Half Moon Investigations - Eoin Colfer [2]
I tapped the laminated card. ‘It’s all right there, Doobie. Fletcher Moon. Graduate of the Bob Bernstein Private Detective Academy.’
‘Can I have it?’ asked Doobie, just like he did every time he saw the badge.
No,’ I replied, slipping the wallet back into my pocket. ‘This took me two years to earn. Even if you had it, it wouldn’t be yours.’
Doobie frowned. This kind of thinking was a bit advanced for someone who hadn’t yet worked out the mechanics of a handkerchief.
‘So, what have you got for me, Doobie? Something juicy, I hope.’
‘I dunno what I’ve got,’ he said. ‘I only came looking ‘cause everyone knows I’m your secret snitch and they asked me to find you.’
I stopped. ‘Who asked you?’
‘Herod Sharkey,’ replied Doobie. ‘I don’t know who the other one is, but he’s big, really big.’
Herod Sharkey. According to school-yard rules, that name shouldn’t have bothered me in the least. After all I was in sixth class and Herod was merely a fourth-class student. But the Sharkey family weren’t ones for rules. In fact, if there was an unbroken rule somewhere, the Sharkeys would drive several hundred miles out of their way just to break it.
Herod was one of the school wild men. The teachers have a name for people like Herod. They call him one of the ‘usual suspects’. Whenever anything went missing, he was routinely summoned to the principal’s office for questioning. Nine out of ten times, Herod had the missing thing in his pocket. The other time, he had probably buried it in the sports field. It wouldn’t be long before the police began to call at the school looking for him.
So why would Herod Sharkey be looking for me? I didn’t own anything valuable. Except my detective’s shield. My hand went instinctively to my pocket, but the wallet was still there. I decided to check it every thirty seconds or so, just to be on the safe side.
I dropped my bag off at the sixth-class spot, then followed Doobie around the side of the school, past the oil tank that had been painted to look like Thomas the Tank Engine, to the basketball court, where all the major student business was conducted. If you needed to hire someone to tell someone that a third person fancied them, this was the place to find that someone. The basketball court was also the agreed location for school fights. I could see from the ragged ring of kids that someone had booked an early slot to settle a disagreement.
‘Where’s Herod?’ I asked Doobie, though I already knew. Herod was a Sharkey, so there was only one place that he was likely to be.
‘He’s fighting. They’re headlocked.’
I nodded. Headlocked was better than pinwheeling. A person could get himself injured getting involved in a pinwheeler.
There are several kinds of school fight. The three most popular kinds are the Pinwheel, the Hold-Me-Back and the Headlock. In the Pinwheel, the two fighters run at each other, eyes closed and arms spinning. The object was to catch your opponent with a lucky shot, but more often than not the enemies missed each other by yards. The Pinwheel was popular with younger kids.
It could be argued that the Hold-Me-Back is not, strictly speaking, a fight at all, since the object is to avoid the conflict altogether. In a Hold-Me-Back, the foes scream ‘Hold me back’ as loudly and often as possible until a teacher arrives to break things up. Following the adult’s arrival, the secretly relieved opponents are led away by their friends, still shouting things like: ‘You were lucky, bum-face. I would have murdered you.’
The Headlock was what we were dealing with on that day. The Headlock does exactly what it says on the tin. Two boys get each other in a mutual headlock and whoever lets go first is the loser. Grip is everything in the Headlock. Some boys favour lacing the fingers, others go for the wrist grip. It depends really on length and strength of fingers. There are many reasons why the loser loses. Not being able to breathe is one, needing a toilet break is another. There is a schoolyard legend of two bitter enemies,