Sticks and Stones Page 19

  “What?”

  “He said under no circumstances am I allowed to bring you.”

  “Fuck him, he can’t make those kind of rules.”

  “Dan, he’s doing us a favor.” Besides, she wanted to say, you’re still drunk. “I’m going by myself. Please don’t hate me.”

  A long pause followed, before, “I could never hate you. I’m going back to bed so I can dream ’bout punching Carmichael’s rules right out of his head.”

  “Okay, you do that, honey. Love you.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Dewey finally came over today, and I eagerly explained to him what me and Mr. Harrison did so we’d have forensic evidence to test out our new lab with. He sat on my bed while I explained everything, pulling each piece of evidence from my duffel bag and placing it on the fold-up table where the two microscopes still stood.

  “He just let you keep the gummies?” Dewey asked. “For free?”

  “Yep.” I’d gone past the gummies two pieces of evidence ago. Dewey hadn’t stopped chattering about them since.

  “Wish I’d been there.”

  “Dewey, the gummies ain’t what’s important. What’s important is all this evidence we have to analyze.” I showed him all the Polaroid shots I took before extracting the actual PE (short for Physical Evidence). “See?” I asked. “These are my muddy shoe prints, and here’s the register with my fingerprint. And here’s your damn gummies before I ate ’em all. This is the poison dart embedded in the wall.”

  He stared at that last shot. “That ain’t no poison dart. It’s a pea from a peashooter.”

  “I know, but we’re pretending it was a poison dart. I fired one off to show him I wasn’t just foolin’ ’round.” I couldn’t believe I had to explain all of this.

  “Oh. And I s’pose Mr. Harrison gave you the peashooter and peas for free?”

  “Yep.”

  Dewey crossed his arms. “Wish I’d been there.”

  “No, you don’t,” I said. “It was raining tabbies and poodles. I got soaked. You’d have hated it.”

  “I like gettin’ wet.”

  I shook my head. “You can be so weird. You know that, right?”

  He ignored me. “That pea still in Mr. Harrison’s wall?”

  I pulled out the evidence bag containing the poison dart. “No, I extracted it.”

  “Did you shoot any more?”

  “Nope,” I said. “One was enough to get Mr. Harrison to give me what I wanted.”

  “What did you want?”

  “It was a robbery, Dewey, what do you think I wanted?”

  “Gummies?”

  “No . . . Well, yeah, I s’pose. But mainly, all the money in his register.”

  Dewey’s eyes went wide. “If he let you keep that, I’m goin’ to be real mad you didn’t call me to come get wet with you.”

  “No, Dewey,” I said, spelling it all out. “We just pretended he gave me the money.” I read from my notepad. “It came to eighty-six dollars and twenty-seven cents.”

  “How do you know?” Dewey’s eyes tracked a fly buzzing around the room.

  “Mr. Harrison counted out how much was there.”

  Next, I took out the two fingerprints I’d lifted. “Before you ask,” I said, “these are my fingerprints.”

  He didn’t seem too impressed.

  Lastly, I removed the VHS tape from my bag and plunked it down with everything else. This caught Dewey’s attention.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “It’s from Mr. Harrison’s security camera. He had to change the tape anyway so he let me keep it. It’s got my whole robbery on it.”

  “And other stuff, too?”

  I shrugged. “I dunno. I guess so.”

  “Let’s watch it.”

  “My robbery?”

  “No, the whole thing.” He was ridiculously excited.

  “Dewey, it’s just goin’ to be all the same thing, people comin’ into the store, buyin’ stuff, and then leavin’. How much of that can you watch?”

  “How long’s the tape?”

  I read the label. “Two hours.”

  “I reckon I can watch two hours of that, no problem at all.”

  I just shook my head. “Let’s analyze the rest of the evidence ’fore we do anythin’ with the tape.”

  “Thought you weren’t finished with the book yet?”

  “I’m not, but I’m comin’ up on page one hundred.”

  “How we gonna know how to analyze anythin’ if you still got sixty-five pages to go?”

  I thought this over. He was right.

