She stopped writing on my back. Straightening up, I watched her rip the check out of the book.
Her home address was printed on it, of course.
She handed it to Julian.
He held it open in front of him, studied it for a few moments, then slipped it into a pocket of his shiny black shirt. He patted it there and smiled at Lee. “If it bounces, of course, we’ll require your blood.”
She grinned. “Of course.”
“Let me get your tickets,” he said. He turned away and walked briskly toward the open front door of the bus. Like the hearse, the bus’s windows were draped on the inside with red curtains.
I waited for Julian to vanish inside. Then I whispered to Lee, “That check has your address on it. Now he knows where you live.”
“No big deal,” she said. “While he’s gone, why don’t you take a look at the roof?”
I scowled toward the snack stand. It was only about twenty feet away, and none of the workers seemed to be watching us any longer. So I walked over to it, jumped, caught hold of an edge of the roof and pulled myself up.
Slim and Rusty were gone.
They’d left behind nothing, not even my shirt.
I dropped to the ground. No sign of Julian yet. I strolled back to Lee and reported, “They aren’t there.”
“Probably ran off when they saw what was coming.”
“But what’d they do about the dog?”
Lee shook her head, shrugged, then smiled at Julian as he came out of the bus. In a quiet voice, she said to me, “They’re probably on their way home.”
“Sure hope so,” I muttered.
“Four tickets for tonight’s performance,” Julian said, raising the tickets and smiling as he came toward us. With each stride, his black hair shook, his glossy shirt fluttered, and he jingled. The silvery, musical jingling sounded almost like Christmas bells, but not quite.
They sounded more like spurs.
I looked down at his boots. Sure enough, he wore a pair of spurs with big, silver rowels.
Had he been wearing them all along? Maybe, but I don’t think so. Maybe he’d put them on while he was in the bus.
If so, why?
Why would he wear spurs at all?
I glanced around just to make sure there wasn’t a horse nearby, and didn’t see one. Of course, you could’ve fit half a dozen Clydesdales inside the truck and nobody’d be the wiser.
But I doubted there were any horses at all. More than likely, Julian wore the spurs as fashion accessories to his costume.
Maybe part of him longed to be Paladin.
The jingling went silent when he halted in front of Lee. He presented the tickets to her.
“Thank you so much, Julian,” she said.
“My pleasure. We don’t have reserved seating, so come early.” His smile flashed. “And stay late. After the show, I’ll introduce you to Valeria. You, your brother and his friends.” He cast his smile in my direction.
“That might be nice,” Lee said. “Thank you.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I threw in.
“The pleasure is mine,” he said to Lee. “I’ll look forward to seeing you tonight. All of you.”
She blushed and said, “All four of us.”
“Isn’t that what I said?”
“Guess so.” Nodding, she said, “Thanks again.” Then she turned away and climbed into her truck. I hurried around to the other side and hopped into the passenger seat.
As she backed up, Julian walked away.
She swung the truck around and we started bouncing our way across Janks Field.
“You didn’t have to buy tickets,” I said.
“You want to see the show, don’t you?”
“Well, yeah. I guess so. But Mom and Dad are never gonna let me.”
“Maybe not.” She tossed me a smile tinted with mischief. “If they know about it.”
“Anyway, what about Slim and Rusty?”
“We’ve got four tickets and Danny’s out of town. All four of us can go, just like I told Julian.”
Holding back a groan, I muttered, “I don’t know. I just hope they turn up. They were supposed to wait for me.”
“I’m sure they’re all right.”
Chapter Eleven
As Lee steered us into the shadows of the dirt road, she said, “If I’d been up on that roof, I would’ve jumped down and run for the woods… probably before the Show even pulled into sight. A truck like that, it’d make a lot of noise coming through the woods.”
“The bus, too,” I added.
“They must’ve heard the engines in plenty of time to get away.”
“But what about the dog?” I asked. She shook her head. “Maybe it was gone by then.”
“What if it wasn’t?”
“Might’ve been distracted by the new arrivals.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said, but I pictured Slim and Rusty racing over Janks Field, the yellow dog chasing them and gaining on them and finally leaping onto Slim’s back and burying its teeth in the nape of her neck and taking her down. Rusty looking back over his shoulder…
Wrong, I thought. Rusty’s slower than Slim. He would be dragging behind and first to get nailed by the dog.
Unless Slim held back to protect him.
Which she might do.
Probably did do.
So then, though she was the faster of the two, she would’ve been the one to get attacked.
In my mind, I once again pictured Rusty looking over his shoulder. He watches Slim go down beneath the dog, then hesitates, knowing he should run back to help her.
But does he go back?
With Rusty, who knows?
I’m not saying he was a coward. He had guts, all right. I’d seen him do plenty of brave things—even foolbardly things, every so often. But he had a selfish streak that worried me.
Take for example how he snuck off, that morning, to eat his Ding-Dong.
Or what he did last Halloween.
Rusty, Dagny (later to be known as Slim) and I figured Janks Field would be the best of all possible places to visit on the spookiest night of the year. Maybe, as a bonus, we’d get to spy on a satanic orgy, or even (if we really lucked out) a human sacrifice.
But what had seemed like a great idea during the last week or two of October turned suddenly into a bad idea at just after sundown on Halloween. Confronted with walking out to Janks Field in the dark, I think we all realized that the dangers were more real than make-believe.
We’d gathered on the sidewalk in front of Rusty’s house and we were all set to go. We wore dark clothes. We carried flashlights. We were armed with hidden knives—just in case. At supper, I’d told Mom and Dad that I would be going over to Rusty’s to “goof around.”
Which was not exactly a lie.
As we left Rusty’s house behind and started walking in the general direction of Route 3, Dagny said, “I’ve been thinking.”
“Hope you didn’t strain nothing,” Rusty said.
“Maybe we should do something else tonight.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Not go to Janks Field.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I mean it.”
“You wanta chicken out?”
“It’s not chicken to be smart.”
“Bwok-bwok-bwok-bwok-bwok.”
“Hey, cut it out,” I said.
“You gonna chicken out, too?” Rusty asked me.
“Nobody’s chickening out,” I said.
“Glad to hear it. I’d hate to think my two best friends are a couple of yellow-bellied cowards.”
“Up yours,” I said.
We kept on walking. Most of the houses in the neighborhood were well-lighted and had jack-o’-lanterns glowing on their porches. On both sides of the street, small groups of kids were making the rounds, walking or running from house to house with bags for their goodies. Most of them were dressed up: some in those flimsy plastic store-bought costumes (witches, Huckleberry Hound, Superman, the Devil, and so on); many in home-made outfits (pirates, gypsies, vampires, hobos, princesses, etc.); and a few (who probably lacked imagination, enthusiasm or funds) pretty much wearing their regular clothes along with a mask. Whatever their costumes, many of them laughed and yelled. I heard people knocking on doors, heard doorbells dinging, heard chants of “Trick or treat!”