Cody grabbed one of the straps of her backpack and started shaking it.
“Hey!” I said.
She turned to see what was going on. The German shepherd must have thought there were treats in the backpack, because he was shaking it hard. The pack opened up and stuff went flying out—her wallet, a hairbrush, a small ball, probably for playing with Buster. A spray can.
Alyssa and I stood up at the exact same time.
We bent down at the same time.
We both reached for the spray can.
I picked it up.
I stared at it.
It was a can of neon orange spray paint.
I looked at it, and then I looked at her.
She spent a lot of time in the neighborhood where the robberies were happening.
She talked to a lot of people in the neighborhood. I bet she noticed things too.
“You knew that house didn’t have a real security system,” I said. “You knew because I told you.”
She picked up her backpack and put her wallet, her hairbrush and the ball into it. Then she reached for the can of spray paint.
“It’s you,” I said. “You’ve been leaving those codes, haven’t you? You’re a thief.” She used to walk dogs over in Hillmount too. The graffiti had stopped there—no wonder. She was here now. I wondered how many robberies there had been in Hillmount.
I stared at her. She was so pretty, and she seemed nice. She didn’t look at all like a thief.
She was calm. She took the spray can from my hand, tucked it into her backpack and pulled the drawstring to close her pack.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Yes, you do. But I don’t get it,” I said. “You have a job with that vet. You walk all those dogs. Why are you stealing?”
Her eyes flashed. Boy, did she look mad.
“I’m not,” she said.
“Right. Let’s see what the cops say.”
“I’m not stealing,” she said.
“You’re telling them which houses to break into. It’s the same thing.”
“No, it isn’t,” she said. “It isn’t the same thing at all.”
I couldn’t believe it. She had just as good as admitted that she was involved. Maybe she wasn’t breaking into those houses, but she was working with the thieves. She was telling them where to go.
I backed away from her.
“I’m going to the cops,” I said. “You can come with me or not, it’s your choice. But I’m going to tell them what’s going on.”
She snapped her fingers.
The German shepherd went still. His ears stood straight up. His tail didn’t move. He growled at me. She had told me that Cody was a guard dog. Was he also an attack dog?
“If you go to the cops, I’ll tell them you were in on it with me,” she said.
“You know that’s not true.”
“I know it now,” she said. “But you said it yourself. The cops already suspect you. That woman knows you overheard her. I’ll tell the cops you told me what you heard. And you’re always there, first thing, getting rid of the marks, getting rid of the evidence. If that doesn’t make it look like you’re involved, I don’t know what does.”
I couldn’t believe what was happening. She could make big trouble for me. I reminded myself—again—that I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I turned to leave.
I heard her fingers snap again. Cody growled at me. Then he lunged in front of me, blocking my way.
“I don’t want to mess you up,” she said. “But I’m not kidding. If you go to the cops, I’ll make sure you end up in trouble too. That’s a promise.”
I turned slowly.
“Why are you doing this?” I said.
She bit her lip. Finally she said, “It’s my brother.”
chapter twelve
“Your brother is a thief?” I said.
Her eyes flashed again. I think she wanted to punch me, even though she was a girl and I was a lot bigger than her.
“My brother made a mistake, that’s all,” she said. “He did something stupid—he trusted the wrong person. Now he’s in prison.”
“I thought he was in the hospital.”
“He’s in a prison hospital,” she said, her voice bitter. “My brother isn’t tough. He isn’t bad. He’s gentle. He wanted to be a social worker, only now he’s in prison. It’s awful in there, especially if you’re like my brother. There are guys in there that bully you. They won’t leave you alone unless you pay them—and my brother doesn’t have any money.”
“Is that what this is all about?” I said. “You’re stealing stuff so that your brother won’t get bullied?”
“I’m not stealing anything,” she said again.
“But you’re helping them.”
“I wanted to stop. I told my brother I wasn’t going to do it anymore. That’s when they beat him up.”
Oh.
“Is that why he’s in the hospital?”
She nodded. “If I go to the cops, they’ll hurt him.”
“If you go to the cops and tell them what’s going on, they’ll protect him.”
She was shaking her head before I finished talking.
“They’ll blame my brother. They’ll say he’s the one behind it.”
“But you just said—”
“You don’t get it,” she said. “He’s the one who told me what to do.”