  “So, let’s just watch the tape now,” he said. “Do you have popcorn?”

  With a huge sigh I took the VHS from the table and Dewey followed me into the living room, where I slid it into our machine.

  “What ’bout popcorn?” Dewey asked, getting comfortable on the sofa.

  “I ain’t making popcorn to watch people buy stuff,” I said.

  “All good movies have popcorn, Abe.”

  “This ain’t no good movie. It’s a stupid surveillance video from a five-and-dime.”

  “I think it’ll be great.”

  “I think you’re weird.”

  Carry was out or we would have had a fight on our hands for taking over the TV. It was unusual for her not to be draped across the sofa like she normally was, with her head on Jonathon’s lap.

  I turned on the TV, switched it to channel three—for some reason movies only worked on that channel—and pressed PLAY on the VCR. Apparently, Mr. Harrison had rewound the tape to the beginning before giving it to me because the screen showed him sweeping up his shop, not my pretend robbery.

  “I need to fast-forward it to the part where I steal everythin’,” I said. “It’s probably at the very end.”

  Just before I hit the double arrow button that forwarded the tape, Dewey stopped me. “No, Abe. I wanna watch the whole thing.”

  “Seriously? I thought you were just goofin’. You really wanna watch Mr. Harrison sweep up the floor for two hours?”

  “Yeah. And everything else. People comin’ in and buyin’ stuff, people leavin’, Mr. Harrison stockin’ the shelves. I wanna see everythin’.”

  “You’re crazy,” I said. “What do you want to watch all that stuff for?”

  “It’ll be fascinatin’.”

  “It’ll bore me out of my skull.”

  “Please? You said it’s only a two-hour tape.”

  “Dewey, I am not going to watch Mr. Harrison sweep for two hours. That’s just plain nutso.”

  “Let’s start watchin’, and if you really find it that borin’, you can forward it to your stupid robbery thing.”

  My stupid robbery thing? Now I was getting mad. “Dewey, it wasn’t stupid, it was fun and you gotta pretend it was real. Remember, I even got free gummies and a peashooter out of it.”

  He crossed his arms, defiantly. “Whatever. If you don’t at least play part of the beginning, I’m goin’ to go home and not watch your thing at all.”

  “Now you’re just bein’ a baby,” I said.

  Dewey sat there on the sofa, arms remaining crossed. He didn’t say a word.

  “Fine,” I said. “We’ll watch some of the beginning. But when I start noddin’ off, be sure to wake me up.” I left the tape playing and sat in the big chair across from the sofa. On the TV, Mr. Harrison finished up his sweeping and put the broom away in the utility closet. Then he sat behind the counter, drumming his fingers on the top. After a while, he picked up a book from beside the register and started reading. I watched him read for about five minutes before I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “Okay,” I said to Dewey. “Do you now agree this is the most boring movie ever? It’s worse than the stuff Carry watches, and that’s sayin’ somethin’.”

  “No,” Dewey said, riveted to the screen. “Leave it on.”

  I sighed. I figured there was no point in arguing about it. No matter what I said, I was destined to spend the nex
t two hours of my life watching somebody else work one of the most boring jobs on the planet. I might as well have been working at the store myself if I had to watch Mr. Harrison doing it.

  “Look!” Dewey said, stiffening. “Somebody’s comin’ in!”

  The front door opened and three kids entered. I didn’t recognize any of them at first because the picture was so grainy, but as they got closer to the camera, I realized it was Tyler Bonnet and two of his friends. I didn’t know his friends, but Tyler was in the same grade as me and Dewey, and rode the bus with us to school. On the screen, he was wearing a hoodie and shorts, both different shades of gray on account of the video being all black and white. His friends were wearing T-shirts and shorts. One had a baseball cap on with the Alvin Eagles logo on the front. The other had some kind of picture on his shirt, but the picture quality was too bad to make out what it was.

  The kids split up and perused different aisles of the store. I really was starting to feel like I was falling asleep when suddenly Dewey jolted me awake.

  “Abe! Did you see that? Rewind it! Play it again! Play it again!”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked.

