Watch Out

by Alison Hughes

  “I will, I will. I got it covered.”

  An alarming thought popped into my mind. Gary wouldn’t actually have gotten himself a gun for his night patrols. He wouldn’t be that stupid. Would he? Was he the kind of guy who might do something like that? Dangerous, that’s what he’d said. That was a scary word. Did he mean the thieves, or what he’d do to them if he caught them?

  “Look, don’t do anything stupid, okay?” I called after him.

  He wasn’t even listening. He’d turned around and was halfway down the path, his bag banging against his thin little legs.

  Great. Just great. I already had Uncle Dave to worry about. He had promised to look in the car guys’ garage next time they had band practice. Just to prove there’s nothing there, he said. To prove to me they were good guys.

  But what if they weren’t, and they found him there, snooping around their stash of stolen stuff? So I was worried about that.

  And now I had Gary to worry about too.

  Chapter Nine

  It took Tom what seemed like three years to crutch downstairs and out to the car for his doctor’s appointment. I tried to get him to slide down the banister. Both practical and fun, I argued. Mom didn’t think it was such a great idea.

  “We don’t need another broken leg, Charlie,” she said. Fair enough.

  Turns out, we didn’t need to hurry after all.

  “Dr. Washington is running at least forty-five minutes late,” said the dead-eyed clerk at the desk. No “sorry.” No explanation. She may as well have added, So just sit down and suck it up.

  “Okaaaaay,” Mom said with a sigh. “So we could just wait here, or we could go get burgers now, instead of after the appointment. Anybody hungry?”

  Tom and I were pretty much always hungry. And let’s be honest—I was only along for the burgers anyway. Sitting in the doctor’s office reading ancient Sports Illustrated magazines was not my idea of fun.

  So we went and grabbed an early dinner. The burgers were great, and not only because Tom and I had been living on cereal and frozen pizza. Mom told us stories from the operating room. She was funniest when she was mimicking the doctors. It was nice to see her relaxed and happy.

  And the bonus: now she wouldn’t have the extra worry that her brother was a criminal. Because now I knew he wasn’t. So all good.

  We went back to the doctor’s office and settled down to wait.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said, “do I have to stay or is it okay if I just walk home? It’ll only take me about half an hour. I wouldn’t mind getting some exercise.” There was no reason for me to be there. Now that the burgers were eaten.

  “Sure,” she said. “Got your phone? Text me when you get home. Dave’s probably going to be out, just so you know.”

  I knew. Tonight was when he was planning to go to the car guys’ house to snoop around for me. I’d made him promise to ask some questions. Have a peek in the garage, if he could manage it. He had said he’d try.

  But I was definitely feeling a bit nervous about Uncle Dave doing any kind of detective work. He just seemed too obvious, somehow. Too honest. I still couldn’t believe he’d never eaten a grocery-store grape.

  “Charlie, don’t do anything stupid, okay?” Tom whispered as I passed by. I’d said exactly the same thing to Gary. That was good advice. For Gary. This was insulting.

  “I won’t, I won’t.” I’d filled Tom in on everything. He knew we were now focusing on the car guys and their stuffed garage.

  It was getting dark as I walked home. Even though I told myself to think about other things, my thoughts kept turning to the break-ins. To the thieves. I didn’t have a whole lot else going on in my life, to be honest.

  I passed by the car guys’ house. I could see that the lights were on in the basement. And I could hear the heavy beat of the drums. Band practice was on. Uncle Dave was in the house.

  Don’t do anything stupid, okay, Uncle Dave?

  I kept walking until I reached our house.

  If I were a thief, I thought as I approached our front door, how would I break into this house? Never through the front door. There was no cover at all. It was a straight walk up from the street, and there was a very bright porch light. No bushes, nowhere to hide. No, if I were a thief, I wouldn’t chance being seen from the street. I’d head around back.

  So I headed around back. This was more like it. It was really quite dark at the side of the house. But problem time: there was only way in, and it was the dining room window. It was high off the ground. Like, small-ladder high. And I doubted the thieves were carting around ladders, big or small. I thought they would look for an easier way in.

