The Fourth Stall Part III

by Chris Rylander

He moved closer to me, so close that his shadow covered my face in darkness. His stare burned right through my head and probably set the grass behind me on fire. I tried to swallow, but my body didn’t seem to be functioning anymore.

  “You’re going to help me,” he said quietly. “Because if anything happens to my sister, then I won’t have any reason to let you live anymore, will I? I’ll have nothing left to lose. Not even the state penitentiary will deter me from exacting my revenge on anybody and everybody who could have stopped bad things from happening to my sister. Besides, I hope you realize that when the Suits finally sort all this out, it’s going to lead right back to you guys anyway. Are you really that sure this Jimmy kid won’t squeal?”

  I glanced over at Vince. Staples made a compelling argument. That much was for sure. Plus, deep down I knew it really was the right thing to do. But not just for his sister—for all the kids involved. I had been lying to myself all this time. There was no retiring from this. Me trying to argue any further would be like a Great White shark trying to become a vegetarian. Fixing problems is what I do. It’s in my bones, my DNA.

  Besides, if I didn’t help, then Staples was going to turn me inside out like a reversible sweatshirt. That by itself kind of made it an easy decision.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do this.”

  “I was wondering when you’d finally give in,” Vince said. “I think you know we should have never allowed this to happen in the first place. We should have just told Jimmy no.”

  “Great!” Staples said, suddenly smiling. Then he punched my arm to show we were all good or something. “So where do we start?”

  I rubbed my shoulder wondering why some kids learned to communicate with punching instead of words like the rest of us.

  “Well, the next step is to arrange another meeting with Jimmy Two-Tone to see exactly what is going on here and why Thief Valley is even involved. But we need to get to Jimmy someplace other than in the East Wing bathroom. Someplace he’ll be more exposed and vulnerable and won’t have Mitch and Justin there for protection. And especially someplace where I know the Suits won’t be watching.”

  The next day, which was a Monday, I did my best to act normal and keep my distance from Jimmy’s office. The last thing I needed was to attract even more attention from the Suits. This was going to be hard enough as it was to resolve without drawing attention. But I’d deal with that problem later. First things first, and the first thing was to get to Jimmy.

  After school Vince and I went home just like on any other day. Principal Dickerson followed me home in his gray sedan just like on any other day. Once home all I had to do was wait.

  The phone call came at 6:12 p.m. CST.

  “Yeah?” I answered.

  “He’s with his parents at this Italian restaurant called Michael’s,” Staples said. “I’ll be there to get you in five. Be ready.” He hung up.

  We’d given Staples the job of keeping track of where Jimmy went after school. Then as soon as he was someplace in public, either with his parents or alone, we’d make our move. We needed Staples for this job since he was the only one of us with a car.

  I told my parents I was going to Vince’s and then went outside to meet up with Staples.

  The drive to the restaurant took forever. I needed to catch Jimmy there before they left. It was too risky trying to confront him at his house because he could easily just not let me inside. But at a restaurant I could get right next to him and he’d have nowhere to run or hide.

  Staples pulled up in front of Michael’s Italian Ristorante after about a fifteen-minute drive. I was just hoping it wasn’t too late.

  “I’ll be waiting down the street. Don’t mess this up,” Staples said with a menacing look.

  I entered the restaurant at 6:34 p.m. CST.

  Two men stood in the corner wearing tuxedos and playing string instruments slowly and softly like we were in some old-school Italian village. It didn’t seem like a super nice or expensive restaurant in spite of the tuxedoed musicians, but it was apparently pretty popular, given how many tables were filled. The place had a relaxing charm about it that I liked.

  It didn’t take long to find Jimmy and his parents, since the place wasn’t very big. They were seated in a red booth along the far wall—his parents seated on one side, Jimmy on the other. In the dim light they looked just like any other family out to enjoy a nice dinner. No one would suspect that at that table sat one of the most conniving kids ever born and the person apparently solely responsible for starting some sort of war between two schools that had escalated to the point where swimming pools were filled with blood, guts, and body parts (fake, but still).

