Number Two Read Online Free PDF

scumbags behind bars.
    When that bell finally rang we tore up the hill as fast as our ten-year-old legs could carry us, hoping to beat the Leather Jacket Gang to their favourite spot. We set up shop near the clearing—dangerously close—and waited.
    Sure enough, a few minutes later the Leather Jacket Gang showed up and sat on tree stumps in a circle like they were about to start a campfire. One of them fired up a lighter, and a billow of smoke wafted through the air.
    The demon weed!
    This was our moment. Illegal drug activity was taking place right before our very eyes and now was our chance to stomp it out.
    Sadly, this was years before camera phones could have captured the action with the silence required for such a covert operation. Robin’s camera was not so quiet. Robin was on his elbows, clicking away, and lying on my stomach just a few feet away I thought it all sounded dangerously loud. How could the Leather Jacket Gang not hear Robin snapping away with his camera like a young Annie Leibovitz?
    The Gang continued to smoke away while Robin snapped his pictures. When he was comfortably satisfied that he had captured enough photographic evidence to put these guys behind bars where they deserved to be, Robin signalled for us all to sneak away in the opposite direction so we could make our escape. Then after school we would quickly get these pictures developed at my dad’s drugstore and bring the photographic evidence to the appropriate authorities, probably the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
    Just as I put my hand down to slowly and quietly prop myself up and leave, I heard a voice—the most terrifying voice I had ever heard. Menacing, ominous, it came from one of the Leather Jacket Gang, the one with his back to us. He didn’t even turn around when he said:
    â€œYou guys are gonna get it.”
    We had been caught, and now there was nothing to do but panic.
    We all sprang up in unison and ran, screaming at the top of our lungs the entire time.
    All the way down the hill we ran, pushing aside tree branches, stepping on leaves and dog shit, practically falling all over each other in our attempt to flee the scene. It wasn’t exactly every man for himself, but if you were to have witnessed us emerging from the trees that day you would have assumed we had all been held against our will in those bushes for weeks and had just now found our escape. That was the level of unbridled terror in our eyes. Our fellow students looked at us like we were completely and totally insane.
    We sprinted to the doorway of the school and ran inside toward our home classroom, where Mr. Galonka would surely appreciate our tale and keep us safe from the pursuers who were about to be exposed to the entire world for their drug use and general bad influence.
    But there was no one behind us.
    No one .
    They hadn’t even bothered to chase after us. They just didn’t care. They were happy to put the fear of God into us and that was that. They went on drinking their sizzurp and smoking what was likely one of their father’s cigarettes. It probably wasn’t even dope.
    We had never really gotten a good look at their faces, so we had no idea who they even were. There weren’t many kids wearing leather ties at that school, but there were plenty of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds wearing bad leather jackets. We never did find out who the real Leather Jacket Gang was.
    After that embarrassing conclusion to the investigation, we wisely closed up our detective agency and the Dopebusters became nothing but a memory from those few weeks in grade five when we suddenly became the least cool school kids in North America.

Chapter 4
The Sweat and the Fury
    G rowing up, my father didn’t make me do many chores around the house, but my one regular responsibility was mowing our one-acre back lawn about once a week during the summer months in Alberta. (For those not from Alberta, the “summer months” are May to