The Adventures of Jack Lime (9 page)

Monday, June 9, 3:43 p.m.
34 Kuiper Belt Crescent, The Hampton Place

It was the last Monday of classes before exams started. All the wind turbine projects had been handed in. Grade 12 physics students all over Iona High were celebrating. I was sitting on the front steps at the Hampton residence waiting for Walter to get back home.

“Hello, Walter,” I said, as he stepped onto his front walk. “Good to see you again.”

“What do you want, Lime? Another beating?”

“How did the wind turbine project go?”

“Fine,” he said, stepping up to me. “Just fine.”

“All handed in and wrapped with a bow?”

“That's right,” he said. “Now, could you get out of my way? I have a hamster to feed. And a python, too.”

“You don't have to worry about Carver anymore,” I said.

“What are you blabbering about now?”

I pulled a DVD out of my pocket. “You know what's on this? A video of the winning Science Fair project from City Heights High School. It's all about wind turbines. Tyrone Jonson did it last year. It's fantastic. You should watch it, Wally.”

Walter pursed his lips, and his nose got a little sharper. He snatched the DVD out of my hand.

“You're welcome, Wally. Consider it a graduation present. Of course, there are plenty of copies: one for your physics teacher, one for Principal Snit, one for the execs at Luxemcorp. They might get a special delivery this week. But that depends on whether or not you give up Carver.”

“There's nothing on this,” Walter spat at me.

“There's lots of good material on there, Walter. You can watch it to your heart's content tonight. And you'd better hope your paper isn't too much like Tyrone's Science Fair project. Think back, Wally: how much did you use out of the paper Tyrone sent you? A little? A lot? Academic fraud would take you out of the running for the Luxemcorp Prize PDQ.”

“I'm going to kill that little ball of fur right now,” he barked, stepping by me. “I'll feed it to Cindy!”

“That's a lose-lose situation, Wally,” I said, before he got inside. “You'd be out of the running for the big prize, and Tyrone loses his precious hamster. But Tyrone will get over it, I'm sure. Thirty-five grand a year will do that to a person. Plus, he'll finally get the chance to stuff you in a toilet paper roll without worrying about Carver getting fed to a snake. I don't think you'd look good stuffed in a toilet paper roll, Wally. How about you? No, I think the smarter play would be you bringing Carver down here now and taking your chances on the prize the right way, the fair way, using your brain instead of Tyrone's.”

“How do I know you won't send the disks anyway?”

“It's called leverage, Wally. We send the DVDs, and we lose our leverage. You should know that.”

Monday, June 9, 5:28 p.m.
2 Main Street, The Train Station

The train station is a busy place at rush hour. Parents are getting home from a hard day's work. Kids are crowding onto the trains to go earn a dime at part-time jobs in the city. But Tyrone Jonson is not a hard person to find, even in a crowd.

“Thanks again, Jack,” he said, putting Carver into his cage and draping a blanket over it.

“I'm just glad you've got him back.”

“How did Walter take it?”

“Not good,” I said. “I'd keep an eye on him for the rest of the year.”

“I'm not worried,” Tyrone said, “as long as we've got some leverage.”

“That reminds me,” I said. “I've got an atomic wedgie to record tonight.”

“What?” Tyrone asked.

“More leverage,” I said. “More leverage.”

Friday, September 27, 5:51 p.m.
Iona Hospital, Room 234

I woke up in a fog as thick as a three-day-old cup of joe. I didn't have a clue where I was or how I got there, so I tried to sit up and have a look around. Problem was, my head felt as if it'd been cracked open like an egg at a Sunday brunch, so the world went topsy-turvy faster than you can say concussion. I flopped back down and tried to suss out my situation, but thanks to all that fog, I couldn't see much except shadows. And the longer I looked, the more shadows there seemed to be. Soon they were all around me, watching me, closing in on me. I was completely surrounded.

“Hay ack,” I slurred, throwing my hands in the air, but they just fell back down like two dead fish.

And that's when a voice whispered from the shadows, “Ake ideez hack.”

That kind of gobbledygook made me nervous, but hard as I tried, I just couldn't manage to sit up.

“Hake id eez, Jack,” the voice said, as one of the shadows broke off from the rest and lurched toward me.

“Hay ack,” I slurred, but it kept coming, getting closer and closer.

“Ake it eezy,” the voice said. The shadow was standing over me now, like a spider over a fly.

“Ack off!” I yelled, swinging my fists into the darkness.

The shadow leaned over. The darkness covered me like a funeral cloak. I was sure I'd be taking the next train to Deadtown. Then a light flicked on. And in a flash, the shadow was gone and I was face to face with Old Doc Potter.