  “Can I help you?” the host asked. She was a cute teenager with short brown hair.

  “I’m meeting someone,” I said, pointing toward the back booth.

  “Oh, okay, then,” she said with a smile, and then stepped aside.

  I made my way back toward their table. They still had food on their plates; I’d made it with time to spare. A few steps away I took a deep breath.

  “Hey, Jimmy!” I said as I walked up to them.

  Jimmy’s eyes grew larger than the giant meatballs sitting on his plate. He dropped his fork. I could see the wheels turning inside his head.

  “Oh, Jimmy,” cooed his blue-eyed mom, “is this a little friend of yours from school?”

  Jimmy shook his head and was about to say something, but I beat him to the punch.

  “Yeah! We’re partners in crime, aren’t we, Jimmy?” I said. “I came to discuss our next crime . . . uh, I mean, discuss some business.”

  “Partners in crime?” his brown-eyed dad said, not sure if I was joking.

  “He’s only kidding, Dad,” Jimmy said quickly. “Could we, like, sit alone for a second?”

  His mom looked uncertain.

  “You know, Mom, middle-school stuff!” Jimmy said.

  I saw his dad motion toward his mom that they should move.

  “Oh, okay, Mom and Dad will go sit at the bar for a little bit,” she said.

  “Dad is glad you’re making friends, Jimmy,” his dad said.

  I marveled at the fact that his parents also did that weird refer-to-themselves-by-their-own-names thing—something Vince told me was called speaking in the third person. Which made no sense since it only involved one person, but whatever. The point is this: his whole family was nuts.

  Jimmy’s mom and dad got up and took their plates of food and drinks to the small bar at the front of the restaurant. Then it was just Jimmy, me, a half-eaten plate of spaghetti and meatballs, and a candle.

  I sat down across from Jimmy Two-Tone and folded my hands in front of me. I started by just staring at him without blinking. Something I’d learned from watching lots of mobster movies and TV shows about training dogs: unflinching eye contact shows your dominance. I tried my best not to blink or smile or even move as I stared Jimmy down in the booth across from me.

  He shifted in his seat several times as he tried to match my stare, but he was clearly uncomfortable. Nervous, even. Then he broke eye contact first, losing the battle of dominance. He stuck his fork in his spaghetti and seemed to collect himself a little bit. He took a huge bite that left red lines of sauce all over his cheeks.

  “What do you want, guy? Jimmy’s trying to enjoy a nice dinner with his family,” he said with his mouth still full, spraying bits of meatball and noodles and sauce all over the white paper covering the table.

  He was much less professional at the dinner table than when doing business.

  I noticed that there were crayons lying near his plate. I’d seen this before at other restaurants. Sometimes they had huge sheets of white paper instead of normal tablecloths and then they gave your table crayons so you could draw on it. I noticed a few drawings that Jimmy had apparently done as well as a few games of hangman they’d apparently played as a family.

  Jimmy’s drawings were of a dog chewing on a ball and an eyeball floating in space with a small sti
ckman looking up at it. And one drawing was of a cat sitting in a window. They were surprisingly good drawings.

  Jimmy noticed me looking at them, and he shifted his plate so that most of the drawings were covered.

  “Jimmy,” I said finally, having let enough silence sit between us to show off my power over him, “when you get into a business like this and you’re not totally honest with people, bad things tend to happen.”

  Jimmy looked at me and then swallowed before shoving more noodles into his mouth and chewing again.

  “What do you mean by that, bro?” he asked, spraying more bits of food onto the table again. “Jimmy doesn’t like riddles. Jimmy prefers, like, straight-up talking, dude.”

  I reached over and grabbed his plate and slid it across the table and just out of his reach. He looked at me like he wanted to jab his fork into my hand. I picked up a gray crayon and a black crayon.

  “This is what I mean,” I said.

  I drew a black cat like the one in his drawing—mine wasn’t nearly as good, but it looked enough like his that I’m sure he would get the point. Then with the gray crayon I drew a huge knife sticking out of the cat’s back. If there’d have been a red crayon, I’d have drawn some blood for effect.

