Swindle Read online

  Ben shrugged. “Maybe the medicine really works.”

  Nurse Savage held open the door, and Ben disappeared inside the building.

  “What the —?”

  Something jagged scratched Griffin in the back of his neck. He wheeled around to find a sixth grader the size of an NFL linebacker stabbing at him with a long branch.

  “Darren, what are you doing?” Griffin shouted.

  “Can’t you tell?” Darren Vader jeered, poking the stick at the bridge of Griffin’s nose. “I’m field-testing my new invention, the DumbPick. Sorry, I thought your head was a coconut.”

  Angrily, Griffin slapped the branch away. “It’s a SmartPick, you idiot, and it’s a miracle of technology!” He would never have admitted his own doubts about his father’s brainchild to Darren. “You wouldn’t even know about it if you weren’t such a snoop.”

  “I wasn’t snooping,” Darren defended himself. “My mom had the papers spread out on the kitchen table.” Mrs. Vader was the lawyer who’d filed the SmartPick patent.

  “Yeah, and way to blab it all over the school,” Griffin accused.

  “Excuse me for making sure a brilliant inventor gets some credit. You guys will be rich someday — you know, when millions of people decide to quit their jobs and start picking fruit.”

  “Shut up!” Griffin thundered. “You’ve always got so much to say, but when it comes to action, you’re nothing! What about the old Rockford house, huh? Where were you on Friday night?”

  “I had the flu,” Darren mumbled.

  “You don’t look like you’re at death’s door.”

  “It was a twenty-four-hour bug!” Darren exclaimed.

  “There was a lot of that going around.” Griffin clucked disapprovingly, raising his voice to reach some of the other sixth graders nearby. “Nice show of solidarity, you guys — leaving Ben and me to stand up for the kids in this town.”

  “Sorry, Griffin,” said Antonia Benson, who went by her climbing nickname, Pitch. “My family was at the indoor rock wall. I completely spaced.”

  “Me, too,” admitted Marcus Oliver. “Totally blanked.”

  Griffin was unconvinced. “You guys didn’t blank when it came to filling Ben full of stories about railway spikes and possessed pets.”

  “There’s no such thing as a possessed pet,” lectured Savannah Drysdale. “Animals are all innocent inside. And speaking of animals, that’s why I couldn’t be there on Friday. Madame Curie was about to litter. My hamster.”

  “And?” Pitch prompted.

  “It was a boy,” Savannah reported happily, “and another boy. And three girls.”

  “Well, I didn’t miss it for any dumb reason like that,” said Logan Kellerman haughtily. “I have an audition for an acne cream commercial. I had to stay home and rehearse.”

  “Rehearse what?” Darren laughed. “Squeezing zits?”

  “That shows what you know about acting. It’s all emotion. The audience has to really believe my heartbreak over having a pimple.”

  “You are a pimple,” Darren grunted.

  “Whatever the reason, we’re all sorry, Griffin,” Pitch put in. “We shouldn’t have flaked out on you that way. Maybe some of us were a little scared. Maybe we just didn’t think it was worth it. Walking past that big pile of rubble this morning, I wished I had been there. Our loss.”

  “You bet it’s your loss,” Griffin said resentfully. But with the fruits of that adventure — the Babe Ruth card — in S. Wendell Palomino’s chubby hands, he was in no mood to tell them why.

  Mr. Martinez’s students were working on their creative writing assignments when Ben got back to class. He deliberately avoided Griffin’s searching eyes as he took the seat next to his friend.

  “Let’s get together after school to start work on the plan,” Griffin whispered eagerly.

  Every second he’d spent with the nurse, Ben had been dreading this conversation. Since the days when Griffin’s plans had involved bicycles with training wheels, Ben had always been “in.” It had become as constant as the sunrise. That was what made this so difficult.

  “Griffin, I can’t.”

  “Obviously we’ll have to do some surveillance on the store,” Griffin went on. “You know, pinpoint the weak spots —”

  Ben wasn’t even surprised that Griffin had missed his refusal. Once his friend was on a mission, nothing short of an earthquake would get his attention. “You’re not listening, man. I can’t do it. The answer is no.”

