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  It occurred to me that maybe they’d seen me send the security guard after them in front of the sporting goods store and wanted to pay me back for it. That could be why they were after me, and, as they were scouring the mall, they’d gone outside, seen the Cruiser, and flattened the tires so I couldn’t get away. But I knew Razor already had it in for me for some other reason, so it was more likely that all of this was tied to the case in some way.

  Well, either that or someone else was after me, too.

  TEN

  The side street I’d taken from the mall parking lot was small and sleepy and well enough off the beaten track that I wasn’t too worried about being followed. But it angled northwest and didn’t have any turnoffs, so it left only one route to my next destination—the long one. I knew it’d be even longer than usual, too, because walking with a bike was much slower than regular hoofing, and I was looking at a serious trek ahead.

  Pushing the Cruiser almost two miles to the gas station gave me more than an hour to get angry, and the sudden cloudburst on the way there made sure that I was. So it was getting late and I was wet and tired and starving and completely ticked off when I wheeled around to the air pump in the back, filled my tires, and just happened to look at the gas station bathroom before I rode off. It was like all gas station bathrooms—cinder-block walls, gray metal door with rust spots, shit stains in the corners and hinges, a thick ribbon of gnats and flies gyrating in front of it, and a stench like an open cauldron of manure over a low, steady flame. I was a good ten feet away but still felt like scrubbing myself with Pine-Sol, and if I were one inch closer to that cesspit than I already was, I’d have to get home and bathe within fifteen minutes or less, or I could just skip everything else and head straight for the morgue.

  But someone I knew had gotten closer, a lot closer. To the right of the door, there was a big white skull with yellow lightning bolts in the place of crossbones carefully spray-painted on the wall. It kind of looked like the Grateful Dead symbol, only the expression on the skull’s face was meaner, more menacing. It almost killed me to admit it, but as far as graffiti went, it was top-notch work: the outer lines were smooth and unbroken, there were no gaps or missed spots in the interiors, and the finished product was solid and crisp. It was obviously the effort of someone who knew what he was doing; someone who wanted other people to know who he was. So, at the bottom, in a fluid scrawl of darkest red, it said DINK. The skull and cross bolts, the three colors—white, yellow, red—and the DINK were a signature, as identifiable as a fingerprint, and they all pointed to the same hand: Darren’s. Apparently, the crew had already marked so much of the town as their territory that Darren felt safe to piss here, too.

  Fucking Darren and his fucking crew. Those dickweeds broke a different law practically every goddamn day, left evidence of it everywhere, but never got caught, while I couldn’t so much as break a little wind without counselors, teachers, coaches, and cops calling a series of emergency meetings up my ass. All right, nobody ever said life was fair, and it wasn’t like anybody in the crew had ever started with me, because they weren’t that kind of gang. But when Darren stole my old bike, I got my first real glimpse of what their program was all about, and it’d been chafing my sphincter ever since.

  I was at the arcade with Thrash one day last February playing Frogger. I remember that because I’d gone to play Track and Field, but Thrash wouldn’t quit pestering me until he got his way and we played the other one instead. He was like that sometimes, especially when it came to Frogger, because he just lost his shit over that game. He got so into it—yelling, grunting, telling me when to go, when to stop, moaning and carrying on when the frog got flattened by a car or eaten by an alligator—that you’d think he was rooting for a close relative to cross the river or highway instead of some stupid, pretend video-game frog he didn’t even know. Then again, every once in a while, it was pretty fun.

  Anyway, after I’d blown half my allowance without breaking the high score, I went outside and discovered that my bike was gone. Just gone—no tire tracks, no witnesses, no clues, no nothing. Okay, I didn’t have a lock back then, so maybe I’d been asking for trouble, but my old bike was such a piece of crap—one of those tiny three-speeds with wrap-down handlebars designed to look like a mini ten-speed racer, but really looked like a bike for thumb-suckers and bed-wetters—that I’d never needed a lock before. That was part of the reason I’d held on to it, not because it was the very first bike without training wheels I’d ever owned all to myself, without having to share with Neecey or because I’d had it since I was eight, but because the whole point of having a really shitty bike was that you never had to worry about somebody stealing it. So when I found it gone, I wasn’t expecting it to be gone, and that pissed me off, and I stood there cursing and boiling over and not knowing what to do.

