“Moods, we need to get this done. I’m going now. You can go catch a ride with Werewolf Eddie,” you say. Werewolf Eddie was already heading to his car, yelling about getting the horn customized to make a howling wolf noise. Moods looks at you.
“OK, let’s go,” he says.
You make a deal with the Pemberton twins, a pair of promising sophomore yakks named Fred and Gred, to drive them home and then borrow their car and you head through the deepest part of the night to the Barrow Arms.
You arrive. It’s completely silent. Whatever goings-on, schemes, scams, and rendezvous at the teeming hotel and its parking lot full of hushed conversations and shadowy handshakes have resolved themselves, and an eerie calm has settled over it. You go straight for Duckett’s room and tap on the door.
No answer.
You tap again. And again, a little harder. Still nothing. You can tell the light is on because it’s leaking from the bottom. You grab the knob. The door isn’t locked, and it opens. What had been a tidy room was now a nest of papers. Drawers are flung open haphazardly. You have no idea how Duckett had this much stuff. There’s a corkboard with red string on it. And also Buck Duckett is there.
Duckett is sitting at the edge of the bed, absorbed in some sort of file that he’s staring at intently when he whips around and looks for a second like he’s going to charge you.
“We knocked, but you didn’t answer,” you say.
“Sorry,” Duckett says. “I was just going over a few open investigations. You have no idea how much pants traffic is going on under our noses at any given time. It’s like a river. So, did you make contact with Wump?”
You give him the card with the meeting time set.
“Splendid. Splendid. You’ve done well. Very well.”
“So, what is the plan?” you say.
“Well, you’re obviously going to go to the meeting,” Duckett says. “But you need clear evidence. You can’t just go to another dead drop. I need to be able to connect him directly to the pants,” he says looking at a piece of red string on the board between the picture of Wump and a picture of pants that had been clearly cut out of a magazine, possibly Pant Alone, the high fashion pants magazine that Moods and a few other teammates read on bus rides to away games. “No pants, no collar.”
“But how exactly will you know? Are you going to be there?” you ask.
“I’m not wearing a freaking wire,” Moods says.
“Relax,” Duckett says. “I will be there. You won’t see me, you won’t know where I am, but I’ll be there to get him. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Duckett then laughs, it’s a strange guffaw that you don’t expect from someone normally so grim and officious, but then again you didn’t expect to see so much junk strewn all over his room.
“You two, go home and get some sleep. It’s probably going to be a long night.”
You leave. When you get back to the car, you look at Moods. “Something seemed off in there, didn’t it,” you say.
“In there?” Moods says. “This whole thing is off. This is not how I wanted to spend our last year, dude.”
“Well, remember if we don’t get Wump tonight, there might not be a senior year,” you say.
Next chapter
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