The Fourth Stall - Chris Rylander [48]
I looked up to see what all the commotion was.
It was our house. There were eggs all over it. I knew right away who had done it. I didn’t even need to read the message they had crudely left in huge, red, spray-painted letters on the garage: “BacK oFF MaC or Your DeaD.”
Poor spelling aside, it was pretty menacing. Mostly because I couldn’t back off. If I gave up and just rolled over, then it would be easy for him to wipe us all out. So it wasn’t really a threat. It was just meant to say: “You’re dead, Mac.” Which wasn’t any better.
Chapter 15
The next morning as I left for school, I saw my dad on a ladder trying to scrub off congealing eggs. My mom pulled the car out of the garage and waited for me. I’d had her drive me to school ever since the night the red car tried to kill me. I couldn’t risk riding my bike or walking to school anymore.
“Christian, are you sure that you have no idea who might have done this?” my dad asked, looking down at me. “You have no clue who this Mac character is?”
I felt like melting into the cracks on our sidewalk. My dad had so much work ahead of him and it was all my fault. But I still couldn’t tell them, no matter how bad I felt. I had made a vow to keep my family and business separate and I meant to keep it.
“No, Dad,” I said.
“Okay.” He sighed.
I don’t know if he believed me.
“I can help you with that after school,” I said.
He thought it over. “Do you think you and some of your friends might want to come over and help clean it either today or tomorrow? I’ll pay them and then maybe afterward they can come inside and watch a movie and have snacks.”
“Sure, I’ll ask them. They do love Mom’s cookies,” I said. Plus, we could always use more money; even if it was just like five or ten bucks. Five bucks would buy almost half a Chicago Dog at Wrigley Field.
“Okay, good,” my dad said, and scanned the whole house from the ladder. “This is going to take a long time if I have to do it myself.”
With that, he went back to scrubbing. My mom honked.
I slowly turned and walked to the car.
All morning customers were demanding cheaper prices because I had been so unavailable lately. And a few more came to me for loans to pay back gambling debts. Which was a problem because my funds were getting low. According to Vince, we don’t have enough money to give out any more loans. The whole ordeal was embarrassing; I never turn away customers—it’s against my business policy.
The worst part was that my cash flow was drying up because more and more of the customers who I actually could help had to pay with favors. It wouldn’t be long before we would have to drain the Emergency Fund, and then eventually the Game Fund as well.
At the end of recess I instructed Joe to deliver a message to Justin during a class they had together right before lunch. The message was a proposal for a meeting to discuss business. I thought it sounded pretty political. At the end of the note I said Justin could choose the time and place, but it had to be on school grounds and it had to be this week.
Joe returned with only five minutes left in the lunch period. He handed me the note I’d given him earlier. I unfolded the crumpled piece of paper and looked at the bottom. Something had been written in blue ink. It was just four words: Tomorrow, four, the Shed.
The Shed is this little shack next to the school’s track and football field. It’s where the janitor keeps all of the yard work stuff like the lawn mower and sprinklers and other junk like that. It’s also where all the kids who smoke gather during recess. The Shed is down the hill, across the football and baseball fields, and way out near the street, the chunk of school property farthest from the actual school building. It is a perfect place for kids to smoke because the recess supervisor on that side of the school hates walking, so she never really goes much past the first goalpost of the football field. They never get caught, and no one