Font Size:  

I found him in the driver’s side mirror reflection first. Then he rolled down his window and waved, smiling. He was clean now. His long blond hair was brushed back and swept up into a black hair clip. He winked at me. “Didn’t I just see you?”

Gabriel got in on the passenger side. I hopped in behind Luke. The moment we were inside, Luke took off.

Gabriel sat back, slumped against the door. He breathed out heavily. “Geez. Motherfucker needs to be in jail.”

“Not yet,” Luke said. He drove down the lane, taking a winding route between the trees surrounding us. “Soon, though. But first, he’s our weakest link. Kota says they’re working on a plan. McCoy and Hendricks seems to have different dirt on each other. We’re looking for Mr. Hendricks’s dirt. In the meantime, we’re following McCoy’s every move. So far he doesn’t do a lot but he’s been on the move lately.”

“Why is he coming here?” Gabriel asked.

“Don’t know,” Luke said. “That’s what they want to find out. It might be like the others. He’s been sent to find out what you’re doing. We just didn’t want him finding Sang here.”

“Now what?” Gabriel asked.

Luke slowed the car a bit as he looked into the rearview mirror, angling it so he could look at me. I smiled a little, trying to show I was fine, but my heart was racing a mile a minute. I wanted answers, too, but I didn’t know where to go for them. We’d overheard Mr. McCoy talking to Principal Hendricks, and ever since then, we’d kept our distance from the principal and he hadn’t called me down to the office. There was a discussion to try to find out how much Mr. McCoy might have told Mr. Hendricks, but we hadn’t gotten the opportunity, especially when the principal never called me into his office anymore.

“There’s always someone chasing his tail now,” Luke said. “Only less obvious so they’re not caught. So we’ll see how long he stays looking at your place and if he’ll lose interest. He might be under orders from Mr. Hendricks. That’s hard to tell, though, because since that night, Mr. McCoy operates alone, without talking to Mr. Hendricks at all.”

Ever since I’d overheard Mr. McCoy at the school dance, talking in the shadows with Mr. Hendricks, I’d been going over what I’d heard. They’d sounded like enemies, and yet they were working together. They were making veiled threats against each other. They thought the Academy team was their common enemy, and it forced them to work together.

That reminded me of Mr. Hendricks and the superintendent. Neither of them got along like friends. So why work together?

“Who does he talk to?” I asked. “Does Mr. McCoy interact with anyone else?”

“I don’t know,” Luke said. He turned the car onto a busier road, and started heading north. “I think I heard Mr. Morris’s name at some point.”

“Maybe we should talk to him,” I said.

Luke shook his head. “Nope. I’m supposed to take you all somewhere else other than around where Mr. McCoy might show up.”

I wanted to press him, but it seemed like the best chance for me to talk to Mr. Morris might not be outside of school. I had class with him. Maybe I could find out then.

“Right now, we’ve got other things to do,” Gabriel said.

“Your birthday?” Luke asked.

Gabriel sliced his hand through the air. “Besides that. I mean about Sang wanting in the Academy.”

Luke’s head turned sharply to look at him, his hands releasing the wheel for a moment. He caught it just before the car started to drift to the right. “Does she want in?” he asked. He coughed and then looked in the rearview. “Sorry, I mean, you really want in?”

“Yeah,” I said. I caught Gabriel’s eye, questioning why he was bringing Luke into this. I wasn’t ready to battle Luke yet. Luke didn’t want me to join because he was worried I’d join another team. “I mean, shouldn’t I? I already help out. Wouldn’t it be a good thing if I joined?”

Luke pulled into the empty parking lot of a run-down café. He turned in his seat so he could face Gabriel and me. “Listen, I heard North talking on his phone the other day about you joining the team.”

I perked up. “What’d he say?”

“He was talking to this guy. I sort of know him. He and his team don’t live too far out of Charleston. North had been on a job with him and was trying to fill him in on details, but in the meantime, the guy asked how it was going getting our girl on the team. So he knew about you. North was vague about the details, but asked a few questions.”

“What the fuck?” Gabriel asked. “He’s just going to blab about her to anyone? What if he told the rest of the Academy? What if they looked in on her?” Gabriel sat back and groaned. “Jeez. What happened to not talking about her much?”