  Then it hit me, kind of all in a rush. My bike had been stolen, a crime had been committed, which meant I had a mystery on my hands, and since I was standing in the middle of the crime scene, it was the perfect opportunity for me to put my detective skills to use for real. Suddenly, I wasn’t angry anymore, but all keyed up and raring to go. I was on my first real case, with myself as client and detective.

  There still weren’t any clues, of course, just an empty space in the bike rack where my ride should’ve been and a lack of witnesses to press for leads. So I settled myself down and made a few deductions to try to figure out what kind of maggot would steal my piece-of-shit bike, because if I could figure out what kind of kid had done it, then I’d have a better idea of where to find him. And it came to me pretty quickly. Since nobody could possibly want a bike like that, the only kind of lowlife that would actually steal it was either the kind that couldn’t afford anything else, or that would attract too much attention by riding something better. That meant a kid who was poorer than I was, so I set my course northeast, toward the town center, to track down a thief.

  It turned out I was tracking that thief for a while—hours, actually—in the stinging wind and needling mist of a frigid February evening, making a systematic search of the roughest part of town. I didn’t find anything, and sooner than I knew it, it was well after dark and I realized I’d been out on foot for ages. It’d gotten a hell of a lot colder, too, and as I walked I got the kind of chill that grabbed you down at the base of your spine and worked its way outward, that inside-out chill where you felt like you’d never get warm again, and I was late for my curfew, so I was more than ready to pack it in and try again the next day. The only problem was that I’d lost my bearings a little. I’d gone so far north and east that I was practically in the next town; in fact, I was so far from everything that the kids who lived there didn’t even go to our schools. So I was way out of my territory and had no other choice but to take my best guess toward home.

  I wandered for a while and eventually turned down a dim side street, where I came across a shabby duplex with four guys playing hoops in the driveway under floodlights, with four bikes piled on top of one another over to the side. One of the bikes looked like mine. My blood went up in a hurry, but I was cool about it, and just sort of ambled over, as if I were mesmerized by the way they kept bricking lay-ups. I inched closer and saw that the bike was the same make as mine and about as old, but it was black or looked black in the downward glare and shadows, while mine had been blue. It was similar enough that it could’ve been my bike, but I would’ve had to get even closer than I was to tell for sure, and that seemed like an unhealthy idea at the time, so I just figured I’d crapped out and turned to go.

  As I did, however, I felt this dense object thumping me in the chest and my arms shooting up and catching it of their own volition. I realized pretty much instantly that it would’ve been better to let it drop. The guys were around me in a flash—all four of them older and athletic looking—asking me what the fuck I was doing trying to steal their rock. It was the oldest trick in the book for picking a fight; I was in trouble, Thrash was croaking retreat from inside my backpa
ck, but I was cold and tired and taken by surprise, so I didn’t move right away. When that first fist cracked me sharp in the ribs, I snapped out of it, whipping the ball at one kid’s face with my right hand and pitching a reckless hook at some other kid’s throat with my left. That gave me just enough space to bolt, but I took a few more body-shots as I hit the accelerator and hot-footed it the hell out of there. I sprinted my ass all the way home, where mom was already waiting for me in the living room because she didn’t have to work at the bar that night. I was more than two hours late and she was pissed as hell, and the only thing that saved me from the riot act and a week in solitary was the fever I’d come down with.

  I didn’t have to go to school the next day, but I was sick, bruised up, and practically dying on the sofa for most of it, when who should appear on our doorstep for the very first time that afternoon but fucking Darren—wheeling my goddamn bike, turning himself in, and trying to make amends. He made such a major production of explaining himself—saying he’d been high at the time, got stuck on how funny it’d be to ride such a tiny bike home from the mall, but that he hadn’t meant anything by it, how totally beat it was, and all this other crap—and tried so hard to be convincing and sincere that the whole thing seemed rehearsed.

