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Thrash was swatting as many flies on what to do next as I was, so I stood up from the edge of the fountain and walked to the front window of the bookstore on the right. It was called Waldenbooks, named for the book Orlando had given me, and there was a placard just inside the store’s entrance to spell it all out for you, in case you didn’t know. What the placard didn’t tell you was that
Walden
wasn’t just the title of the book, it was also the name of the pond in Concord, Massachusetts, where Thoreau had gone to live for two years and two months, all alone in a cabin he’d built by himself. He’d named his book after the pond because that’s where he’d written it, and the pond was named Walden because, at some point or another, that’s what it had been—
walled in
. Thoreau had pieced that one together all on his own, just like a detective, and I knew he had because I’d read it.

Orlando and his
books, shit. There’d been all this crap about how I was supposed to be the smartest kid in school, but I’d always thought Orlando was way smarter than me. It was like he’d read and remembered everything. He also had this weird thing where he knew the birthdays of all these famous authors by heart, which I found out the time he’d asked me over to his house on my birthday. Even though I had junior peewee practice after school that day and knew mom was getting off work early to take us out to dinner, I said okay anyway, but that I couldn’t stay long.

His house was awesome. It had like six or seven bedrooms, a finished basement with a sauna, this crazy office with bay windows, a glass den with high ceilings and a concrete wall and a real fireplace, all this new and modern furniture, paintings and sculptures everywhere, and a pool out back that was made to look like a lagoon with a waterfall. I told him his place looked like an art museum from the twenty-first century, and he said that’s what his parents wanted, because they were both architects, and took me upstairs to his room. It was bigger than Neecey’s and mine combined, and it had all this pocked concrete and metal and skylights in the ceiling, which made it look like part Fortress of Solitude, part library, because all the walls were lined with books.

Orlando knew it was my birthday because I’d told him a couple of weeks before, and he said I was lucky because there were a lot of famous authors born on that day—this guy named Nietzsche, a poet named Virgil, and some other ones, too—so it was a great day to be born. Then Orlando walked over to one of the shelves, pulled out a book, and handed it to me. He said the guy who’d written it was born in July, and that it was one of his favorites, so he was giving it to me as a present. I tried to pronounce the name but mauled it, and Orlando laughed that high-pitched laugh of his and said, no, it’s pronounced
Thuh-row
, and that I was really gonna like it.

I felt weird and kind of embarrassed. I’d never been invited to somebody’s house before, or talked about writers or books with someone my age, or gotten a birthday present from another kid, and I realized I was out of my depth. But I was game to play along, so I asked Orlando why he thought I’d like it. He said I’d have to read it for myself and then I could tell him. He warned me it’d be hard at first, but since I was already a genius, I’d figure it out sooner or later. That was the first and only time he ever mentioned anything about that, and although I knew he was busting on me, there wasn’t any spite in it, and we both cracked up laughing.

I didn’t know what to say, so I said thanks, and asked him when his birthday was. He said in early January, but it wasn’t as good as mine, because the only writer born on that day that he knew of was this Italian guy who wrote a detective story about a monastery, but he’d only just become famous in the past few years. I told Orlando he was luckier than I was, because my birthday seemed crowded, but his was practically empty, and that he should write a book, become famous, and even our birthdays out a bit, or at least get off his ass and actualize for a change. He shook his head, sighed, and said that sounded an awful lot like selling out to whitey and we both cracked up again.

That’s how I’d gotten
Walden
in the first place, all the way back in fifth grade part one, and by now I’d read the book four times, cover to cover. And Orlando was right; it was hard. In fact, it had like no plot at all, so it was even hard to describe. But if I had to say what it was about, I’d say it was the story of some guy holing up in the woods for a couple of years, more than a mile from his nearest neighbor, kind of like a hermit, only he spent most of his time writing about what he did and what he thought was essential for like a deeper and more meaningful life. The moral of the book was self-reliance. Well, it was about nonconformity, too, but you couldn’t be nonconformist if you weren’t already self-reliant (I read that in the editor’s introduction), and Thoreau went to live in the woods to conduct an experiment to
see if he was.
Walden
never told you straight out if Thoreau was self-reliant or not, but I figured he must’ve been, otherwise he would’ve died alone in the woods and never would’ve been able to write about any of it.

