“You ain’t got a chance,” said Ape Man 1. “You might as well give up. We saw you run back here.”
And then Ape Man 2’s like, “Hey, I got an idea.”
An idea? That seemed unlikely coming from one of these knuckleheads, but there was always a first time for everything.
Their footsteps headed in my direction. Loud footsteps. These guys must be wearing boots. All the better to kick my butt with.
One of them banged on the side of the Dumpster. “Come on, little wussies. Don’t make us come in there and get you.”
“You’re just gonna make it worse on yourself,” the other one said.
At this point, my choices were severely limited:
1. I could try to scrunch down in the trash, but that was likely to make too much noise.
2. I could try to hide behind the CPR dummy, but it probably wasn’t big enough. Like I say, I carry a little extra weight.
3. I could sit there as quietly as possible and hope they went away.
But of course they weren’t going anywhere. The lid to the Dumpster sprang open and the streetlight’s glare flooded in.
“Gotcha,” said Ape Man 1.
“You ain’t gonna have any fingers left to flip people off with now, boys,” added Ape Man 2.
Their fat white faces loomed over me like two evil moons. Then something happened—their snarling mouths went horrorstruck.
Ape Man 1’s like, “What the hell?”
And Ape Man 2 goes, “Jesus, what did you do, kid?”
They looked at each other, and then it was like, both at the same time, they go, “Shiiiiiiiittt!” And bolted. I stood up just in time to see them fighting for the inside lane as they galloped around the corner of the building.
I’m like, “Wow. What got into them?”
Then I looked down. It was no CPR dummy stowed away with me in that pile of trash. No. It was Hector Maldonado.
CHAPTER 2
Hector Maldonado. Dead as a plank. You better believe I couldn’t clamber out of that Dumpster fast enough. It was like just touching the same trash might make me catch whatever it was that killed him. But once I was out, despite a case of the cold shivers, I couldn’t help gawking back in. I don’t know why, but there’s something about death that makes you want to stare at it. Maybe it’s just because you’re glad it’s not you.
Hector was my age. I had him in Western Cultures. His father laid tile or something like that. I didn’t know about his mother. Hector and I weren’t friends, but he seemed like an okay guy. Smart, didn’t play sports, not in a bunch of clubs, didn’t crack jokes in class or bully anyone in the halls. I guess he was kind of a good-looking guy—not to sound g*y or anything—but he was really quiet. Maybe in some other universe, he could’ve been cool, but not in the one at our high school. At our school he was just kind of there. Like desks, and water fountains, and vice principals.
Now here he was, stiffly leaning against one side of the Dumpster, chest-deep in garbage, his eyes staring blankly at the sky, a candy-bar wrapper sticking to the side of his face. A strange coldness seeped into my stomach, my elbows, my knees, like some kind of poison. This was real. Final. Foreclosed on.
“What’s going on?” It was Randy sauntering up from the east side of the building. “Are those guys gone?”
“They’re gone.”
“What are you looking at?”
“You have your cell phone on you?”
“Yeah, why?”
“We have to call the police.”
“What for?”
“Look.” I nodded toward the Dumpster.
Randy had to stand on his tiptoes. “Holy crap. Dude’s dead.”
An argument about whether we should actually call the police followed. Randy was against it. Finally I persuaded him that we might find ourselves in plenty of hot water if the cops discovered we’d been here and didn’t report Hector’s condition. “Okay,” he said. “But call on your own phone.”
Things got involved from there. The cops don’t want you calling in about a dead body and then leaving the scene. We had to stay and answer a bunch of questions:
“Name?”
“Dylan Jones.”
“Age?”
“Sixteen and a half.”
“Occupation?”
“Grocery-sacker-slash-student.”
“Relationship with the deceased?”
“We go to the same school.”
“And why were you enemies with the deceased?”
“What? We weren’t enemies. I hardly knew him.”
“Just a routine question.”
I couldn’t believe it. Apparently, we were actually suspects, which was really a pisser. I was like, “Look, I’m on the school newspaper. My dad’s a teacher and my mom’s a nurse,” but they didn’t care. Somehow we still looked unsavory to them.
At first, it was just a uniformed cop, but then a couple of detectives showed up along with some forensics people. The detectives were even bigger ass**les than the uniforms. There was a huge one with a forehead like a cinder block and then a wiry cool-guy type who was too in love with his hair gel. It wasn’t hard to see what their routine was. Detective Forehead’s job was to intimidate you physically, and Detective Hair Gel was there to throw in a few zingers to deflate your self-esteem.
They were convinced Hector had OD’d on some drug or other and seemed to have their minds made up that Randy and I were involved somehow. Which was stupid—we obviously weren’t on drugs at the moment—but once a cop gets an idea in his head, he has a hard time shaking it out.