Jack: Secret Vengeance Read online

  Good.

  Jack wore dark jeans, a navy blue sweater, and a knit watch cap. He stoked his rage as he planned his moves.

  When Toliver arrived, Jack would wait till he got out of the car, then pull his cap down over his face, sneak up on him, and crack his kneecaps—good, hard, solid shots to one, then the other, ending his sports-hero days. Then, if time permitted, maybe he’d smash the hands that had groped Weezy. That done, he’d hightail it back through the orchard to his bike and be back home before the sheriff’s office got the call.

  Yeah. That would work.

  But the longer he waited, the more he thought about it. And the more he thought about it, the less he liked it. But he wouldn’t back down. Someone needed to put the hurt on this guy, and Jack had elected himself to the job.

  He crouched lower as he saw lights flare down the street. They reached the end of the cul-de-sac and swept into the driveway as a Mustang pulled to a stop before the garage doors. Jack stretched the cap down over his face and watched through the weave as the convertible top rose from its hiding place behind the rear seat, then lowered itself into place. As he waited for the driver’s door to open he felt sweat collecting in his armpits and on his palms where he white-knuckled the bat. Finally Carson Toliver stepped out. He stood and stretched, and Jack knew here was the perfect time to make his move.

  Yet he remained in a crouch as Toliver strolled up to his front door and stepped inside. When the door slammed shut Jack slumped onto his butt with his back against the wall.

  His first thought was that he’d chickened out, but it hadn’t been that. With darkness, surprise, and a baseball bat against a barehanded kid, even if that kid was older and bigger, Jack had had nothing to fear. But as he’d readied to spring, he thought about cowardice. And he’d realized that making no move wouldn’t be cowardly—but attacking would.

  If he’d gone through with it, he’d have been nothing more than a thug. Yeah, he’d have gotten even for Weezy, but with a sneak attack and brute force. Not the sort of thing he’d take pride in afterward. In fact, he could see himself feeling pretty crummy about it later.

  Besides, Weezy deserved better.

  He rose and trotted back to the orchard. As he reached it he glanced back and saw a light go on in a bedroom. Toliver stepped to the window and pulled the blinds.

  Sleep tight, you rotten …

  As he wove through the droopy trees, their branches lighter now since the recent apple harvest, he searched for a way to balance the scales. He knew he’d eventually find one, because he wasn’t giving up on this. His rage at Toliver hadn’t dissipated one speck, it had simply gone from hot to cold.

  And revenge, they said, was a dish best served cold.

  But how to balance those scales? Or better yet, tip them the other way?

  On one side was Weezy, afraid to go to school and perhaps teetering on the edge of some emotional abyss. From the sound of her earlier, maybe she’d already slipped over.

  On the other side was Toliver, riding high.

  And in the middle … Jack, with very few options.

  Weezy’s refusal to let anyone know about the attack was tying his hands. That had been a bad decision on Sunday morning, and here, on Monday night, it was no longer an option. Toliver had made a preemptive strike, and no one would believe her now.

  Had to be a way.

  Carson Toliver, looked up to and admired by all. The guy must love to come to school every day; walking through those doors had to make him feel like a king entering his court.

  But what would happen if the king lost his crown? What if things changed to make him afraid to go to school?

  That would be cool.

  Yeah, but how? How to change the hallway buzz from Easy Weezy to Creepy Carson … or Cowardly Carson? And all without even a hint that it had anything to do with Weezy.

  Tall order. This would take some thought.

  Jack wasn’t going to let this ride. One way or another, Carson Toliver was going down.

  And if Jack worked it right, maybe, just maybe the creep would end up wishing someone had busted his knees instead.

  TUESDAY

  1

  “What the hell is going on in this world?”

  Jack was lying in bed, semi-awake, when he heard his father’s raised voice.

  He hopped out and padded down the hall to find him standing before the TV.

  “Dad?”

  His father turned to him, his expression distraught. “We’ve just invaded Grenada. What the hell?”

  Jack looked at the TV—nothing but talking heads there. He’d heard of Grenada but had no idea where it was.

  “Is that in the Middle East?”

  Dad gave him a look. “The Caribbean—near Venezuela. Apparently some commies took over and executed the prime minister and a bunch of others.”

  “So we’re peacekeeping again?”

  Dad shook his head. “Not this time. There’s a bunch of American kids in the medical school there. It looked like they were in danger—at least that’s the reason given—so the troops hit the beach this morning.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Don’t know. They’re still fighting.” He shook his head. “What’s going on in the world these days? You never know what you’re going to find when you wake up. Bombings, invasions … what a world. What a world.”

  2

  Jack figured it best to play dumb.

  “Where’s Weezy?” he asked when Eddie showed up at the bus stop without her.

  His red Izod was tight on his overweight bod. He turned off his Walkman and pulled his headphones off his ears to let them rest on his neck.

  “Not coming.” He looked uncomfortable.

  “She’s still sick?”

  He kept his eyes pointed north on 206, the way the bus would come. “Sort of.”

  Jack didn’t know how hard to push. Weezy was his best friend and he craved information on how she was doing, but he didn’t want to step on her privacy. She obviously didn’t want anyone to know about her psychiatrist.

