SEVEN

How it happened was no big mystery.

Like all students, Beatrice the Bear lived in the vicinity of her school bus stop. Roy likely had ridden right past her front door, and when Beatrice had spotted him, she’d simply tailed him to the golf course.

“That’s my bike,” he said to her.

“Yeah, it is.”

“Can I have it back?”

“Maybe later,” she said. “Hop on.”

“What?”

“The handlebars, you dork. Get on the handlebars. We’re goin’ for a ride.”

Roy did what he was told. He wanted to retrieve his bicycle and go home.

Two years of pushing up and down high hills in Montana’s thin air had made Roy a powerful rider, but Beatrice Leep was stronger. Even through deep puddles she pedaled swiftly and effortlessly, as if Roy were weightless. Perched uncomfortably on the handlebars, he clutched the sodden cardboard box.

“Where are we going?” he shouted.

“Hush up,” Beatrice said.

She steamed past the fancy brick entrance to the golf course and soon the paved road gave way to a dirt rut, with no curbs or streetlights. Roy braced himself as the bike jounced through muddy potholes. The rain had softened to a mist, and his wet shirt felt cool against his skin.

Beatrice stopped when they came to a tall chain-link fence. Roy observed that a small section had been cut with wire clippers so that it could be pulled back. He got off the handlebars and tugged at his jeans, which had ridden up the crack of his butt.

Beatrice parked the bicycle and motioned for Roy to follow her through the hole in the fence. They entered a junkyard full of wrecked automobiles, acres of them. In the twilight Roy and Beatrice crept along, darting from one rusted hulk to the next. From the way Beatrice was acting, Roy assumed they weren’t alone on the property.

Soon they came to an old panel truck propped up on cinderblocks. Roy could barely make out the faded red lettering on its battered awning: J O- J O ’ S I CE C REAM AND S NO- C ONES .

Beatrice Leep stepped up into the cab, pulling Roy behind her. She led him through a narrow doorway into the back, which was cluttered with crates, boxes, and heaps of clothes. Roy noticed a sleeping bag rolled up in a corner.

When Beatrice closed the door, they were in total darkness; Roy couldn’t see his own fingers in front of his face.

He heard Beatrice’s voice: “Lemme have your box.”

“No,” Roy said.

“Eberhardt, are you fond of your front teeth?”

“I’m not afraid of you,” Roy lied.

It was stuffy and humid inside the old ice-cream truck. Mosquitoes hummed in Roy’s ears and he slapped at them blindly. He smelled something that seemed out of place, something oddly familiar—cookies? The truck smelled like freshly baked peanut-butter cookies, the kind Roy’s mother made.

The piercing beam of a flashlight caught him squarely in the eyes, and he turned away.

“For the last time,” Beatrice said menacingly, “what’s in that shoe box?”

“Shoes,” said Roy.

“I’m so sure.”

“Honest.”

She snatched the box from his hands and flipped it open, aiming the flashlight at the contents.

“I told you,” Roy said.

Beatrice huffed. “Why are you carryin’ around an extra pair of sneakers? That’s really weird, cowgirl.”

“The shoes aren’t for me,” Roy said. They were almost brand-new; he’d only worn them a couple of times.

“Then who’re they for?”

“Just a kid I met.”

“What kid?”

“The one I told you about at school. The one who went running by your bus stop that day.”

“Oh,” Beatrice said caustically, “the one you went chasing when you should a been minding your own business.” She turned the flashlight off and everything went black again.

“Well, I finally met him. Sort of,” Roy said.

“You don’t give up, do you?”

“Look, the kid needs shoes. He could step on broken glass or rusty nails ... or even a cottonmouth.”

“How do you know he wants to wear shoes, Eberhardt? Maybe he can run faster without ’em.”

Roy wasn’t sure what Beatrice Leep’s problem was, but he knew he was seriously late for dinner and his parents were probably frantic. He planned to make a break as soon as Beatrice turned on the flashlight again. If he could somehow beat her to the bicycle, he might be able to get away.

