Харлан Кобен - Found

Uh-uh, I told myself. No way.

I said that to myself because when I thought about who hated Troy, the first name that popped into my head was Ema.

I pushed the thought away. This sadly was sometimes how my mind worked. It went places that it shouldn’t go.

“I don’t know,” Troy said.

“So let’s see how this plays out.”

“Okay,” Troy said. “What do we do now?”

I took the lead. We crept down closer to the building. I wasn’t sure exactly how to describe the size. When I think of a shed, I think of a place to store tools in the backyard. This was bigger than that, closer to the size of a one-car garage. It was oddly situated too, behind town hall, not far from the police station, the library, and the high school. One would think that this was public land, owned by the town, but for some reason, Buck’s father had decided to purchase it.

Why?

I moved toward the shed and tried to look through the darkened windows. I cupped my hand against the glass and leaned in close. Part of me almost expected to see a face jump into view, like a big clown’s face with a big smile, and then I’d startle back, screaming.

Stop it, I scolded myself.

There was nothing to see. It was too dark.

Troy was trying to peer into the window too. “Make out anything?” he whispered to me.

“No.”

We circled the building. I could see why you might call it a shed. It was flimsier than a real building, made out of some kind of prefab material you’d find in the lot of a hardware store. There were two more windows in the back, but the shades were drawn.

“So now what?”

I spotted a back door. Good. From this angle, no one near the circle could see anything. Come to think of it, even in the front, which more or less faced the circle, no one could really see anything.

“We check the door,” I said.

Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you put a hand on a doorknob and turn it and the door is unlocked. That wasn’t what happened here. Locked. I checked the area around the knob. The lock looked pretty cheap.

Not long ago, Ema and I had tried to break into Bat Lady’s house. I had taken a credit card from my wallet and tried to open it via the way I had seen a thousand times on television. It hadn’t worked. That lock had been old and so it simply gave way. But after that I got curious, so I started searching the Internet to learn how to pick locks. In truth, it isn’t easy. If there was a deadbolt, it was impossible, but if this was a standard spring bolt, I could maybe get away with it.

It was a spring bolt.

Bingo.

I took out my credit card and started to work it. You don’t really pick a lock with a credit card. You jimmy it open. I stuck the card in the crack between the door and the frame and slid it down to the lock. I bent the card toward the knob, hoping to slide the corner underneath. Nothing much happened. I put my shoulder against the door. The key is, open it fast when you feel the pop. That’s what the websites said.

It wasn’t working.

I pushed a little harder with my shoulder. The cheap material gave way. I could feel something bend. I looked back at Troy. He shrugged and said, “I can do it if you want.”

I shook my head. I was already there. My fingers might not be nimble, but there was nothing like a strong shoulder. I rocked back, hit the door a little harder with my shoulder, and the door flew open.

Breaking and entering. Again.

I was already cooking up various excuses, just in case we got caught. Example: We had heard someone calling for help maybe. Or we just tried the door and it was already open, so we just came to check and make sure everything was okay.

Right. Like either one of those would fly.

But at least I had a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card with me: the police chief’s son. I slowly stepped into the shed. Troy followed me inside. There was a wall right in front of us dividing the space into two rooms. The lights were out, so we couldn’t see much more.

“You take the room on the left,” I said to him. “I’ll take the room on the right.”

“Should we use our flashlights?”

“Let’s keep the beams low, beneath the window height.”

“Okay,” Troy said. “Mickey?”

“What?”

“What are we looking for?”

“A big sign with the word clue on it.”

Troy laughed at that. “I’m serious.”

“A laptop, for one thing. Files maybe. But in truth, I’m not sure. I think it’s one of those ‘we’ll know it when we see it’ kinda things.”

“Got ya.”

We split up then. I did as I suggested and kept my smartphone’s flashlight beam pointed at the floor. I could make out what looked like a table in the center of the room. I moved toward it. I risked lifting the beam a little higher to see what was on the table.

It looked like chemistry class.

Test tubes, beakers, flasks, and the like littered the table. I started to wonder if there was a Bunsen burner here too. I turned off the flashlight and tried to think for a moment.

A lab.

Why?

I thought about what Troy had told me — about Randy dealing drugs. Could this be, I don’t know, a drug lab of some kind? How do you make steroids? I had no idea. Could that be what this was?

Again: no idea.

The room was sparkling clean. I saw a metal cylinder on the right. Stainless steel cabinets lined the wall. I put my hand on one. It felt cold to the touch. I took hold of the handle and pulled the cabinet open. It opened like a refrigerator. I felt cold air. I lifted the flashlight so that I could see inside.

There might as well have been a sign saying CLUE.

“Ew, gross,” I whispered to myself.

Troy stuck his head around the wall. He shined the flashlight up in my face before aiming it toward the open cabinet. “Wait, is that...?”

“I think so, yeah,” I said.

The cabinet was loaded up with small plastic containers that I recognized from our drug testing. There was a yellow liquid inside. In short, the cabinet was loaded up with...

“Urine samples,” I said.

“Nasty.”

I made a face and gently lifted one of the specimen cups.

Suddenly I heard Troy’s panicked voice. “What was that?”

I turned toward him. “What?”

He leapt toward the window, nearly knocking the urine specimen from my hand. I followed him. We ducked down low and peeked outside. At first, I didn’t see anything, just the streetlights in the distance.

“What?” I asked.

“Might have been my imagination, but I–I thought I saw...”

And then they became clearer. Flashlights. Flashlights that were heading toward us. Not small flashlights like on our smartphones, but big, thick ones, the kind used by...

“It’s my dad!” Troy yell-whispered. “We gotta get out of here!”

He didn’t have to tell me twice. We ran for the door, bumping into the table. Beakers crashed to the floor. I heard a voice yell out. An adult voice.

Like the voice of a cop.

Troy got to the door first, but I was right behind him. We ran straight back, trying to keep the building between those flashlights and our bodies. Troy jumped behind a big boulder. I joined him. Up the hill on Kasselton Avenue, I could now see the whirling light atop a parked police car.

“Oh man,” I said.

“Split up,” Troy said. “You head into the woods, I’ll go behind the Y and try to circle to the street. If I can get there, I can divert them.”

That made sense. I turned and ran into the woods behind me. This sounded easier than it actually was. It was dark now. There was only the faintest light coming from the distant streetlights. Woods have a lot of, well, trees. So put it altogether: running in a dark place with a lot of trees.