  I moved on. I went through the gate to the backyard. Mom had the porch light on here too. But because of the trees, the back door was way more private. It was a definite possibility. I pictured a tall shadow lurking at that door, picking the lock, slipping inside…

  I stumbled to the door and reached for the doorknob, suddenly afraid. Locked. Thank goodness. I felt weak with relief. My imagination was way too active.

  Okay, Charlie, settle down. House is all locked up. Stop freaking yourself out. You are so pathetic…

  I took out my key and let myself in, slipping in as silently as the thief I imagined. I locked the door quickly behind me. Safe. When did I get so jumpy? My nerves felt stretched to the limit. I took a couple of deep breaths and bent to untie my shoes.

  Thud.

  What was that? I froze. A dull thud. Upstairs.

  I straightened up very slowly. I strained my ears to hear.

  A dull thud. I swore I had heard a dull thud. Like something falling on the carpet. Did I actually hear that, or did I imagine it? I stood still, trying to hear over the loud pounding of my heart.

  Nothing. I listened again. Nope, nothing.

  I shook my head at myself. Wow, I was so tense.

  I relaxed my shoulders (which had clenched up somewhere near my ears). Did a little back stretch. I was just reaching for the light when I heard the floorboard outside our bedroom creak. I snapped to attention. It felt like my heart actually stopped or missed a beat or something. I was that scared.

  There was no explaining that sound away. I knew that one. And I had heard it as clear as day.

  It’s a family joke, that floorboard. Tom and I had named it Creaky McCreaker (we were, like, four and seven at the time). It was just put in wrong or something. Uncle Dave had tried to fix it a while back, and now it creaked even worse. You had to step over it if you wanted to avoid the creak.

  Everyone knew that. Everyone who lived in this house.

  So the person upstairs was somebody who didn’t know you had to step over Creaky McCreaker. Somebody who didn’t even know it was called Creaky McCreaker. Somebody who didn’t live in this house.

  A stranger.

  A thief.

  A thief-stranger was upstairs in our house.

  Chapter Ten

  The thought that there might be someone in my house made me almost dizzy with fear. The house suddenly seemed a strange and sinister place. A scary place.

  There was dead silence now. Listening silence. Like that loud creak had frightened the person upstairs too, and they had frozen. So now there were two of us in the house who were frozen, listening.

  I felt very vulnerable standing there in the back entrance. I moved a small step back into the coats that were hanging on the hooks. The faint smell of my mom’s perfume wafted from one of them. I sunk deeper.

  I groped silently around me for some kind of protection. I pawed at back-packs, gym bags, coats, scarves. Did we own nothing hard? Nothing sharp? My hand closed on an umbrella. That was at least something I could swing. It would have to do.

  I didn’t dare move. I didn’t dare try to leave. I hardly dared to breathe. I just stood in the dark back entrance, listening. I felt for my phone in my pocket. Not to call 9-1-1 because I didn’t want to have to whisper and blow my cover. Who knew what these thieves would do if they heard me?

&nb
sp; Tom. I’d text Tom. I shielded my phone with a coat and quickly typed.

  thief in house come now

  I felt a little better. Less helpless.

  Until I heard the person upstairs moving again.

  What could I do? What could I possibly do? Rush up there with an umbrella? Scream the place down? Actually, I considered screaming. Making a racket might scare them away. I wanted to scare them away without them hurting me. I wanted to make them leave. Basically, I wanted some cops with megaphones and whistles to appear.

  Wait. Whistles. Tom’s gym bag was on the floor beside me. Tom had been a camp leader at a soccer camp this past summer. A leader at a soccer camp probably had a whistle! I inched open the zipper on the bag and shoved my arm inside. While I felt around in there, I listened to the person upstairs.

  Slight, stealthy sounds. Footsteps.

  My hand scrambled over things in the gym bag, identifying them by feel—cleats, socks, shin guards, card, cord. Cord. I gently pulled on the cord, gathering it into my hand a little bit at a time. Was this a whistle or just a shoelace? It seemed like the longest shoelace in the whole world. But just when I was going to give up, I came to the end of the cord.