“Whatever,” Roy said. “If he doesn’t want the shoes, I’ll keep ’em myself. If he does, well, they ought to fit him. He looked about as tall as me.”

From the darkness, only silence.

“Beatrice, if you’re going to beat me up, could you please hurry up and get it over with? My mom and dad are probably calling the National Guard right now.”

More heavy silence.

“Beatrice, you awake?”

“Eberhardt, why do you care about this kid?”

It was a good question, and Roy wasn’t certain he could put the answer into words. There was something about the look on the boy’s face when he went running past the school bus those days; something urgent and determined and unforgettable.

“I don’t know,” Roy said to Beatrice Leep. “I don’t know why.”

The flashlight blinked on. Roy clambered for the door, but Beatrice calmly snatched him by the seat of his jeans and yanked him to the floor beside her.

Roy sat there panting, waiting to get clobbered.

Yet she didn’t seem mad. “What size are these?” she asked, holding up the sneakers.

“Nines,” said Roy.

“Hmm.”

In the cupped glow of light, Beatrice put a finger to her lips and pointed over her shoulder. Then Roy heard the footsteps outside.

Beatrice clicked off the light and they waited. The steps in the gravel sounded heavy and ponderous, like those of a large man. Something jangled as he moved; a set of keys, maybe, or loose coins in a pocket. Roy held his breath.

As the watchman approached the ice-cream truck, he whacked one of the fenders with what sounded like a lead pipe. Roy jumped but made no noise. Luckily, the man kept walking. Every so often he’d bang the pipe loudly on another junker, as if he were trying to scare something out of the shadows.

After the man was gone, Beatrice whispered: “Rent-a-cop.”

“What are we doing here?” Roy asked weakly.

In the darkness of the compartment, he could hear Beatrice the Bear standing up. “Tell you what I’m gonna do, cowgirl,” she said. “I’ll make you a little deal.”

“Go on,” said Roy.

“I’ll see that the barefoot kid gets these shoes, but only if you promise to leave him alone. No more spying.”

“So you do know him!”

Beatrice hoisted Roy to his feet.

“Yeah, I know him,” she said. “He’s my brother.”

At four-thirty in the afternoon, when Officer David Delinko normally got off work, his desk was still piled high with paperwork. He had lots of forms to fill out and reports to complete about what had happened to his patrol car. He kept writing until his wrist began to ache, and at six he finally called it quits.

The motor pool was only a few blocks away, but the rain was pouring down when Officer Delinko wearily came out of the headquarters building. He didn’t want his uniform to get drenched, so he waited under the eaves, directly beneath the capital P in C OCONUT C OVE P UBLIC S AFETY D EPARTMENT .

Lots of cities had started referring to their police forces as “public safety” departments, a phrase intended to promote a softer, friendlier image. Like most officers, David Delinko thought the name change was pointless. A cop was a cop, period. In an emergency, nobody ever yelled, “Quick! Call the public safety department!”

“Call the police” is what they always shouted—and always would.

David Delinko was proud to be a policeman. His father had been a robbery detective in Cleveland, Ohio, and his older brother was a homicide detective in Fort Lauderdale—and a detective is what David Delinko fervidly wanted to be, someday.

That day, he realized sadly, was probably further in the future than ever, thanks to the vandals at the pancake-house construction site.

Officer Delinko was mulling his situation, watching the rain stream down, when a lightning bolt zapped a utility pole at the end of the street. Briskly he retreated into the lobby of the headquarters building, where the ceiling lights flickered twice and faded out.

“Aw, shoot,” Officer Delinko grumbled to himself. There was nothing to do but wait for the storm to pass.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the bizarre incidents at the Mother Paula’s property. First, somebody pulling the survey stakes; then dumping the alligators in the latrines; then spray-painting his squad car while he was asleep inside—this was the work of bold and defiant perpetrators.

Immature, certainly, but still bold.

In Officer Delinko’s experience, kids weren’t usually so persistent, or so daring. In typical cases of juvenile vandalism, the crimes could be traced to a group of youngsters, each trying to outdo the other for thrills.

