100 Proof Stud (The Darcy Walker Series) (15 page)

Dylan clenched and unclenched his left hand, taking one methodical step forward. Not worried in the slightest.

Grumpy bent at the waist, trying to retrain his lungs how to breathe. “He beat the crap out of Walker, man. He came at her first…and slammed her head up against the wall. Do something.”

OHHHHHH. CRAAAAPPPPP.

Another step. And another. “Let me take a guess,” Dylan said lowly. “You’re the asshole that Darcy stopped from molesting that girl.”

Jerk-wad squirmed.

Hemmed and hawed.

Dylan glanced to the ceiling. “Well, thank you, God,” he seethed sarcastically, “because I’d scheduled a little meet-and-greet with you anyway. Now it seems like you’ve been delivered up to me instead.”

“I
do
want to kill her,” Jerk-wad hissed, adding a psychopathic laugh. “And by God, I
will
.”

Dylan dove (jaws and fists clenched), and took Jerk-wad out in a rib-cracking explosion. The knife sky-rocketed, arcing up into a “U,” and coming to rest point-side down underneath the basketball goal. Jerk-wad writhed for two-point-something seconds (probably a reflex) and then flattened like he’d gotten trampled by a herd of angry elephants. Dylan pushed up on his hands, his I’m-going-to-play-with-you face grinning. But before he got off a shot with a fist, Finn met him in a full-bodied tackle, and they slid across the recently waxed floor like stones in a game of curling.

Dylan immediately scrambled to his feet; this time Grumpy lunged at him with his eyes closed. Guess he expected pain.

Dylan got knocked on his butt twice, trying to get to Jerk-wad which only made him angrier. Coach Wallace instantly appeared, distraught, quickly surmising Finn and Grumpy merely tried to keep Dylan’s beast on the chain. He wrenched his way between them, tailed by an even more distraught Principal Grim Ward.

Can you say…W. T. FFFuuuuuuudddGE!!

Grim Ward ran the place, and by goodness, we barely knew what the man looked like. I’d always thought he was of the mole genus because he rarely saw the light of day.

Coach blinked rapidly, pointing a shaking finger in Grumpy’s face while he bent over and angrily snatched a still-wrestling Dylan and Finn off the floor. “What in God’s name happened here?” he barked.

Grumpy served up an explanation.

He raised his shirt, spitting blood into the hem, furiously pointing to Jerk-wad who lay there, still not able to reclaim his breathing. “He hit Walker, Coach!” he barked back. “He claims he’s going to kill her, but I’ll kill him first. I want his dead body to lie on the pavement so the vultures can pick away at it.”

And this is why I loved Grumpy…

We all heard something. Maybe it was Dylan breathing; maybe it was Dylan’s heart beating, but whatever the case, the six of us took pause. Like you do before you go down one of those shark tanks and find their teeth look bigger than you initially thought. There was a flash of speed, and this time Coach and Finn brought Dylan down in a body slam.

I needed to barf.

Did they not know they asked him to willingly castrate himself?

Finn had one swinging arm and Coach had the other. Both were flung around like ragdolls in an angry dog’s mouth. Coach’s glasses went airborne, and he caught an elbow to the jaw—Finn took one to the cheek when he dodged Dylan’s headbutt. They made no headway at corralling Dylan until Principal Ward wormed his way between them. Principal Ward was a large man—head and shoulders above most—but he was no match for Dylan when his Darcy-switch had been flipped. His comb-over began to flap, this way and that. Last I saw him, he didn’t even have a comb-over. Once again, the mole thing.

Finn, Coach, and Principal Ward frantically locked on my gaze, begging for an assist. Pure unadulterated fear froze my body in place. After a few breaths, I fearfully tripped forward and braced both palms on Dylan’s chest—an effort to calm but push further away if need be. “I’m good,” I whispered.

“He hurt you,” he growled. Fat tears immediately spilled down my cheeks, and I’m pretty sure I had raccoon eyes from the sweaty brawl. When Dylan saw them, he clenched his teeth so hard it’s a wonder he didn’t crack a molar. Dylan was
thisclose
to doing permanent damage. I watched in tense anticipation, knowing he could freaking flatten the whole place if he so chose.

Pinky swear
, his eyes demanded.

I searched for a pinky swear loophole and came up empty-handed. I gave him a subliminal I’m-good face, but by the heavy emotion crackling between us, I got the impression he didn’t buy it. I should’ve lied. At this, Dylan’s anger revved again, and after a few shoves and words you shouldn’t say in front of your principal, Dylan eventually heeled enough for Principal Ward to demand a reason for the rumble.

