Chapter 7

The genius of the plan, I thought, was that I was blatantly framing myself for a crime that I most certainly didn’t/wouldn’t ever do, to cover for a collection of other crimes that I most certainly did do, which would result (I hoped) in the exposure of lot of crimes that other people had very certainly done. I was poking the sleeping bear ... with a very short pointed stick. Like most things in life, it was complicated ... and at moments the actual wisdom of my plan entirely escaped me, but I still was pretty sure it would work out alright in the end. Ah, the innocence of youth!

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, in theory, just about everything. Looking back on thing now years later from the rear-view mirror, so to speak, it was a slight miracle that I instead didn’t suffer a fatal bullet wound ‘while resisting arrest’ with a throw-down cheap revolver planted next to my corpse; case closed.

For a punk teen-aged kid, grading on a curve for youth and inexperience, I suppose that I’d rate my oh-so cunning plan now as being adequate ... but in retrospect over the years, I’ve decided that I could have handled this endgame quite differently. The main problem was that I was now running out of time. It was almost April and very near the end of the school year as graduation time was now barely six weeks away. I had to act now – or it might be too late to nap some of the senior class offenders. Besides, there is no way I could have let the status quo remain for another summer ... and see videos of the next initiation ceremony. I’m still not certain that the final results would have been that much different though, even if I had chosen to do things differently.

Admittedly, I had to rush some things and when you’re sloppy you take risks ... the biggest deadline being that after yet another thorough re-review of Reggie’s email archive reminded me that the gang’s ‘big three’ all got together on the last weekend of every month at Frank’s father’s hunting and fishing cabin on Bull Creek. The cabin was in a very rural part of the county without many close neighbors, giving the guys all the privacy they could wish for to hunt and fish a bit, and drink as much beer as they wanted. Sometimes they brought girlfriends along with them, but usually it was just Frank, Reggie and Morris by themselves, hanging out away from any nominal adult supervision. I was counting on this.

Now, there was no turning back, even if I had had any second thoughts. According to Suetonius’s much later account, Caesar said Jacta alea est (The dice have been thrown) when his army crossed the Rubicon, initiating the Roman Civil War. The decision had been taken, the event done, and there was no avoiding the consequences.

Thursday and Friday, the week before the end of the month, I spent finishing the very last final prep-work for the final phase of my plan. I’d bought a tiny pinhole digital spy camera about a month ago off of eBay that could take still photos about every five seconds ... and it had taken me weeks to figure out how to use the damn thing to get clean, clear, useable secret photos of people at school that didn’t look like Blogsquatch trying to take a dump behind a bush in a rather dark & foggy forest. Originally, I had mounted it in my school backpack, to be as unobtrusive as possible, but after a week of failed attempts that yielded nothing useable, I had to give up and pocket-mount the damned thing in a shirt. The next week of photographic results had been slightly better, but not ideal. Through a lot of trial-and-error testing I figured out that if I just stood stone-still for at least five seconds and used the manual mode to click the shutter, the results became at least acceptable.

Reggie, the semi-serious amateur photographer, probably could have explained the problem right off the bat, like the cheap-ass Chinese made device had a stupid-slow shutter speed (since it had been designed to be used in a stationary mounting) and that ‘keep still, stupid’ was the key. Reg might have been smarter than me, but I did figure this out on my own, eventually.

Finding a color photo-grade printer was trickier. Nothing I saw online looked obsolete enough to avoid forensic tech tracing later, so I decided to just embrace a tiny amount of risk and settled for convenience. In my back support area of Don’s PC shop there was a 90’s era small photo printer by some Japanese or Korean tech company I’d never heard of. It had been collecting dust, sitting in a backroom on a junk shelf for the last 2-3 years because Don had never been able to find reliable Windows drivers for it, so that it was ‘consumer useable’, so he could resell it. I could ‘borrow’ it for a long weekend (and then trash it afterwards) and it would never be missed. Drivers to connect it to my also borrowed ‘lair laptop’ remained an issue. In the end, after a lot of trial and error and finding an old discussion thread on an internet tech site about this exact issue, I found a driver that ‘mostly’ worked ... if I could deal with the printer randomly quitting half-way through printing and ruining at least half of everything it tried to print. When it did work properly, maybe twice an hour, I was eventually able to print out enough of my spy-cam pics to suit my needs.

The printed pictures on standard HP glossy stock photo-paper actually looked pretty good at full 1200 dpi resolution and when I was finally done printing by mid-afternoon, the next to last Sunday of the month, I had three good sets of prints of each of my subjects, all ready for final decoration and use! I wasn’t going to get much sleep tonight ... there was still too much left to do, now at nearly the last minute.

