Thief (27 page)

“I was just going to peek in the window.”

“Well Axel said you’re not allowed to run off and do things on your own. It’s like an Academy rule or something.”

Brandon sputtered and made hand signals like he wanted to say something but couldn’t formulate what he wanted. “I know you’re not spouting Academy rules at me.”

Hypocrite! I poked a finger at his broad chest. “If you’re going to break the rules, I don’t have to listen to you.”

He puffed out his chest at my poking as if to show he was immune. “It’s a rule to not have a girl on the team!”

I ignored this, although I was a little perturbed by it. Axel was going to have me join, but I couldn’t work with guys? That would have sucked. Girls are okay but are usually too prone to drama. I would have wanted a boy team. Maybe not theirs, but at least someone I could get along with. Maybe I could have Corey on my team.

Or maybe I didn’t want to sign up at all.

The yard in the back was tiny. Other houses were built so close, cutting off the view of most of the sky. For rich people, they didn’t have any yard space. I knew downtown homes were worth millions. Was it worth it for such little space?

I wound around to the back porch and checked out the windows, looking inside. The back room had a few pieces of furniture covered in white cloth. From what I could tell by the shapes, there were sofas, and upright chairs, and a useless corner table. Maybe that was why it was stored here. A million dollar storage unit?

Or a decoy? Like Mr. Coaltar’s weird office that didn’t have anything but empty filing cabinets?

I passed by the back door as I couldn’t see through it. The second window was to the kitchen. The counters were clean, but something was different. It took me a minute. “The fridge is humming,” I said.

“So?” Brandon shoved my arm in an effort to keep me walking and head back. “Now we’ve seen his fridge. Let’s get out of here.”

“No,” I said. I pointed at the kitchen. “You don’t leave the fridge running if you’ve left the house. That’s just weird. Let’s go see what’s inside.”

“No!” Brandon grabbed my elbow and tried to drag me off the porch. “I’ve seen enough. Mr. Fitzgerald left his fridge running. We’ll finally be able to make that prank call and actually mean it. Great. Let’s get out of here before someone calls the cops on us.”

Corey held up the camera, snapped a picture of the kitchen. “I’d say let’s break in, but I mean, even if he keeps something in that fridge, there’s no evidence anyone’s been here. He probably keeps the electricity running to keep some kind of alarm system online.”

“Let me see the camera?” I asked Corey.

“We’re leaving,” Brandon said.

I pulled myself out of his grip. Now that we were out of sight of the street, I felt a little better poking around. I don’t know why, but this whole thing bothered me. The puzzle I couldn’t figure out. “I just want to take a few pictures,” I said.

Corey passed off the camera. I held it between my fingers, figuring out the right button to push as there were three on top. I held it up, testing by taking a picture of Corey with a lopsided grin. Another I took of Brandon, looking perturbed and arguing with me that we should leave.

I turned around, taking a snapshot of the interior of the kitchen. I leaned over, taking a picture of the abandoned back living room.

There was thudding next to me and I was pushed hard. The camera was ripped from my hands. I didn’t see who was coming and I fell hard, crashing to the wood boards of the porch. I landed on my side. My hand and knee scraped against the grooves.

“Get off my porch,” a voice boomed over us.

Terror swept over me as I looked up, staring into the harsh, cold eyes of Mr. Fitzgerald. He wore white shirt, his sleeves rolled up on his arms and his face was covered in thick stubble. He gripped the camera, and loomed over me like he wanted to throw it at my face.

His other hand held his .38 and he had it pointed at Brandon.

I didn’t know much about South Carolina gun laws, but I was pretty sure he had every right to shoot us, and then tell the police he was protecting his property in self-defense. How did he sneak up on us? How did he know we were here?

Brandon raised his hands. “Sorry, sir,” he said.

Mr. Fitzgerald’s eyes widened slowly. Recognition must have settled in, and then got confused when he looked at Corey. “You ... you both.” His eyes looked down at me and then again he seemed to put the pieces together as he remembered me from the party. His lips twisted into a snarl. “Get out,” he said.

Brandon reached down, scooping me up and hauling me with his arms cradled under my back and knees. “We’re leaving,” he said. “Sorry. We were just ... we thought this house was for sale.”

