The Fourth Stall - Chris Rylander [32]
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Nothing, forget it,” Vince said.
I hesitated. Had he been referring to the fact that my dad is still around? Or that my family moved out of the trailer park and lives in a house now? If so, where the heck did that come from? He knows that everything I have is his, too. We share everything.
“This is just the worst time ever for Staples to suddenly show up,” I finally said.
Vince agreed with a nod and we left it at that. We rarely argued about money, but the Cubs game was changing things a bit.
The Cubs won that night, advancing to the National League Championship Series for the first time in over ten years. They just needed to win four of their next seven games and they’d make it to the World Series for the first time in basically forever. The good news was that they’d dominated their next opponent, the Phillies, all season long; the bad news was that the tickets weren’t getting any cheaper. We needed extra money now more than ever before.
After the game Vince and I looked at each other and nodded. We didn’t even have to say it. Going to this game was truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and we couldn’t let it pass. We really needed to take out Staples, and fast.
The next morning (which was Thursday, in case you’re keeping track), we all gathered in the bathroom at first recess. Me, Vince, Joe, Fred, Brady, and the nine newly hired bullies. The bathroom got kind of hot and smelly with that many kids all grouped in there. We tried to ignore the smell as I congratulated them on their successful hit. Barnaby Willis hadn’t even shown up to school that day. PrepSchool said word was he had to transfer to a new school due to some of the absurdly vulgar emails iBully had sent to the school board from Barnaby Willis’s email account, but coming from her, I had no idea if I could believe that.
I gave them their well-earned twenty dollars and then started discussing phase two of the plan to take down Staples’s operation at my school.
I went over the names of all the bookies that I had discovered as well as where they were normally stationed. I showed the bullies school photos from the year before and gave them instructions to patrol the area around their assigned bookie, making sure that no kid got near enough to place another bet. If the kids still tried to get by, then the bullies were supposed to convince them that it was not a good idea.
“What do you mean convince them?” Nubby asked. “Like with words or what?”
“Make them not want to place another bet,” I said.
“How do we do that?” Nubby asked.
“By whatever means necessary, if you know what I mean. Make them an offer they can’t refuse,” I said. I heard someone say that in a movie once. It’s one of my favorite phrases.
“What do you mean by that?” Great White snapped. “Stop talking in bloody riddles and just tell us what to do, aye!”
“Intimidate them, use a little bit of force if you have to, just get them to stop placing bets. Only don’t go overboard; I don’t want any of these kids to have to go to the nurse, okay? These kids are not to be roughed up like what you did to the Collector.”
With that I assigned them each a bookie and gave them ten bucks.
“I’ll be out monitoring the situation this afternoon and if I’m satisfied with the results, you’ll get the other ten dollars,” I said.
Then they left to go wreak havoc on my school. I felt a little nauseous. I didn’t really like paying nine of the meaner, tougher kids at the school to go intimidate and bully mostly innocent kids and cause problems. But for the sake of our business, the future of the school, and the Cubs game, it had to be done.
At lunch that day we closed up the office so Joe and I could go monitor the progress of our plan while Vince stayed behind to watch over Fred. We started out in the upper-grade playground. Everything appeared to be going well. The bookies stood at their stations alone. Every time a potential customer approached, the bully assigned to that bookie would