An hour later, at about o’dark-thirty, I performed my next act of breaking and entering, popping open a less than secure school security door that led from the teacher’s parking lot outside, next to the tennis courts, into the school gym. I don’t think even ten students knew about this door’s vulnerability, that there was a wide enough gap in the doorframe, above or below the lock’s security plate, to pop in a thin flathead screwdriver and force the bolt back into the lock mechanism to easily unlock and open the door. Once last year, in my sophomore year when I was bored and just hanging around near the tennis courts after lockup time, I watched a teacher who had apparently left her car & house keys still inside the school, pop the door this way in less than fifteen seconds. Amateur; I forced it open the same way that night in less than five.

Once inside the basketball court part of the girl’s gym wing of the school, I now had the full range of the school. Technically, the gym doors leading to the school could be locked, and were, but from the main school-side only. When inside the gym, I could push on the door handle and the door would swing open and stay open, once I latched the door to stay put, like it usually was kept all during school hours. As far as I was aware, the school never had any night security guard, except during ‘Homecoming week’, in the fall semester, when our arch-rival school from the next county occasionally came around to do some petty mischief (and our students went over there to do the same). I stopped to listen hard for several minutes and heard nothing, but I couldn’t dawdle ... still way too much left to do tonight, or rather this early morning.

Since I knew in my sleep (I was damned tired already), right where Frank, Reg and Mo’s lockers were, almost next to each other on the second floor, near mine, I’d did my business and was in and out of the school in probably less than ten minutes total, running the whole way up and down the stairs and down to the far end of the hallway and back out again. I unlatched the gym door to lock itself closed again and left the way I came in. I’d never heard of or seen any security cameras inside the school or outside, but I wore a grim reaper costume with a full hood, just in case. Another eBay acquisition I’d bought as a Halloween costume. It was at least two sizes too big for me and while wearing a skull mask and gloves, I was pretty sure no one could ever make a positive identification of me even if there was a hidden security camera taking pics of me somewhere.

Then I went home, pedaling fast on my bike, still in costume, taking dark backstreets with the least amount of street lighting. I never saw a single car or any other living soul for the five blocks I went until I could reach a dark alley in that I was certain had no street lights or video surveillance cameras where I could change out of the reaper costume. I was too wound-up and excited to get much sleep that night, but I never needed a full eight hours of sleep a night anyway. That would definitely save my ass later on, in Ranger School.

Monday morning the fun began early, even earlier than I’d expected, about ten minutes before I had even arrived at school with about twenty minutes or so left before the bell would ring for the start of first period classes. There was a circus of people around Frank and the gang’s lockers, right at the elbow of the hallway, where the building wing made an ‘L’ turn, near where my locker was. All of the gang was there, along with some of the Authorities, namely both of the assistant principals. It didn’t take the enemy long to spot me and pretty quickly I became the focus of everyone’s immediate attention.

“You fucking did this!” Frank was shouting out, waving his fist and trying to lunge forward to get at me. Fortunately, he was blocked by the rather portly male assistant. principal, as his even plumper woman counter-part charged forward to grab me, shoving (rather harshly) every other student in her path.

“I fucking did what? I’ve fucking done nothing to nobody, so leave me out of your jock steroid-driven delusions.” I replied with as much faux sincerity as I could muster. Also note the creative use of the double-negative.

“Language!” the top foot soldier of the Authorities snarled at me, gripping my arm so hard that her nails dug themselves into my skin. Lena, the women’s assistant principal, was a terror, and probably had more testosterone flowing through her veins than the male AP. For pure anti-male hatred, she could probably even rival Ms. Graham!

“As if we all didn’t know that you were responsible for this ... this terroristic threat against other students!” She then wildly waved a handful of photo prints at me, too abruptly for anyone to have gotten any sort of clear look at them. These ‘might’ be the photos that I’d slipped into each of the three lockers, maybe ... but I honestly couldn’t recognize them for certain, let alone swear to them, and that gave me all of the smug indifference I needed to claim my innocence for the better part of the next hour, before our counties finest, both Lou and Roscoe from the sheriff’s office, arrived to cuff me and stuff me, in front of about half of the school, into the back of their vehicle and they kept the lights and sirens on for full effect, the whole way to the county poky.

I finally got better look at my handiwork, a selection of three printed spy cam pics of the terrible trio, but with a hand-drawn target crosshairs drawn around their heads, done with a red sharpie marker. It was very Zodiac inspired, and even the dimmer idiots like our local law enforcement clowns could understand the intended meaning.

