JW01. Under Locker and Key Read online

  I nodded back. “I might have a plan to get the key back, and it won’t work without you. Together we can return the key to the school, pin Mark with the crime, and go off to summer vacation with not a care in the world.”

  “But to do that, we’d have to break the rules.”

  “A few, maybe.”

  “Lie. Act dishonestly.”

  “Definitely.”

  She shook her head. “Nope. Mom says the law’s the law for a reason. People who break it only hurt other people and themselves. I agree.” She glared at me. “That’s why no one should be above the law.”

  “Oh, now you’re Little Miss Straight Arrow. Where was that moral compass when you snuck out of the cafeteria to spy on the teachers?”

  She turned red. “The teachers gave me the case.”

  “So you were spying on them? Afraid they didn’t give you all the details?”

  Becca slammed her fist on the table. Just one fist this time. “That was for the greater good. Not that you’d care about that.”

  “So you’re above the law when it suits your needs, but when I bend a few rules to help someone, I’m Scottsville’s Most Wanted?”

  Becca glowered, but I continued before she could argue. “This is for the greater good. You know we can’t let Mark keep that key. I’m not going to ask you to pick locks or climb through windows.”

  “What are you going to ask me to do?”

  “Pardon?”

  Now Becca leaned forward, hands clasped. Bet she saw that on some cop show. “I don’t think you came to me just for help with a job. What’s in this for you?”

  I waited for her to answer her own question. When she didn’t, I exploded. “Immunity, okay? I don’t want you to turn me in. You know that’s what I want.”

  “Yeah, but I wanted to hear you say it.” Becca shook her head. “Untouchable Wilderson. Nothing ever sticks to him.”

  “If it helps, consider this community service.”

  Becca nodded. I could see the wheels turning in her head. “Okay, Wilderson. It’s a deal. If we get the key back, you walk on this one. Just this one, and if we get the key back. If not, I’m bringing you in. And don’t expect a pass for any other jobs you take on after this.”

  “Deal.”

  “I also have a couple of conditions.”

  I sighed. Of course she did. “What?”

  “First, no stealing. None. Not while we work . . . together.” She looked like she was going to throw up. “I’m not getting tangled up in one of your dirty schemes.”

  “I don’t steal. I retrieve.”

  “None of that either, then. Just the key. You have my permission to grab that as long as you hand it over to me.”

  I shook my head. “Just the key? Are you crazy? Mark’s out there with a key that opens any locker in the school. He’s not going to wait around to use it. I’m going to get flooded with clients the minute I set foot in school, and you’re telling me that I can’t help them while we do this?”

  Becca folded her arms. “No deal, no help.”

  I simmered. I needed her help. “Fine. Deal. What else?”

  “You run everything you plan to do past me. You don’t pick up a penny in the cafeteria before I hear about it.”

  She had me, and she knew it. “You’re annoying, you know that?”

  Becca glared at me. I stuck out my wrist. “Want me to wear a tracking bracelet too?”

  “Thought about it. They’re too expensive.” Becca smirked. “I’m excited now. I get to see the great Jeremy Wilderson in action and learn all his tricks. I’ll know what evidence to look for next time I investigate one of your heists.”

  I revived the wide-eyed look of innocence. “How do you know I haven’t seen the light and mended my wicked ways?”

  “You can put away the sappy face. I know you too well.”

  “Ooh, really?” I leaned forward.

  “Well enough to know that believing you’ll stop stealing is like believing a fox will stop raiding chicken coops.”

  “You think I’m a fox? I’ve gotta say, I’m flattered. Was that you checking me out at our last track meet?”

  Becca rolled her eyes. “Just lay out this plan you’ve cooked up.”

  So I did.

  I CAME HOME THAT NIGHT exhausted. I’d thought my plan was brilliant, but Becca had found the need to criticize every tiny part of it, peppering the whole conversation with name-calling. “Petty thief.” “Burglar.” “Criminal mastermind.” Actually, I kind of liked that last one.

