The Fourth Stall - Chris Rylander [44]
I shook off the image and veered my bike across somebody’s front yard and around to the back of the house where there wasn’t room for the car to follow. I tried to stay low as I rode through that alley and then through another yard. Zigzagging madly through alleys and yards, I made my way toward my house. The car drove by a few times, but each time I was able to duck behind a fence or trash can. It also helped that there were no streetlights in the alleys.
Eventually I drove up the sidewalk to my house. I typed in the code for our garage and it opened, spilling light onto the driveway. As I walked my bike inside, I heard a car screech to a halt right in front of my house. The red sports car sat there under the streetlamp with its headlights still on. I could feel the driver staring at me. I looked right to where I thought his head would be and stared back. It was pretty safe inside my garage but a chill went up my spine anyways. The car sat there for at least two minutes. Then my dad came into the garage and the red car drove away.
“Hey, who was that?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I think it was some pizza guy looking for a house,” I said.
He nodded. “Close the garage door. You’re letting bugs in.” He went back inside.
I wanted to tell my dad. I really did. I mean, I always try to keep my business and family separate but someone had just tried to kill me. There’s nothing I wanted to do more right then than to tell my parents.
But I still couldn’t say anything. The Cubs game is too important and getting my parents involved would only risk us not being able to go. For one, they’d call the cops and once the cops got involved I’d run the risk of having to come clean about my Funds. No adult was going to let a kid keep six grand in his closet. Also, if my parents thought that someone was out to kill me, then they’d go into super overprotective mode. Which means they’d definitely nix our plan to go to Chicago with Vince’s brother.
I wanted my parents’ help, but this was something I would have to deal with myself. It was the only way. Besides, this wasn’t my parents’ problem. It was mine. They had enough to worry about.
Chapter 14
On the car ride down to the lake cabin, I went through our Books and tried to figure out if I had any people who owed me a favor that I could use to help take down Staples. Vince sat beside me and read some ancient, dusty book about President Lincoln’s Cabinet or something incredibly boring like that. He gets these books for like fifty cents each at the Salvation Army store. I can never understand how he reads that stuff without falling asleep.
I hadn’t slept well the night before so it was hard to stay awake on the drive there. I’d kept thinking I heard a car drive slowly past the front of my house. It was probably a different car each time, but I still couldn’t get the image out of my head of the sinister red sports car creeping past again and again, its tinted windows revealing nothing but the reflections of tall evergreens.
“So you really think the plan to take out Justin will work?” I asked Vince as we later cast our lines out into the water. It was Saturday morning after we’d arrived, and we were sitting side-by-side on the end of the dock.
“I don’t know. It has to; he’ll have no choice. I just don’t know if taking out Justin will get rid of Staples, you know? The U.S. put Castro into office in Cuba to get rid of the old dictator, but then they ended up having even bigger problems with Castro. You just can’t be sure.”
“Huh?” I said.
Vince laughed. “What I mean is we might solve one problem but that just may create