  Sure, it was a nice act for all the bullshit, I guessed, but it wasn’t for me. Literally. Darren didn’t look at me once the whole time he was there. But he didn’t have any problem keeping both eyes on Neecey. That was because everything he said and did was for her, all of it, like he was only there to prove that he was bad enough to take whatever the hell he felt like taking, but also big enough to own up to it and give something back if he wanted to, like some kind of stoner bandit with a heart of gold. As if. I’d taken a beating because that dildo had felt like amusing himself, and worse than that, by returning my bike he’d cheated me out of solving my first case. And as if that weren’t enough to make me want to swear a blood feud on Darren and all his present and future kin, it was all just a bad joke to him.

  I failed to see the goddamn hilarity in it. I felt mad, stupid, and swindled, but right then I saw what Darren was up to. He’d used me and my old bike to get close to Neecey so that when she broke up with Gary, who was a senior last year and would be leaving for college practically any day now, Darren would be first in line to succeed. Worse still, she fucking fell for it, because she started seeing him on the sly about a month and a half later.

  That’s when I had my first serious reservations about Neecey’s intelligence and loyalties, because she didn’t just flap her gums about Darren so goddamn much that I felt like ripping my own ears off, she actually took his fucking side about my bike. Christ, at least Judas got thirty pieces of silver; but not Neecey, she worked for free. When I asked her a couple of days later why Darren had apologized to her instead of me, not even glancing my way although I was lying right there, she told me he’d felt like such a tool for taking my bike that he was already all hangdog on the way over to our place, and when he saw I’d gotten sick because I’d been out looking for it in the cold, it just made him feel ten times worse, so he felt too guilty to face me at the time. Yeah, right, like he even knew I had a face then. Anyway, she also said he’d explained everything again the next day—that it was just a simple mistake and he was totally remorseful—and he told her to tell me that when I came around and warmed up to him a little, he’d make it up to me, because he owed me one. I got the message all right: my sister was turning into a pothead’s parrot. And then she went on about how different Darren was when he wasn’t with his buds, how smart he was, how cool, how much fun to talk to, how awesome the paintings and sketches he’d made were, how he planned to go to art school instead of college, how much I was going to like him, and all this other crap that I wasn’t listening to because I’d already heard more than I’d wanted to hear without liking the gist of it a single goddamn bit.

  And here I was, staring at Darren’s graffiti and Darren’s signature on the gas station shitter, like he owned the whole fucking town and everything in it. And what did I have? Nothing, that’s what I had, not a single goddamn thing. I was first in my sixth-grade class and had the best grades by a mile, but I didn’t win so much as one of the subject awards they gave out at the end of the year. I had to sit through the assembly on the last day of school and listen to little Ste-vie Thurgood’s name being called time and again, and watch him go up to the stage to get one award after the other, because he was the teachers’ pet and I was the psycho and that was that. Seeing Stevie Thurgood walk away with the prizes that should’ve gone to me made me do something I regretted, but I left school that day the way I left everything else—the same way I was right now—empty-fucking-handed.

  Well, I had Thrash, but he couldn’t be bothered to talk about any of this shit, because it didn’t matter to him. He always had the same answer for everything: if Darren or Stevie or anybody else was giving me trouble, then I should break them down at the knees and gut them like fish; or if I couldn’t do that, then I should hop my ass under a rock and hide out until everything blew over. That’s the way it was in the wild. Period. No, Thrash wasn’t always as helpful as he could’ve been.

  And I had the Cruiser, too, so I saddled up. I made a left out of the gas station’s back exit and aimed homeward. I would’ve loved to nail Darren and the crew almost as much as I would’ve loved Seven Minutes in Heaven with Stacy, but just because I wanted it didn’t mean I was gonna get it. Besides, I was a detective, and a detective needed evidence before he went off half-cocked accusing people of shit. And as far as evidence went, I didn’t have any. Well, I knew how the crime had been committed and I had a rubber bracelet that had been dropped at the scene of the crime by one of the two perpetrators. Other than that, I didn’t have jack.

