The Big Splash (2 page)

“Stevens,” he spit out, “Mr. Biggs wants to see you, hehehe.” A short, high-pitched giggle ended his sentence, justifying his nickname. He scanned the crowd constantly
as we walked, his head swiveling back and forth in a herky-jerky motion, like a lawn sprinkler with the hiccups.

“Tell him to call my secretary and make an appointment,” I replied.

“It wasn't a request, hehehe.”

“Everything is a request. Ever heard of freedom of choice?”

He stopped walking. “All right, smart guy … here's your choice: You can
choose
to talk to Biggs or you can
choose
to get popped, hehehe.”

He sneered at me, revealing teeth that had enjoyed one Jawbreaker too many. His right hand went to the side pocket of his cargo pants. There was a lump there the approximate size and shape of a squirt gun. Smart guy that I was, I got the message. He raised an eyebrow and waited for my response.

“You know, I've been wanting to talk to Vinny for a while,” I said. “Today's as good a day as any.”

“Good choice, hehehe.” He started walking again. I followed.

The place was packed with seventh graders, not a huge stretch for a middle-school cafeteria at lunchtime. It was spaghetti day, so the air was thick with the smell
of government-supplied tomato sauce. Joey walked in front of me, cutting a swath through the crowd. Nobody wanted to accidentally bump into him because they would “accidentally” get bumped back, only ten times harder. Joey wasn't a big kid, but he was crazy, and crazy trumped size. Size could be negotiated with. Nobody knows what to do with crazy.

Vinny Biggs's table was in the back right corner of the caf, strategically chosen for its view of the entire room. Vinny sat with his back to the wall, so that only ghosts had a shot of sneaking up on him. As Joey and I approached, two hulking eighth graders moved to block our path. Joey gave them a barely perceptible nod. Before I could protest, they lifted me off the ground and guided me toward the wall, as gently as two grizzlies playing with a bunny rabbit.

“Routine weapons check,” one of them rumbled.

“Just doing our job,” said the other.

“Ooof, ow …,” I replied.

They did everything but buy me lunch. When they didn't find any squirt guns on me, they let me through. One of them even helped me sit down, hard.

Vinny was using his meaty hands to delicately eat a
salad too green and fresh to have been gotten from the cafeteria. Sitting to his left was his right-hand man, Kevin Carling, eating potato chips one at a time, wiping the salt from his fingers after each one. They both wore freshly pressed dress shirts and khakis, making them look like businessmen that someone had left in the dryer too long. Kevin and I had been best friends back in Ellie. Now the big jerk was just another one of Vinny's lackeys.

I crossed my arms and waited for Vinny to acknowledge my arrival, but he kept right on eating his salad. I checked my watch. My lunch period was slipping away.

I cleared my throat too loud and too long to be authentic. “Ahem.”

“Hey, Matt,” Kevin said, then shot me a smile I didn't return. Vinny didn't look up.

“That's doing wonders for your figure,” I said, nodding toward Vinny's salad.

Vinny smiled in spite of himself. He looked up at me. “A fat joke? Matthew, I expected better of you.”

“I guess getting manhandled makes me cranky.”

He shrugged, then dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin.

“Did you call me here just to watch you eat?” I asked. “Not that it isn't fascinating.”

“Not quite,” he said. “Are you still for hire, or did things change over the summer?”

“I'm still a private detective, if that's what you mean.”

“Excellent. I have a job for you.”

I stood up in a hurry. “Thanks, but no thanks.
Not
being one of your lackeys helps me sleep at night.”

“Please, sit down and hear me out first.”

This wasn't a request. One of the guards helped me to my seat again.

“Your goons can keep me here to listen to your ‘job offer,'” I growled, “but the chances of me taking it are slim.”

“Matthew, why the hostility? I thought we got along.”

“We used to get along. Now we coexist.”

“Well, then let me put it to you this way: You were one of the few people who stood up for me before I attained my current position. I always felt like I should do you a favor somehow, so—”

“Whoa,” I said, “the people you do favors for either
land in detention or end up getting popped. How about just a thank you and a hearty handshake?”

“How about a thank you, a hearty handshake, and twenty dollars?”

My mouth snapped shut. Twenty bucks was a lot of money. I mean, there's stuff I wouldn't do for twenty bucks, but the list was pretty short. Vinny was watching me, grinning broadly. Apparently, I wore my thoughts like makeup on a little girl: all over my face.

“Ahhh,” he purred, “I knew you'd do it.”

“I'm not ‘doing' anything … yet. Twenty dollars gets my attention, not my services. What's the job?”

“Simple. There's a trinket, a good luck charm. I lent it out to someone a long time ago, and now I want it back.”

“Sounds like a job for one of your goons.”

“Employees, Matthew. Not goons. And yes, it would seem to be, but it isn't. This job requires more … finesse.”

“Why not use Kevin?” I asked, nodding in his direction. “He's not as brutish as the rest of your ‘employees.' I heard he's even housebroken.”

“Kevin can't do this job,” Vinny said, in a way that closed the subject.

I looked at Kevin. His eyes were no longer locked on my face. They had suddenly taken a strong interest in his shoes. His smile now resembled a grimace, as if he had just been hit in the stomach with a two-by-four. There was only one kid in school who could make Kevin look that way.

“Who'd you lend it to?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

“Nicole Finnegan.”

