He took one step forward.
Froze.
Chief Brown strode into the tent. He hugged the old woman and kissed her on her wrinkled cheek.
“Good morning, Mom,” said the chief. “How’s business?”
14
RILEY SAID SO LONG TO Jamal and called an emergency meeting of his crew—in the parking lot of the middle school because the Pizza Palace didn’t open till noon on Saturdays.
Yes, he had promised his mom and his dad that he’d stay away from Gavin Brown. But right was right, and wrong was wrong. Stealing a puppy from one of Riley’s best buds? That was definitely wrong and needed a little righting.
“In short,” said Riley, “we can call off the search party. Gavin Brown stole Noodle. He gave her collar to his grandmother to sell in her junk tent.”
“I’m going to hurt Brown so bad!” said Mongo, slamming his fist into his palm. “His new name will be Black-and-blue!”
“That’s the wrong move,” said Riley. “If we push Gavin, he’ll just deny it, go running to his daddy. If we push too hard, maybe he hurts the dog.”
Jake, tucked inside his hoodie, nodded. “It would be in keeping with his sociopathic character.”
“But, Riley,” whined Briana, “we have to do something!”
“Don’t worry. We will. The Browns are not getting away with this.”
“Thank you,” said Mongo.
“Now then,” said Riley, “I figure there are two ways we can play this thing. One, we do what we’ve been doing. We keep the posters up; maybe make some new ones where the word Reward is bigger, bolder. In a couple days, when they think Mongo’s mom is super desperate and willing to pay whatever they ask, someone, probably not Gavin or the chief, but someone working for the Browns will make the call. When they do…”
Briana gasped. Shot up her arm. She knew this answer. “We call the police!”
The boys all arched their eyebrows. Stared at her.
“Um, Briana?” said Jake. “Chief Brown is the police.”
“Oh. Right. Duh. My bad.”
“When the caller makes contact,” said Riley, “we find out where the money drop is set to take place.”
Mongo raised his bicycle up over his head with both hands. Started thrashing it around. “And then we ambush the guy and jump him and kick him and…”
Mongo only stopped because Riley was shaking his head.
“We don’t do that?” Mongo said, gently lowering the bike.
“No,” said Riley. “You give him the cash and take your dog home.”
“That’s it?”
“Yep. That’s all you do. Meanwhile, Jake, Briana, and I video the whole transaction. We tail the dognapper. We follow the money all the way back to Brown’s house, no matter how many stops it makes along the way or how many couriers relay it back to poppa. When we have proof, we take it to some friends of my father’s, former soldiers now employed by the FBI.”
“Why don’t we just call those guys right now?” said Jake.
“Right. Dognapping. I believe it is currently at the top of the FBI’s priority list, right up there with terrorism and counterfeiting.”
“Got it,” said Jake. “We wait. Till we have solid proof.”
Mongo’s eyes widened in anticipation. “So what’s the second option?”
Riley smiled and pulled a sheaf of paper out of his jeans jacket. He had another devilish gleam in his eyes. “The second option is a little more complicated. A little more fun. A little more what we do best.”
“Fabtastic!” said Briana. “Spill.”
Riley passed around the stack of papers. “I just worked this up. Ran off a couple copies at the drugstore. I call it Operation Blind Date.”
“Nice,” said Jake.
“I likee, I likee,” added Briana.
“What do we do?” asked Mongo.
“We convince Gavin to give our friend Briana here a certain goldendoodle.”
“We do?” said Briana. “How?”
“Gavin won’t know it’s you he’s giving it to. Now, to get this ball rolling, we need to case the high school. This afternoon. There’s a big baseball game. Crosstown rivals. Fairview versus Western Prep. Jake?”
“Yeah?”
“We need to get Mongo into the stands.”
“No problem. I’ll dummy up a ticket with a legit bar code.”
“Good. Mongo, you’re in the cheering section. Up with the freshmen. We give you a little lip fuzz, maybe a dorky Fairview High baseball cap to help you pass as a ninth grader. I want you sitting a couple rows behind Brown.”