  “‘Sort of’ how? Is she running a fever, is she contagious, what?”

  Eddie turned and looked Jack in the eye. “Don’t say I told you this, but she says she’s never going to school again.”

  Jack faked shock. “What? Why not?”

  “She won’t say. But she locked herself in her bedroom this morning and wouldn’t come out.”

  Jack shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

  “Neither do I. All I know is—and after hanging around her all these years, you’ve gotta know it too—she takes some things real hard.”

  Jack nodded. He’d seen it before, but never this hard.

  “Well,” Eddie continued, “something must have happened in school—probably something minor that she’s blown up into something majorly hellacious.”

  Obviously he hadn’t heard the Easy Weezy remarks. Jack didn’t think Eddie would consider them minor. He and Weezy didn’t always get along, but Jack sensed he’d turn tiger if he thought anyone was hurting her. Might go for Toliver and wind up hurt.

  Better he didn’t know.

  “She going to be all right?”

  Eddie smiled. “Sure. You know her—up and down, up and down. She’ll get over it and things will go back to normal.” He shook his head. “At least as normal as things can get with Weezy.”

  Jack hoped so. What if she got so low she couldn’t bounce back?

  Eddie was slipping his headphones over his ears again.

  “What’s on?” Jack said.

  “SRV.”

  “Texas Flood?”

  He smiled as he clicked his Walkman back on. “He’s the greatest.”

  As Eddie started nodding his head in time with the music, Jack tried to guess which song.

  “‘Pride and Joy,’ right?”

  Eddie shook his head. “‘I’m Cryin’.’”

  Jack grinned. “Same thing.”

  He too liked Stevie Ray Vaughn, a
nd he had a Walkman of his own, but he usually reserved it for late-night listening when everyone else was asleep, or when he was pushing the lawn mower around.

  As they got on the bus, some girl in the rear called out, “Where’s Easy Weezy?” to no one in particular.

  Jack glanced at Eddie and saw no reaction. SRV was drowning out the real world. At times like this, Jack almost wished he could live inside the headphones like Eddie was doing lately. But sometimes he had to listen to his own voice.

  Especially now when he was plotting the overthrow of King Carson.

  3

  Mr. Kressy, Jack’s favorite teacher, was discussing next year’s presidential election in civics class, talking about the Democrats who would be vying for their party’s nomination to challenge President Reagan for the White House.

  “Listen to the candidates when they appear on television,” he was saying, “and maybe—just maybe—you’ll be able to determine their guiding principles. If one of them has principles in tune with yours, he may be the man you want for your president.”

  He turned quickly and snapped his fingers.

  “Wait … you each do have a guiding principle, don’t you? You know—a fundamental law, doctrine, or assumption that guides you. Quick: Somebody give me a good guiding principle.”

  Dark-haired Liza Escovedo said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

  “Ah, yes. The Golden Rule. That sounds great, but when you think about it, it means the decision of how to treat other people originates with you, rather than with them. What if you’re, oh, say, a very guilty person who feels a great need to be punished, so you want people to hurt you—punch you, kick you, curse you. That makes you feel better. By the Golden Rule, you’d be free to punch, kick, and curse other people, because that’s the way ‘you would have them do unto you,’ right?”

  Liza slunk lower in her seat. He noticed and said, “It’s a good thought, Liza, and probably works well for ninety percent of people, but we’ve got to think our guiding principle all the way through.” He looked around. “Anyone else?”

  Matt Follette, the class cynic, said, “What’s in it for me?”

  This got a laugh.

  Mr. Kressy pointed to him and grinned right back. “You’ve got the makings of a great politician. Or an even better lobbyist.”

  Another laugh.

  Mr. Kressy turned Jack’s way. “Anybody else?”

  Deciding to go for it, Jack raised his hand and said, “How about, ‘Do the right thing’?”

  Mr. Kressy beamed. “Perfect.” Then frowned. “Except … who or what determines the right thing?”

  “God,” said Liza.

  He shook his head. “Sorry. I’m not allowed to discuss theology in this class beyond the concept of separation of church and state. I will say that if ‘God’ works for you, fine, but as far as politics goes, you should remember that a lot of different religions are practiced in this country, worshipping different gods. I don’t know about you, but I definitely don’t want this class arguing about whose god is best.

  “So we need to approach from a different angle. By what process do you arrive at the criteria for what is ‘right’? For that, you have to dig deep. You need to have a first principle to work from. So let’s think about that for a couple of days. Ferret out your prime or first principle, the touchstone belief to which everything you think or do must answer. Searching for that is going to take you places in your head most of you have never been before. We’ll see what we come up with.” He picked up the civics text. “And now for the easy stuff.”

  Jack frowned as he thought about a first principle. Did he have one? He’d never thought about it. He always tried to do the right thing, but he’d never thought about the path he took to deciding what was right.

  The frown eased into a smile. Mr. Kressy was right. This was going to take him places he’d never been before.

  Cool.

  4

  After finishing lunch, Jack again went in search of Toliver. As he passed the table where Weezy usually sat, one of the girls said, “Weren’t you looking for Easy Weezy yesterday? Guess what? She’s out again.”