  And I felt the whistle.

  I pulled my arm out of the bag and put the whistle to my lips. I paused.

  I still had a choice. Should I hide here and stay safe, or should I scare the living hell out of whoever was upstairs trying to steal our stuff?

  I surprised myself by picking option number two. I took a deep breath and blew.

  The shrill blast of the whistle ripped into the silence. I heard an immediate flurry of activity from upstairs as I sucked in a quick breath. I blew again, the sound unbelievably loud and weird in a dark, still house.

  The advantage of a whistle is that it’s hard to pinpoint. It’s just a wall of sound. It could be coming from anywhere. I kept blowing on that whistle like my life depended on it. Maybe it did.

  The thief must have flown down the stairs, because he was on the main level in a heartbeat. The guy was fast, fast, fast. I saw a shadow bolt from the bottom of the stairs into the kitchen as I blew another blast. I saw a dark form against the white kitchen cabinets, and then, slippery as an eel, the guy slithered out the kitchen window.

  I kept blowing on that whistle for a few more seconds just in case the guy had any friends still rummaging around somewhere. I stopped and listened for a long minute. Nope. Nothing but silence.

  I raced over to the window and slammed it down. I tried to lock it, but the lock had been broken. Forced.

  I ran down the hall to the front door to make sure it was locked. Because I hadn’t actually checked that. Because all of a sudden I felt very, very vulnerable.

  But as I ran down the hall, I heard a familiar sound. Dear lord, the front door was opening.

  I stopped dead. I might have even whimpered. And I blew and shrieked on that whistle again, very, very hard.

  “Charlie, Charlie! Buddy, it’s me, Uncle Dave!” He flicked on the hall light and ran toward me. His eyes were full of concern. “Are you okay? You okay?”

  “What the hell are you doing coming in here like that?” I screamed at him, punching him on the shoulder.

  Okay, that was unfair. The man lives here. I was a little tense.

  “What? Me? I got a text from Tom saying there was a thief in the house! So I dropped everything and rushed home. You okay? What the hell is going on?”

  “Robber. Thief. Upstairs. Out the window.” I was shaking pretty bad by this point. And having problems speaking in full sentences, apparently.

  “Is he still here, do you think?” asked Uncle Dave, clearly looking around for some kind of weapon.

  “No he’s not still here!” I said, like he should have known that. “I scared him off with the whistle. I don’t think he took anything, but I’m not sure.”

  “Jeez Louise.” Uncle Dave turned and locked the door. “Good job, little buddy. So he’s gone? Like, for sure, for sure?”

  “Fired out through the kitchen window. I saw him go.”

  “You’re sure you saw him leave? And there was only one of them?”

  Uncle Dave looked uncertainly up the stairs. Up the dark stairs. “Well, I guess we better check—”

  Poor Uncle Dave. He looked as freaked out as I felt. How had I ever thought he could have been the thief?

  He cleared his throat. “All right. I’m going to go check that everything’s okay up there.”

  “Yeah, you go check,” I said. “Here.” I handed him the whistle and the umbrella. “Just in case.”

  He flicked on the hall light and climbed the stairs.

  “Holy hell,” he exclaimed from the top of the staircase.

  “What, what?”

  “Well, let’s just say you saved your brother a whole lot of money,” he said. He turned and held up two gym bags brimming with electronic equipment.

  “Uncle Dave?” I said. My voice was a little unsteady, which was really annoying. “Were both car guys at your band rehearsal?”

  He stared down at me.

  “Only Josh was,” he said slowly. “Kyle said he had something else to do.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Doorbell,” said Tom, the next morning.

  “Oh. My. God,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I can’t face another conversation with Gary. I really can’t, Tom.” We’d been up late, giving a statement to the police. I’d asked them if they were close to getting these guys. The tired-looking cop just shrugged his shoulders and kept filling out his forms.

  “It’s the last package. DJ controller.” Tom looked at my face. “Okay, forget it. Maybe he’ll come back later.”

