoffs, but wished he’d picked out a rugby shirt instead of this T.
As the three of them neared the site, the noise of the copters grew even louder. Ahead and above they looked invisible—black fuselages against a black sky—with their searchlights seeming to come out of nowhere.
But another sound gradually joined the mix—the throaty, up-and-down roar of diesel engines.
Construction equipment.
As they closed in on the mound area, Jack lowered to a crouch, then turned and motioned Weezy and Eddie to do the same. When he reached a break in the trees he came to a sudden stop. Weezy bumped him from behind. He heard her gasp as she saw what he saw.
Just a hundred feet away, the burned-out area of the mound was ablaze with light, illuminating the dozen or so men walking back and forth among the charred pine trunks. And among those trunks, a backhoe furiously dug up the sand.
He felt Weezy grip both his shoulders and squeeze—hard.
“Our mound!” she said softly, leaning over him, so close he could feel her breath on his ear. “They’re tearing up our mound!”
Not our mound anymore, Jack thought. Pretty soon it wouldn’t even be a mound.
He watched the backhoe systematically tearing up the ground, its yellow arm swinging up and down, ramming its bucket into the mound, pulling out a yard of sand, then dumping it to the side before backing up for another go. If a tree had grown too close, the backhoe’s tractor simply pushed it aside or knocked it down.
Weezy said, “That must have been what the helicopter was carrying when I saw it.”
Men followed in its wake of destruction, some with rakes, some with hoes, some with baskets. Some wore police uniforms with black leather belts that circled the waist and crossed the chest, others wore dark suits and narrow-brimmed hats. They’d poke through the turned-up sand and every so often one would stoop to pick up something. Mostly they tossed whatever they found aside, but every so often one would call the others over. They’d all cluster around and look at his find for a few seconds, then place it in one of the baskets and go back to work.
“They can’t do this!” Weezy said. “They’re going to ruin everything!”
She stepped around Jack and started toward the mound. He grabbed her arm and pulled her back.
“Are you nuts? You can’t stop them.”
“I can try. They’re ruining everything! They’re—”
“Hey!” said a gruff voice behind them. “What are you doing here?”
3
Eddie squealed. Jack jumped and turned to find a flashlight beam in his eyes, the glare blotting out whoever was holding it.
“Did you hear me?” the voice said, louder. “What the hell are you kids doing here?”
“We-we-we saw the copters,” Eddie said. He sounded scared, his we-can-watch-if-we-want attitude of a few minutes ago vanished.
“Damn!” the man said. After a pause, he pointed to three state police cruisers parked on the fire trail. Jack had been so intent on the backhoe, he hadn’t seen them. “All right, get over there.” The man gave Eddie a shove in the direction. “March.”
Eddie stumbled away, his path angling away from the mound. With the light out of his eyes, Jack could see that the man wore a NJ State Trooper uniform. It looked loose on him, as if he’d lost weight. After a few heartbeats’ hesitation, Weezy started to follow. Jack fell in line between her and the trooper.
A state cop … all he could think
of was how this would end: The trooper knocking on his front door in the middle of the night, his father answering, the trooper explaining where they’d found his son, Dad yanking him inside, grounding him for life, maybe longer.
Oh, this was bad … very bad.
As they reached the nearest police cruiser, a man in a dark suit came over.
“What the hell’s going on?” he shouted over the sound of the copters.
The trooper jerked his thumb at them. “Saw the choppers. Told you we should have made a southern approach. How many more peepers we gonna have to deal with before the night’s over?”
The suit stepped closer and played a flashlight over them. The beam lingered on Weezy.
“They’re just kids—dumb piney kids.”
Jack heard a sneer in his tone and felt a flash of anger. He wasn’t a piney and he wasn’t dumb.
“Not pineys,” he said. “We’re from Johnson.”
The suit waved his hands in the air. “Ooh, now there’s a metropolis.”
“We happen to be on private land,” Weezy said. “We know Mister Foster and he lets us come here whenever we want.”
Jack glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. They’d never once seen Old Man Foster.
“Yeah?” the suit said. “Well, if we could find him we could check that out, but he’s a hard man to track down.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t like you digging up his land.”
The trooper said, “Doesn’t matter what he likes. This is a crime scene and we’ve got warrants. It’s all nice and legal.”
“Then why are you doing it at night?” Jack said.
Weezy chimed in, “Because you’re not looking for evidence, are you. You’re looking for something else.”
“Enough of this crap,” the suit said, sounding annoyed and surprised. He turned to the trooper. “Lock them in your unit until we’re done.”
Jack’s gut tightened. Locked up?
“We wanna go ho-home,” Eddie said.
“You will,” the suit told him. “But not till we’re finished here.”
The trooper opened a rear door and pointed to the backseat.
“In. Now.”
Jack: Secret Histories Page 15