Thoreau didn’t die in the woods, though, and he somehow managed to write down just about every single thing he thought and did while he was there. He built a cabin, dug and stocked its storage cellar, made a chimney to warm the place in the winter, planted and sowed a bean field and other crops, and he told you how he did all of those things down to the smallest details, even how much they cost him. Shit, that guy actualized his ass off all the time and was
never
at a loss for anything. Then again, he couldn’t afford to be. I’d read the biography about Thoreau at the public library, too, and it said that a lot of the people who’d known him either didn’t like him or said or wrote all this nasty stuff behind his back, like how short and ugly and confrontational he was, as if he’d been some kind of jerk in real life, or the kind of person who was really tough to warm up to. So it made sense how a guy like that would write about being self-reliant, because if nobody really liked him, then he pretty much had to be.

But the rest of his book had all this other stuff about economics and railroads and how to observe and study nature and the proper names for things and transcendental philosophy that I was sure I didn’t get. Worse still, all that other stuff sometimes made me think I didn’t understand the book at all. For instance,
Walden
was supposed to teach you about being self-reliant. Fine, that was pretty clear. But if being self-reliant was the best thing you could possibly be and every bit as great as Thoreau kept saying it was, then I could never understand why he eventually
left
his cabin in the woods and moved back to town with everyone else, like he did. You know, why didn’t he just
stay
there? Maybe self-reliance wasn’t really the moral of the story, or maybe I wasn’t reading it right, but that didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to me.

It also didn’t
make a hell of a lot of sense for me to be standing in front of the bookstore’s entrance, scouring the tops of bookshelves for the young, dark-skinned giant who clearly wasn’t there, when I had more legwork to do. So I snapped myself out of it, turned around, and headed to the cheap jewelry and accessories kiosk on my left. The salesclerk was this big disheveled teddy bear of a woman who was seated on a wooden stool, had her nose buried in a paperback, and looked like she could bake the hell out of a cake. I slid up to the scrunchies, hair clips, and earrings, and ran my eyes over the bangles, spiked wristbands, and beaded friendship bracelets hanging on the rack until I found what I was looking for. I took the rubber bracelet from the retirement home out of my pocket, held it up to the ones for sale, and saw that they were practically identical. I’d expected as much, but detectives had to verify whatever facts they had as best they could, even the really obvious ones. That way you could be sure of what you knew before tackling what you didn’t.

“Can I help you?” asked the saleswoman.

“No, thanks, I was just checking something,” I said all cheery and polite as I pocketed the bracelet and turned to go.

“Um, excuse me,” she called, standing up.

I turned back, saw her pointing at the $1.50 sign by the bracelets, and knew what she was getting at.

“This is mine. I brought it with me,” I said.

“How do I know that?” She smiled. “Can you prove it?”

“It’s got dirt on it—look.” I showed her the bracelet, pointing to a little brown smudge on the side.

“Okay, sorry.” She smiled again. “Just making sure.”

“Is there a problem over here?” a gruff male voice sounded from behind.

I peeked over my shoulder and saw the tan uniform, thick belt,
and child-molester mustache of a mall security guard closing in from out of nowhere.

“No, no problem, my mistake.” The saleslady waved him off, sweet as could be.

“No problem, then, you say?” He kept advancing.

I wondered what the hell was wrong with some people—you gave them walkie-talkies, pepper spray, and a beat to walk and it made them hard of hearing. The saleslady reassured him again that nothing was wrong, and our little party broke up: she got back on her stool, the security guard walked one way, and I went the other. I realized I had to be more careful. Not because I might get ejected from the mall by a rent-a-cop with nothing to do, but because I’d been set up for a hit yesterday and I hadn’t been watching my back. And if a slow-footed, beer-bellied mouth-breather like that could sneak up on me, then just about anyone could, so I had to stay on my guard.