Coach verbally stumbled around, but as I brushed imaginary dust from my clothing, I calmly dispensed the details. “Jerk-wad here fondled a girl yesterday, I took up for her, he came at me like a spider monkey, Jon defended me, we all started punching, he pulled a knife on Dylan, blah, blah, blah, it got ugly.”

I made an exaggerated switchblade movement of decapitation, promising I’d find my girl cojones if he came at me again. Well, at least I planned to find them. Then I dumbly added—and let me emphasize the
dumb
—“You’d better find a safe house, Jerk-wad, because I’m not through with you yet.”

Then I giggled.

Giggled
, I say. Who giggles when your boob is practically hanging out?

Principal Ward mulled those words over so long it began to make me nervous. Slowly, he walked underneath the basketball goal and pried the knife from the hardwood where it had firmly planted itself, pointing north. Once he flipped the blade down, with one slow blink, he drilled his angry brown eyes into Jerk-wad, then to Grumpy, and ended on me. “Detention,” he snapped, “all three of you!”

Well, well, well, words currently escaped me.

I slid my eyes to him, painting on a flabbergasted face—letting him know, point blank, he’d blown this. He’d blown this by incarcerating the kids who were the heroes. AP Unger and Murphy were friends—as in “real” friends. In fact, they dueled in
Ruzzle
almost nightly. That didn’t always bode well for me, but I can promise you AP Unger would’ve handled this situation differently. Principal Ward and Murphy didn’t have a relationship. In fact, he’d just guaranteed Murphy would now be his mortal enemy.

Pardon me, but the lousy, donkey lovin’, sack of shiz deserved it.

Dylan’s words rang like a gunshot through the room. “No frigging way,” he hissed, turning to him. “Some guy hit my best friend—a girl—her clothes are visibly damaged, and you’re okay with that? The guy has a knife. He took a swipe at me, for God’s sake, and should be expelled because of what he would’ve done with it had I not jumped out of the way.”

The record player screeched in my mind.

I’d cheated the Grim Reaper…AGAIN…how much longer could I outrun his scythe?

I buried my head in Dylan’s chest, and God love him, he kissed the top of my head. “I’m going to leave this world early, aren’t I?” I mumbled into his shirt. “And this was my best bra. Black and lacy, the recipe for sexy according to last month’s
Cosmopolitan
.” Good grief. I’d lost my mind. I said that out loud…right here in front of God and everybody. I glanced up into his face, tears stinging the backs of my eyes.

Dylan rubbed circles around my back.

“Please, don’t punish them,” Dylan begged Principal Ward. “Darcy and Jon are like brothers and sisters. They fight, but if someone else messes with the other, we get involved. This guy hit a girl and practically molested another. Doesn’t that count for something? You should be patting them on the back, not punishing them for having character.”

Principal Ward didn’t consider us all bros. He wanted blood.

My hands shook a little—maybe this was shock. Maybe for the first time in my sorry life I had a normal freaking reaction until…

I got to thinking. Detention wasn’t such a bad idea. Maybe detention is where I
needed
to be. Bean said Slapstick Wilson and Damon Whitehead were practically founding members. While there, I could also throw out random questions about Coach’s car being someone’s art project.

Simple math.

At that time, Finn sidled up alongside Dylan, giving me a nod that said,
I got the information, and my genius powers gave you something a little extra
. He threw his arm around Dylan’s shoulder before Dylan could dislocate Principal Ward’s. “It’s a lovely day, n’est-ce pas?” he asked him.

Dylan blinked at the statement.

Blinked like the whole thing was so preposterous it had to be an optical illusion.

Grumpy held his chin high, blatantly daring Principal Ward to throw him in the school’s boot camp for losers. “Listen, if that’s how you want to play this thing, then go ahead and put us in lockdown. You’re screwing up, Principal Ward, and you’re going to know it by the time everyone’s parents get a earful of what happened here.”

Yeah, it’d be Valley’s next political football if I had anything to say about it.

Principal Ward didn’t appreciate Grumpy’s choice of verbiage. Even told him to point blank, “Shut up.”

Jerk-wad had wisely kept his mouth in check, but Principal Ward bore a hole in his face (should’ve been his crotch) that said discussions with him specifically were far from over. He then unloaded a similar look on Coach Wallace. Coach was being blamed for not being present, I sighed, and all he’d wanted was to talk to his Facebook girlfriend.

“Can’t the man have a girlfriend?” my inner-idiot whispered in his defense.

Assuming I should be in tears, Coach gave a silent assessment of me, trying to figure out what made me tick and whether it was worth trying to un-tick.

Well, guess what? He hired me, and the road to success ain’t always pretty.

9. Hanukkah Hell

H
anukkah started this past weekend,
and it was tradition for Marjorie and me to celebrate with Rookie. Rookie was a proud half Jew, but in truth, he only half observed the holidays. Partly because my mother’s twin, Tabitha Arthur, I think, was the one thing he truly worshiped.

