The Fourth Stall

by Chris Rylander

  I unfolded the piece of paper; on it was a simple message, handwritten: Friends of rats end up dead. Give us Fred by the end of tomorrow or you’ll be roadkill! Vince showed up just as I finished reading the note.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “It’s nothing,” I said as I tossed the note into my locker and slammed it shut. I decided not to tell anybody—they’d just panic. The last thing I needed was Joe and Vince panicking. Besides, there was no way I was going to just hand over Fred. Not now. We were way past that.

  “Oh,” Vince said.

  “What? No joke?”

  He shrugged. “Nah, I’m not really in the mood for jokes.”

  Something was up. Vince was almost always in the mood for jokes. The longest he ever went without making a joke was after his dad died. That was about four years ago. For two weeks afterward he and I just hung out in the old trailer park playground. We didn’t really do much—we just sat on the swings next to each other and I pretended not to notice that Vince was crying. I don’t think he was ever embarrassed about it. I think he was just happy to have me there and that was good enough for me.

  I remember feeling helpless. Here I was the kid who had the answer to everybody’s problems, but I had no answer for Vince. There was no trick I could pull off that would bring my best friend’s dad back. I’d have given up anything, but it just wasn’t possible. Eventually Vince had sort of found a way to move on. But it still bothers me to this day that I hadn’t been able to do more for him when he needed it most.

  “What’s wrong, Vince?” I asked.

  “Oh, nothing, just a bad day at school,” he said.

  I nodded, but I wasn’t sure I believed him. He’s too smart to have bad days at school. In fact, I’m pretty sure he’s smarter than every teacher he’s had. But I let it go. Everybody was allowed to be in a bad mood once in a while.

  “Say, I’m going to head to the office after school to go over some numbers, so you guys can head out without me. I’ll still see you tonight, though, for the game,” Vince said.

  “Sure thing,” I said. Vince had never spent much time at the office alone before. I was starting to get a little concerned. I guess the Cubs actually being good was affecting him more than I’d thought.

  • • •

  That night Vince and Joe came over to hang out and discuss some regular business matters. Joe left when Vince and I switched the TV to the Cubs game at seven.

  “Baseball is so boring. How can you stand to watch it all the time?” Joe said as he got up to leave.

  “What?” I said. “Not if you know what you’re watching, it isn’t. Baseball is the thinking person’s sport.”

  “Plus, I mean, it’s the Cubs,” said Vince.

  He looked at Joe with concern. Like a doctor might look at a patient with a massive head injury. Joe laughed and called us crazy one more time before leaving.

  “All right, Vince, I’ve got a good one for you,” I said as the first inning got underway.

  “Give me your best shot, Trivia Master,” Vince said sarcastically.

  It was a relief to see that humorous glow back in his eyes. I guess whatever he’d done back at the office after school had cheered him up.

  “Okay, then, in nineteen thirty which Cub had one of the greatest offensive seasons in baseball history with fifty-six homers and one hundred ninety-one RBI?”

  “Whew, that is a tough one . . . but, uh, you’ll have to do a little better next time, Mac. The answer is Hack Wilson.”

  “Whatever, you cheater,” I said.

  “Right, how can I cheat at trivia? I can’t help it if my brain just happens to hold more Cubs knowledge because I’m a bigger fan than you.”

  I grinned and threw a handful of popcorn at him.

  After a few minutes Vince’s face got really serious.

  “What is it, Vince?”

  “Mac, you do realize that we’re not going to be able to afford to go to the game at this rate, right?” Vince said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mac! You just promised those bullies almost two hundred dollars for beating up Willis. That’s a lot of cash, my friend. We don’t really have the money for payouts like that.” He sounded as worried as I’d heard him in years. And maybe even a little angry.

  “We’ll be okay. Don’t worry, once we get this Staples thing taken care of, then we’ll just work extra hard to make up for it,” I said.

  If Vince was telling me we wouldn’t have enough, then that was probably true. Vince was almost never wrong when it came to money. Then again, he was also overly cautious when it came to our finances.

  “Do we really have to pay everybody so much? They probably would have worked for less,” Vince said.

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll try to be more careful. Sorry.”

  “I just think I’d snap if the Cubs make it this year and we miss out on the game. Plus, it’s not like these kids need our money all that bad. These are bullies, Mac. They steal other kids’ lunch money. I just think that if we’re going to blow our chance to go to a Cubs World Series game then it should be for a better cause.”

  “Jeez, Vince, I said I was sorry, okay? Don’t you think I know that? I’m just doing what I think is necessary to save our business. Do you have a better idea?” I kind of regretted my tone as soon as the words left my mouth. This was getting too close to a fight for me.

  “No, I guess not. I just think sometimes you forget what it’s like to not have everything you want all the time,” Vince said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “Nothing, forget it,” Vince said.

  I hesitated. Had he been referring to the fact that my dad is still around? Or that my family moved out of the trailer park and lives in a house now? If so, where the heck did that come from? He knows that everything I have is his, too. We share everything.

  “This is just the worst time ever for Staples to suddenly show up,” I finally said.