  “It involves a lot of sneaking around,” Becca said once I’d finished.

  “But no stealing. It’s not like you’re above a little harmless rule-bending.”

  “This is some Olympic gymnast–caliber bending.”

  I slammed my hands down on the table, imitating Becca. “I spent the whole ride home coming up with this plan. I think it will work. But please, feel free to speak up if you think you can do better.”

  “Oh no. I think your plan will work,” Becca said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. It’s simple. Elegant. Not so many moving parts that it gets complicated, but just enough to keep Mark guessing.”

  I scrutinized (vocab word) her. She looked serious. “Then why have you been picking apart my ideas?”

  “It’s fun.”

  While I contemplated whether turning myself in to Principal McDuff would be less painful than working with Becca, she continued. “Are you sure there’s no honest way for me to get the key back?”

  “And put me in detention for the rest of my middle school career?” I added, and she smiled and nodded. “In that case,” I said, “no. We don’t have the time. Besides, what do you care? You’re not going to do anything unsavory.”

  “Being affiliated with you is unsavory. In more ways than one.” She fanned the air.

  “Really? A body-odor crack? You’re better than that, Becca.”

  It was amid the volley of insults that I took my leave. Going home wasn’t much of an improvement: Before I could make it to my room, my center of gravity flip-flopped and I found myself upside down, fingertips brushing the carpet.

  “Where have you been, Dr. Evil?” Rick swung me like a pendulum.

  “With a friend. Can you put me down now?”

  Rick shook me harder, forcing the blood to my face. “Answer honestly, my little criminal friend. Ve have vays of making you talk, and I can do this all day.”

  I pulled a chunk of lint from the carpet and stuck it to Rick’s shorts. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Picking up Dad. Had enough yet?”

  “I see spots.”

  He laughed. “Just tell me the truth, and you can get back to your death rays.”

  I closed my eyes and let my body go limp. While Rick’s torture was uncomfortable, I could have held out for longer. It’s not like I’d never been upside down before; working with grappling hooks and ropes tends to put you in some very unusual positions. But he didn’t know that.

  “Jeremy. Stop it, Jeremy. Jeremy?”

  I didn’t respond, and before long Rick gently laid me out on the floor. “Oh my gosh. Breathe.” His hands brushed my face.

  I grabbed one and bent it back. “You’re such a butthead, Rick.”

  For a second I thought he was going to kill me, his face got so red. But after he pulled his hand free, he burst out laughing. “Okay, that was a good one. You really had me there. But you have made me look silly and must pay. Rest easy for now, but I promise retaliation will be swift and deadly.”

  I laughed. Rick was a jerk, but at least he wasn’t a boring jerk. “I really was at a friend’s.”

  “No, you were at the Mills’s. And that girl is not your friend.”

  “Like you pay attention to my friends.”

  “Just watch your back, Dr. Evil, or you might find something stuck in it.” Rick flicked the lint from his shorts onto my head and retreated to the kitchen.

  I got up and went to my room to begin
fine-tuning my plans. Becca and I had talked big picture and arranged her part in getting the master key back from Mark, but I still needed to tighten up some of the nuts and bolts of my part of the job. Like what places I needed to case and when would be the best time to do it.

  In a perfect world I could watch Mark and learn what his favorite hiding places were, but I didn’t have the time. It was a good thing that Mark was a middle school student and only had a few secure locations anyone would know about. His locker. His backpack. His room at home. I could begin there.

  A smart guy like Mark would want to keep the master key super safe. In those three places the key would be close enough for him to reach it when he wanted, and parents and teachers wouldn’t snoop. If I were the thief, my last choice for a hiding place would be my locker. So that would be where I looked first.

  Why, you ask? How does that make sense? Hang on, listen a while, and you’ll get a feel for my method. If I have to explain everything to you, the story gets boring, and by this point you should know how I feel about boring. So for now all I’ll say is that I planned to outwit Mark and search the last place I’d expect the key to be.

  See, you’re catching on. I’ll make a retrieval specialist out of you yet.