“Okay. Why?”
“Reconnaissance mission. Briana? You’ll work the crowd. I’ll line you up a gig selling peanuts and Cracker Jack. Roam the stands. Keep one eye on Gavin Brown, the other eye on whoever he has his eye on.”
“Oh-kay,” said Briana. “I have this red-and-white striped apron and a paper hat that’ll make me look very concessionairey.”
“Works for me.”
“But how do I get the vendor job?”
“I know this guy who runs the food stand. He owes me a favor ever since I helped him recover his popcorn popper.”
“Where was it?”
“You don’t want to know. While you two are in the stands, I’ll be down on the field with a camera. Jake?”
“You need a press pass?”
“You read my mind. I’ll also need your camera. The one with the really long lens.”
Jake made a note. “No problem. You sure Brown will be at the game?”
“Positive,” said Riley. “Before Jamal and I left the antiques tent, I heard the chief tell Grandma Brown that ‘Gavin has the rest of the day off.’ Said he was going to ‘the big baseball game because he has a crush on one of the cheerleaders.’ Granny was cool with that. Said, ‘I can’t move half the crap he hauls in, anyway.’ She wanted more plasma screen TVs, fewer karaoke microphones.”
“You want me at the game?” asked Jake.
“No. We need you to babysit Jamal Wilson.”
“Come again?”
“He’s in on this thing, on account of the stash of fifth-grader swag Grandma’s peddling in her pup tent. He can help you on the computer, too.”
“I don’t know….”
“He’s a good kid. Smart. Very manually dexterous. Worked a Rubik’s Cube in under a minute.”
“No. Way!” said Briana.
“Way. He can also crack locks.”
“For real?” said Mongo. “Like in the movies?”
“For real,” said Riley.
“Okay. He can hang at my house,” said Jake.
“Excellent. Once we dig up the intel, we’ll need you guys to find her phone number.”
Jake furrowed his brow. “So, um, whose number, exactly, are we looking for again?”
“Whoever this cheerleader is that Gavin Brown has a mad crush on.”
“No problem. You tell me her name, I’ll tell you her landline, cell, fax, whatever. I can even fish for her email, Twitter, and Facebook pages, too.”
“No thanks. All we need is her phone number.”
“Um, pardon me for asking, Riley,” said Briana, “but, why, all of a sudden, do you want some high school hottie’s phone number?”
He smiled at Briana. “So you can call her.”
15
THAT SAME SATURDAY MORNING, TWO shady men sat hunkered behind the tinted windows of a battered blue van.
The driver had pulled into the perfect parking spot: directly across the street from the First National Bank of Fairview.
“You see what they’re calling us?” said the one in the passenger seat, flipping through the back pages of a tabloid newspaper.
“Yeah,” said the driver, who was rolling a toothpick from one side of his lips to the other. “I seen it.”
“‘The Suburban Buckeye Bandits.’” The man in the passenger seat angrily wadded up the paper. “I am not buckeyed.”
“I know this,” said the dri
ver.
“I just have what they call a slight strabismus, on account of the fact that my two eyeballs are not properly aligned with each other. Got a little lack of coordination going on between the extraocular muscles is all.”
“Fred?” said the driver.
“Yeah, Otto?” said the passenger.
“Your strabismus there means you’re cross-eyed, not buckeyed.”
“Oh. That true?”
“Yeah.”
“So why’s the newspaper calling me a buckeye bandit?”
“On account of the fact we knocked off that string of banks back in Ohio.”
“So?”
“Ohio is the Buckeye State.”
“They got a lot of cross-eyed people in Ohio?”
“No, Fred. Buckeye is their nickname. On account of the many buckeye trees that once grew there and whatnot.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Interesting.”
The two men stared at the bank building some more. The driver took the toothpick out of his mouth and grinned.
“Looks like Chuck ‘call me Chip’ Weitzel isn’t as good with security as he is with the roulette wheel,” he said.
