Riley Mack and the Other Known Troublemakers (10 page)

BOOK: Riley Mack and the Other Known Troublemakers
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LATE SATURDAY, JAKE'S GPS TRACKING
software showed the truck leaving Fairview and traveling about ten miles out into the country, where it remained parked all night.

“You think that's where she has Noodle?” asked Mongo.

“Tomorrow night, we'll know for sure,” said Riley.

“How we gonna do that, Riley Mack?” asked Jamal, his eyes fixed on the static star in the center of the glowing map.

“Easy. We're going out there.”

And then Riley explained to Briana what she had to do to help make that happen.

 

On Sunday afternoon, Riley and his mom went to the flea market in Sherman Green.

“This is nice, Riley. I've been cooped up in that stuffy bank all week. It feels good to be out in the fresh air.”

“I figured you might need a break.”

“You figured right.”

“Riley? Mrs. Mack?”

It was Briana and her mother. Right on schedule. Two fifteen p.m. in front of the goat-yogurt stand.

“Well, hello, Briana,” said Riley's mom. “Moonbeam.”

Yes, Briana's mother's name was Moonbeam. It probably wasn't on her birth certificate, but that's what she called herself. Moonbeam Sunchild Bloomfield. She was wearing a tie-dyed dress that went down to her ankles, lots of beads, rose-tinted sun goggles, and a flower-power headband that put a crimp in her bubbly gray Afro.

“Hey,” she said slowly. “What's happenin'?”

“Not much,” said Riley's mom. “Just, you know, checking out the market.”

Mrs. Bloomfield nodded very slowly, very thoughtfully. “Far out.”

“You betcha,” said Riley's mom.

“Oh, Riley,” said Briana, “I almost forgot….”

Riley tried not to grin. “Yes?”

“I have to do that astronomy project tonight.”

“Oh, the one Mr. Thorne gave us where you have to go out into the country and check out the constellations and junk?”

“Yes,” said Briana, playing the script to perfection. “Have you done your astronomy project yet?”

“No. Hey, maybe we can do ours together!”

“Cool. Are you free tonight?”

“What time?”

“How about my mom and I pick you up at nine? It'll be way dark then.”

Riley turned to his mom. “Is that okay, Mom?”

“What time will you be home?”

“No later than eleven,” said Briana.

“You don't mind driving the kids, Moonbeam?” asked Riley's mom.

“Not at all.”

“Oh, Mom,” said Riley, “I need to borrow Dad's night vision goggles. To see the stars better.”

“Okay. Do you know where they are?”

“Yeah. In my room.”

 

At 9:15 p.m., Riley, Briana, Jamal, and Mrs. Bloomfield were parked on a country road in the middle of nowhere, but only a few miles outside the town limits of Fairview.

Jamal, who was only ten, had told his parents that he and his new friend, Jake Lowenstein, were building a
supercomputer in Jake's basement.

“Beautiful out here, isn't it?” said Briana's mom.

“Yes, ma'am,” said Jamal.

“Listen to the crickets. Soak in their wisdom.”

“Well, we gotta go, Mom,” said Briana. “The stars are all aligned and junk.”

“Should I come with you kids?”

“Um, no. Mr. Thorne, that's our teacher, he's a real stickler about us doing our own homework without a bunch of help from our parental units.”

“Groovy.” Mrs. Bloomfield put a New Age tinkly-music disc into the dashboard CD player and closed her eyes. “I'll just chill. Haven't done my om chant today.”

 

Riley, Jamal, and Briana headed up a rutted dirt road. They could hear Mrs. Bloomfield
om
ing in the distance.

All through elementary school, Briana Bloomfield had always been one of the most popular girls in whatever school she attended. But then, the minute seventh grade started, for some reason all her girlfriends turned against her, called her Flaky Wakey and Wavy Gravy, like the old Ben & Jerry's ice-cream flavor. Seemed all the other popular girls had decided over the summer that they were way too mature to hang out with Briana Bloomfield any longer.

Riley could tell she needed a brand-new set of friends. So he became the first.

“Sorry about that,” Briana now said. “My mom acts a little goofy sometimes. She's actually supersmart. Has a PhD.”

“I think she's far out,” said Riley with a grin.

“I can dig her, man,” added Jamal.

Briana smiled. “Yeah. Me, too.”

The road soon narrowed as it entered a stand of tall evergreen trees. Riley, Briana, and Jamal were engulfed by darkness and an eerie quiet. The only sounds were the crunch of their feet and the chirp of bugs serenading Mrs. Bloomfield in her hybrid station wagon.