  “Hey, bud, are you threatening Jimmy’s cat? ’Cause that ain’t cool, man, if you are,” Jimmy said, looking nervous. “Jimmy and his cat don’t like threats, guy.”

  “No, not me, Jimmy. The people you’re making back-alley deals with to mess up our school! I don’t have anything against you or your cat, aside from you giving this business a dirty name, but that’s beside the point. What I’m trying to say is when you make back-alley deals and double-cross people, bad things will happen.”

  With that I circled the picture I’d drawn.

  “Look, friend, Jimmy doesn’t know what you’re talking about! Why would you stab Jimmy’s cat, Scarface, with that, like, jumbo sword?”

  Of course his cat’s name was Scarface. That was too obvious. Only a Scarface fan would think to do something like that. I bet that like 90 percent of Scarface fans had at least one pet named Tony or Scarface.

  “This is what I’m talking about,” I said.

  I took out my phone and set it on the table. I pressed Play on the video clip Tyrell had forwarded me. He’d edited it so first you see the Swimming Pool Bloodbath Massacre in all its gory glory, then it cuts to two kids sneaking around near some bushes behind the school with bags of supplies that could be used to create a fake cannibal holocaust, then it cuts to them clearly being handed cash-size envelopes from Jimmy under a streetlight with the school clearly visible in the background. All were time-stamped with the same date and within a few hours of each other.

  “So, want to tell me why you’re making back-alley deals with kids from Thief Valley? Because I really need to know. I hand you my business and then you apparently pay to purposefully sabotage it and yourself? It doesn’t make any sense, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy buried his face in his hands and shook his head.

  “Look,” he said, “Jimmy wasn’t trying to sabotage his own business, guy. He was trying to help it.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Look, friend, right after you handed the business over to me, I was approached by this huge dude who claimed to be representing a rival business owner over at Thief Valley Elementary. Some guy named Ken-Co apparently has an operation pretty similar up there at TV. Ever heard of him?”

  I shook my head. This was news to me. I was actually shocked. I had no idea that there was another business just like mine less than fifteen miles away.

  “Well,” Jimmy continued, “he’s apparently a pretty big deal over there. Makes this business look like a game of hopscotch. So they make Jimmy this offer he can’t refuse, right, dude? I mean, they say they’ll cause some problems and drum up some business for me in exchange for a small cut of the profits. And Jimmy is thinking, Well, what better way to make a splash with this new business than to show kids right away what Jimmy is capable of, right?”

  I just looked at him and waited.

  “Anyway, as you know, guy, this is a volume-based business. It’s all about the numbers you can churn through. So Jimmy figures this deal is perfect. It’s more money all around—more for you and Vince, more for this Ken-Co guy, and more for Jimmy. Win-win-win. But that’s when things start to go wrong. At first it works like a charm, but then this Ken-Co guy starts doing too much. The problems he’s creating are more than Jimmy can handle. Pretty soon Jimmy owes this guy money. Mac, I just . . . I can’t pay my debts. Jimmy’s in deep now. It just got so out of hand. I don’t know why he double-crossed me like this. I really don’t.”

  I shook my head. “How deep are you in?”

  “Close to four grand,” Jimmy said.

  My head about smashed into the table. Four thousand dollars? That was insane! How could he have gotten that behind?

  “You really think that if I don’t pay him back soon, he’ll, like, stab Scarface with some giant momma-jamma sword?” he said, glancing nervously at my drawing.

  “Yeah, exactly like that,” I said.

  “Dude,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Guy,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “Why didn’t you come to me sooner?” I said.

  “Because I knew you wanted to be retired. And, well, Jimmy was kind of embarrassed. Your reputation is a lot to live up to, bro.”

  I shook my head and sighed.

  “Tell me more about this Ken-Co,” I said.

