The Fourth Stall - Chris Rylander [46]
“I’m just checking, that’s all,” I said.
“Oh. Well, I think we have just over six thousand or so,” he said. Then he shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “No, wait. No, I guess it’s more like just under six thousand. I think it’s like roughly fifty-nine sixty-two all combined. That’s every dollar to our name. Or as my grandma would say, ‘There ain’t no place like Chattahoochee for making a lady feel like a carpetbagger.’” He laughed after saying this, but again it didn’t sound quite like the Vince laugh I’d been used to hearing for the past seven years.
“Come on, Vince. That grandma quote isn’t even close to making sense,” I said while throwing him the ball. Normally, I would have laughed anyways, but I didn’t feel much like laughing.
Vince caught the ball and shrugged without even cracking a smile and threw the ball back. Another nasty circle change that dropped off the table and this time I missed it. The ball bounced off the edge of my glove and hit my foot. It rolled under some trees a few feet away.
“Sorry, Mac,” he said as I turned to get it.
“No problem,” I said. “It was a good pitch.”
Vince is going to be an awesome pitcher next summer when we finally get to play full-fledged fast-pitch baseball. Vince had been studying some Nolan Ryan book on pitching that he’d found at the Salvation Army, and ever since, whenever we play catch, we just throw different pitches at each other. I’m not nearly as good as Vince. Which is funny because in movies the guy who’s good with math and reads a lot usually isn’t all that good at sports. But Vince is good at everything. Except confrontations.
I leaned under a tree to get the ball and something caught my eye. It was an older red sports car. With faded black racing stripes. It was down the street and parked just off to the side of the road. I grabbed the baseball and stood up.
“What’s wrong?” Vince asked, jogging over.
I motioned for him to follow me. We crept up to the next cabin over and peeked around the corner. It was definitely a red sports car, and it looked like the same one that had tried to run me down the night before. We could see it parked about a hundred yards down the gravel road in front of a small and dirty trailer that some mean lady lived in year-round. One time I drove a Jet Ski we’d rented too close to her dock and she came running out of her house screaming at me to get off her property, and then she threw a beer bottle at me.
“Is that the same car?” Vince whispered as we crouched behind the edge of the cabin.
“I think so. I can’t believe he followed us here,” I said.
“What should we do, Mac?” he asked.
“Doesn’t your grandma have some advice for a situation like this?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes but actually grinned, which was nice to see.
“Let’s get a closer look,” I suggested.
Vince pondered this. I could tell he didn’t want to, but he finally nodded.
“You go first,” he whispered.
I quickly ran from the edge of the cabin to a small tree across the gravel driveway. Vince followed. We moved closer to the car, hiding behind various objects: trash cans, trees, boats on trailers, central air-conditioning units. Finally I stopped behind a pine tree right next to the dirty trailer, about forty feet away from the car. I really thought it was the same one from the other night, but it was hard to tell because I had last seen it under the creepy, hazy orange glow of streetlights.
“You don’t think that this place is Staples’s headquarters, do you?” Vince asked.
“I don’t think so; it’s too far away from our school. Plus, I know the lady who lives here, and I think she lives alone.”
We waited and watched. The car was empty.
“Well? Let’s go!” Vince said, and started to run toward the car. But just then the trailer’s front door slammed open with a bang that sounded like a gunshot.
Vince dove back behind the tree as if it actually was a gunshot. We ducked as low as we could. The tree was behind the front door a little bit, but it was only fifteen feet away.
A fat, balding guy came thundering out of the trailer. He wore