  That was earthquake enough. “What are you talking about?” Griffin asked. “Why not?”

  Ben looked at him helplessly. “Where do I start? It’s against the law, we’ll never get away with it, and it’s just plain wrong.”

  “It isn’t wrong,” Griffin said stoutly. “What Swindle did — that’s wrong. We’re just setting it right again.”

  “Okay, so it’s not wrong. But it’s wrong for us. We’re not burglars. I know we talk about how kids can do anything adults can, but not this.”

  Griffin’s voice rose in tone and volume. “Then Swindle wins!”

  “Shhh,” hissed Mr. Martinez from behind his desk.

  “How can you let that jerk get away with taking advantage of us?” Griffin continued in a slightly lower voice. “How can you let him get rich doing it? That’s my card, my money. Our money, because I was going to give you half!”

  “I don’t want to be rich,” Ben shot back. “Okay, maybe I do, but not this way.”

  “Boys — quiet,” the teacher said warningly.

  “I have to do this,” Griffin pleaded. “I can’t explain, but there’s a good reason. Of all my plans, this one is the most important!”

  “You always say that! Every plan is the most important — till the next one comes along!”

  “This time it’s true!” Griffin exclaimed. “The money —”

  “Griffin and Ben,” Mr. Martinez interrupted angrily. “Since you can’t work quietly as neighbors, you’re going to have to move. Ben, you go over and sit with Logan. Griffin — take the empty desk behind Melissa.”

  “But, Mr. Martinez —” Griffin began.

  “Now.”

  As he gathered up his papers, Griffin looked beseechingly at his best friend. He mouthed the word, “Please.”

  Ben could barely muster the strength of will to shake his head no.

  Griffin’s despair was total. Year in and year out, there had always been one constant, one thing that could be relied on through floods and asteroid strikes: the unchanging fact that Ben was willing to follow him anywhere.

  Yet today, with so much at stake, his loyal friend had let him down.

  He had never felt so helpless.

  6

  Logan Kellerman is an idiot.

  That was the conclusion Ben had reached after three days of sitting next to the boy. The audition for the acne cream commercial had not gone well, and Logan could think of nothing else. He slumped at his desk, his already long face drawn out to banana-like proportions, blaming his failure on everybody except himself — the casting director, his parents, and Sanjay Jotwani.

  “Who’s Sanjay Jotwani?” asked Ben without interest.

  “Only the greatest acting coach ever to come out of India,” Logan told him. “He’s giving private lessons in the city. Guess whose parents are too cheap to pay for it.”

  Ben cast a longing gaze across the classroom where Griffin sat behind Melissa Dukakis. That was what really bothered Ben, why he had so little patience for Logan’s nonsense. The punishment was over. Mr. Martinez said the two were free to return to their old seats. But Griffin was so upset over Ben refusing to take part in the baseball card robbery that he wouldn’t move.

  “I don’t sit with traitors” had been Griffin’s declaration when Ben had made an attempt to come back.

  Those were the only words Ben had heard from his best friend in the past three days. The icy silence between them had become so obvious that the other kids were starting to mention it. Pitch kep
t asking what was wrong, and even Darren commented, “Who broke up the Doofus Patrol?”

  How could Ben ever explain it? The same dogged go-getter qualities that forged The Man With The Plan made Griffin as stubborn as a mule when he was angry about something.

  “Kate Mulholland has been working with Sanjay Jotwani for less than two months, and already she’s landed a part in a heartburn commercial,” Logan was lamenting. “I’m better than Kate Mulholland. I can do heartburn. I can do gastric distress. I can do constipation like nobody’s business.”

  At least Griffin wasn’t exactly having a picnic on the other side of the room with Melissa. She had a reputation as a computer genius, but it was impossible to be sure about that. She was the shyest kid in town, and spent most of her time hiding behind long stringy hair that completely covered her face.

  As Ben watched, Melissa agitated her head until the curtain thinned to reveal pale skin and wide eyes. She mumbled a one-word answer to Griffin’s question.

