Rivals (2010) (15 page)

SOMEONE CLEARED HER THROAT
behind Josh and Benji and said, “Now we need the envelope.”

Both boys spun around and spoke at the same time. “Jaden?”

“Who did you think?” she asked.

“Not Mickey Mullen Junior’s
girl
friend,” Benji said.

“Cut it out, Lido,” Josh said.

“Dude, she rode in the guy’s helicopter,” Benji said.

“And gave us the heads-up on Myron’s meeting with Seevers,” Josh said.

He clasped Jaden by the shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

“Did you get it?” she asked.

Benji held up the phone with a nod. “Video. The whole thing. We just sent you a copy.”

“You’re big-time, Lido,” Jaden said, slapping his back. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

Jaden kept looking over her shoulder as if she expected someone to be following them. They darted between the trees and around the side of the massive hotel, winding through the landscaping, hurrying until they reached Lake Street.

“Okay,” Benji said, tramping down the sidewalk toward town. “Now we’ve got to eat. You can’t do this to me anymore. I am starved. This is cruel and unusual punishment.”

Josh and Jaden hurried along behind Benji. Jaden took out her phone.

“Who are you calling?” Josh asked.

“My dad,” she said. “I got to check in. I don’t want him worrying.”

“What are you going to say?” Josh asked, but Jaden’s call had already gone through and she held up her finger.

“Dad?” she said. “Yeah, it was fun. Yeah, I met Anne Hathaway. She was nice. Um, Mickey invited me to this big barbecue they’re having at the Otesaga. A bunch of celebrities are going to be there—Anne Hathaway and Orlando Bloom—you don’t mind if I go, right?”

Jaden nodded her head, then said, “Thanks, Dad, you’re the best.”

Benji spun around. “Did you just say ‘Anne Hathaway’?”

Jaden said, “I guess she and Orlando were in New York doing a movie or something and the Mick flew them in his jet. They’re friends.”

“Can
I
go to that thing?” Benji asked. “As
your
friend?”

“Now we’re friends?” Jaden asked, forcing a smile. “Nice, Lido the fair-weather friend. Only I’m not going.”

Benji’s eyes widened. “You just told your dad. Now you’re lying to your dad? Dude, you are so changed. That’s classic Hollywood.”

“I didn’t lie, Benji,” she said, stamping her foot. “Tell me how I lied.”

“You said you’re going to that barbecue,” Benji said.

“No, I said they were having a barbecue and that I was invited, all true. I asked if he minded if I went. He said I could. I never said I
was
.”

Benji slapped Josh’s chest with the backs of his fingers and said, “You see what I was saying about women? Very dangerous.”

Jaden hefted her phone at them and said, “You guys better do the same thing. It’s starting to get late and you don’t want your mom all worried and your dad hunting you down, right?”

Josh took out his own phone and pulled the same stunt with his mom as Jaden had with her dad, asking permission to go to the party at the Otesaga, saying Jaden had been invited and that she wanted them to hang out with her tonight. All true.

They entered town and found Benji the cheeseburgers he’d been craving, eating on the sidewalk outside the Triple Play Café as the sun dropped behind the buildings and the shadows grew long. After emptying a bag of two triple cheeseburgers, fries, and a milkshake, Benji suggested a pit stop at Esposito’s Italian Ice Cream. Jaden and Josh both rolled their eyes.

“We’ve got to get going,” Josh said. “You had your food.”

“Besides,” Jaden said. “You don’t want to be too weighted down. What if we have to run?”

“Run?” Benji said, catching up with them at the door. “Why would we run? Where are we going?”

“You don’t think Seevers is just going to give us that envelope filled with cash, do you?” Jaden asked, stepping out onto the sidewalk. “We’ve got to go get it.”

“Wait, can’t the police get it?” Benji asked. “Or some other grown-ups or something? I didn’t think you meant
us
.”

“Us,” Jaden said, continuing to walk.

Josh nodded. “The police aren’t going to do anything until we can prove they’re paying off the umpire.”

“Even then,” Jaden said, “I don’t think it’s the police we go to. I think the only help we’ll get is from the media. If we can prove it to them, it’ll be a huge story. Then maybe someone will do something—the people at the Hall of Fame or the ones who run the tournament.
I don’t know if what they’re doing is criminal, but it’s just really, really wrong. No, we’ve got to go there by ourselves.”

“Where is ‘there’?” Benji asked, his voice sounding small.

“Josh didn’t tell you?” Jaden said. “Seevers’s place.”

