Bad Monkeys Read Online Free PDF Page A

Rapture?”
    “The death angel,” said Carlotta. “He grabbed another kid yesterday, right outside Modesto.”
    Modesto was north, the same direction the RV had been headed. That should have been enough to start me thinking, but the lightbulb didn’t go on until Carlotta said: “Get this. He didn’t just take the kid this time. He killed the kid’s dog , too.”
    “Dog?” I said. “What kind of dog?”
    “I don’t know, a big one I guess. They think the dog tried to protect the kid, so the angel, like, gutted it.”
    “What about the boy? Did they find his body yet?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Where?”
    Carlotta looked excited. “You’ll see.”
    A half mile out from school, we hit a traffic jam. This was something else that had never happened before—the road was usually empty at this hour—but when I saw the flashing lights up ahead, I immediately understood.
    “The state police found him around two in the morning,” Carlotta said. “Mrs. Zapatero from the motel was coming back late from visiting her sister and saw them roping off the crime scene. She said the kid was laid out on one of the picnic tables, like a human sacrifice.”
    As we got closer to the turnaround, Carlotta and Irolled our windows down and leaned out, hoping to catch a glimpse of the corpse. Señor Diaz yanked us back into the car and gave us each a swat on the head. “Show some respect!” he demanded, adding, to Carlotta: “You see why I don’t want you walking?”
    Did you tell Señor Diaz about the janitor?
    No. I know I should have, but I was pissed at him for hitting me. Besides, telling what I’d seen meant explaining how I’d happened to see it, and I didn’t think he’d appreciate the part about me looking to get stoned. I needed time to come up with a sanitized version of the story—one that would stand up to questioning.
    Meanwhile, I decided to ask some questions of my own. When we finally got to school that morning, I quizzed the librarian about the janitor. She didn’t know much. His name was Whitmer, Marvin or maybe Martin, and like me he was new; she’d heard he’d worked at another school before this one, but she couldn’t say where.
    “So you wouldn’t know whether this other school was also by the highway?”
    “No, dear.”
    I thanked her and sat down. Then Carlotta started interrogating me: “What are you so interested in the janitor for?”
    “It’s nothing,” I told her.
    “Like hell it’s nothing. Hey, I’m not stupid like Felipe.”
    “OK, it’s not nothing. But I’m not ready to talk about it.” I didn’t think Carlotta would care about the dope—at least, not enough to give me shit for it—but she would care that I’d gone into the closed wing without her.
    Of course, now she was mad at me anyway: “What do you mean you’re not ready to talk about it? Since when do we keep secrets?”
    “Carlotta…It’s not a secret, exactly, it—”
    “You asked about the highway,” she said. “You thinkthe janitor had something to do with that kid who got killed?”
    Good guess; maybe there was something to the Bobbsey Twins after all. “Yeah, I do.”
    “But why would you think that? What happened? Did you see something?”
    “I told you, I’m not ready to talk about it…Look, Carlotta, I promise I’ll tell you later, OK? But first…I need your help with something. I want to search the janitor’s van after school today, and I need you to be my lookout.”
    Now, I came up with this purely as a way of stalling, but when I thought about it, I realized it wasn’t a bad plan. If I did find incriminating evidence in the van, I could turn the janitor in for that, and forget about the other thing.
    Wouldn’t you still have to explain your decision to search the van?
    Well, that was the beauty of it: if I found proof that the janitor was a serial killer, people would be so excited they’d accept pretty much any explanation. At that point I could just say I had a hunch, and even Carlotta