“You guys?” It was Jake, back in the basement. He had lent Riley one of his spare cell phones and hooked everybody up with linked earpieces.

“Yeah?” said Riley.

“You're close. I'd say it's only about another hundred yards to where she parked the truck. And Riley? You better move fast. The battery in your cell phone must be tanking. The GPS signal is spotty. Intermittent.”

“Got you.”

“You guys find Noodle?” asked Mongo, stationed in the basement with Jake.

“Not yet, big guy,” said Riley. “But don't worry—we're not coming back without her.”

“Thanks,” said Mongo, sounding kind of choked up.

“Hey, you'd do the same for us,” said Jamal. “Am I right? Say I needed to employ a little muscle to get
back a couple iPods or something…”

“Jamal?” said Riley. “Focus.”

Off in the distance, Riley thought he heard a dog bark.

Briana's eyebrows shot up. She heard it, too.

“Come on,” said Riley. “It's showtime.”

A gated fence blocked the way forward. The air was scented with the odor of wet hay and wetter animals. On the other side was probably some kind of farm. Riley shone his compact flashlight at a padlock clamped through a loop of heavy chain.

“I got it,” said Jamal.

“Hurry,” said Riley.

Jamal worked a jagged steel pick into the lock. “Ooh. This is a good one. Gonna take a little longer than that cheap motor scooter pop-top.”

“You guys?” It was Briana. Over in the bushes. Holding open a hole in the chain-link fence.

“Good eye,” said Riley. “Come on, Jamal. Let's go.”

“Wait a second,” said Jamal, twisting and flicking the tool jammed inside the padlock. “Almost got it.”

“We don't need to do that anymore. There's a hole in the fence.”

“Fine. Sure. Some people are always looking for the easy way.”

They scrambled through the brambles.

Briana was already on the other side of the fence.

Jamal crawled through the hole next, muttering about shortcuts and laziness. Riley was the last one through and made sure to rig the fencing so the breach didn't show. He tore a small sliver of silver duct tape off its roll, wrapped it around a link in the fence.

“So we can spot it later,” he said. “We might be in a hurry.”

Because Granny Brown might be chasing after them. With a shotgun or, seeing how she was a farmer, a pitchfork.

Up ahead, through an opening in the trees, Riley could see a weedy meadow and, beyond that, the silhouette of a short outbuilding of some sort. It was wide, but not very tall. Maybe a chicken coop. Maybe a huge rabbit hutch. The air was fetid. It reeked like the cattle tent at the county fair. Or the urinal in the boys' bathroom at school.

“Somebody's coming!” whispered Briana.

“Two somebodies,” added Jamal. “I hear voices.”

“Going to night vision,” said Riley, flipping down the lenses on his dad's very expensive goggles, which allowed him to see in the dark. He panned to the left, where he saw two green-gray images. Fat man. Waddling woman. He heard their muffled voices. Followed them as they neared the chicken coop.

That's when Riley saw the dogs.

Dozens and dozens of dogs.

“SHUT UP, YOU MANGY MUTTS!”
shouted Chief Brown as he whacked the wooden frame of a raised chicken coop.

Only it wasn't a chicken coop.

It was a dog coop.

Through the night vision goggles, Riley could make out two rows of elevated cages, each cage maybe three feet wide and three feet deep with very little headroom. There were ten cages in each row, with three or four dogs squeezed into each and every cage.

Sixty, seventy dogs.

Mostly puppies. Some older. Some crippled.

Now that Chief Brown had rattled their cages, the
barks and cries of distress were deafening.

“Shut your yapping traps or nobody gets dinner!” shouted Grandma Brown. She went to a nearby post and flicked up a circuit breaker. Sparks sputtered. Spotlights blazed to life to illuminate all the miserable creatures locked in their even more miserable cages. The infrared signature of the lighting was so intense, Riley had to flip up the night vision goggles to keep from frying his retinas.

“Dag,” whispered Jamal.

The horror of the dogs trapped in their filthy cages might have been the first thing to ever leave Jamal Wilson speechless.

“Riley,” whispered Briana. “It's a puppy mill!”

The three of them were lying on their stomachs behind the rotted trunk of a fallen tree, maybe twenty yards away from the closest cages.

“We need to get Noodle out of this horrible place!” said Briana.

Riley agreed. But first they had to find her.

“Toss me your field glasses.”

Briana lobbed Riley her binoculars. He scanned the rickety chicken-wire cages, which were propped up on wooden stilts so the dogs' poop would fall through the mesh floor to the mud below.

We should rescue them all
, Riley thought. But would that be considered stealing, since Grandma Brown
technically “owned” the dogs she was abusing?