I barked out a laugh. “Right. You expect me to go up to Nikki Fingers, only the most feared trigger-girl in school, and force her to hand over your good luck charm. You have another one
I
could borrow?”

“It isn't like that.”

“Well, how is it like?”

“You know as well as I do that over the summer she decided to stop working for me. She's out … completely out. She wouldn't hurt a kitten.”

“I'm not as cute as a kitten.”

Vinny ignored me and continued. “And you wouldn't be ‘forcing' her to do anything, Matthew. I doubt she even remembers she has it. And if she does remember, I doubt that she'd have any problem parting with it. I gave it to her last year. We used to joke that it gave her good luck.”

“If it's her good luck charm, why would she give it up?”

“She needed it when she worked for me,” he said. “She certainly doesn't need it now.”

“Everybody needs good luck.”

“True, but not everybody needs the same kind.”

I nodded, conceding his point. “So why hire me?” I asked. “You don't need a detective. You already know who has the charm. And there must be someone in your organization with enough brains and manners to ask Nikki for something she doesn't want anymore.”

“There are, but Nicole and I made a deal. She would never talk about my organization to anyone, and I would never approach her again. We both wanted a clean break.”

“That doesn't really answer my question.”

“Doesn't it? You're a neutral party, Matthew. You don't work for me—”

“But you would be hiring me.”

“Technically, yes. But let's face it, everyone knows you would never ‘work' for me, not in any way that really mattered.”

“What if she refuses?”

“If she refuses, then nothing. I want my trinket back, but not that badly. I respect her way too much to try to force it from her.” His gaze went distant for a moment. “In a way, it would be nice if she refused. She was the best … my favorite … and if she wants to keep the trinket as a token of what we once had, then I would be flattered.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Joey make an ugly face, as if what Vinny said didn't sit too well. Then again, maybe I was reading too much into it; the Hyena had a lot of faces, none of them pretty. I turned my attention back to Vinny.

“Sounds easy. What's the catch?”

“No catch. You ask her for the trinket. Whether you get it back from her or not, I pay you twenty dollars. Consider it back pay for being nice to me before you had to.”

It sounded plausible, but trusting Vinny Biggs was like signing your own detention slip. Twenty bucks, however, was hard to ignore, no matter what the risks were.

“What does the trinket look like?”

Vinny smiled. “It's a hula girl, holding a surfboard.”

“What's the time frame?”

“The sooner the better.”

“How's this afternoon?” I asked.

“Fine.”

“Fine. Half now, half after the job's done,” I said.

Vinny put ten dollars on the table. His smile widened. He had been holding it in his hand the entire time. He had known what I wanted before I did. I frowned, but picked up the bill and put it in my pocket before I could change my mind. He slid something else across the table. It was a hall pass with my name on it.

“So you can eat your lunch in peace,” he said, “without rushing.”

I picked up the pass and looked at it. It was expertly forged. My frown sunk a little lower.

The bell rang. Vinny stood up; I didn't move. “Don't question your decision, Matthew,” he said, reading my mind via my face again. He walked over and put his hand on my shoulder. “A smart kid knows a good deal when it falls into his lap.”

He clapped my shoulder twice, like an over-friendly politician, then walked out of the caf with his entourage trailing behind him. Joey the Hyena lingered for a moment. His eyes were full of malice. “See you
around, Stevens,” he said, then giggled that eerie giggle of his. “Hehehe …”

I sat there cursing myself for breaking one of my longest-standing rules: Don't
ever
work for Vinny Biggs, especially on deals that were too good to be true. Nothing that paid well was ever easy.

sleepwalked through the rest of my classes that afternoon, only making a fool of myself in History. When Mr. Donnelly asked me who started the Peloponnesian War, I almost answered “Nikki Fingers.”

Luckily, I had a seventh-period study hall, which gave me an opportunity to catch up with my thoughts about Nikki and Vinny's sordid past. Nicole Finnegan, a.k.a. Nikki Fingers, was a dream girl … the kind who caused nightmares. She was twelve, but could have easily passed for fourteen. One glimpse of her bright red hair
and luminous green eyes made you freeze like a package of fish sticks, and that was all the time she needed to shoot so much water on the front of your pants, it looked like your bladder exploded. She was a big reason behind Vinny's rise to power in the middle-school underworld.

One year ago, the Franklin Middle School landscape looked a whole lot different. Small-time scams ran rampant at the Frank: kids shaken down for lunch money, stolen exams sold on the black market, that sort of thing. There was no organization to it. Everyone was out for themselves. At the time, Vincent Biggio was just a short, chubby, sixth-grade target for upper-class bullies. Each bully took his shots, but one in particular seemed to want to turn torturing Vinny into a career. Richard Dexter, or Dickie Dex as he was known, was a two-time eighth grader whose only ambition seemed to be to make the middle school need Driver's Ed. He fulfilled all the requirements of your average, run-of-the-mill bully: big, dumb, and vaguely greasy. He must have been waiting for someone like Vinny his whole life, because from day one, Dickie was all over him like hair on an old man's ear.

“Hey fatboy!” he used to call out, laughing at his own lame attempt at humor. Vinny would take it all stoically:
the laughing, the name-calling, the beatings. When Kevin and I were still friends, we were able to step in a couple of times and bail him out. We didn't do it because we were friends with Vinny; we did it because we hated bullies. Unfortunately, we couldn't be everywhere, and when we weren't around, Vinny took his lumps.