They kept me for the full 48 hours that they could legally manage without actually putting me in front of a judge to make official charges, during which I was interrogated nearly non-stop and half of the town and county law enforcement officials engaged themselves in climbing about as far up my ass as could be managed. The searched my house (twice) and even Donald’s computer shop (which he did not at all appreciate) and he promptly fired me via a very short message emailed to me at home. Nothing was found there (or anywhere else) that could be linked to the photos – or proved that I had any interest or intent on committing mass school-related homicide. Hell, they couldn’t even find a normal red Sharpie in my bedroom! Not that this stopped them from trying to fit me up for the attempted crime.

It was almost interesting to see how their investigative minds worked and I decided pretty quickly that I’d given everyone far too much intellectual credit. They didn’t quite decide to just beat a confession out of me, like they had the last time that I’d been their guest, but I could see that they all wanted to ... badly. I think only the fear of the photo evidence on-file (somewhere) in the DA’s and county social services offices kept a break on their ambitions to remove my shit-stain from their lives. I wasn’t in the mood to play games with them or try to push their buttons over the edge. I maintained my innocence for the first few hours and then gave up talking this those morons and just quietly then repeated ‘I want a Lawyer’ about a hundred times, and about mid-morning Wednesday, one actually arrived. I could tell that the hard-faced gal didn’t like me at first sight and probably in her heart she thought I was absolutely guilty of everything I’d been rumored to have done. She likely had a school aged kid and the last thing she’d ever want is another Columbine type incident here, so I kept to the facts and prayed that she actually cared somewhat about preserving the letter of the law.

“Look, I’m sorry you had to come here, and deal with me in this circumstance,” I stated with as much sincerity as I could muster, but they’ve kept me here for two days now, illegally questioning me as a minor without my father or any other adult advocate present. That’s par for these people ... some kids that don’t like me very much seem to have rigged up some sort of fake ‘hate crime’ incident to implicate me, and they might be claiming that I’ve threatened to shoot them. Nonsense ... I don’t even own a BB gun, let alone any other firearm, nor has my father ever possessed even a pistol, let along some ‘sniper rifle’ the idiots in blue here are babbling about. No one is ever going to get shot, or even poked with a sharp stick – at least by me. Honestly, I’m just the lowest of low-hanging fruit that these clowns could be bothered to grab, right after their donut break. Evidence ... make them show you some! If they had anything, I’d already be in front of a judge with charges filed and probably zero chance of ever getting bail. So, if they’ve really got nothing, a big fat nothing-burger with no shred of evidence of any sort, then they need to let me walk out of here now. I’m already late for morning classes at school!”

She left and I shut my eyes and counted one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, etc. until the Sheriff himself reopened the interrogation room door to tersely announce that I was free to leave. Less than four minutes of waiting ... not bad! I’d figured that the blue bastards would fuss about it for at least ten minutes, before they admitted to my legal mouth-piece that they had fuck-all for any actual evidence to make any initial charge, let alone anything that would stick. She then mumbled a few words to me that I didn’t quite understand. She was probably a bit confused herself that she’d gotten me out of poky this fast, and with a bare minimum of paperwork, but I wasn’t quite done with her services yet.

“Can you also do me the big favor of dropping me off at school,” I asked her, a little bit louder than was really necessary. She nodded, probably quite reluctantly, but I probably needed to be released into the custody of an adult, for legal reasons, anyway. I let her drive me about six blocks, or about half of the way there, when I told her, “Screw it. I’ve had no sleep in two days ... so I’m just going to go home and face-plant into my pillow. Just turn right at the next corner and you can drop me off there, and save yourself time.” She obliged, probably happy to be rid of me at the earliest possible moment.

I thanked her, sincerely (politeness costs you nothing), and the second she drove off I scampered into the nearest alleyway and immediately hid myself behind a collection of trash cans. Not ten seconds later, another car also turned the corner and kept following after my local, county-provided defense lawyer. It wasn’t a marked sheriff’s department car, but from the brief glance I saw of the driver, hunched over the steering wheel like Quasimodo, I could easily recognize Lou, who was along with Roscoe were easily the two most obviously corrupt members of our crop of county-mounties. I counted to twenty, slowly, before running my ass off towards the direction of home, taking nothing but back alleys, overgrown lots and using all of the tree cover I could find to lurk behind if I even thought I heard the sound of a car. Lou would of course know right where I lived, and eventually think look for me there, but I was (rightfully) concerned about an unofficial snatch-grab on the street and then a ride out into some remote part of the country where loud screams wouldn’t be heard, and my body then buried or fed to some feral hogs, never to be found. Case closed.