BENJI CLEARED HIS THROAT
and said, “Really, you guys, one of us should be at that barbecue in case either of your parents asks about it. I can go and give you guys a report. Look, it’s gonna be dark soon and the mosquitoes will be out. I don’t even have a shirt. I got no shoes.”

“Come on,” Jaden said, leading them down the street to Pioneer Alley, where they walked into a gift shop.

Benji watched in horror as Jaden removed a pair of pink rubber flip-flops from a plastic bin and placed them on the checkout counter along with a flimsy white T-shirt with SpongeBob wearing a Yankees cap on it. The total came to seven dollars and change. Jaden took the money from her pocket, paid, and handed the stuff to Benji.

“Shoes and a shirt,” she said. “No more excuses. SpongeBob even matches your shorts.”

“
Pink
sandals?” Benji asked.

“They’re kind of cute,” Jaden said.

Benji moaned but dropped them onto the sidewalk and slipped them on along with the T-shirt.

“Great,” he said, his words as glum as his expression. “Anne Hathaway’s at the Otesaga and I’m running around Cooperstown dressed like a Disneyland fairy.”

Josh led his friends to the edge of town, where Seevers’s place and other ancient homes backed up to the river. By the time they reached the gravel drive with its two small stone gateposts, the sun had disappeared behind the trees and the sky was fading to purple in the coming night. Heat still bled up from the pavement, but already the woods offered cool wafts of evening air.

“We’re just going to walk right down the driveway?” Jaden asked.

“No reason to get all cut up or lost in the woods,” Josh said. “If we see headlights coming, we’ll have plenty of warning and we can hide in the trees.”

They followed him along the winding drive where the overhang of trees made it quite dark and the gravel crunched beneath their feet. Jaden put a hand on Josh’s shoulder, and Benji put his hand on the other one. A sudden clatter of sticks and a shriek made them all jump. Josh pulled himself together and said in a loud whisper, “It’s just a bird, an owl or something.”

“I know that,” Benji said.

It wasn’t long before gloomy yellow blotches of light appeared through the trees. The leaves flickered in a small breeze and the glow of the windows seemed to pulse with some inner heartbeat of the house, a monster crouching in the shadows. On the far side of the house, a window cast its beam on the low mound with its crumbling tombstones. The breeze carried with it the smell of the river’s mud and something else, breath from the damp rot that ate away at the wooden house.

“Holy moly,” Benji said, pointing. “Don’t even tell me those are tombstones.”

“Okay,” Josh said, “I won’t tell you.”

“Because if some ax-murdering zombie comes blowing out of that house screaming at us,” Benji said, “I’m the one who’ll go down. Sure, the heavy kid in the pink flip-flops, he’s the one who caught the ax blade in the back of the head. Poor kid, he never stood a chance. I can hear it on the news right now.”

“There’s no zombies,” Josh said, annoyed at the feeling of fright that had curled up in the corner of his stomach like a rodent. “Just a weird, greedy, crooked umpire.”

They crept forward, heading for the house. They walked along staring up into the lifeless windows. When they turned the corner at the rear of the house, they saw a flicker of light coming from a window that looked out onto the back porch. Josh crept up the steps, dodged
past a couple of broken wicker chairs, and waved for them to join him at the window. Peering through the curtains, they saw Seevers slumped down on a couch in front of the TV, cradling a whisky bottle against the fur on his naked chest.

“Looks like he’s out of it,” Jaden whispered.

Josh nodded and led them back down the steps and around the other side of the house, where light spilled out from another window. When Josh got to the window, he reached up, grasped the sill, and did a chin-up so he could peek in.

“Holy moly,” he said, peering through the screen. “There it is.”

Jaden and Benji gripped the slimy windowsill with their fingertips and hoisted themselves up as well so they could peek over its edge. In a small room with a musty-looking double bed and a floor lamp with no shade, a battered desk faced the opposite wall next to the door. On the desk, beside a cluster of empty beer cans, rested the manila envelope with fat stacks of green bills spilling from its mouth.

“Yeah, but what do we do now?” Benji asked, his voice quavering.

JOSH LET GO AND
dropped to the ground.

“What are we going to do?” Jaden asked.

“We’ve got to think,” Josh said. “We need a plan.”

Benji and Jaden followed him and they huddled up behind the tree. Josh studied the house in silence as the evening deepened into night. Suddenly Benji pointed up at the peaks of the roof jutting into the early set of stars.

“Oh gosh,” he said. “Look. Do you see?”

Josh narrowed his eyes and saw the flicker of wings, darting and dabbing around the edges of the roof.