  Phase one of my three-phase plan was scheduled to begin the very next day. I knew Mark wouldn’t waste a single day of his last couple of weeks in middle school, so Becca and I couldn’t sit around twiddling our thumbs. What is twiddling, by the way? No one’s ever explained that to me.

  The next day dawned, a beautiful Thursday morning. A jolt of adrenaline woke me five minutes before my alarm went off. This was it: the job I’d been waiting to do, the one that made me feel alive again. But to do it, I had to trust a straightlaced PI to do her half of the work just right when she wanted nothing more than to cheerfully toss me into eternal detention.

  Not a pleasant arrangement.

  Mom didn’t have to be at school early, so she gave me and Case a ride. During the ride Case, in a 49ers jersey, made veiled comments about how his fake Picasso was coming along; he made it sound like he was doing a project on Picasso’s painting style. I could feel my mom’s approval hanging in the air like perfumed mist.

  At school Case and I met up with Hack just inside the halls. “Hey, anything new?” he asked. “Mom’s banned me from the Internet until further notice.”

  “Yeah, about that.” I pulled three comic books out of my backpack. “Sustenance.”

  “Thanks!” Hack tucked the books into his backpack. “I don’t know how much longer I can go before I start annoying Mom just for something to do. What about you, Case?”

  “Well, the Picasso’s going well,” Case said. “I was just telling J about it.”

  “I meant do you have any comics for me, but your Picasso’s good too.” Hack adjusted his backpack.

  “Why are you doing it, anyway?” I asked. “It sounds like a lot of work, and you have to keep it hidden from your parents and your sisters.”

  “Yeah,” Hack said. “The only people who can ever see it are J and me.”

  Case shrugged. “I just want to see if I can do it.”

  More on the Picasso. The original painting is a lesser-known piece that was donated to the local art museum by some tycoon with money coming out of his Ferrari’s tailpipe. Case goes there weekly, studying brushstrokes and paint thickness. Granted, he’s not going to try to sell his copy as the real deal—he’ll be the first to admit that the paint and canvas aren’t accurate to Picasso’s time, and he’s not going to age it—but he’s working hard to make it look real. Case won’t let anyone see his work, any work, before it’s done, so I can’t tell you if he’s succeeding in this forgery.

  “Whatever,” Hack said. “Just don’t bring it to school. The snitch might bring you down.”

  Case shivered. “I don’t think she’d recognize the piece, but I don’t want to find out what she’d do if she suspected forgery. Accusing me of stealing paints was bad enough.”

  “Is it really a forgery if you aren’t trying to pass it off as the real thing?” I asked.

  “Becca Mills will say it is.” Case shuddered. “And she could make my life miserable for a long time. That girl has an unnatural knowledge about what goes on in this school.”

  “I wonder how many of J’s contacts are secretly working with her,” Hack mused. He took off his glasses and used them to scratch his head.

  My stomach heaved. I had wanted to tell my friends about the key job, even if I couldn’t include them in it. But I couldn’t tell them I was working with the snitch Becca. In their minds, I’d be a traitor to rival Benedict Arnold and Darth Vader.

  “Cricket might be,” Case said. “He doesn’t have anything to lose.”

  Cricket was a lanky guy who always wore a denim jacket, even in the summer. He was a professional informant; he knew everything that went on in the school, from honest business to under-the-table dealings. A good person to go to for a little extra information on a mark or a client. But he stayed honest. He might skulk a little, but he’d never do anything sketchy enough to attract Becca’s attention. And although he knew about everyone else’s closet skeletons, he had none of his own.

  “Nothing to gain, either,” Hack said. “He’s just below her radar; he’ll want to keep it that way. No, my guess is Tomboy Tate. You know how girls like to stick together.” He put his glasses, with a fresh thumbprint, back on.

  Case’s jaw dropped. “Tomboy Tate’s a girl?”

  “Dude, you knew that!” I said.

  “No, I didn’t.” Case pulled a pencil out of his pocket and stuck it behind his ear. “She’s your contact, J. I’ve only heard you talk about meeting ‘Tate’ for intel on your marks. I’ve never met her. And you call her Tomboy.”