I took the escalator up to the mezzanine, hung a right in front of what used to be Bamberger’s, and made for the exit at the far end. There were a couple of pay phones right before the glass doors leading to the parking lot and wooden benches just outside, so you could usually find some kids making prank calls or ducking out to sneak a smoke. That end of the mall was pretty vacant, like they hadn’t finished it yet or couldn’t rent all the space, and I could see nobody was clogging up the exit well before I’d gotten near the pay phones. I poked my head out the exit doors and checked the benches anyway, and saw a freckled Yeti with a shock of red hair relieving himself against the wall to the right of the benches. His back was to me, but I knew instantly it was Tommy Sharpe, even though he looked a lot different from the last time I’d seen him at the beginning of summer. He used to be fat, but over the past couple of months he’d lost all his flab and gut and had replaced them with shoulders the size of bowling balls, a neck just slightly thinner than a fire hydrant, and patches of swollen zits so peaked and red across his hulking arms that they must’ve been visible from outer space.

For a second I caught myself wondering what in the hell you’d feed a kid to grow him so goddamn big, and more important, where I could get my hands on some. But I got over it fast, backed up silently the way I’d come, and spun around quickly to check my rear flank, because if Tommy Sharpe was at the mall, then dimes to doughnuts Razor was with him, and that spelled hard times for any preteen who wandered aimlessly into their path. Razor was nowhere to be seen in the long, vacant corridor ahead of me, but I knew I wasn’t safe out in the open where I was, because that end of the mall was the perfect place to corner a kid and spring a trap.

I darted into the small hardware store near the pay phones as fast as I could, hustling toward the back. I passed an aisle with handsaws, jigsaws, and hacksaws; another with hammers, screwdrivers, and pliers; and shortly arrived at the end of the line—the paint section. There were plenty of colors to choose from, and that struck me as a damn good thing. Not because I had anything I wanted to paint, but because the shelves were tall and wide and easy to hide behind. All I had to do was wait a few minutes, make sure the hall was clear, and then I’d be on my way again. In the meantime, though, I had to make it look like I was mulling over a purchase or the salesclerks might escort me out the door to certain doom. So I got busy.

As I pretended to read the label on a gallon of latex indoor paint, it finally occurred to me where I was, and it gave me an idea. I walked into the far right corner, pulled out the smallest can of black paint they had, went to the hammer aisle, picked up a tape measure, and made a mental note: a small can of black paint was about three inches tall, three and a half inches in diameter, and cost exactly $2.49. Back in the paint section, I found out that a paintbrush with bristles small enough to fit into that size can came in two different lengths—a four-inch model and a six-inch—but no matter which you preferred, you could still get it for under a dollar. Add a small screwdriver from the screwdriver aisle to pry open the lid, and you were looking at less than five bucks to get yourself started in a life of crime.

A salesman came over and asked if I needed any help as I was putting everything back, and I fed him the same line I’d used at the jewelry kiosk—nope, I was just checking something. He raised an eyebrow at me, nodded his head, and left me alone. Yeah, it worked like a charm, but it was also true. I
was
checking something: I was reconstructing how the crime had been committed, building a picture of it in my head, so I could keep running through the image in my mind, studying it from different angles until a new or overlooked detail popped up and gave me a better lead, like the height of the sign had earlier. Because in detective work it was just like Holmes and Thoreau were always saying: it wasn’t always
what
you saw but
how
you saw it that mattered.

Right now I could see that a small can of paint, a paintbrush, and a screwdriver meant something to carry them in, because only extra-large clown pants would have pockets big enough, so my next stop was the sporting goods store in the middle of the mall. Sure, to get there I’d have to run the risk of strolling right into the not-so-welcoming arms of two knucklescrapers, but running risks was what detectives were supposed to do.

I edged to the front of the hardware store and peered out, first one way, then the other. All was clear. I stepped out, sliding along close to the wall, speeding up like a racewalker as I crossed store windows and slowing down to below Livia’s speed as I passed each entrance, just in case I had to duck in. My body tensed up as I went, and the way I kept shifting gears and looking in every direction, ready to break for it at a moment’s notice, made me feel like I was in the final round of the first annual Musical Chairs Championship. I got back safely to the main corridor, passed Orange Julius and the pretzel place without incident, and shortly after that the escalators in the center of the mall came into view.