The Fort (Aric Davis)

just built for, and he felt sure that he was one of them. Lex’s leaving crippled that part of him.
    Had she just left, that would have been one thing. He would have been bruised, but not broken. When she left, though, rage in her eyes and mouth, she’d told him how she really felt about her cop husband. She hated him for what he was. He was a pig, a phony, he was worthless to her. Van Endel hadn’t known for sure that she was using cocaine behind his back until that moment, hadn’t known that she was cheating on him. “You’re such a shitty detective,” she’d said, “that you didn’t even know.” The first of many confessions. She’d left that night, picked up by a sheepish man ten years her junior. Van Endel had left, and when he returned, the house was empty. He never even filed a police report for the stolen goods, just slowly and cheaply rebuilt his home, and who he was. Neither had turned out too well.
    Van Endel finished the beer and stood, not feeling better, but feeling grounded. Molly Peterson was dead, and that was that. Now it was his job to find out who, and maybe even why, though usually the latter was nothing worth knowing. Van Endel slapped a ten-dollar bill on the bar, waved to the barkeep, and walked out.

31
    The sound of the alarm woke Tim slowly, but once he realized what it was, he turned it off quickly. His heart was thumping in his chest as he slid out of bed. He was trying to be as quiet as possible, but every noise felt like the gunshot in the fort all over again. Thank God I sleep with the door closed. He got dressed in the clothes he’d helped his dad with the patio in—the last thing he needed was for one of his parents to notice extra laundry—walked to the window, and slid it the rest of the way open. He pushed in the buttons to raise the screen up, and it squeaked slightly as he moved it out of the way. Wincing at the squeak, Tim slid himself out of the window, then dropped silently into the bark around the landscaping. He gave a last look at the house, still not sure if this was a good decision, and took off running, headed straight for the path to the forest.
    The grass made his feet wet through his sneakers, but Tim didn’t care. The lights from some of the other houses gave off threatening beams of illumination that he avoided, and within just a few minutes he was in the darkness of the forest. Fumbling with the flashlight he’d stuck in his pocket and then turning it on, he began to run to the fort, no longer worried about noise or anything else. He just wanted to see his friends. Most of all, he was anxious to hear if Luke had come up with any other plans.
    By the time he got to the ladder he was panting, but a glint from the forest floor made him smile. When he ran the flashlight over the spot, he saw two caps, Coke and Sprite. Tim dropped the Budweiser cap next to them, stuck the flashlight in his mouth, and began to climb.
    When he got to the top and pulled himself into the fort, he felt his friends’ hands pull him over the hole in the floor. He brushed himself off and then sat heavily by the window they’d been shooting from. It sure didn’t feel like it had been less than a day since they’d been here, but that was the reality of it.
    When he looked at his friends he saw smiles, and he didn’t know if he’d ever been happier to see anyone in his whole life. “Think you’re going to get caught?” Scott asked, and Tim smiled even wider. “No, but you probably are.” All three of them erupted into tired giggles at that, and, not for the first time, Tim wondered at the logic in banning a kid from his best friends in the world.
    “All right, all right,” said Luke. “That’s enough screwing around. We need to figure out a plan.”
    “To catch the guy?” Tim asked. “That’s sort of what I figured we have to do to clear our names.”
    Luke and Scott exchanged a glance. “That’s what we think too,” said Scott. “It’s our only option.”
    “So we all agree,” said Luke, a touch of annoyance in his voice. “Great. But how are we going to do it?”
    Tim thought about that. He hadn’t really considered the middle step, he had just figured they’d find the guy who had kidnapped Molly, thus saving both her and the currently doomed summer. Nothing in his life had ever prepared him for how to find a kidnapper, not even a wounded one.
    “Since neither of you is saying anything,” said Luke, “I guess it will come down to me to figure