“Your brother?”
“I only ever spoke to him. He told me what they wanted me to do. He said if I went to the cops, they would say he was calling the shots. He’ll never get out of prison.”
“So you find places and you leave those marks to tell them which house.”
She nodded.
“But there are so many streets,” I said. “What do they do, drive around the neighborhood looking for marks?”
“I leave a sign somewhere else, to tell them which street,” she said.
“Where?”
“There’s this box,” she said. She didn’t need to say any more. I knew which box she was talking about—the utility control box. “I leave a sign there, and the next day I leave another one on whatever street it is, to tell them which house. I do a lot of other tags too, you know, so it looks like there are a lot of kids tagging.”
“And I’m always there first thing after the robbery, cleaning up the evidence,” I said.
“I call this graffiti hotline,” she said.
“Yeah, well, lucky for them that your marks are always first on my job list,” I said.
She gave me a look. “You think that’s a coincidence?”
What did she mean by that?
Oh.
“If they even suspect I talked to the cops, they’ll say my brother is the ringleader,” she said. “And he won’t give anyone up—no way. They’d kill him. There’s no way out.”
I didn’t know what to say. But I did know that what she was doing was wrong.
I took a step backward.
The German shepherd growled at me.
I looked at Alyssa. was she going to snap her fingers? Or did she have a different signal to get Cody to attack?
chapter thirteen
She raised her hand.
What would happen if I ran?
I looked at the big German shepherd. Then I turned to Alyssa.
“It’s all a mistake,” she said. “My brother never should have gotten arrested. He was just helping a guy he knew move some stuff. It turned out that the stuff was stolen. My brother didn’t know. Then the guy—his so-called friend—blamed my brother when he got caught, so he told the cops my brother was in on it. Then, once he was in prison, some other guys started giving him a hard time. I don’t want anything bad to happen to him. I want him to get out in one piece.”
I believed her. If I had a brother and he was in a jam like that, I’d want to help him. But that didn’t make what she was doing right.
“You said it yourself, Alyssa,” I said. “These
guys are dangerous. They break into people’s houses. They beat up your brother. You have to go to the cops.”
She shook her head. “No way.”
I glanced at Cody again. He still looked like he was ready to attack me. My mind raced. How was I going to get out of this?
Two little kids ran past us on their way to the swings and slides. Two more little kids chased after them. C couple of women pushing strollers followed them. Alyssa looked at them. She called Buster, picked up his leash, and then she stood there for a moment, both leashes in her hand.
“I meant what I said, Colin,” she said. “If you tell, you’ll be sorry. He’s my brother. What choice do I have?”
She turned and walked out of the park.
I didn’t know what to do. What if Alyssa told the guys she was helping that I had figured out what they were doing? What if they came looking for me? What if they beat me up?
I thought of telling my mom what had happened, but she would just make me go to the police and tell them about Alyssa. what if Alyssa carried out her threat? What if she told them that I was in on it?
Then I had another idea.
Dave Marsh was surprised when I turned up at his office.
“How’s the job going, Colin?” he said. “Is everything okay?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
I took a deep breath and told him all about the markings on the utility control box and the utility poles. I showed him my sketchbook. I told him about the graffiti hotline and how the first jobs on my work sheet were always the places that had the special markings on them. I didn’t tell him Alyssa’s name. Not at first. But I did tell him that the person who was marking the houses had been forced into it and that the person was scared.
Dave Marsh leaned back in his chair. His face was more serious than I had ever seen it. I couldn’t tell whether he believed me or not. Finally he said, “You want to help this person, is that it, Colin?”
I nodded.
“I have an idea,” I said. “But I don’t know if it’s any good.”
He didn’t interrupt me while I explained. When I had finished, he said, “I think it’s worth a try.”
I was so nervous that I thought I was going to throw up. I was sure the cops wouldn’t believe me. I think it helped that Dave Marsh was there with me. The cops listened carefully to what I said.
Finally they said, “what about the girl? Do you think she will go along with it?”
That was the biggest problem. I didn’t know what Alyssa would do.
“She’s just trying to help her brother,” I said.
I didn’t find out what happened until after it was over. The way I heard it later, one night Alyssa put a neon pink code on the utility control box to tell the thieves which street to go to next. Right after that, she did what she always did—she called the graffiti hotline. The next morning, that box was the first stop on my work sheet. I cleaned the marks off.