  With a loud sigh, Logan put his books away and laid his head down on his desk. “What’s the use? Who can think when my entire career is falling apart? My parents are way too East Coast to understand what it takes to make it in Hollywood.”

  Ben closed his eyes and pictured himself in a faraway place, where there was no such thing as a million-dollar baseball card, and heists only happened in action movies.

  So this was what ex-friendship was like: Griffin was stuck with a kid who barely opened her mouth, and Ben was stuck with one who never shut up.

  As miserable as sixth grade had become, the after-school hours were even worse. Ben was used to spending all his spare time with Griffin, so he wasn’t just depressed; he was bored. A toxic combination.

  He had been biking a lot, almost as if he believed he could outrun his loneliness if he pedaled hard enough. He must have passed the site of the former Rockford house a dozen times. The debris had been cleared away. All that remained was the stone foundation and the old-fashioned mailbox out front — a grave marker for the ghosts and murderers that had probably never lived there.

  The place made him think of Griffin, just like every place made him think of Griffin. For Ben, very few landmarks in town didn’t hold some special Griffin connection — the school, the town hall, Palomino’s Emporium. It wasn’t very long before he found himself on Griffin’s street, almost as if his bike knew the way and had ridden there on its own. How often in the past had he wheeled up this block, turning onto the familiar driveway?

  A woman he didn’t recognize was on the front lawn, hammering in the stake of a cardboard sign. Ben squinted to read it:

  FOR SALE

  He was never sure exactly how he and the bike separated. The next thing he knew, he was flying through the air. He landed hard on the road, leaving much of the skin of his left elbow on the concrete curb.

  The sign lady rushed over and helped him up. “Are you all right?”

  Ben hardly noticed the pain or his bleeding arm. “This house isn’t for sale!”

  “It just listed this morning,” she told him. “Do you need me to drive you somewhere? Is your mother home?”

  Ben yanked himself away. “People live here!”

  The door opened and Griffin peered outside. “Ben?”

  Ben pointed to the woman. “She’s trying to sell your house out from under you!”

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Brompton,” Griffin told her. “He’s my friend.” He hustled Ben inside to the bathroom and held his injured arm under running water. “Calm down, man. She’s our real estate agent.”

  “Real estate agent?” Ben pulled back from the sink, splattering the floor with pink-tinged water. “You mean your house really is for sale? You’re moving?”

  Griffin nodded.

  “All because I wouldn’t do the heist?”

  “Of course not. Listen …” Griffin hadn’t told a soul about the Bing family’s financial problems. Now Ben listened with rapt attention.

  “That’s why I got so freaked out about the Babe Ruth card,” Griffin concluded the whole sad story. “That money would save our house. It would let my dad develop his dream. It would change everything for my family. How can I let a sleazy two-bit con man take all that away?”

  “I — I don’t know what to say,” Ben managed. As awful as these past few days had been, it was nothing compared to what Griffin must have been going through. No wonder he was so obsessed with the heist. He was fighting for his home and family.

  Despite his horror at the thought of Griffin moving away, Ben was aware of an even stronger emotion. He’d always wondered what it would be like to be Griffin. To experience the pure, clear sense of purpose that was at the core of his friend’s character. In that instant, all his doubts and misgivings about the robbery burned away. What was left was the searing certainty that this was not just the right course of action, but the only course of action.

  “You really think we can pull off a heist?” Ben asked.

  The Man With The Plan grinned.

  THE GREAT BASEBALL CARD HEIST

  Plan of Attack:

  (i) Gain access to SWINDLE’S STORE

  (ii) Locate SAFE behind SALES COUNTER

  (iii) Burn HOLE in side of SAFE using Dad’s BLOWTORCH

  (iv) Return home RICH

  Major Obstacles:

  (i) Padlocked GATE

  (ii) 7-foot-high FENCE

  (iii) SECURITY GLASS on front DOOR

  (iv) 3 DEADBOLTS

  (v) Burglar ALARM — (How can we learn KEYPAD CODE?)

  (vi) The X-factor — (Anybody who wires display cases and bolts a safe to the floor must have a few SURPRISES up his SLEEVE.)