“Bats,” Benji said.

“Relax,” Josh said. “They eat insects.”

“And suck your blood,” Benji said.

“That’s vampire bats,” Jaden said. “They’re in South
America. You don’t have anything to worry about. Stop being a pain.”

“Bats have rabies,” Benji said insistently as he inched away. “Rabies can kill you. You go mad and start foaming at the mouth. Then you’re wracked with pain until you go stiff and just croak. I saw it in a movie.”

“Lido,” Josh said, yanking him back. “We’re not leaving. You want to go, you go ahead, but I’m not going without that envelope. We’re supposed to play for the national championship tomorrow night, and I’m not going to let this creep ruin it for us.”

“Well,” Benji said, “we’re just sitting here. It’s not going to fly out the window at us.”

“Okay,” Josh said, making up his mind. “Cell phones out, everyone. Jaden, you can conference with yours, right?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“So, you tie us all in together,” Josh said. “Everybody put their phone on vibrate first.”

They did, and Jaden then linked them all onto the same call.

“Good,” Josh said, sneaking a look at the big, gloomy house. “Okay, now look around for a piece of metal or something. I need something to help me pry that screen off.”

They fished around in the grass, and near the house Jaden came up with an old metal bracket.

“Good,” Josh said, hefting the rusty metal. “Okay,
after you guys help me through the window, Benji, you watch the front door. Jaden, you watch the back. If either of you sees anything, you let me know on the phone.”

“This is, like, breaking and entering,” Jaden said in a low whisper as they stepped up beneath the window. “Then we take the money? We could go to jail.”

“We’re not stealing it,” Josh said, looking up at the sagging screen. “We’re investigating corruption. Stealing is when you take something and you plan on keeping it. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re going to borrow it to show the people who run the tournament that it’s the same envelope Myron gave to Seevers. If they don’t believe the video, their fingerprints are all over that thing. Now, you guys boost me up.”

“What about Seevers?” Jaden asked, nodding her head toward the back of the big old house.

“He’s half in the bag,” Josh said in a whisper. “If the roof fell on him, he wouldn’t notice, but if he does get up, one of you will see him and we’ll all run like heck.”

Benji looked up at the window, shook his head, and said, “This is bad. This is so bad.”

“Bad is what they’re doing,” Josh said. “Robbing kids of a chance to win a championship, or my dad the chance for a long-term sponsorship. That’s bad. That’s stealing, not this. Hurry up and help me here.”

Jaden and Benji each cupped their hands together and bent down so Josh could step into them. Then they
raised him up so that he could pry the screen loose, drop the bracket down into the grass, and slither inside. He slipped and thumped to the bedroom floor, dizzy with fear for a moment before he scrambled up and gave them a thumbs-up, pointing to his phone, then silently directing each of them toward the front and back of the house.

He watched them disappear, then turned back into the room.

The light next to the bed cast a yellow glow over musty sheets and stained pillows. Josh moved carefully toward the dresser where he’d seen the envelope of money.

He was only halfway there when Benji screamed.

JOSH BOLTED TO THE
dresser, grabbed, and felt the envelope in his fingers. He spun, leaped across the room, threw the envelope out the window and into the night, then quickly scrambled out of the window himself before falling in a heap on the grass.

“What happened?” Josh asked in a frightened hiss as he got to his feet.

Benji ran toward him from the front, swatting the air over his head. Then he tripped and fell to the ground, still screaming. The bat that had swooped down and fluttered about his head zigzagged off into the trees.

“Benji, it’s gone,” Josh said, grabbing two handfuls of Benji’s SpongeBob T-shirt and hauling him to his feet.

“What happened?” Jaden said, hissing as she appeared from the back.

“Benji got attacked by a bat,” Josh said, also in an urgent whisper.

Jaden looked down, scooped up the envelope from the grass, and said, “Let’s get the heck out of here.”

Benji yelped again, and Josh scowled at him in disgust.

“I told you,” Josh said, looking around above Benji’s head, “the bat’s gone. Be
quiet
.”

Benji’s face had gone white, and it glowed at them in the darkness like a pale moon. He raised a finger, pointing behind them, past the graveyard and toward the front of the house.

“It’s him,” Benji said, trembling.

Josh spun around and gasped. Seevers stood there, bare-chested and wearing nothing but a pair of blue-and-white-striped pajama bottoms with his frizzy gray hair sticking up like a maniac. That’s not what made Josh gasp, though.

The umpire was carrying a shotgun.

His mouth barely moved as he said, “You kids don’t move. Not a muscle.”