  Vince agreed with a nod and we left it at that. We rarely argued about money, but the Cubs game was changing things a bit.

  The Cubs won that night, advancing to the National League Championship Series for the first time in over ten years. They just needed to win four of their next seven games and they’d make it to the World Series for the first time in basically forever. The good news was that they’d dominated their next opponent, the Phillies, all season long; the bad news was that the tickets weren’t getting any cheaper. We needed extra money now more than ever before.

  After the game Vince and I looked at each other and nodded. We didn’t even have to say it. Going to this game was truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and we couldn’t let it pass. We really needed to take out Staples, and fast.

  The next morning (which was Thursday, in case you’re keeping track), we all gathered in the bathroom at first recess. Me, Vince, Joe, Fred, Brady, and the nine newly hired bullies. The bathroom got kind of hot and smelly with that many kids all grouped in there. We tried to ignore the smell as I congratulated them on their successful hit. Barnaby Willis hadn’t even shown up to school that day. PrepSchool said word was he had to transfer to a new school due to some of the absurdly vulgar emails iBully had sent to the school board from Barnaby Willis’s email account, but coming from her, I had no idea if I could believe that.

  I gave them their well-earned twenty dollars and then started discussing phase two of the plan to take down Staples’s operation at my school.

  I went over the names of all the bookies that I had discovered as well as where they were normally stationed. I showed the bullies school photos from the year before and gave them instructions to patrol the area around their assigned bookie, making sure that no kid got near enough to place another bet. If the kids still tried to get by, then the bullies were supposed to convince them that it was not a good idea.

  “What do you mean convince them?” Nubby asked. “Like with words or what?”

  “Make them not want to
place another bet,” I said.

  “How do we do that?” Nubby asked.

  “By whatever means necessary, if you know what I mean. Make them an offer they can’t refuse,” I said. I heard someone say that in a movie once. It’s one of my favorite phrases.

  “What do you mean by that?” Great White snapped. “Stop talking in bloody riddles and just tell us what to do, aye!”

  “Intimidate them, use a little bit of force if you have to, just get them to stop placing bets. Only don’t go overboard; I don’t want any of these kids to have to go to the nurse, okay? These kids are not to be roughed up like what you did to the Collector.”

  With that I assigned them each a bookie and gave them ten bucks.

  “I’ll be out monitoring the situation this afternoon and if I’m satisfied with the results, you’ll get the other ten dollars,” I said.

  Then they left to go wreak havoc on my school. I felt a little nauseous. I didn’t really like paying nine of the meaner, tougher kids at the school to go intimidate and bully mostly innocent kids and cause problems. But for the sake of our business, the future of the school, and the Cubs game, it had to be done.

  At lunch that day we closed up the office so Joe and I could go monitor the progress of our plan while Vince stayed behind to watch over Fred. We started out in the upper-grade playground. Everything appeared to be going well. The bookies stood at their stations alone. Every time a potential customer approached, the bully assigned to that bookie would get in their face and the customer would sulk away. Pretty soon it became obvious to the kids on the playground what was happening. After a while nobody even tried to place a bet, especially after Snapper almost bit off this one kid’s thumb to keep him from approaching the bookie.

  It was when Joe and I were on the grade school side of the playground that I saw something shocking. We had just finished watching some kids make fun of one of the bookies about this really horrible rumor that PrepSchool had started about him sneaking home chunks of the school meatloaf in his backpack because he was building a meatloaf castle in his bedroom that he was going to live in with his pet hamster, Charleston.

  Anyways, we moved on to Jacky Boy’s post and that’s when I saw him. I didn’t know who it was at first because his back was turned to us, but some kid was having a heated conversation with Jacky Boy. Jacky Boy kept slamming his finger into his palm as if he was expecting the kid to put a stack of cash into it. The other kid shook his head so vigorously I thought it might fall off and roll down the hill, where someone might mistake it for a kickball and punt it out into the street.

  Joe and I glanced at each other and repositioned ourselves so we could get a better look at the kid Jacky Boy was arguing with. The recognition hit me like a medicine ball chest pass from Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  It was Brady.

  I motioned for Joe to go check it out in person while I considered the implications.

  But before I even really had a chance to process what it all might mean, the attack happened. I should have been expecting it, considering what we had done to Barnaby the day before, but I guess I didn’t realize just how many kids Staples had under his control.

  Right after Joe left my side, I felt hands grab my shoulders and spin me around.

  “I’ve been looking for you.”

  I looked up at the kid’s face. It was a pretty big seventh grader who I recognized but didn’t really know.

  “What?”

  “Did you really think you’d get away with all this?” he said.

  “With what?”

  He looked confused. I tried to look confused back.

  “You’re Mac, right?”

  “Who?” I said, making sure I looked more lost than ever.

  His grip on my shirt loosened as he tried to figure out if I was lying. I quickly pulled away from him and ran. I headed toward the teeter-totters. I could feel him right behind me.

  I heard kids cheering me on as if it was some sort of game. I wanted to yell at them to trip the kid instead of just yelling stuff like, “Yeah, go, Mac!”