“Take it easy, Jack,” he said, dodging my punches. “You must've been having a dream.”

I glanced around the room and realized I was in the hospital — again. “How'd I get here, Doc?” I asked.

“I was hoping you could explain that,” Potter said, taking a little flashlight out of his pocket and shining it in my eyes. “All I know is that your principal brought you in after a schoolyard fight, and it looks like you lost. You've been unconscious for almost two hours.”

Now that he mentioned it, a nasty brawl did ring a few bells. But all I could remember were four hairy knuckles coming at me like a runaway locomotive. “So what's the damage this time, Doc?”

“A nasty concussion and a broken nose,” he said. He sat in a chair next to my bed. “Your grandmother tells me you're still the local crime fighter. Is that true?”

“Say, where is Grandma, anyway?” I asked, touching the bandages on my nose.

“I sent her home to get some rest. But you didn't answer my question: are you still the local crime fighter?”

“Crime fighter, detective, private eye, sleuth, peeper for hire, you can call it a lot of different things. Long story short, I fix problems for people who need problems fixed. Which is a lot like what you do, isn't it, Doc?”

“I suppose you're right about that, Jack,” Potter said, leaning back in his seat, “but I don't end up at the hospital as much as you do.”

“That's saying something, Doc, considering you're supposed to work here.”

“Only part time, Jack,” he said. “I'm trying to retire, but I'm worried if I did that you'd end up in the morgue. And I feel like I have a duty to your father to make sure that doesn't happen. Did I ever tell you I was the doctor who delivered your father?”

“I think you've mentioned it once or twice, Doc.” In fact, just about every time I saw Doc Potter, he reminded me that he'd delivered my father, which usually led into the you-should-take-better-care-of-yourself lecture, and I could smell that coming a mile away.

“Well, I did, and I would like to think that I'm one of the reasons he became a doctor. You know, he used to come visit me at the hospital just to —”

“Doc, I hate to cut you off, but my head is ready to split open, so why don't we cut to the chase.”

“That's fair, Jack. That's fair,” he said, stretching out his long legs. “It's time that you started to take better care of yourself, and your poor grandmother, and stopped trying to solve everybody else's problems.”

“It's not like I go looking for trouble, Doc. Trouble just has a nasty way of showing up on my doorstep. Heck, I didn't even get into the P.I. business on purpose. It found me.”

“How, exactly, does that happen?” he said, sitting forward in his chair.

“I don't know if you want to hear that long and sordid tale, Doc.”

“Jack, let me tell you something. Tonight Mrs. Potter plays bridge with the girls. And when Mrs. Potter goes out to play bridge, all I get to go home to is a half-blind dog and a cold dinner. So a good story sounds a lot better than that.”

“Suit yourself, Doc, but don't say I didn't warn you.”

Potter rolled his eyes.

“I arrived in this little slice of heaven called Iona halfway through Grade 9. It ain't easy making friends in a small town like this, Doc, especially when you're the new kid on the block. For the first couple of months, I might as well have been a ghost to the kids at Iona High. To compensate for being on the bottom of the social pecking order, I threw around enough money to let everyone know I was a big-time player. See, back in the City of Angels, money equaled power, and power equaled popularity. I didn't think Iona would be all that different. So I started spreading around my loot like it was going out of style. I always had the latest and greatest cell phone, I carried a flashy iPod, I had fourteen different pairs of sneakers and I dressed in enough labels to make it look like I just walked out of a magazine.

“FYI — The only reason I could afford all that stuff was because I got a check in the mail every two weeks that came out of a trust fund set up by the executor of my parents' estate. That's fancy talk for me getting a tidy little bundle of dough every two weeks because my parents died in a car accident, and my Dad's best friend back in L.A., who was in charge of it all, felt guilty about shipping me off to live with my grandmother in a go-nowhere town like Iona.

“But no matter how much cash I threw around, no matter how much I showed off all my cheddar, nothing changed. I kept right on being a big fat nobody. However, there is an upside to being a big fat nobody in a fishbowl like Iona. For one, you get to listen — and you get to watch, and all that listening and watching means you learn a lot of stuff about a lot of people. About a month after my arrival, a girl in my history class figured I might like to do some listening and watching on her behalf.

“The job was simple enough; I just had to watch her boyfriend, a sap named Ryan Morrison, and see if he was a two-timing fink. She offered me twenty bucks a day, and the way I was burning through my dough, I needed all the cash that I could get. As it turns out, Ryan really was a two-timing fink. I took a few snapshots of the dirty dog, she paid me forty bucks and we said our good-byes. That's how I got started in the Private Eye racket.”