  The doorbell rang three more times. I could not believe how persistent that little freak was. Four rings. Wasn’t that excessive? Wasn’t that practically harassment? There it went again. Five rings. Six.

  “This is ridiculous,” I muttered. I slammed out of the room, ran down the stairs and wrenched open the door.

  Gary jumped like he hadn’t been expecting me.

  “Oh, hi. Thought you guys might not be home.”

  “So you rang the doorbell many, many times. Sorry—took me a while to get down here.” I held out my hand for the package. But Gary had a firm grip on it. How sad was it to hold someone’s mail hostage to get them to talk to you?

  “Any news about the break-ins?” he asked.

  “As a matter of fact,” I said in a snotty tone, “we had a break-in here. Last night. Didn’t see you patrolling the frickin’ neighborhood, Gary.”

  “Here? Like, this house? Oh man.” He sounded so disappointed. “When? I was patrolling over past the park.”

  “They got away. Didn’t get anything though.”

  “Good! Listen, I’ve been watching that house across the park. The one where those two guys work on all those cars.”

  “Really?” I was surprised. Somehow Gary had come to the same conclusion I had. This made me feel uncomfortable. It made me want to rethink everything. “You got any proof?”

  “I’m working on it.” He smiled and nodded at the potted plant on the step. “Your uncle is there a lot.”

  “Uncle Dave’s a good guy, Gary. He is not involved, so you can forget about him. Better yet, leave the investigating to the cops, Gary. Just leave it.”

  He handed me the package with a scowl and made his way back down the steps.

  The talk with Gary left me unsettled. There was a niggling little something in the back of my mind that was worrying me. I felt like I’d noticed something over the past few days that might have been a clue. What was it? And why did talking to Gary remind me of it? Because he’d mentioned the car guys’ house? What was it about those car guys and their house?

  Everything kept coming back to them.

  Chapter Twelve

  Tom had taken his pain medicine and was fast asleep, even though it was only early afternoon. It really sucked for him to be in so much pain. The doctor had said his leg was he
aling well but that there was still a long way to go.

  The doorbell rang. Tom wasn’t even awake to point it out.

  Who on earth could that be? We had already had a call from our number-one visitor today. Probably somebody selling something. Or maybe Uncle Dave had forgotten his key. He’d gone out hours earlier. Band practice. I guess when nobody had real jobs, they could practice whenever they wanted.

  “Have you looked in their garage?” I’d asked when I saw him leaving.

  “I’m working up to it, okay? You can’t just rummage in somebody’s garage with no excuse. I’d look like a fool if they caught me at it. But I really don’t think Josh and Kyle are your guys, Charlie. Or Amanda.”

  “Who the hell is Amanda?” I demanded. Was this someone I needed to add to the suspect list?

  Uncle Dave looked surprised.

  “Their sister. You’ve never seen her? She lives there too now. Just moved in a few weeks ago. She’s super cool, so nothing suspicious there.” Uncle Dave’s face was getting a little pink. Oh, great, now there was romance clouding his judgment.

  “Look, Uncle Dave, just try to get into that garage.” It was the last thing I said to him before he left.

  The doorbell rang again.

  I closed my book, ran down the stairs and peeked through the peephole.

  Unbelievable. It was Gary again. It was truly depressing that Gary was the only visitor this house seemed to get. We seemed to be the guy’s personal project. I looked at his little head in his big ballcap and sighed. Then I opened the door.

  “Hi, Gary,” I said dully. I stopped myself from saying, What do you want? I went for something a bit more polite. “Another package? You don’t usually deliver this late.”

  “No, no, no package.” Gary looked nervous. Agitated. “Look, I have talk to you,” he said to the ground. “It’s about the break-ins. I found out something. And I just have to talk to somebody.” He put a trembling hand up to his damp forehead.

  “Well, okay, but—”

  “—because I have proof! Proof.” He looked over his shoulder. Before I even knew what was happening, he’d pushed past me and shut the door. He looked back through the peephole. “I feel like I’m being followed,” he muttered.