  I quickly hopped onto an empty teeter-totter and ran to the middle so it tilted down the other way. My attacker ran around to the other side and stopped. He smiled at me. I stood in the middle of the teeter-totter, balancing it so it was parallel with the ground.

  “Let’s go, loser. You trying to get me or what?” I said to my attacker.

  He scowled and charged at me.

  As soon as he lunged forward, I jumped from the middle of the teeter-totter onto the seat behind me. The other end fired up like a Chuck Norris roundhouse. I didn’t actually see what happened, because I was too busy making sure I landed on my feet, but I heard a crack that sounded like a baseball being crushed out of its skin by a wooden baseball bat.

  The attacker was on the ground moaning and I felt a little bad. I stepped toward him to see how badly he was hurt, but he looked up like he was going to murder me. I turned to run as he started getting to his feet, but there was no need. Kitten just came flying out of nowhere and did what he did best: something insane.

  He was bent over my attacker, and while I couldn’t see what was happening, the screams coming from the seventh grader were horrifying. “Aaaah! Okay, okay, please!” the seventh grader pleaded.

  Kitten stood up, a stapler hanging from his hand in the open position. The kid’s pants leg was full of staples.

  I helped the seventh grader to his feet.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and led him around to the side of the building where I could talk to him privately. Kitten stayed close.

  “Are you done?” I asked the kid as I shoved him against the school.

  “Yes, yes. I’m sorry. I only did that because I owe Staples a lot of money and Justin said that I wouldn’t have to pay him back if I beat you up. He said some- thing about avenging Willis or something like that, I don’t know . . . I hardly know the guy.”

  “How did you know to find me out here?”

  “This is just where Justin told me to watch out for you. That’s all I know, I swear. I didn’t even want to do it, but I had no choice.” His eyes nervously flickered back and forth between the stapler in Kitten’s hand and my face.

  I nodded and took a step back. The kid pulled at the places on his leg where Kitten had stapled him and then whimpered like a puppy.

  “Okay. I’m going to let you go. But I better not ever see you in this sort of situation again. Got it?”

  “Yeah. I swear, I really didn’t even want to do it in the first place. Thanks, Mac, really,” he said, and then limped toward the school. I watched as he went inside, probably to the bathroom, where he could cry in privacy.

  Justin had known that I was going to be out here today. And I’d had no idea to even watch out for that kid. Something definitely wasn’t right. First the Tanzeem thing and now this. I was getting a bad feeling that I had a snitch on my hands, and considering what I saw just moments before the attack, I had a good idea of who it might be. One thing was definitely pretty clear: I couldn’t really trust anybody outside our business anymore.

  During afternoon recess I dismissed all of the bullies and my other employees except for Fred, Joe, and Vince. There was no sense in moving forward with any further plans until we took care of the snitch. As long as Staples had a man on the inside, none of us were safe. I scheduled a meeting for Joe, Vince, and me for later that night to discuss what to do about the mole.

  At least the plan to neutralize Staples’s influence here was working for the time being. No bets were being placed and we had eliminated the Collector. That’s why it was too bad that it all came crashing down after school that day. A day I now refer to as Black Thursday.

  Chapter 11

  That day after school as Vince, Joe, and I walked Fred home, I heard someone shouting for help. It was coming from an alley that ran behind the houses across from the school. There were actually a few voices yelling for help.

  “Hear that?” I asked as I veered off toward
the alley.

  “Yeah, Mac, but be careful,” Fred said.

  We approached the alley with great caution, but there was no need to. We saw them almost immediately. It was most of my hired muscle.

  Four of my bullies all sat next to each other right in the middle of the alley and two others stood nearby. We jogged over to them and I swore under my breath when I was close enough to see them clearly. Little Paul, the Hutt, Kevin, and iBully were all tied up on the ground. Some were crying. Only Snapper and PrepSchool were not bound, but they still looked pretty shaken. They were trying to untie the others, unsuccessfully. I knew immediately what had happened. I had ordered a hit on Staples’s hit man, so he responded by ordering a hit on my hit men.

  “Help us, Mac,” Kevin said. Kevin was a seventh grader. A real tough kid, actually, and now his eyes were red from crying.

  We freed the four of them and they all rubbed their wrists and tried to soothe their injured pride. These were the kings of the school and they had just been manhandled and made fools of. They weren’t even angry; they all looked more scared than anything else.

  I addressed the Hutt, as he seemed to be the only one who could talk without crying or stumbling over a busted lip.

  “How did this happen?” I asked.

  “They were jus’ there waitin’ for us,” the Hutt said.

  “Who?”

  “It was a bunch a’ high schoolers and Justin Johnston. I was on my way home when these two high school kids grabbed me and forced me here. And then when I got here, they tied me up and then they brought everybody else here, too. There were like four or five high school kids and Justin and his friend Mitch. They, like, punched us and kicked us and, uh, we tried to get free and fight back, but we couldn’t. The only one of us who even got a hit on one of them was Snapper. She bit one of them in the ear because they refused to fight her, due to her being a girl and all.” The Hutt practically choked on his panic. “They said to give you a message, too.”

  “What?”