Okay. Tonight's mission would be a limited one: find and extract Noodle. But Riley knew he'd be coming back for the others—soon.

He could see that some of the dogs, especially the older ones, looked sick. Weeping red sores splotched their fur. Shrunken bellies tugged down on their chest skin, pulling it tight against exposed ribs.

Grandma Brown walked up the center lane between the cages, scooping handfuls of kibble from a five-gallon bucket, tossing it into the cages. Dogs fought one another for the measly scraps of food. Jaws snapped. Hackles shot up. The chorus of desperate dog barks was quickly replaced by the violent snarls of starving beasts.

Riley inched the binoculars to the left and saw Chief Brown, pulling a cell phone out of his bulging shirt pocket.

“Hello?” he shouted to be heard over the dogs. “Yeah. Yeah. I thought we agreed to eight thousand? Aw, never mind. Ship it tonight. Tonight!”

Riley inched the binoculars over to the circuit breaker box. It had no door panel on its front and was mounted on a post maybe two feet in front of a corrugated aluminum shed. Riley tilted the glasses down and noticed a coiled garden hose lying on the ground. It gave him an idea.

“You got your poodle, Mom,” said the chief. “Apricot will be here first thing tomorrow morning. Of course those crooks jacked up the price. Cost me
nine
thousand dollars!”

“Aw, quit your bellyaching. We got the goldendoodle for free.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” groused the chief. “So where is she?”

Grandma Brown head-gestured left. “Gave Noodle a cage of her own. She gets the pink one. Apricot will move into the blue one next door.”

There, on the ground, sitting underneath the closest puppy hutch, were two parakeet cages—the same ones they'd seen Nick carrying outside the pet supply store. The baby-blue birdcage was empty but, behind the pink bars, Riley could see a lump of muddy fur curled up in a terrified ball.

Noodle.

“Apricot weighs seventy pounds!” screamed the police chief. “He's not going to fit in a birdcage!”

“So, we'll buy him a big crate!” his mother snapped back.

Noodle's parakeet prison had a chain looped through its thin wire bars. The chain was then wrapped around a four-by-four post and secured with a serious-looking lock.

Riley lowered the binoculars and rolled onto his
back. He touched his earpiece. “Jake?” he said in a hushed voice.

“Yeah?”

“Chief Brown's cell number. We need it.”

“On it.”

“Briana?”

She scooted closer.

“I need to borrow your video camera.”

Briana was the star reporter on FMS-TV, the middle school's TV station, which was basically a bunch of kids who read the announcements every morning in a makeshift news studio set up in a corner of the library. She always carried a tiny Flip Video camera wherever she went.

She dug it out of her backpack. “Here.”

Riley took it. “Thanks. Now you've got to pull Chief Brown out of the scene.”

“How?”

“You got that cell number, Jake?”

“Yeah.”

“Briana—head back to the gate. Get the number from Jake. Call the chief. Tell him he won something. Make it food. The guy likes to eat.”

“Cheese of the Month Club!” said Briana in an excited whisper.

“Works for me,” Riley whispered back. “But your phone call keeps breaking up. Tell him he's in a bad
cell zone. Keep him moving. Toward the farmhouse, away from the cages.”

“Gotcha.”

“Go! Hurry!”

Ducking low, Briana scampered back the way they had come in. Riley turned to the wiry fifth grader.

“Jamal, you're with me.”

“Cool.”

“Noodle is in a pink parakeet cage underneath the closest coop. The cage is chained to a four-by-four post—”

“And there's a lock involved, am I right?”

Riley nodded. “I can't tell if it's a combination lock or a key.”

“Either way, I'm popping it! But you know, Riley, locks aren't all I do. Say you needed to rig up a…”

They heard a hose
snick-snick-snick
to life. Jets of water needled against the aluminum sides of the shed.

The chief's cell phone rang.

“Hello? I won what? You're breaking up. Hold on. Can you hear me now? What if I move over here?”

The chief's voice faded in the distance.

“Stay low, stay quiet,” Riley said to Jamal. “Stay in the shadows till the lights go out.”

“How's that gonna happen?”

“I'm pretty sure Grandma's going to have an electrical accident in about two minutes.”

“Cool. I'm down with that.”

“When the lights go dark, unlock Noodle's cage, grab it, and haul your butt out of here. Meet up with Briana and head for the car.”

“Where you gonna be, Riley Mack?”

“Busy.”

“Doing what, man?”

“Well, first, I need to shoot some video. Then, I need to take out those lights.”

BOOK: Riley Mack and the Other Known Troublemakers
3.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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