  “Tyler just took somethin’ off that shelf and put it in his pocket! He’s stealin’ from Mr. Harrison!”

  “He did not. I didn’t see it.”

  “You had your eyes closed. Rewind it and you’ll see.”

  I got up and hit the double arrow key that made the movie go backward. I went back about a minute and pressed the PLAY key again.

  Sure enough, Tyler Bonnet was in the middle of an aisle, looking around to make sure Mr. Harrison couldn’t see him right before he nabbed something off one of the shelves and stuffed it in his kangaroo pocket. I couldn’t make out what he had taken. We watched that part of the tape four times before we finally figured out what it was he stole. Well, to be honest, it was Dewey who caught it.

  “He’s in the knickknacks aisle,” Dewey said. “He took a hacky sack.”

  “Maybe he’s just puttin’ it in his pocket until he gets to the counter,” I suggested.

  We kept watching. The boy in the baseball cap went up to the register and bought some Action Candy (which, when I was younger had been called Pop Rocks) and a roll of Bottle Caps, but Tyler never approached the counter or put the hacky sack back. After his friend bought the candy, all three boys left the store together. You could see some of the sidewalk through the store’s glass front, and, once outside, the boys high-fived each other.

  “Tyler steals from Mr. Harrison!” Dewey said. “We gotta tell someone.”

  “Probably Mr. Harrison?” I figured it was the obvious choice.

  “Or your ma. She’s a law enforcement agent, after all.”

  “Why don’t you just say ‘detective’?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Nothin’.”

  We kept watching the tape. I started noticing that when nobody moved in the store and nothing changed, the video stopped recording and skipped to the next point of action, sort of jerking along. Mostly, we only saw the store in the daytime when Mr. Harrison was there doing stuff, but sometimes we’d see a night shot if someone happened to walk by on the sidewalk.

  I had no idea how many hours or days went by while the movie jerked along, but, later on the tape, Tyler Bonnet once again came in—this time with just the friend with the baseball cap—and me and Dewey watched, both of us on high alert. Believe it or not, Tyler did it again, only this time he stole a yo-yo. Just like before, he waited till the coast was clear and then stuffed it in his hoodie’s kangaroo pocket.

  “He’s a compulsive thief!” I told Dewey.

  “We really gotta tell somebody ’bout this.”

  “I reckon the best person to pick is Mr. Harrison. He can decide if it’s worth talkin’ to my mom.”

  Dewey considered this. “I s’pose that makes sense. Let’s keep watchin’ and see if he takes anythin’ else.”

  We watched the entire tape, which actually only went to an hour and forty minutes, and Tyler Bonnet came in two more times. The first time, all by himself and he still managed to steal some kind of fancy notebook. The second time he was with both friends again and took a whole bottle of Coke from the back cooler.

  When the tape got to my pretend robbery, both of us were too revved up about discovering Tyler Bonnet being a kleptomaniac to really care about what I did. I’d never admit it, but Dewey turned out to be right: Watching the tape was fascinating.

  Deciding this news was too important to wait, I took the tape and we headed out to our bikes so we could go down and tell Mr. Harrison what we had discovered right away.

  CHAPTER 23

  It was near on two o’clock when Leah finally reached District Attorney Gary Carmichael’s office in Talladega. She was so sick of driving, she actually considered getting a hotel room for the night, but was unsure how Dan would react. He was already pissed about having to stay home.

  While inside the elevator and heading for the tenth floor, Leah felt the first twinge of relief she’d had since this case fell into her lap. Obviously, Stanley “Duck” Bishop knew something important. His statement could literally break the case wide open if he accepted the deal. Leah was pretty certain he would say yes. He’d pulled the three year number out of his ass. There was no way he expected it.

  Thankfully, Carmichael suggested they take his car, which turned out to have its own driver. Leah was happy Dan wasn’t there when they both got in the back and Carmichael began discussing how things would proceed.

  “You talk first,” he said. “I want you to tell him how great a thing this is that he’s doing before we even mention the word deal.”

