The Fourth Stall - Chris Rylander [41]
“You know what?” I asked him. “I just don’t care. I’m sick of being lied to. Whether you’re telling the truth or not, I just can’t trust you anymore.”
“But,” he started, and then seemed to give up. He knew he was had.
“Good-bye,” I said coldly.
I wanted him to break down. I didn’t feel comfortable punishing him any further without a full confession. But he just started crying tears of guilt and buried his face in his hands. I nodded at Joe. He lifted Brady out of the chair and escorted him out of the bathroom.
I spent the rest of lunch convincing Great White, Nubby, and Kitten to stay on board with our business after what had happened to the other bullies. Then I told them all about the rat and note I found in my locker. I wanted everybody to be extra careful, just in case. To try and stick together as often as possible. And I agreed to up their pay a little in light of the increased danger of working for me.
At afternoon recess I organized another meeting between Joe, Vince, and me that night at Vince’s place. It was probably an especially dangerous time for us to be meeting near the Creek, given the threats we’d received, but it was also important that we rotate our meeting places. Besides, it was kind of fun to visit my old trailer park once in a while. The purpose of this meeting was to move up the ladder. Now that we had our snitch situation taken care of, it was time to strike a real blow against Staples.
“We need a new plan,” I said as the three of us played video games in Vince’s room. “I think we need to go straight to the top this time.”
“What! We can’t go after Staples—we’d get wasted! I heard he’s got a pit bull chained up near his office,” Joe said.
“You’re right. That’d be crazy; we don’t even know how to get to Staples. We don’t know what he looks like or where he lives. But we can go after Justin Johnston. He runs the business at our school and without him Staples will have nothing here. He takes the money and bets. I bet he also does some of the bribing of athletes and stuff, too. I think that if we take out Justin, we can deal Staples’s business a pretty good blow,” I said.
“Let’s do it,” Vince said.
“What are we going to do, though?” Joe asked as in the video game I got my revenge by dropping a grenade onto his character after he walked into my trap.
“I don’t know. You guys got any ideas?” I said.
“Mac, that’s perfect!” Vince yelled. “What you just did to Joe in the game, I mean. We should do the same thing to Justin Johnston. It’ll be like when Ronald Reagan was so obsessed with “Star Wars” that he totally blew the U.S.’s chances of getting out of the Cold War before nineteen ninety.”
I shook my head and sighed. Vince references history stuff a lot. He’s really good at school and reads a lot of huge dusty books from the nonfiction section of the library that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.
Vince grinned at me and said, “Just try to imagine a chimpanzee named Bonzo with strings attached to his hands and feet like a puppet and it’ll make sense.”
I laughed, but of course it still didn’t make any sense at all. Once Vince started pulling out monkey references, it was time to move on or he’d start saying some really bizarre stuff.
“Look, guys, I hate to interrupt, but even if we do trap Justin, what are we actually going to do to him? We can’t exactly blow him up with a grenade like in the game,” Joe said.
“We’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse,” I said.
Like I said, I always try to say that as often as possible. I love that movie. I think it’s called The Godfather, but it doesn’t have any pizza in it and it isn’t about some guy’s crazy godparents or anything, so don’t let the title mislead