But this wasn’t a typical case, Officer Delinko thought. Possibly it was the work of just one person with a grudge—or a mission.

After a while, the squall began to subside and the thunderclouds scudded away from the center of town. Officer Delinko covered his head with a newspaper and made a dash for the motor-pool yard. His hand-shined shoes were squirting water by the time he got there.

The Crown Victoria, looking as good as new, sat outside the locked gate. Officer Delinko had asked the garage chief to hide the car keys in the gas cap, but instead they were inserted into the ignition, visible to anyone strolling by. The garage chief believed nobody was loony enough to steal a marked police car.

Officer Delinko started up the car and headed for his apartment. Along the way he made a slow loop around the pancake-house property, but there wasn’t a soul to be seen. He wasn’t surprised. Criminals disliked lousy weather as much as law-abiding citizens did.

Even when off-duty, Officer Delinko always kept the radio in his police cruiser turned on. That was one of the strict rules for those who were allowed to take their patrol vehicles home with them—you must keep your ears on, just in case a fellow officer needs help.

Tonight the dispatcher was reporting a couple of minor fender benders and a local boy who went missing on his bicycle during the electrical storm. Roy something-or-other. A burp of static on the radio made it hard to hear the boy’s last name.

His parents must be pulling their hair out, Officer Delinko thought, but the kid’s bound to turn up safe. He’s probably just hanging out at one of the shopping malls, waiting for the thunder to stop.

Ten minutes later, Officer Delinko was still half-thinking about the missing boy when he spotted a slender, rain-soaked figure standing at the corner of West Oriole and the highway. It was a boy matching the description given out by the dispatcher: approximately five feet tall, ninety pounds, sandy brown hair.

Officer Delinko steered his car to the curb. He rolled down the window and called out across the intersection, “Hey, young man!”

The boy waved and moved closer to the edge of the road. Officer Delinko noticed that he was walking a bicycle, and that the rear tire appeared to be flat.

“Is your name Roy?” the policeman asked.

“That’s me.”

“How about if I give you a lift?”

The kid crossed the street with his bike, which fit easily inside the spacious trunk of the Crown Victoria. Officer Delinko radioed the dispatcher to report that he’d located the missing youth and that everything was fine.

“Roy, your parents are going to be mighty happy to see you,” the patrolman said.

The boy smiled nervously. “I sure hope you’re right.”

Silently Officer Delinko congratulated himself. Not a bad way to end the shift for a guy stuck on desk duty! Maybe this would help get him out of the captain’s doghouse.

Roy had never been in a police car before. He rode in the front seat next to the young officer, who did most of the talking. Roy tried to be polite and keep up his end of the conversation, but his mind was swirling with what Beatrice Leep had told him about the running boy.

“My stepbrother, actually,” she’d said.

“What’s his name?”

“He got rid of it.”

“Why do they call him Mullet Fingers? Is he an Indian?” Back in Bozeman, Roy had gone to school with a boy named Charlie Three Crows.

Beatrice Leep had laughed. “No, he’s not an Indian! I call him Mullet Fingers ’cause he can catch mullet with his bare hands. You know how hard that is?”

A mullet was a slippery, free-jumping baitfish that traveled in schools of hundreds. The bay near Coconut Cove was full of them in the spring. Throwing a cast net was the customary method of capture.

“Why doesn’t he live at home?” Roy had asked Beatrice.

“Long story. Plus, none of your business.”

“What about school?”

“My brother got shipped off to a ‘special’ school. He lasted two whole days before he ran away. Then he hitchhiked back, all the way from Mobile, Alabama.”

“What about your parents?”

“They don’t know he’s here, and I’m not gonna tell ’em. Nobody is gonna tell. You understand?”

Roy had solemnly given his word.

After they’d sneaked out of the auto junkyard, Beatrice Leep had given Roy a peanut-butter cookie, which he gobbled hungrily. Considering the circumstances, it was the best-tasting cookie he’d ever eaten.

Beatrice had asked how he planned to explain his whereabouts to his mother and father, and Roy had admitted he hadn’t figured that part out yet.