  Hack laughed. “ ‘Tomboy’ means a girl, genius. And you’ve met her.”

  “When?”

  “Back in February. Remember that snow day when a girl came over and told Jeremy the school’s doors were only going to be unlocked for the next half hour, so if he had anything to retrieve, he’d better get moving?”

  Case’s eyes bugged. “That was Tate?”

  “Yeah!”

  “She’s cute! I should . . . give her a call or something.” Case nudged me. “What do you think?”

  “About Tate? Go for it, but I’m warning you, the last guy who asked her out got punched in the stomach.”

  “Huh.” Case frowned, then shook his head. “I’ll be fine. No, I’m talking about the snitch. Do you think she’s compromised some of your contacts?”

  I faked a laugh. “If she had, I’d know.”

  “I suppose that’s true. They’d have spontaneously grown devil horns.” As I rubbed my forehead, feeling conspicuous, Case led us to homeroom. “She’s an evil little—what the . . . ?”

  A small crowd waited outside the door, made up of our classmates in the sixth grade and a number of seventh graders. My stomach heaved again; I immediately regretted drinking orange juice with breakfast. Mark had already started.

  Case and Hack, however, didn’t know that. “Whose birthday is it?” Hack said, pushing past people. “I didn’t know someone ordered a party.”

  Case nudged his way past too, keeping his gloved hands tucked against his chest.

  As soon as I tried to pass, though, kids grabbed my elbows and I was blasted with noise as everyone talked over one another.

  “My French book—”

  “My sweatshirt—”

  “My gym uniform—”

  “Gone, just like that.”

  “Hey, people, leave him alone,” Hack called, but they didn’t hear him.

  It took three whole minutes of waving my hands before I managed to calm everyone down. “Okay, listen to me.” I pulled out a pencil and a sheet of notebook paper. “Pass this around. Write down your name and what was taken. Whoa, one at a time!” The paper circulated, crumpling in the crowd’s haste to each be the next person served.

  “What was that
about?” Case asked after the crowd scattered.

  I peeked around, acting like I was making sure I was out of Becca’s or a teacher’s earshot, while really trying to come up with a good excuse that didn’t involve explaining my temporary alliance with the school’s most notorious, possibly demonic detective. “What was what about?”

  Okay, not my most clever response, but is lying to your friends ever easy?

  “You never have this much business,” Case said. “Especially this early in the day. What’s going on?”

  “Must be a crime wave or something. Don’t worry; I’m on it.” I smiled.

  “This is bad,” Hack said, taking the list. “I can’t have a virus ready by second period, but I might be able to take control of Mr. Gumby’s computer remotely. While he’s dealing with it, you can sneak out and get a start tracking down all these things.”

  Case nodded. “I can run interference during third period. You can skip that too. Use your new hall pass. With lunch, that’s three straight periods of free retrieval time.”

  I tried not to squirm as I remembered my promise to Becca not to retrieve anything but the key. I took the list from Hack and looked it over. “Thanks, guys, but not today. I don’t even know who the thief is.” Another lie from a lying liar who lies to his best friends.

  “Are you sure?” Hack said. “This is just like that guy back in December. Thieves who go for quantity over quality—”

  “Are going to sell everything, I know. And soon.” My rib cage seemed to be shrinking and squeezing everything up my throat. “I’ll stop the thief and get everything back. But right now, the best thing for me to do is analyze who was stolen from and where their lockers are. Look for a pattern. Okay?”

  I looked Case in the eyes and refused to break first. Maintaining eye contact looks honest, hides a lie.

  Case glanced away. “Okay.” Then he frowned and scratched his head. Hack chewed his lip.

  That trick about keeping eye contact when lying? Yeah, they know it too.

  I smiled, but I felt like throwing up as I went inside the room and sat down. When all this was over, I’d make it up to them. I’d tell them everything. Well, almost everything. Becca would be too hard to explain.