Marked (3 page)

I moved to the next item on my list—a utility pole on one of the residential streets. For some reason, this particular pole had attracted a lot of attention. There were maybe five different tags on it, not counting a neon orange one that reminded me of the neon pink tag I'd taken off the utility box the day before. If you ask me, it was done by the same person, only this one wasn't a cross. This one was a triangle, with numbers and letters next to the three sides. On the left side of the triangle was the letter
E
; on the right side, the number nine; and underneath, the letter
N
. It was completely different from the tags and pieces I had removed the day before. It looked kind of
official, like the cross on the utility box. I decided to copy it down, just in case. Stike hadn't said anything about the one I'd removed the day before, but maybe that was because the city hadn't noticed that it had been erased. I also wrote down where I found it, just in case. Then I got out my sprays and my rags and set to work.

I had half the pole clean when a cop car rolled up the street. It slowed down as it passed me, and I felt myself freeze up. I had to remind myself that there was no way they were here for me. I hadn't done anything wrong. For once I was the good guy.

I didn't look at the cop car as it rolled by. I concentrated on my work.

But out of the corner of my eye, I saw it come to a stop up the street. A man came down his front walk and pointed to the house next door. Two cops got out of the car. One of them talked to the man. The other one walked up the driveway of the house next door.

I finished cleaning the pole I'd been working on and moved to the next one,
which was near the house the man had come out of.

The cop who had been talking to the man went up the driveway of the house next door to speak to his partner.

Pretty soon another cop car arrived, and then a police van with the words
Forensic Identification
on the side.

People started coming out of their houses to see what was going on. I heard the first man say, “I came out to get my paper and I looked over at Neil's house, and I saw that his suv was gone, the new one, the Lexus.”

“I thought Neil and Melanie were in France,” a woman said.

“They are,” the man said, nodding. “That's why I called the police. That SUV was there last night. I saw it myself. I—”

He stopped talking when the first two cops came back down the driveway. He went over to them. I guessed he was asking them about what had happened, but I couldn't hear what they were saying. A few minutes later, as I was getting ready to move on again, the man came back.

“Just as I suspected,” he said to the other people who lived on the street. “Neil's suv was stolen.”

That caused a buzz.

“But I thought he had one of those new vehicles, you know, with a key that has a computer chip in it. You can't start them unless you have the key.”

The man nodded somberly. “They broke into the house,” he said. “I told the cops Neil keeps his keys hanging near the phone in the kitchen. You know what the cop told me? There's no key there now. They're going to try to get in touch with Neil and Melanie and see if they can figure out if anything else is missing.”

“Poor Melanie,” a woman said. “She's been looking forward to this trip all year. This is going to ruin it for her.”

Yeah, poor Melanie, I thought. She's off there in France, and someone broke into her house and stole her car that costs more than my mom probably makes in a year, maybe in two years.

I packed my gear into the milk crate
and was just getting on my bike to ride to the next job when a cop came toward me.

“Hey, buddy,” he said. “Come here.”

I told myself again that this time I was the good guy, that I was doing this neighborhood a favor. But that didn't stop me from feeling sick inside.

I started to push my bike over to the cop. But he said, “Leave the bike where it is.” He said it in that bossy way cops have. I don't think a cop has ever talked to me without ordering me around, letting me know who was boss.

I put the kickstand down on my bike and walked toward him. My knees were shaking. My mouth was dry.

“What's your name?” the cop said.

“Colin Watson.”

“You live around here?”

“No, sir.”

The cop looked hard at me, like he was trying to decide if I was trying to be smart, calling him sir like that, or if I was just a nice kid.

“I saw you over at that utility post,” the cop said. “What were you doing?”

“Cleaning up graffiti,” I said. I unclipped my id from my belt and handed it to him. He studied it.

“What time did you arrive here?”

I told him.

“Did you see anyone enter or leave that driveway?”

He pointed to the driveway where all the cops were.

“No, sir.”

He wrote down the information from my photo
ID
, asked me for the name of my supervisor and told me I could go.

I was glad to get away from there.

A couple of hours later, I found a shady spot in a small park and sat down to eat my sandwich and drink my juice box. I pulled out my sketchbook. But instead of sketching what was in front of me, I sketched some graffiti. I even played with turning my initials into a tag. Then I looked at what I had done.

Dave Marsh was wrong. This wasn't art.
It was territory marking, like what dogs did. The markings said, Hey, look at me, I was here. It wasn't even nice to look at. For sure the letters and numbers were stupid. Why did kids—I was betting most of the taggers were kids—get such a charge out of spraying their initials everywhere? What was the big deal?

I scrunched up my empty juice box, tossed it into a garbage can and went back to work.

A couple of days later I was studying the utility control box in the middle of that traffic island. It was like the thing was lit up or something, the way it attracted tags. I recognized a couple of them—the same tagger, marking his territory over and over again with his initials, the style as recognizable as handwriting. That made me nervous. If the same taggers kept coming back, then they knew that someone was removing their tags every day. That made
me think about the kid who had ended up in the hospital. I looked all around, but I didn't see anyone.

Also on the box that morning were numbers and letters around a neon pink cross. I recognized that writing too. The same person who had put a cross there that first time had put another one there. But I still didn't get it. It wasn't initials, like most of the tags I was removing. It wasn't a piece, either. It was different. I copied it into my sketchbook, just in case. Then I sprayed it and was about to wipe it with a rag when something zipped past me, grazing the backs of my calves.

I spun around.

It was a dog, one of those little ones, a Jack Russell terrier. My mom calls them Jack Russell terrorists because of all the trouble they can cause when you leave them alone. A woman she works with left her Jack Russell puppy alone at home and when she came back at the end of the day, her sofa had been torn to pieces. Those dogs have a lot of energy, my mom said. If you
don't tire them out, they'll find some way to tire themselves out. Mostly they find destructive ways.

