The Fourth Stall - Chris Rylander [30]
Behind the portables is the official fighting rink. Everybody knows that if you’re going to fight somebody, you take it behind the portables. The portables have no windows and the recess supervisor never goes back there. Plus, with the portables all side-by-side, there is enough room for a whole crowd of kids to watch without being seen. The spot has been used so many times that a large circle of trampled dirt has replaced the nice green grass.
Little Paul led the Collector around to the back of the portables. As soon as he cleared the end portable, Vince gave the other bullies their signal. They descended upon Willis like a pack of starving monkeys at a flea market. What happened next was pretty hard to watch, in all honesty. Willis was a crying mess by the end, and to add insult to injury the bullies even stole his wallet and shoes. After finally prying Snapper off his ankle, the bullies told Willis that if he ever collected one more kid, they’d collect him twice as hard next time.
I made eye contact with Vince during the aftermath. I could tell he was thinking the same thing I was: What have we done? I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the whole thing made me feel horrible for the rest of the day, even in spite of what the Collector had tried to do to me on Tuesday.
But what mattered was that the Collector was out of commission, which meant it was now time to fix the problem at the source: getting kids to stop placing bets. If we cut off the supply of gamblers, then the money would stop coming in. If the money stopped flowing, then Staples’s business at my school would collapse. Easy as pie. Or as Vince’s grandma sometimes said: Easy as dressing up like a tree to catch wombats.
Chapter 10
After school that day I found a surprise in my locker. Not a good one, though. I opened my locker to put away some books and get my Cubs hat. And there it was, staring at me with the type of vacant look that only death can supply: a dead rat.
I was just barely able to hold back a yell. I think probably the only reason I didn’t make a fool of myself right then and there was because the rat lying on the top shelf of my locker was actually pretty small and white, like the kind that are in the school science lab, and not a huge gray beast like you see in movies that eats small deer for snacks and would give you the bubonic plague.
After I reminded myself that it was really just a mouse after all, I nudged it onto a piece of paper and tossed it in the garbage. Although the dead rat had been gross, that wasn’t what was bothering me. It was the message it was supposed to send. I looked around inside my locker and found the note I knew would be there.
I unfolded the piece of paper; on it was a simple message, handwritten: Friends of rats end up dead. Give us Fred by the end of tomorrow or you’ll be roadkill! Vince showed up just as I finished reading the note.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“It’s nothing,” I said as I tossed the note into my locker and slammed it shut. I decided not to tell anybody—they’d just panic. The last thing I needed was Joe and Vince panicking. Besides, there was no way I was going to just hand over Fred. Not now. We were way past that.
“Oh,” Vince said.
“What? No joke?”
He shrugged. “Nah, I’m not really in the mood for jokes.”
Something was up. Vince was almost always in the mood for jokes. The longest he ever went without making a joke was after his dad died. That was about four years ago. For two weeks afterward he and I just hung out in the old trailer park playground. We didn’t really do much—we just sat on the swings next to each other and I pretended not to notice that Vince was crying. I don’t think he was ever embarrassed about it. I think he was just happy to have me there and that was good enough for me.