“Hang on,” Luke said. “I don’t think this guy will talk to the other groups. From their conversation, it sounded like they’d talked about this in depth before. I think this other guy has a girl on his team.”

“A couple team?” Gabriel asked.

“No, there’s other guys on the team. At least two, maybe a third.”

This seemed to spark Gabriel’s interest. I eagerly sat on the edge of my seat, waiting for confirmation, one way or another. “Does having other people on the team make a difference?” I asked.

“Does if there’s a girl,” Gabriel said. He focused on Luke. “Where are they? Can we go talk to them?”

“You want to?” Luke asked.

“North’s talking to him. He’s telling them about our business. If North thinks he’s okay, then we should be able to talk to them. Why didn’t he say anything before?”

“He’s been keeping a lot of secrets lately,” Luke said quietly.

I’d noticed North had been quiet for the last couple of weeks. I thought maybe he was simply tired. Football was starting to gear up for some final games before playoffs, plus he was working a lot of extra hours at the diner. He often took short naps, and I’d find him on Kota’s couch passed out for a few minutes before he got up to go to work.

We exchanged looks. I probably should have disagreed with Gabriel’s idea, but I couldn’t help it. Curiosity won over. Without a word, we all nodded at the same time. We wanted to know.

Luke turned the car back on, and turned the wheel. “Good,” he said. “Glad we’re all agreed. Let’s go.”

THE THREE AMIGOS DISCOVER

Gabriel got directions to the house by asking covert questions to someone else in the Academy. He said he was asking because he needed a favor from one of the guys.

The house was brick, two story, and surrounded by live oak trees in a wide circle around the property, making the big house look cozy at first. As we got closer, I realized the house was larger than it seemed, more like an estate. The structure was a good distance from the nearest neighbor, and we couldn’t see anyone from the yard due to the woods surrounding the property.

The estate itself looked dingy. The white paint was old. There was ivy growing over part of it, although some of the ivy had died and all that was left were branches and a few dead leaves sticking to the walls. A heavy amount of fall leaves covered the lawn.

“Creepy,” Luke said as he drove slowly along the gravel lane toward the house.

“When the zombie apocalypse happens,” Gabriel said, “this is the last place I want to be. Zombies would be coming out of the woods all the time. You can’t see shit.”

“I’m hoping for dino-pocalypse, personally,” Luke said. “Less smelly.”

“More smell,” Gabriel said. “Dinosaur poop probably smells.”

“I can stand poop over rotting dead bodies trying to eat my brain.”

I giggled. It eased my fear a little bit. I imagined I wouldn’t want to come here in the dark, though.

“How do we know they’re even here?” Gabriel asked.

“It’s the weekend,” Luke said. He pulled up along the drive close to the door and parked there. There was a garage off to the side, with several cars parked in the driveway. “And it looks like they’re

home.”

There weren’t any signs of life in the windows. For a Sunday afternoon, there wasn’t much activity going on.

“Still,” Gabriel said. He opened his door, stepped out and looked around. He moved to open the door to the back seat and I climbed out to stand beside him.

“What do we do?” I asked.

“Ask what they know about keeping a girl on their team,” Gabriel said. He pointed to the front of the house. “Don’t worry. No matter what, they’re Academy. Even if they live in an old, rickety house.”

“My house is an old rickety house,” Luke said. He came around the other side of the car and started up the walkway toward the front door. “But that’s because no one kept it up and we’re fixing it. This house, no one kept up on purpose, but there’s people living here. The lawn’s covered in leaves, but the bushes haven been pruned back. The hinges on that door look new, but the paint around the window looks chipped.”

“Maybe they only know how to do a few chores,” Gabriel said, following Luke up the steps. I was close behind. “Maybe they don’t know how to repaint, but they can repair a hinge.”

“Maybe they’re older than we thought,” Luke said. “They can only do so much.”

The porch creaked badly the moment Luke stepped on it. He and I both looked for a way around the creaking by easing our weight on the wood boards, but the moment either of us put weight on a step, the noise gave us away.

“That’s done on purpose,” Luke said. He lifted his head, gazing through locks of his blond hair toward the windows. “They listen out for this.”

“Smart,” Gabriel said. “We should do that to your house.”

Luke nodded and then stepped up, creaking and all, to the front door.

He rang the doorbell in multiple ways: fast, slow, stopping, once, fast. It wasn’t the same pattern as before. Random.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
Articles you may like