  Worse still, what little evidence I did have didn’t seem to point to Darren. For instance, if Darren had hit the sign at grandma’s home, he would’ve done a much better job; the tag I’d just seen reminded me of that. More than that, although there was some danger in tagging a sign in open view of a highway, it wasn’t enough danger to impress anybody, and if it wouldn’t impress anybody, then you could bet your ass Darren wouldn’t consider doing it. He’d gotten way too big to sweat small shit like that; plus, he had the crew’s reputation to think about, which he could only maintain at this point by sticking his neck out every once in a while to pull something ballsy.

  So it seemed to make sense that Darren had dragged the crew down to the church on Saturday night, like he’d said, because that was a high-risk job, and kids were sure to talk it up once they’d heard about it. It made even more sense, now that I thought about it, that Darren had told me they’d done it, because if the people at the church had painted over the tag and hushed it up early Sunday morning, then other kids might not know that the crew had even hit it. And if other kids didn’t know about it, then they definitely wouldn’t talk about it, and that defeated the purpose of doing it in the first place.

  I made a left turn behind the strip mall, sped up, gave the Italian salute to the brown Datsun hatchback that honked at me, grabbed the handlebars again, and jumped the curb as a tailwind hit my back. I caught some sweet air, and as I floated gently back to earth, my mood began to change. I finally felt like I was getting somewhere, partly because I’d just realized something that I hadn’t thought of before. Although the clues I had weren’t leading me to anyone in particular, I still might be able to crack the case by working in the opposite direction. In other words, if I could eliminate people from the list of possible suspects, then I’d have fewer to choose from, which meant I’d stand a better chance of apprehending the culprits. And since two perpetrators and a rubber bracelet pointed to almost every possible pairing of teens and preteens in the whole damn town, I could do a hell of a lot worse than to narrow the field a little.

  So I set my mind to the cheerful task of eliminating Darren—at least as a suspect. The biggest problem was easy to see, and I saw it right off: it didn�
��t seem like Darren had a motive to hit the sign. But while he might not’ve had any motive I could easily discern, the fact that both he and Neecey had lied to me in connection with the sign, independently of each other, made me think there had to be something rotten as all hell in DINKMARK. She’d lied to me by saying she hadn’t heard about it, and Darren had lied to me when he’d said he didn’t know who did it.

  Neecey could be lying to cover for Darren again, like she’d done with my bike, but that still didn’t necessarily mean he’d done it, because there was always the chance that Darren had lied to both of us to cover for somebody else. But if that’s what he was doing, then the question was, for whom? Well, that was pretty simple: he’d be covering for someone in the crew. Maybe that was why he wouldn’t say whether he knew who did it or not, but tried to warn me off the case anyway.

  Fair enough. If I were Darren, I’d be afraid for their sake, too. But that instantly shrank the field of suspects down to less than the number of starters on a Little League team, because beyond Darren there were only six other members of the crew, and I knew the names and addresses of every single one of them. There was Sticky, who was six feet tall and weighed a hundred and a quarter wearing a full suit of armor. He’d be a senior this year, so that made him the oldest. Then there were the juniors: Squat, who had light hair, a medium build, the height to go with it, and was named for what he knew; Burger, a goofy, almost likable guy who got his nickname because he was kind of round and because his favorite food was hot dogs; Roni, pronounced with a long o, as in maca-roni and cheese, but meaning cheese, because everything he said was really fucking corny; and Lyle, who was another pipe cleaner like Sticky, but didn’t have a nickname, because Lyle was his real one, and I guessed they figured that was bad enough. Finally, there was Johnny Scatto, who was going to be a sophomore this year, like Neecey and Cynthia, and whose nickname was Chakha, not after the singer, but because he was short and square-shaped and had thick hair all over his body, so he reminded you of the prehistoric ape-boy in that old TV show The Land of the Lost. He was the youngest, and once he’d started high school last year, the crew had closed their ranks and hadn’t admitted any new members since. Not like that was a surprise. They’d all been friends since the beginning of elementary school and they’d only been waiting for Chakha to start his freshman year to go exclusive anyway. And now they were.