This little Jack Russell was sure energetic.

It raced past me, trailing a leash, and kept right on going.

Someone yelled, “Buster, stop!”

It was the girl. She was wearing a tank top and tan pants, and her gold-streaked hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was struggling to hold back the rest of her dogs. The German shepherd and the chocolate Lab were yanking their leashes in the same direction that the Jack Russell had gone. The Airedale was pulling in a different direction. A fourth dog, a pug, was sitting on its butt.

“Buster, come back here!” the girl called. She glanced around, like she was looking for something to tie the dogs to. But there wasn't anything.

I dropped my spray bottle and my rag and took off after the Jack Russell. He was moving so fast that he was practically
a blur. But he was trailing that leash, and that worked to my advantage. I ran flat-out, and I dove for the plastic reel at the end of the leash.

Got it.

I held fast.

The leash kept paying out. The Jack Russell darted around a corner.

Then the leash went taut. I had a good grip on the handle, otherwise it would have been jerked out of my hands. I started pulling the leash in, like a fisherman reeling in his catch, until finally the Jack Russell darted back around the corner.

By then the girl and the rest of her dogs had caught up to me.

“Buster,” she scolded. “Get over here right now.”

Buster looked at her with lively eyes. But after a moment, he trotted back to her.

“Good boy,” she said, holding four leashes in one hand so that she could scratch Buster behind the ear.

As soon as I put out my hand to give her Buster's leash, the German shepherd
growled at me. His ears stood straight up. He barked and lunged at me.

“Cody! Sit,” she said firmly. “Sorry,” she said to me. “He's a good dog, but he's a guard dog. He's very protective. He listens to me, though. I helped to train him.” She took the leash I was holding. “Thanks,” she said in a breezy kind of way, like she wasn't all that grateful. “If I'd had to run after Buster with the rest of these guys, I don't know what would have happened.”

“That's sure a lot of dog power,” I said. “You must really like dogs.”

“Buster is the only one that's mine,” she said. “And, really, he's my brother's. I'm looking after him for a while.”

“So, the rest of the dogs...”

“I walk them. It's my job.”

I guess the surprise showed on my face, because then she said, “What's the matter? You never heard of a dog walker?” Like I was a moron or something.

“Sure,” I said. “I just thought—” I shut my mouth. I didn't want to say anything that she might take the wrong way.

“You just thought what?”

“Nothing.”

Her eyes were dark brown. They stared right at me.

“What did you think?” she said.

“Well, if you live around here...”

“I don't,” she said. “My clients live around here. There's a big difference, believe me.”

The way she said it, it sounded like she was glad she wasn't part of the neighborhood. I didn't get it. Who wouldn't want to live in a nice house with expensive cars in the driveway? If you lived around here, for sure your mom wouldn't have to work at some lousy minimum-wage job. For sure the highlight of her life wouldn't be getting a diploma so she could be a dental hygienist.

“Do you mind?” she said. She handed me a couple of leashes—the ones for the Jack Russell and the pug. While I held them, she adjusted the straps of her backpack. She took the leashes back. “I have to go,” she said. “I'm on a schedule. I have to deliver these guys home and pick up the second
shift. Nice meeting you, I'm sure.” And there it was, that half-breezy, half-sarcastic tone that made me wonder what I had done wrong. She was long gone before I realized that we hadn't really met at all. I had no idea what her name was, and I hadn't told her mine. She hadn't even asked. Well, why would she?

I went back to work. I told myself I wasn't going to think about her, not even for one second. Maybe she didn't live around here, but she sure acted the way I bet most of the girls in this neighborhood did, all stuck-up and superior. I told myself that I didn't care if I never saw her again.

But if that were true, why couldn't I get her and her brown eyes out of my mind?

By the end of my first week on the job, the thrill was gone—not that there had been much of a thrill to begin with.

“If the utility companies want to get rid of all the graffiti so badly, why don't they just hire someone to watch their property?” I said to Stike one morning while I refilled my spray bottles and packed some fresh rags. “The taggers always go back to the same place.”

“
Hmph
,” Stike said. He was deep into his newspaper.

“I'm serious,” I said.

Stike glanced up at me. He looked annoyed that I was distracting him from catching up on what had happened in the city since the last time he'd read the paper.

“You think the utility companies would be paying your salary if this didn't work?” he said. “Ray has the contract to maintain the utility poles in this area. You're just one of a couple of kids working for him. He had a kid working in Hillmount all last month.” Hillmount was a nice neighborhood, almost exactly like the one I was working in. “The taggers got tired of their stuff being removed. They moved on. We haven't had a call from there in two weeks now. We re-assigned the kid to another neighborhood. There are other contractors with other kids cleaning up across the city.”

“Yeah, but it looks like it's always the same guys,” I said. “At least, it is where I'm working. I recognize their tags. Take the utility control box I'm always starting with. I bet if the utility companies got someone to
watch that box for a couple of nights, they could catch the guy easy—”

“Tick-tock,” Stike said, holding his watch out to me.

Right.

What did I care what the utility companies did? They were paying me, weren't they? I had a job, didn't I?

Still, I knew I was right. I decided to keep track of the graffiti I removed, so I could prove to Stike that it was always the same guys.

When I got to the utility control box, I copied all the tags I found into my sketchbook before I sprayed them and rubbed them out.

I did the same at the next stop. Besides initials that I recognized, there was another one of those neon orange triangles. This one said
W
to the left, 7 to the right, and
S
underneath. I copied it and cleaned it off along with the rest of the tags on the pole. I was moving down to the end of the street when I passed a house that had a tall hedge all the way around it—so tall that I couldn't
see the property until I was riding past the end of the driveway.