Then Beatrice had performed an astounding feat—she’d lifted his bicycle by the sprockets and chomped a hole in the rear tire, like she was biting into a pizza.

Roy could only gape in amazement. The girl had jaws like a wolverine. “There! Now you’ve got a flat,” she’d said, “and a halfway decent excuse for missing dinner.”

“Thanks. I guess.”

“So what’re you waiting for? Get outta here.”

What a weird family, Roy thought. He was replaying the tire-biting scene in his mind when he heard the policeman say, “Can I ask you something, young man?”

“Sure.”

“You go to Trace Middle, right? I was wondering if you’ve heard any talk at school about stuff that’s been happening out where the new pancake house is supposed to go up.”

“No,” Roy said, “but I saw an article in the newspaper.”

The officer shifted uneasily.

“About the alligators,” Roy added, “and the police car getting spray-painted.”

The officer paused for a brief coughing spell. Then he said, “You sure nobody’s been talking about it? Sometimes the kids who pull these sorts of pranks like to brag on themselves.”

Roy said he hadn’t heard a word. “This is my street,” he said, pointing. “We’re the sixth house on the left.”

The policeman wheeled into the Eberhardts’ driveway and braked to a stop. “Roy, could I ask you a favor? Could you call me if you do hear something—anything, even a rumor—about the Mother Paula’s situation? It’s very important.”

The officer handed Roy a printed card. “That’s the office line, and that’s my cellular.”

Above the phone numbers, the card said:

“You can call me anytime,” advised Officer Delinko. “Just keep your eyes and your ears open, okay?”

“Right,” Roy said, not too eagerly. The policeman was asking him to be an informant: a snitch on his own classmates. It seemed like a steep price to pay for a ride home.

Not that Roy wasn’t appreciative, but he didn’t feel like he owed the officer anything besides a sincere thank-you. Wasn’t it part of a policeman’s job to help people?

Roy got out of the car and waved to his parents, who were standing on the front steps. Officer Delinko removed Roy’s bicycle from the trunk and set it upright, on its kickstand. “There you go,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Roy.

“They’ll patch that tire for you at the Exxon. Was it a nail that got you?”

“Something like that.”

Roy’s father came up and thanked the policeman for bringing his son home. Roy overheard the two men exchanging law-enforcement chitchat, so Roy figured his father had told the officer he worked for the Justice Department.

When Mr. Eberhardt went to put Roy’s bicycle in the garage, Officer Delinko lowered his voice and said, “Hey, young man.”

What now? Roy thought.

“Think your dad would mind writing a letter to the police chief? Or even to my sergeant? No biggie, just a nice note about what happened tonight. Something they could put in my permanent file,” Officer Delinko said. “The little things help, they really do. They add up.”

Roy nodded in a noncommittal way. “I’ll ask him.”

“Terrific. You’re a solid young fellow.”

Officer Delinko got back in his car. Mrs. Eberhardt, who had gone inside to get a towel, came up and pumped the patrolman’s hand. “We were worried out of our minds. Thank you so much.”

“Oh, it was nothing.” Officer Delinko shot a wink at Roy.

“You’ve restored my faith in the police,” Roy’s mother went on. “Honestly, I didn’t know what to think after reading that outrageous story in the paper. The one about that policeman who had his windows painted black!”

It was Roy’s impression that Officer Delinko suddenly looked queasy. “You all have a good night,” he told the Eberhardts, and turned the key in the ignition.

“Do you happen to know that fellow?” Roy’s mother asked innocently. “The one who fell asleep inside his car. What’s going to happen to him? Will he be fired?”

With a screech of rubber, Officer Delinko backed out of the driveway and drove off.

“Maybe there was an emergency,” Mrs. Eberhardt said, watching the patrol car’s taillights disappear into the night.

“Yeah,” said Roy, smiling. “Maybe so.” sHimI5KJ3uBFvIZ8+tbjp2mSOmGcRopJgEut4OBJxcocqhMu4booGnWE0OI9hEcN