  “Well, Jimmy never really met the guy before. I only met his assistant, but Jimmy heard he’s a pretty ruthless guy. I guess he runs a pretty good business. But I don’t think he’s going to stop sabotaging our school anytime soon.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw his parents get up and start heading this way.

  “All right, Jimmy, I’ll be in touch soon,” I said, and then got up to leave.

  “Are you going to help me?”

  “We’ll see,” I said, and then walked past his parents and out the door.

  Once outside the restaurant I had to restrain myself from picking up this little dog that some guy was walking and punting it right through the restaurant window. Okay, okay, I’d never actually hurt a dog—I loved dogs—but being that angry can put crazy thoughts into people’s heads. I mean, he owed over four thousand dollars? How was that even possible to owe someone that much in just a few weeks? And how was I ever going to find a way to fix this?

  The next evening Vince, Staples, and I went to play miniature golf. It was another one of Staples’s “brownie point” outings. I wasn’t sure where the phrase “brownie points” came from, but I was starting to pretty much hate it. Because in our case it didn’t involve scoring any points or eating any brownies. For us it simply meant getting slugged in the limbs a lot. Well, okay, maybe Staples had stopped doing that as much now that he knew his sister was mixed up in some sort of school war.

  And so, yeah, maybe he wasn’t quite the same bloodthirsty psycho he had been a year ago, but he was still plenty mean when he wanted to be. And being around him made me nervous. I mean, could anyone blame me if I never would truly trust the guy again?

  “So I think the next step is that I should meet up with this Ken-Co kid to see if we can make a bargain with him somehow. I mean, paying him back in full will be basically impossible.” I hit my ball toward this ramp that would send it soaring over a mini waterfall. It was a pretty cool mini-golf course that Staples had taken us to; I’d give him that much.

  “Wait, you have enough to cover it, don’t you?” Staples said as he watched my ball sail not only over the waterfall but also right over the hole and bounce off some rocks that were technically out of bounds. “I mean, what happened to all your cash? You guys used to be loaded.”

  I glanced at Vince, who was pretending to study the hole we were on.

  Our dwindling cash supply was a touchy subject with him. Not because he
was greedy or obsessed with money, necessarily. He was just overly cautious. It stressed him out anytime our cash dropped under three thousand dollars because a good business always has a lot of disposable cash or something like that. I usually zoned out when Vince would get into one of his financial mumbo-jumbo lectures.

  “We’ve spent most of it,” I said. “Some cleaning up the mess last year, some just for fun over the summer, and some paying out old debts to longtime employees like Joe and Tyrell. Stuff like that. Plus, the Cubs are terrible again, so the Game Fund just didn’t feel worth keeping anymore. And yeah, we’ve been getting a cut from Jimmy, but a cut is still just a cut. Fifteen percent does not equal four grand, not even in the best of years, and this has only been, what, like a month, maybe? How much money do we have left, anyway, Vince?”

  I had a general idea, but Vince was our money guy so he’d know for sure.

  “Last I checked we were down to $1612.86 in all of our Funds combined,” Vince said. “Those are all of our liquid assets.”

  “That’s it?” Staples said as he drained his second putt into the cup.

  “Hey, it goes faster than you realize when there’s not as much money coming in,” I said, scooping my ball out of the hole after logging a six.

  Staples just shook his head in disbelief. I could see why he was shocked. Way back when he’d stolen all of our Funds, there’d been over six grand all combined. We were worth just a fraction of what we used to be.

  “Where does that leave us?” Staples asked.

  “I think I’ll have to go pay this Ken-Co a visit. To see if we can work out some sort of deal or payment plan or something. I mean, he runs a pretty good business from the sound of it, so I’m sure he’s a reasonable dude. Besides, he’s only a fourth or fifth grader, supposedly.”

  “I still can’t believe we’re digging Jimmy out of this pro bono,” Vince said.

  “Well, it’s more about helping Staples and all the other kids than it is helping Jimmy, but I know what you mean. It does feel like he’s getting a free ride here, doesn’t it? We’ll probably have to neutralize him somehow once this is all over.”