“You promised me a long and sordid tale, Jack, and that was just short and boring,” Potter said, raising one bushy gray eyebrow.

“That's just how I got my start, Doc, but that's not why I'm still in the sleuthing business. It was my second case that kept me in this dirty game. See, since I did such a bang-up job on that case, there were a few people who sat up and took notice of yours truly. One of those people was a girl named Jennifer O'Rourke. She tracked me down in the cafeteria one day, and I haven't been the same since.”

Thursday, March 12, 12:17 p.m.
Iona High, The Cafeteria

Jennifer O'Rourke is the kind of girl you want to protect from all the nastiness of the world. She's got silky brown hair that she pulls back in a ponytail, baby-blue eyes and freckles across her nose. She's short and slim and has a way of bouncing when she walks that makes you think everything is going to be all right.

Other than the fact that Jennifer seemed as innocent as a teddy bear at a picnic, I remember our first meeting because I managed to eat a clandestine glob of wasabi that had attached itself onto the back of my sushi. (FYI — Eating sushi for lunch was just one more way I liked to show off my scratch back in those days.) As soon as I swallowed that green glob, it felt like a bundle of dynamite had been set off in my mouth. I actually thought my nose might explode. I was gulping for breath, with tears rolling out of my eyes, when Jennifer strolled over to my table.

“Are you Jack Lime?” she asked. Then she caught a glimpse of my face and started to back away. I might have been a nobody at Iona High, but somehow everyone and their dog knew I was an orphan. So when I looked up and my eyes were rimmed with tears, she must've thought I was getting misty about my parents, when I was actually just trying to survive some extra-hot sushi sauce.

“I'm sorry,” she blurted, blushing and averting her eyes. “I'll come back later.”

“It's … all … right,” I croaked. “Please … sit ...”

“Are you sure? I can come back. I don't —”

“Please,” I said, trying to catch my breath. I took a long swig of Red Bull and cleared my throat. “What can I do for you?”

“Well, if you're sure,” she said. “A friend of a friend told me you solved a problem for her and that you were very discreet. My colleagues and I require some assistance.”

“Your colleagues?”

“Yes,” she said, motioning toward a table of three students sitting on the other side of the cafeteria. They were all trying hard not to look at me. “We need some help with a troubling … situation and would like to hire you in order to rectify this matter.”

“Why don't you tell me what kind of situation you need me to rectify, and I'll tell you if I'm your man.”

“Tobias Poe is missing.”

“Tobias who?”

“Tobias Poe? The top student at Iona High?” she said, like I'd missed the memo. “He's the captain of the chess team and the robotics team, plus he's got the highest GPA in the school. He's the whole reason we're in the Academic All-Stars Trivia Tournament Regional Final on Friday night.”

“The Academic what?” I asked.

“The Academic All-Stars Trivia Tournament. And, thanks to Tobias, Iona High has reached the regional finals for the first time … like, ever.”

“And now Tobias is missing?”

“That's right.”

“Since when?”

“Since yesterday morning.”

“Slow down, sister. I hate to tell you this, but where I come from, when a kid cuts class for a day and a half, it doesn't necessarily mean that he's disappeared.”

“He didn't just miss school. Yesterday he missed our team breakfast, our team practice at lunch and our team practice after school. And he isn't here today, either. Plus, he hasn't called any of us.”

“Sounds like you spend a lot of time together.”

“Yes,” she said. “We need to be prepared for our match against Montgomery Academy tomorrow night. If we win that match, we'll progress to the National Championship Tournament. I'm surprised you don't know about it. Everyone in school is going to come and watch. It's even going to be on TV.”

“The Regional Final, lots of people watching and it's on TV.” I figured that Jennifer and her Merry Band of Geniuses weren't the type of people who craved loads of attention. “Did you ever think that Tobias might just be getting a little nervous and decided to fly the coop?”

“First, Tobias is a very logical person who deals very well with pressure. Second, I called and spoke to his grandfather. He thinks Tobias was at school yesterday. In fact, he told me that Tobias was staying with a friend for the next few days.”

“And you didn't blow his cover?” I asked.

“No.”

“That's very noble.”

“Not really,” she said, blushing a little. “If he gets caught skipping classes, he'll be kicked off the team.”

“So I have to keep this hush-hush,” I said.

“That's right,” she said, glancing around the room.

I looked at this girl, so innocent of the ways of the world, and felt sorry for her and her keen-bean friends. My gut was telling me that Tobias was probably just scared out of his britches and didn't want to face the bright lights of a championship game. But I wasn't the kind of guy who turns down a damsel in distress, and I could always use a few more coins jingling in my pockets.