Hanukkah held many traditions like exchanging gifts, spinning the dreidel, receiving gelt (a coin-shaped piece of chocolate), and eating fried foods. Rookie’s tradition tonight, however, was the usual—a knock-down-drag-out fight with Red.

“Shalom, Rookie. Thanks for the jeggings,” I said when he picked up his phone. I’d had my eye on jeggings at Hollister for months, and a new pair was lying on my doorstep in a UPS box when Dylan dropped me off after school. My guess was Red bought them online and had them mailed to me as Hanukkah gift number four.

Rookie didn’t have a clue what constituted a jegging but murmured, “Shalom, baby, and you’re welcome” anyway.

Rookie always wanted particulars of your day,
Did you have tests; Did anyone pick on you; Did you have a good night’s sleep;
and so on and so forth. I opted against telling him what Jerk-wad did for fear of his reaction. It was election year, and if Rookie went badass-mofo-prosecutor on people, then he might need to beef up his burger-flipping skills. Instead, I told him I thought I’d made headway in uncovering who painted Coach Wallace’s car. As a testament to his despair, all he gave me was an, “Uh-huh.”

Murphy hadn’t been such an easy sale. When I gave him each depressing little detail, he’d gone psycho, opting to phone AP Unger first who talked him down from charging into Principal Ward’s home and beating the holy bejeezus out of him. Things that included—pardon me for the visual—ripping his balls from his groin and feeding them to him. Problem was, Murphy had two beefs with VHS…make that three. Mr. Himmel, Principal Ward, and Jerk-wad who smashed my face against the wall. Murphy made headway with Mr. Himmel. No, he didn’t get him fired, but he
did
get my assignments, including permission to turn in an at-home science experiment. Word was mum on what would happen to Jerk-wad, but my guess was he’d get slapped with assault and battery by the time Murphy was through with him.

Believe me. It’s better than Murphy’s fist.

Rookie murmured, “I feel like rebelling, baby. I lost a case today. Get ready, and let’s go grab a hotdog at Gold Star.”

If you live in Cincinnati—AKA Chilitown, USA—you’d better develop a taste for hotdogs. Trouble was, our chili joints delivered the pork version. A Jewish and Hanukkah law-breaking no-no.

“Rookie, it’s Hanukkah,” I laughed. “Shouldn’t we find a kosher dog somewhere?” He’d shown me the virtue of the Hebrew National brand, and I have to admit, I’d become a bigot.

“Darc, you sound like Tabitha. Trust me. You don’t want the association today.”

It was never a term of endearment when he dispensed her name in formalities. When he loved her, he addressed her as “Red” and “Tabby, baby.” When they were at war, it was Tabitha Rosemary Arthur. Things always blew hot and cold with them. It was either hot love and sweaty nights, or icicles on your libido.

They had four marriages of frostbite to prove it.

He explained, “I didn’t take her advice, and we lost. I’ve heard enough of her mouth to last a lifetime. Plus,” he paused, “
he
called. God,” he sighed in prayer, “I hate what that man does to her, and I hate it even more that I let her tell me.”

Ahhhh, Boyfriend Zero—the guy who started Red’s love train in motion.

Never met him. Red never spoke of him. But we all knew he existed.

Cue the violins
. “Sorry, Rookie.”

More silence. “It’s okay,” he finally sighed, worn-out. “So you’ll go?”

First thing I did when I clocked into HQ this afternoon was to drop the credit cards and social security card in a padded envelope—addressed to Tito Westbrook—and then leave them in our mailbox for pickup. Second, I attached Murphy’s camera to the computer to evaluate the photographs. In short, they sucked. Right now, I’d hoped to flow-chart what I’d learned, following an information trail if one materialized.

But Rookie was beat…and I couldn’t leave a good man down.

“I’m in,” I answered. While Rookie paused to say something to someone in his office, I pulled ripped Rock & Republic’s on and a ribbed, red turtleneck. I rounded out the outfit with new black UGGS, Hanukkah gift number one. I stepped inside my bathroom and coated my lashes with mascara and rolled on Go Glam! clear lip gloss. Looking ghostly pale, I kicked things up a notch and added pink blush.

Let’s face it, folks, I needed all the help I could get.

Once Rookie and I ended the call, I texted Rudi and told her the good news—she was first runner-up (a Hot Girl), by only one vote, after (gosh, I hated her) Brynn Hathaway. Rudi was profusely embarrassed, but after I convinced her this was a good thing, she said she’d heard of my latest “project.” She then confessed she had sixth period Study Hall with Slapstick Wilson.