  Surveillance Report:

  (i) Store hours: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

  (ii) SWINDLE leaves 5:30 in black HONDA ELEMENT

  (iii) Assistant Manager TOM DUFFERIN closes shop at …

  7

  “Six o’clock on the nose,” Griffin hissed excitedly, making a note on his pad.

  The two boys were hidden inside a large globe cedar directly across Ninth Street from Palomino’s Emporium.

  “Come on, Griffin. How about a little wiggle room?” Ben complained. “I’ve got a prickly branch up my armpit.”

  They watched as Dufferin got into a car parked at the curb. Griffin wrote down the make and model as the assistant manager drove away.

  The two boys emerged from the bush, shaking and stretching cramped limbs.

  “What do you think about the fence?” Griffin mused.

  “I think it’s a fence around a locked store with a burglar alarm,” Ben confirmed. “Piece of cake — if you’re made of ectoplasm and can walk through walls.”

  “Just because we haven’t figured it out yet doesn’t mean it can’t be done,” Griffin replied. “If you want it bad enough, it’ll come to you.”

  They crossed the street and stood before the heavy chain that held the gate shut.

  “Can we climb it?” Experimentally, Griffin jammed a toe in the mesh and hoisted himself up.

  Luthor came out of nowhere. The big Doberman launched itself through the air and slammed into the fence opposite Griffin. The shocked boy lost his grip and tumbled into the arms of a terrified Ben. The two of them landed flat on their backs on the sidewalk. The monster clung to the mesh by its powerful teeth, snarling and growling.

  Griffin hauled Ben upright, and they scrambled back across Ninth Street to the cover of their bush.

  Griffin pulled out his notebook and wrote ANIMAL CONTROL?! in large letters across the page.

  “Control that guy?” Ben squeaked. “I’d settle for not being his lunch.”

  Griffin looked thoughtful. “Who knows more about animals than anybody else in town?”

  8

  Savannah Drysdale was talking to a rabbit.

  She whispered softly into a floppy ear as she held the animal on her lap, rocking slowly on her frilly purple quilt. Griffin and Ben could not make out what she was saying, but it was obvious that the
creature was totally calm in her arms.

  Mrs. Drysdale cleared her throat. “Savannah.” Louder: “Savannah, your friends are here.” She disappeared into the hall.

  Savannah regarded them dubiously, but she set the rabbit down. It hopped over to an elaborate cage in the corner, where it shared a water-feeding tube with a pair of hamsters.

  “I guess you have a lot of pets,” Griffin observed.

  “Not ‘pets,’” Savannah replied pointedly. “In this house, we’re all equal partners — my mom and dad, me, my brother, our dog, two cats, four rabbits, seven hamsters, three turtles, parakeet, and albino chameleon.”

  “If it’s albino, how does it change color?” asked Ben.

  “He has to stay white. It’s a disability. And his name is Lorenzo, not ‘it.’”

  Griffin cleared his throat carefully. “That’s really cool that you can talk to rabbits. Does it work with other animals that way?”

  “We don’t talk about the weather, if that’s what you mean. Animals are sensitive to the tone of your voice, the vibe you put out. They know who to trust and who not to trust. They may not be able to understand your words, but they know they’re safe with you. It’s not a conversation, but you’re definitely communicating. Why?”

  “We need you to talk to a dog,” Ben blurted.

  Savannah’s eyes narrowed. “What dog?”

  “Remember what you said about how all animals are innocent inside?” Griffin reminded her. “Well, there’s this guard dog on Ninth Street, a Doberman — he’s pretty much pure T. rex. We’re talking vicious, nasty, mean —”

  “Stop right there,” Savannah interrupted. “A guard dog is only mean because that’s how he was trained. If you take a newborn puppy and raise it so that the one behavior that ever gets rewarded is aggressive, you’re going to wind up with a pretty rough adult dog.”

  “That’s Luthor, all right,” put in Ben.

  “But that doesn’t make it the dog’s fault,” Savannah continued sharply. “And it doesn’t mean that a little puppy isn’t trapped in there somewhere, waiting for a chance to come out.”