The Fourth Stall - Chris Rylander [4]
“Look, Fred, relax and slow down. I’m having a coronary over here just watching you. Take a deep breath. I can’t help you if I don’t understand what you are saying. Okay?”
Fred breathed deeply and nodded. He still looked terrified.
“Okay, Fred, let’s start with who is after you.”
“Staples.”
I hoped Fred couldn’t see my shock. That couldn’t be right.
Staples? Staples wasn’t even supposed to exist. The legend of Staples has been spread throughout the town practically since the beginning of time. According to the most often repeated stories, Staples was this kid who dropped out of school after fourth grade and never went back. His age always varied from story to story, but it was generally agreed that he was now between fourteen and twenty. Some kids claimed that he could do forty pull-ups with two seventh graders dangling from each leg. Others said he could pop a tetherball with a single punch. He also supposedly ran a mile in under six minutes and was smarter than Albert Einstein and Hermione Granger combined.
According to the legends, Staples had an intricate web of connections that spread throughout almost every high school, elementary school, and middle school in the city. He was even rumored to have people in the police department. He was untouchable.
They say he used his network to operate an illegal gambling ring. He’d take bets for pro sporting events like football and baseball games, but he mostly took them for local middle school and high school sports games. He also fixed the games. That is, he paid kids to lose on purpose. To miss free throws and easy layups in basketball and fumble the ball in football games and stuff like that.
Some of the rumors even say that Staples is to blame for the Cubs being terrible for so long. I heard some kid say once that Staples was the one who paid Mark Prior and Kerry Wood to fake injuries their whole careers.
And that was the problem with what Fred was telling me. Staples couldn’t be real. No way. I’d never encountered anyone who had actually seen him or claimed to have gambled through his network. And even if he did exist, there’s no way his business could have spread here. I would have known about it. I knew everything that happened at this school.
I rubbed my eyes and then addressed Fred.
“The Staples?”
Fred nodded and then looked at the floor.
“How can you be so sure?” I asked.
“Because I work for him,” Fred said, still looking down. “I used to take bets for him here.”
Then he started crying.
I sighed. “Vince?” I said loud enough for my business partner to hear me outside the stall. “You want to join us?”
A few moments later the door opened and Vince stepped in. Fred seemed too busy rubbing his eyes to notice. Normally nobody sat in the stall but me and the customer. But I made exceptions when stuff like this came around. Things as major as the revelation of the existence of a force like Staples. And Vince was the only person I’d ever made that exception for.
Vince gave me a look as he leaned against the stall’s wall beside my desk. He must have heard enough from the outside to know what was going on. Vince was the master of giving simple looks that could say a lot.
“I don’t gamble myself,” Fred finally continued. “I don’t even really get how it all works. But there are plenty of kids my age who do. I’d take their money and stuff and then give them their winnings if they ever did win, which was almost never. The legends are true, you know.”
“How long has he been operating here?” I asked.
“Umm . . . like three or four weeks or something,” Fred said.
“Why now?” Vince asked.
Fred glanced at Vince as if noticing him for the first time.
“He always said that grade schools are tougher to break into because it’s hard to find young kids to work for him,” Fred said.
“How did you get recruited, then?” I asked.
Fred shook his head. “My brother works for him at the high school in Glyndon. He talked me into it. I was too scared to refuse.”
A brief silence followed. The shock of Staples’s existence was starting to catch up with me. Especially the shock over how