Now the two shady men both laughed. They had met Mr. Weitzel at a bar in Las Vegas. The banker had extremely minty breath. He had also given Otto and Fred his business card, said he ran “the bestest little bank” in the country. “Stop by sometime when you’re back east. We can loan you enough money to get you completely out of debt.”
Otto and Fred had both laughed at the bad banker joke. Then they pocketed Mr. Weitzel’s business cards and did their homework.
The First National Bank of Fairview—what bank manager Weitzel called “Fin-boff”—was ripe for the picking. Especially on Thursday nights after the branch received its weekly infusion of cash to handle the Friday-afternoon payday rush.
“We do the usual?” asked Fred, staring across the street at Mr. Weitzel’s bank.
Otto nodded. “We case the joint for a couple days. Learn how to disarm the alarm.”
“Thursday night,” said Fred, picking up on Otto’s thread, “when the safe is loaded, we slip on our masks, go in the back door.”
“Once we’re in the bank, you crack open the safe, I take out the security cameras.”
“We load up a few gym bags with moola-boola.”
“We waltz out the door.”
“We move on to the next sleepy little burb.”
Both men sank back in their seats and sighed. They were a well-oiled cash machine—an ATM that only made withdrawals.
16
AT NOON ON SATURDAY, RILEY Mack’s Operation Blind Date was in full swing.
Jake Lowenstein went home to set things up on his computer. Jamal Wilson would join him there in about an hour.
Riley, Briana, and Mongo headed downtown on their bikes.
“We need to buy Mongo a baseball hat,” said Briana, who was in charge of everybody’s disguises, or costumes as she always called them, even though Riley and Mongo begged her not to. “His buzz cut is a total giveaway. The cap will cover it up.”
“I already have a baseball hat,” said Mongo, teetering on his two-wheeler. He was so big and his bike so small, he looked like a clown at the circus. “Man, I wish I had a moped like that busboy Nick. I see him riding his motor scooter around town all the time, delivering pizzas. Looks like fun.”
“Totally,” said Riley.
“You guys?” said Briana. “We were talking baseball caps?”
“I told you,” said Mongo, his knees pumping up toward his nose, “I got one.”
“Yankees or Mets?”
“Yankees.”
“Well, the Fairview High School team is called the Furriers so you need a Furriers cap. You should have one, too, Riley, since you’re playing the high school newspaper photographer. Ooh—you should wear yours backward!”
“Good point,” said Riley, as they cruised around the corner onto Main Street. “We’ll go to Sports Town. They have all sorts of Furriers junk.”
The mascot for the Fairview High Furriers was a buck-toothed beaver wearing a puffy mink coat because the original settlers of Fairview had been fur trappers and traders.
Sports Town was one of a cluster of shops in the commercial blocks of Main Street across the street from the bank where Riley’s mom worked. As they started locking up their bikes, they saw the busboy from the Pizza Palace, Nick, come walking out of the local pet supply store toting two birdcages, one pink, and the other baby blue.
“How’s it going, Nick?” said Riley.
“Great.”
“Cool,” said Riley. “You got birds?”
“Huh?”
Riley nodded toward the two portable parakeet palaces.
“Oh. Yeah. Boy and girl.”
“I get it,” said Mongo. “Blue and pink!”
“Yeah. Hey, Mongo, sorry about your mom’s dog, man.” Nick gestured to one of the Lost Dog posters stapled to a nearby utility pole. “Bummer, dude. Totally.”
“Thanks.”
“Well, gotta book.”
“You workin’ today, Nick?” asked Riley.
“Yeah. But not at the PP until later.” (Yes, the Pizza Palace had a very unfortunate nickname.)
Riley arched an eyebrow. “You’ve got a second job?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“Here and there.”
“What kind of work?”
“This and that.”
In the distance, Riley heard a yappy dog bark.
“Later, dudes,” said Nick. He bustled up the sidewalk, holding his arms out wide so the bouncing birdcages didn’t ding him in the hips.
“Let’s go, you guys,” said Briana, leading the way up the sidewalk to Sports Town.