“It’s not,” Mr. Fitzgerald said in a near shout. He waved his gun at us, ushering us off.

My heart thundered in my chest, but I caught a strange vibe from Mr. Fitzgerald that now while Brandon held on to me, I couldn’t place. It niggled at the back of my brain.

Brandon didn’t let go. I felt myself clutching my arms around his shoulders as he marched off, putting himself between the gun and me. Corey stood by his brother, backing off slowly and apologizing nonstop.

When we were at the front fence, Brandon threw me over it. Corey jumped it and picked me back up. I was going to tell him to put me down, that I could run, but he held strong and Brandon marched next to him, squinting in anger, his mouth tight.

When we were a block away and heading back toward the market place, Corey released me and let me walk next to him, but he held my hand in a firm grip and was dragging me along as I had trouble keeping up. I half jogged as we made a beeline for the SUV. I jumped in between them in the front seat.

When we were on the road again, and I managed to swallow back my heart in my throat, I broke the silence. “Mr. Fitzgerald is terrified,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” Brandon asked. “We pissed him off for walking in his grass and his porch. He’s a crazy old man.”

“He’s protecting something,” I said. “He was ready to start shooting, and then he stopped when he realized it was us and we were defenseless. He’s guarding an empty house with a gun loaded and ready to go.”

Corey picked up my hand I was waving around as I talked and opened up my palm. “You’re bleeding.”

I pulled my hand away. It was just a few scratches. I just needed to wash it. I crammed it into my side to hide it. “I’m telling you guys, he’s scared. Something’s wrong.”’

“We’ve got other problems right now,” Brandon said as he turned the SUV down to head to Broad Street and headed south to the Sergeant Jasper. “We have to get that camera back.”

“We do?” I asked. “Why?”

Brandon tapped his fingers against the steering wheel. “There’s stuff on that camera. We need to get it back.”

“What stuff?”

He turned to me. “It’s the camera I used when I was tracking you,” he said. “If he gives it to Coaltar, he’ll know exactly who you are and where you live.”

––––––––

T
he full weight of what he was saying took forever to sink into my brain. I think maybe because looking at Mr. Fitzgerald and then thinking on it, I felt bad. We scared the guy by poking around his house. It was almost like getting caught pulling a wallet out of pocket. It was all those fears I’d had since forever coming to life. I hadn’t meant to scare him and I felt horrible.

If what I said was true and Mr. Fitzgerald was terrified, was it true that maybe Mr. Coaltar was the one scaring him? Or if he did work for Coaltar, he’d easily give the camera over to him. Mr. Coaltar would recognize my face in the camera. He may want to know what I was up to. They could come after me at the hotel.

They’d find Wil. He’d be in the middle of this mess. And if Coaltar was as dangerous as we feared...

I tried to tell Brandon that we should go back, but he drove all the way back to the Sergeant Jasper.

“We need to get the camera,” I said. “They can’t know about me.”

“I know,” Brandon said.

“Then why are we driving away? Let’s go knock on his door and ask for the camera. If we approach him slow and nicely, he may give it back.”

“And get a second chance to get shot at?” Brandon asked. “I don’t think so.”

“But we can’t—”

He reached out, grabbing my hand with his free one as he drove with the other. “Hey,” he said. His eyes tried to hold mine as long as possible, occasionally glancing to the road. “Look at me, sweetie.” He squeezed my hand. “We’re not going to let them keep it.”

“What do we do?”

“We do nothing,” he said.

He had to be insane! “We can’t just assume he’s not going to look at it.”

“No, I mean,
we
can’t do anything. If we go back there, we’re looking at a gun in our faces, or even the police chasing after us. Our team can’t get any closer right now.”

The way he said our team was troubling. “You have another? That teenage squad I saw at the gun range? You’re going to send them after it?”

“Or another group,” Corey said from the back seat. He had his face in his phone and he was pushing buttons in a mad wave of texting. “We need to call in a few favors.”

“Do it,” Brandon said.

“What favor?” I asked. “What’s this? Like in those mafia movies? Someone owes you a favor and you call it in?”

Brandon released my hand to drive. “Not really.”

