The Silver Star(61)

“Maddox is a goner,” I said.

We sat down on the pine needles and waited.

After about an hour, we heard the whistle of the train and the wheels rumbling and screeching across the tracks that ran through the middle of Byler. After the noise died away, the back door opened. We jumped up and grabbed the handle of the tamping bar. But instead of Maddox coming out the door, it was Doris. She had just given birth and was carrying her pink-faced newborn in one arm and a bag of trash in the other.

I felt my whole body sag. All the energy that I had worked up to kill Maddox just drained out of me. As much as I hated Doris for siding with her husband, I wasn’t about to kill her—and certainly not the new baby. That was when I realized I really didn’t want to kill anyone, not even Maddox. Bad as he was, that just wasn’t in me.

“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea after all,” I said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Joe said.

As we watched, Doris took the lid off the can, dropped the bag in, and replaced the lid without putting down the baby. Then she went back into the house, never once looking our way. Joe pulled the tamping bar out from underneath the rock. “That was a right nice fulcrum, though,” he said. “Could have done it if we’d wanted to.”

We headed across the hill, away from the house.

“Does this mean we’re wimps?” I asked.

“Nah,” Joe said. He kicked at a pinecone in his path. “You know, we could get Maddox where it really hurts.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Le Mans.”





CHAPTER FORTY


Joe and I talked about smashing the windshield, but we worried that the noise might bring Maddox running out of the house. Then he suggested keying the car, but we also nixed that idea because it would only do cosmetic damage, and Maddox could still cruise around, trying to mow us down. In the end, we decided that the best course of action would be to immobilize the Le Mans by slashing the tires. Maddox could buy new ones of course, but we’d have made a real statement—and we could always slash the new tires, too.

We waited until the weekend, when Maddox would probably be home. We needed the cover of darkness, so Joe told me to meet him at the library at dusk. He always carried his jackknife on him, he said, so I didn’t need to worry about anything in the weapons department. He said he’d go over the day before and case Maddox’s street and work out a plan of attack. We needed to wear dark clothes, he added. “Camouflage,” he explained. Joe was putting a lot of thought into what he called “the operation.”

When I rode up at the appointed time on Saturday, Joe was waiting at the library bike stand. He got on the Schwinn, and with me sitting on the rack behind, we pedaled over to Maddox’s neighborhood as the sun was going down. It was a colorless December sunset, the sky all silvers and whites and grays.

When we got to Maddox’s street, we could see the Le Mans parked in the breezeway down the block. Joe had me hide with the Schwinn behind a holly bush at the street corner. My job was to be the lookout and if anyone approached, either in a car or on foot, I was supposed to hoot like an owl. By then the sun had gone down, the streetlights had come on, and they cast pools of purplish light. While I waited at the holly bush, Joe casually walked down the street and looked around. When he saw that the coast was clear, he ducked behind a big rhododendron a few houses up from the Maddoxes’.

As I watched from over the holly, Joe scurried from bush to bush, stopping at each one to suss out the situation. When he reached the bush closest to Maddox’s house, he dropped down on his stomach and shimmied over to the Le Mans.

Joe was out of my sight when a porch light flicked on at the house across the street from Maddox’s. The front door opened and an older lady let out a little dog. I started hooting like crazy. At the sound of it, the little dog began to bark. Suddenly, Joe came running as fast as he could toward me. I had the bike ready to roll, kickstand up, when he reached me.

“Got two tires,” he said breathlessly as he jumped on. I clambered aboard and pushed off with both feet while Joe stood up on the pedals, working them as fast as he could.

We circled around town instead of going through it, and fifteen minutes later, we got to the bottom of the mill hill. Joe was about to get off and walk the rest of the way home, and I was going to head back to Mayfield, when the squad car pulled up alongside us. The cop pointed to the side of the road. Joe stopped the bike, and the cop parked behind us and got out, leaving the engine running and the headlights on. As he walked toward us, he put on his broadbrimmed hat and adjusted the chin strap.