The night after that, Alyssa made neon orange markings on a utility pole to tell the thieves which house to go to.
But when the thieves turned up, they got a big surprise.
The police were waiting for them. They arrested them.
They arrested Ray too. Alyssa had been right about that. It was no coincidence that her markings were always first on my work order. Ray was in on it.
They also arrested Alyssa.
It made the news: Police crack car-theft and burglary ring. All of the news stories said that the police had been tipped off by a youth who was employed for the summer cleaning up graffiti. One newspaper quoted one of the arresting officers as saying that the ring wouldn’t have been broken “if it wasn’t for the sharp-eyed young man who figured out what was going on.”
“You did a good thing,” my mom told me. We were on the way to the police station together. The police wanted to ask me a few more questions.
Alyssa was there too. She was leaving as I was going in. She looked at me, but she didn’t say anything.
I saw her again when I came out of the police station. She was standing on the other side of the street.
“I’ll meet you at home,” I said to my mom. I crossed the street.
“I was really mad at you when the cops showed up at my house, Colin,” Alyssa said. “I thought you ratted me out. Then the cops told me that they knew why I had done it. They said someone told them all about my brother. That was you, wasn’t it?”
I nodded.
“They said if I helped them catch the guys, they would see what they could do to help me and my brother. After they arrested the thieves, they came and arrested me. They put handcuffs on me, Colin. And they made me walk past the thieves so that they could see that I’d been arrested too.”
“Were you scared?” I said.
“What do you think? But the cops kept their promise. My brother has been transferred to a minimum-security prison. It’s a farm. They finally listened to him. They also talked to the guy he was arrested with. They offered to make him a deal if he told the truth about my brother. I think he’s going to get out soon.”
“You did the right thing,” I said. It felt good to see her happy for a change.
“You did the right thing,” she said.
Before I told the police about Alyssa, Dave Marsh had told them that I wanted them to promise that she would be protected. The cops agreed. They said that they would make sure it didn’t look like she tipped them off because, well, she hadn’t. I was glad she had decided to cooperate with them.
“So it all worked out,” I said.
She hesitated.
“At first, I thought you were part of it,” she said. “You know, because you were always there, cleaning up the evidence. And because you were always looking at me.”
“That wasn’t why I was looking at you,” I said.
Her cheeks turned pink.
“So, now what?” she said. “I guess you’re out of a job, huh?”
It was true. Ray’s company had closed down.
“I have a job interview tomorrow,” I said.
Dave Marsh had called me with the news. “You did a good thing, Colin,” he said. “So, I got in touch with the utility company. They’re still cleaning up graffiti. They want to offer you another job, if you’re interested.”
I said I was, and I thanked him.
“What about you?” I asked Alyssa.
“Same old, same old,” she said. “walking dogs, at least until my court date. They said I’d probably get probation and community service.”
“It could be worse,” I said.
“Yeah.”
We looked at each other for a few moments.
“So I guess I’ll see you around,” I said finally.
She smiled again. It was as if the sun was coming out.
“I guess,” she said.
Norah McClintock is the author of numerous mystery novels for kids and young adults, including Bang, Tell and Snitch in the Orca Soundings series. Norah lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Other Orca Currents titles:
121 Express Monique Polak
Camp Wild Pam Withers
Chat Room Kristin Butcher
Cracked Michele Martin Bossley
Crossbow Dayle Campbell Gaetz
Daredevil Club Pam Withers
Dog Walker Karen Spafford-Fitz
Finding Elmo Monique Polak
Flower Power Ann Walsh
Horse Power Ann Walsh
Hypnotized Don Trembath
Laggan Lard Butts Eric Walters
Manga Touch Jacqueline Pearce
Mirror Image K.L. Denman
Pigboy Vicki Grant
Queen of the Toilet Bowl Frieda Wishinsky
Rebel’s Tag K.L. Denman
See No Evil Diane Young
Sewer Rats Sigmund Brouwer
The Shade K.L. Denman
Splat! Eric Walters
Spoiled Rotten Dayle Campbell Gaetz
Sudden Impact Lesley Choyce
Swiped M
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Wired Sigmund Brouwer
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