  Jack realized with dismay that the “Easy Weezy” thing had legs. It wasn’t going to fade away anytime soon.

  “Maybe she’s morning sick!” said the same one who’d said it yesterday.

  Jack stopped and looked at her. He wanted to get in her face and tell her it wasn’t funny the first time and how about straining the two sporadically connected neurons that passed for her brain to come up with something new and perhaps even remotely clever.

  Instead he moved on. Drawing attention to himself was the last thing he needed.

  What those girls needed, though, was something else to talk about.

  And Jack was going to give it to them.

  He scouted the halls till he found Toliver, then followed him again. As before, Toliver strolled around like the school’s godfather. Finally he stopped at his locker, removed a couple of books, and moved on.

  Jack let him go. He slowed his pace to a crawl as he passed the locker. Number 791. He checked out the lock: a regular spin-dial combination model. He didn’t think he’d have any problem getting past that, but first things first: He had to be able to sneak back into school when no one was around.

  He looked up and stifled a yelp when he found himself inches from the white face and pink eyes of the albino piney girl, Saree.

  “Why can’t I see you?” she said.

  “What?”

  “I can’t see you.”

  Jack waved his hand between them and she flinched.

  “You can see me.”

  “No.” She looked at Toliver’s locker. “I can see him. He’s all sorts of dark, almost black as night.”

  Jack remembered Levi’s warning to Elvin about Toliver yesterday: You know what Saree says about him.

  “What’s that mean?”

  She shook her head. “But you … you’re hiding from me.”

  What was this girl talking about?

  “Gotta go,” he said.

  No lie. Lunchtime was winding down and he had to get to the boys’ room pronto.

  SBR had two of them, one on the east side, one on the west. Jack stood in the east room and washed his hands at the sink closest to the windows. But instead of paying attention to his hands, he was studying the windows: identical top-hung casement types, four feet wide and maybe eighteen inches tall, set a good five feet off the floor. Each had two latches. He didn’t know if they were ever opened, but he could tell from the hinges that they swung out. One overhung his sink, the other looked over the last stall.

  That stall was empty, so Jack dried his hands and slipped into it. He stood there, waiting. Lunch break was almost over. He hung out until the bathroom emptied, then he stood on the seat for a closer look. The handle on the bottom told him this was a simple push-pull window. If it had been the kind of casement that needed to be wound open and shut, he’d have been sunk.

  He studied the latches—simple levers on the bottom of the frame with blades that swung up and down, in and out of slots in the casing. He tugged on one but it wouldn’t move. He tried harder, grunting with the effort, but the thing wouldn’t budge. He tried the other with the same result. Obviously they hadn’t been opened in a long, long time.

  He was going to need some sort of tool for prying. He searched the stall. Nothing. He returned to the sink area and looked around. More nothing. A screwdriver would have been perfect but not the sort of thing he carried around …

  But he did carry a pen.

  He fished out his ballpoint as he returned to the stall. He wedged it under the latch handle, and using it as a lever, managed to budge the latch. It moved only an eighth of an inch, but that was enough to allow him to open it the rest of the way by hand. As he was prying at the second latch, the hard plastic of the pen shattered, but not before it had succeeded in doing its job. Jack pried the latch the rest of the way by hand. He
was about to push on the handle when he caught a flash of movement off to the right. He pressed his head against the glass to see who or what it was, but saw nothing. Had someone been out there? Had someone seen him messing with the window?

  Couldn’t worry about that now. He pushed on the handle, and with a squeak and a groan, the window opened an inch.

  But something else opened as well—the door to the boys’ room.

  Jack ducked and crouched with his feet on the toilet seat. He hadn’t bothered to latch the stall door, so it stood half open. If whoever it was wandered this far down …

  He heard a couple of voices and recognized one of them.

  Oh, crap—Toliver!

  If he found Jack here and spotted the open window, it would be more than embarrassing. Jack’s whole plan would be shot.

  Heart pounding, he listened to Toliver talk to whoever was with him, their voices low, casual … something about football and North Burlington Regional.

  Right. Friday’s game was the big rivalry—the South Badgers against the North Greyhounds.

  Their voices were drowned out by flushes and then the room went silent. Jack stayed put until he was sure he was alone, then he rose and pulled the window closed. But left the latches undone.

  Seconds later he was in the hall, hurrying for his next class, not knowing if he’d been wasting his time back there or not. Because he didn’t know if the window opened wide enough to allow him to slip through. If it didn’t, he’d have to go to plan B.

  Trouble was, he didn’t have a plan B.

  5

  USED started out slow, even for a Tuesday.

  Jack had worked in the store over the summer and into the fall. It sold a mishmash of antiques and junk, with a blurred and wavering line between the two: One person’s precious antique was another’s junk, which some people spelled junque. Whichever way it was spelled, USED had tons of it, all stashed here and there in a seemingly willy-nilly pattern. Jack knew the place held loads of goodies he hadn’t yet seen, and might never see, but Mr. Rosen, the owner, knew where everything was. Or pretended to.