The Fourth Stall - Chris Rylander [73]
The scene on the couch was a pretty gross and sad sight, but at least from the look of it, we probably would not have to worry about the guy waking up and catching us snooping around. Or if he did, he’d never be able to catch us if we ran. I went back to where Tyrell was crouched near the front steps and filled him in on what I’d seen.
“Let’s go,” he said, and nodded his head toward the gate to the backyard.
Staples’s pit bull was still barking, and once we got there, I peeked over the fence. He was just a few feet away from the fence gate, held back by a chain attached to the doghouse. Tyrell must have seen the look on my face because he just grinned and then climbed over the gate to the other side.
I shrugged to no one in particular and then climbed over myself. The dog was only a few feet away from us and was frothing at the mouth the way rabid animals do in cartoons. The chain holding him at bay started to strain under his pull.
“What now?” I asked.
Tyrell reached into his messenger bag and pulled out a hunk of tinfoil. He unwrapped it and revealed a pretty sizable steak. The oldest trick in the book, sure, but did it work in real life?
Then Tyrell took off running to my left. It wasn’t really what I was expecting him to do, and I froze, unable to take my eyes off the pit bull snapping at his heels. Tyrell stayed just ahead of the dog, dangling the steak behind him. He wove around a tree and then back around another just a few feet away. The dog followed, getting so close that he actually was able to clip one of Tyrell’s shoes in his jaws and tear it right off his foot.
But then the chain, which was now woven and wrapped tightly around two trees, pulled tight and the dog yelped and jerked back. He was stuck well out of range of me now, and there was a clear path to the shed. The dog continued to bark at Tyrell, who taunted him with the steak as he put his shoe back on.
Then Tyrell tossed the steak at the dog, who ignored it at first and just kept snarling. But then eventually the dog lost interest in us and lay down with the steak clutched between his two paws. Tyrell walked back over to where I was standing and grinned at me.
“Nice trick,” I said. “How did you know you’d need that? Or do you always walk around with a two-pound steak in your bag?”
Tyrell didn’t answer but just motioned for me to follow him.
We approached the shed. It was padlocked shut. Tyrell dug into his bag and then removed a chunk of metal kind of shaped like a gun. But instead of a barrel or muzzle it just had these two long, thin rods. He stuck the rods into the lock along with another L-shaped piece of metal he held in his other hand. He pulled the “trigger” of the gun while turning the other metal rod like a key. The padlock clicked open, just like that.
And then we were inside. It was warm, but Tyrell switched on a nearby electric fan. He also clicked on a naked lightbulb dangling from the ceiling of the moderately sized shed. If it was empty, it would have been just about the right size to store a Jet Ski or a few motorcycles and not much else. But it wasn’t empty. Inside were a large desk, a few chairs, and a few old file cabinets.
Staples’s office.
It looked pretty similar to my own. Which surprised me, though I wasn’t really sure why. It’s not like I expected his office to be made of bones and jagged rocks and have miniature volcanoes inside it shooting out fireballs. I think the surprise was that someone so mean and supposedly evil could also be so organized.
We started digging. On his desk were a few notebooks containing lists of kids who owed him money. As much as I was curious to see who was in there, that wasn’t