“Then what is it? How can you just send someone else after it?”

“We ask nicely,” Corey said. “Don’t ask any more. We can’t tell you anything.”

I pressed my fists to my eyes to block out the light. This whole Academy thing was complicated and infuriating. It was crazy! We should be the ones to go and get it. I didn’t trust anyone else to understand why we needed to go back and do this now. Why would they risk their necks? They didn’t know who I was.

When we got back to the Sergeant Jasper, I followed the twins back up to their room. I trailed Corey to his bedroom as Brandon took over the computer desks and put in a phone call. I washed up my cut palm and my knee. They weren’t bleeding anymore, though they did sting a little.

Corey crashed onto his back on the bed. “Well that’s a dead end for us.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. I sat on the corner of his bed, unsure what else to do and feeling like I should be doing something. “He held a gun at us to get off his property. Something’s going on.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” Corey said. He nudged my side with a foot. “We’ve proved he’s a grumpy old man who doesn’t like people on his porch.”

“He’s called Coaltar, who may be doing crimes, from a phone registered to an abandoned house that he guards during the day. He didn’t park in his drive or out front. He wanted it to look abandoned but then guards it anyway?”

Corey breathed in deeply and then let the air out slowly. He stared up at the ceiling. “Odd.”

I flopped back on the bed next to him. He made room by scooting closer to the wall. “Did we screw up?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “We screwed up.”

“Is Axel going to yell at us?”

“Axel doesn’t yell. Marc, however...”

I knocked my ankle into his. “Do we blame it on Brandon?”

He rolled his foot against mine in a playful kick back. “We’ll still get yelled at.”

“Yeah, but it just feels better if it’s at Brandon.”

“Brandon’s not so bad,” he said. He nudged an elbow into my ribs.

I grunted as I didn’t want to answer him. So far every time I ever talked to Brandon, we ended up in a fight. And now he was going to blame me for this mess. Still, there were moments, like when he held my hand in the car and promised things would be okay, or the hug at the party, where it left me in a weird position with how I felt about him. Maybe Corey was right and he wasn’t so bad and we just totally misunderstood each other from go. I gave Brandon a pretty hard time, and I didn’t listen to him, so could I blame him for being angry?

I avoided thinking about it by stabbing my elbow back into Corey. Corey was fun; I liked him.

“Ow,” he said, in a flat tone while still staring at the ceiling. He aimed his elbow at me, but knocked it into mine as I tried to block.

That did it. I tucked my knees up, and then pushed at his side, trying to do the same thing I did earlier to Raven and slide Corey right off the bed. Except I was on the outside so he only ended up getting squished into the wall. I didn’t do it hard. Just playfully.

“Oof,” he cried out. He spun around with a grin. He caught both my ankles and twisted.

I had to flip around to relieve the pressure and the next thing I knew, I was dangling precariously off the edge of the mattress. I had to do a weird, twisty sit up to avoid falling on my head. I squealed loud and patted at his arms as he kept me trapped there. A laugh rippled from him, deep and mischievous. He was a nerdling, but he was strong and he knew how to defend himself.

“No fair!” I yelped at him.

“Say mercy,” he said.

I knew how to win fights like this. Feign that you’re giving up and then when they let their guard down, go in for the attack. “Mercy!” I cried out.

“Say uncle.”

“I just said mercy!”

Brandon materialized in the bedroom doorway. He spotted his brother first, and opened his mouth to say something, but stopped when he caught me on the bed. “Kayli?”

“Hi!” I squealed, a little louder than necessary. I patted Corey’s arm. “Let me up.”

Corey laughed, getting off of me, but hanging on so I didn’t just fall on my head. I wriggled onto my back but ended up spilling onto the floor and tumbling until I was sitting up. I swept back the hair from my eyes, laughing.

Corey hovered on his hands and knees, looking over the edge of the bed. “You okay?”

“Fine.”

Brandon’s eyebrows scrunched together. “What are you two doing?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just playing.”

Corey stabbed a finger at my head. “She started it.”

“I did not!”

Brandon sliced his hand through the air. “Okay, don’t care that much.” He jerked his chin toward Corey. “Axel wants you to do ... Academy things. There’s something on his computer.”