The front door of the pet supplies store swung open. A customer came out hugging a fifty-pound sack of dog food. Five dogs bolted out with him.
“Holy crappola!” a woman shouted inside the store.
The guy with the feed sack spun around and nearly tripped himself up as two dogs darted between his legs and dashed out into the street. One was a big, galumphing guy; the other a little white fur ball.
Two bug-eyed Chihuahuas with wildly curly hair sproinking up on top of their heads ran straight toward Briana.
“Grab the Speedy Gonzaleses,” Riley shouted over his shoulder as he and Mongo bounded into the street after the two dogs in the most immediate danger of being mowed down by a minivan. A fifth dog—a black Lab puppy with big floppy feet and long flappy ears—merrily loped down the sidewalk in the opposite direction.
A college-aged girl sprinted out of the pet store.
“Help!” she shouted.
“Go after flopsy-wopsy,” said Riley as he corralled the white fluff ball in the middle of the street. “We’ve got these other guys!” Mongo raised his hands to stop traffic as Riley scooped up the yappy lapdog.
The second escapee had gray fur on his muzzle, a shallow tummy, and bony ribs. He was frantically turning around and around in the middle of the road. He seemed pretty old so Riley crept up slow behind him. A car honked.
Yappy yipped.
The dog squatting in the middle of the road pooped.
The car horn blared again.
“Shut up!” Mongo shouted at the driver. “He needs a moment!”
“Easy, easy,” Riley said to the creaky dog finishing up its business on the solid yellow line. Poor guy. He wasn’t trying to escape. He was just looking for the bathroom.
“You better clean up after your dog!” huffed a mom behind the wheel of her SUV. She, apparently, didn’t like any traffic tie-up caused by unexpected doggy doo. Neither did her daughter. They were both scrunching up their noses and making poopy faces at Riley.
Smiling, still clutching the mop-haired pooch against his chest while bending down to escort the old guy by the collar, Riley gave the mom and daughter his sunniest smile. “I’ll be back to clean it u
p. Just need to go get my pooper-scooper.”
“I got these guys!” shouted Briana, who was on the sidewalk doing some kind of loose-limbed chicken dance, struggling to carry one squirming Chihuahua under each arm.
The girl from the pet store came up the sidewalk cuddling the floppy-eared Lab. The dog was manically licking her face like it was a pork-flavored lollipop. “Thank you, guys, so much!” she said, using her foot to open the door. “Can you help me put them back in their cages?”
“Sure,” said Riley.
“How’d they escape?” asked Briana, giggling because the two crazy-eyed Chihuahuas were nuzzling under her arms with their noses.
“I don’t know,” said the girl. She was wearing a green polo shirt with Mr. Guy’s Pet Supplies embroidered over the pocket. “I think somebody undid the latches on their cages. Two boys were in the store earlier. They said they wanted to look at hamster tunnels. I think they wanted to monkey around.”
“Where do you want these guys?” asked Briana.
“Their crates are all back here. Near the dog food.”
“Are they for sale?” asked Riley.
“No. They’re free—to a loving home.” She slid her frisky puppy into its crate and latched the door shut. “Of course, there’s a small adoption fee. A donation to the animal shelter.”
“Works for me,” said Riley.
“Could these two little guys ride in my purse like they do in Beverly Hills?” asked Briana. “I saw what’s-her-name, the movie star, in People magazine and she went shopping with two Chihuahuas in her handbag!”
“Would you like to adopt them and find out?” asked the pet shop lady.
“Maybe. I’ll have to check with my mom and dad.”
“Great. Oh, by the way, I’m Jenny Grabowski. If your folks say yes, just let the store know. Even if I’m not working that day, I’ll come in and set up the adoption papers.”
“Cool,” said Briana, somewhat reluctantly handing off her two wiggly tail waggers.
“I’m Riley Mack,” said Riley. “That’s Briana Bloomfield and Hubert ‘Mongo’ Montgomery.”
Jenny shook their hands after the last cage was closed. “I can’t thank you guys enough for jumping in like that.”