  “I don’t think he’ll care about that, especially if it’s my opinion on the matter,” Leah said. “We all know he ain’t doing this because he’s a saint.”

  “Everyone likes to think they have noble intentions,” Carmichael said.

  “You reckon? Even someone like Duck?”

  “Everyone. Everyone wants to believe they’re doing things for the right reasons, Leah. When you’ve been a DA as long as me, you learn these things.”

  “Wow, you just restored a little bit of my faith in mankind.”

  “So, you tell him how great he’s bein’, and the first thing he’ll say is, ‘Cut the crap, what’s my deal?’ because even though he might aspire to be good, truth is he’s just another asshole waitin’ out time while stuck in a cell. This’ll be where I take over and lay out our first deal: an upgrade to his cell.”

  Outside, the omnipresent rain came down in a sheen of gray. Leah was getting a mite sick of this damn weather. It especially did nothing to complement Carmichael’s little speech he was making her listen to.

  “He’ll reject offer one,” Carmichael continued. “That’s when I hit him with what I say is the best we can do: an upgrade to his cell plus shave a year off his sentence. It’ll take him a while to think this through, but eventually he’ll reject it, as well. That’s when you and I get up to leave, but just before we make the door, you stop me and ask if we can please sit down and try one last time to work somethin’ out. I look at you like you’ve lost your mind, but I sit. Then you say to him, ‘Duck, think about it. You’re not hurtin’ anyone giving us this information. You’re not incriminating yourself or nothin’. There’s no backstabbing goin’ on here. You’re just helping with an investigation. Take the deal. Don’t stay behind bars any longer than you have to’.” Carmichael grinned. “And that I believe he will buy.”

  He sat back and smiled.

  “So when do we offer the two-year pardon?” Leah asked.

  Carmichael just batted the question away. “That’s just there on the off chance he doesn’t take the year. But trust me, he’ll jump at the year. He’ll be happier than a hog in shit with that year.”

  “Wow,” Leah said, “you’ve really played this through.”

  “I like to be prepared. It’s why I win most of my cases.”

 
; Well, I guess we’ll see, Leah thought.

  Carmichael’s car pulled up to the front of the Talladega Correctional Institution, and the driver opened Leah’s door for her. Leah thanked him. Carmichael stayed seated until the driver came around and opened his door. Not a word of thanks left his mouth. He just grabbed his briefcase from the seat beside him and got out.

  Leah and Carmichael went inside, going right past the desk officer without so much as even showing identification. Leah supposed that, when you were with the DA, you got some sort of GET OUT INTO JAIL FREE card.

  The on-duty lieutenant was the same one Leah remembered from last time. He took Carmichael off to the side for a few words before they returned and Carmichael told her everything was in order. He rubbed his hands together. “Duck’s already waiting for us,” he said.

  Things were identical to Friday when Leah and Dan had come here, only now an extra metal chair stood at the table. Duck was already seated, same as last time, his hands cuffed behind his back.

  Leah followed Carmichael inside the room and they both sat at the table. Leah carefully picked the seat across from Duck—it being the farthest away from him. Carmichael looked at her expectantly.

  Oh yeah, I’m supposed to start this. “I want to begin,” Leah said, her voice tentative, “by thanking you for agreeing to meet with us. We appreciate it.”

  “Where’s the asshole from last time?” Duck asked.

  Leah didn’t know right away who he meant.

  “The one who offered to ‘put in a good word with the DA,’ ” Duck explained.

  Ah. He meant Dan. “Oh,” Leah said. “He couldn’t make it. Had other things that needed to be done. But, as you can see, the DA is here.” She gestured toward Carmichael.

  “And,” Carmichael clarified, “not in any way because that ass wipe put in a ‘good word for you.’ Let’s get that straight right off the top.”

  Okay, that was off the script. “Anyway,” Leah went on, “I want you to know that I reckon it’s a tremendous thing you’re doin’. You could save many lives today.”

  Duck laughed. “Cut the crap. Just give me the deal.” He actually parroted the response Carmichael had surmised he would give. “Is this worth my time, or should I go sit on the shitter and count my farts?”