The Adventures of Jack Lime (14 page)

That's when a lightbulb went on in my head. It came on with a white-hot light that made the back of my eyeballs hurt. I slipped back into the main part of the shed and rushed to the whiteboard. One of the grids I'd ignored the other night was titled AATT. Could that stand for Academic All-Stars Trivia Tournament? I looked over the grid. This was no math project; the letters down the side were probably pseudonyms for people who were laying down bets (to protect the identity of the guilty), the numbers were the amounts of each bet and on the top row were the odds. Tobias had been running the gambling operation at Iona High all along! This whole thing had been a setup, and he'd left it all there, right under my nose. I'd been duped, hoodwinked, bamboozled.

Monday, March 16, 8:22 a.m.
Iona High, The Cafeteria

I stormed into Iona High first thing Monday morning looking for Jennifer. I wanted to warn her that Tobias was a wolf in sheep's clothing. I wanted to protect her from getting hurt. But when I stepped into the cafeteria, I realized that she already knew all about Tobias Poe. You see, Doc, she was sitting with him and Valda and Mike.

“Jack! Come on over!” Tobias yelled across the cafeteria when he spotted me. “I have to thank you for the new laptop. Mine was broken when you stormed in on me yesterday. That's my own fault, though. Valda called to let me know you were on your way, but I got caught up adding a few last-minute bets on tonight's basketball game. Say, would you like to place a bet? Maybe you can win a little money back.”

Gone was the squealing, sniveling pinhead who was terrified to get up in front of the school. Instead, Tobias was acting like a suave stockbroker celebrating his latest acquisition. “Or if you don't want to do it now, you could always give me a ring on my cell.” He paused for a moment and then said, in the same deep, menacing voice I'd heard on Mike's cell phone. “Is this Lime?”

Everything made perfect sense. Tobias was obviously the ringmaster of this dirty three-ring circus. Valda was always popping up at the worst time because she must have been tailing me to let the others know where I was headed. And then there was Jennifer; she was the one who'd come to me in the first place, who'd identified Valda as a possible suspect, who'd tried to talk me out of investigating Max, and who'd set up my meeting with Mike from the betting pool. They'd all been playing me like a fiddle, and I'd been squeaking in all the right places.

“Why'd you do it?” I asked in a hoarse voice that sounded far, far away.

“Do you remember taking some pictures a couple of weeks ago?” Valda asked. “Of a guy named Ryan Morrison kissing a girl, only the girl wasn't his girlfriend?”

“I remember,” I said.

“Good,” she said, “because I don't want this next bit to confuse you. See, I remember those pictures, too, Jack, because my last name's not Pernickle, it's Morrison. Making any connections yet?”

“And Valda happens to be my girlfriend, Jack,” Tobias added. “So when she needed me to exact some revenge for her little brother on the town's new peeping tom, I was more than willing to oblige.”

“It was genius, darling, pure genius,” Valda said with a chuckle.

“You're too kind,” Tobias said, standing up and bowing slightly. “But really, it was all too easy. I mean, Jack, it wasn't very difficult to pick out your Achilles' heel.”

“Was any of it true?” I asked.

“Well,” Jennifer started, “we exaggerated some of the details. Tobias doesn't have the top GPA in the school.”

“I'm in the top ten, though,” Tobias smirked.

“And he wasn't the captain of the robotics team,” Jennifer added.

“But I did lead the chess team to the city cham- pionships,” he said. “I'd love to play you sometime, Jack. You make me feel so clever.”

My heart was pounding. I could feel the blood pumping in my temples. I was ready to kill someone, and I didn't care if it was a boy or a girl. Somebody was going to pay, big time. And that's when, for the very first time, my condition kicked in — and I fell asleep.

Friday, September 27, 8:03 p.m.
Iona Hospital, Room 234

“Finding out that the world isn't always what it seems was a hard pill to swallow, Doc. Harder than anything you've ever given me. But when I woke up that day, all by myself in the cafeteria, I vowed I wouldn't let that happen to anyone else. Not if I could help it. So, that's why I'm still in this dirty racket.”

“That's a tall tale, Jack,” Potter said.

“But it's all true, Doc. And the more I learned, the more I became certain that Tobias was behind a lot of the shady deals that were going on at Iona High, and I vowed to stop him and all of his cronies. But that's a story for another day.”

“That's very noble, Jack,” Potter said, getting out of his seat. “And I'm sure your parents would be proud.” He was halfway out the door when he stopped and turned around. “Just try to keep your nose clear of any fists for a few days. And get some rest.”

“You're the doc, Doc.”

“See you soon, Jack.”

“I doubt it, Doc. I think I'll take it easy for a while, stay on the straight and narrow, maybe take a vacation from this P.I. gig.”

“I wouldn't bet on it, Jack. I wouldn't bet on it.”

The End

The names of the people and places haven't been
changed to protect the innocent. Everything is exactly as it happened.