It’s easy for Rudy and me to cut school on Wednesday since Rudy’s my ride there anyway. It’s just a question of what turns you do and don’t make after that. We head straight for the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts, but the nearest DD is not all that near. It’s located between Stanton and Brantley in an area that probably has a name but that we call Stantley. It’s the perfect place for a covert operation.

It’s midmorning and the place is hopping with coffee addicts. “I’m ’a get some Munchkins,” Rudy says as we shuffle toward the front of the line.

“Munchkins?” I say. “What are you, four? Man up and get some donuts.”

“No way,” he says. “Look. They’re having a sale.”

He points to a sign for a back-to-school sale on Munchkins. It has a bunch of Munchkins with little faces riding a cartoon school bus.

“When they say, ‘back-to-school,’ they mean like kindergarten, first grade,” I tell him, but he cannot be reasoned with and orders a dozen, along with a coffee.

“Milk and sugar?” says the lady, whose name tag says KIMITHA.

“Light and sweet,” he says.

He pauses and I’m wondering, Is he going to say it? And then he does: “Like me.”

“You’re a loser,” I say behind him, but I’m glad he’s feeling so relaxed. We’re on the verge of doing something risky and maybe dangerous. There’s really nothing in it for him, but he’s treating the whole thing like some big prank that we’re both in on.

No Munchkins for me. I order my chocolate-frosted donuts like a man, dammit, and it’s not my fault if they give me the ones with pink sprinkles. I didn’t think Kimitha would do that to me. Maybe I shouldn’t have ordered my coffee light and sweet, too.

We don’t have much trouble finding a little two-person table, since most of these people are getting their stuff to go. And really, what could possibly go wrong trying to drink hot coffee and eat a jelly donut while driving too fast to work?

We plunk our stuff down and look both ways, in case anyone here is trying to spy on us. The coast is clear, and we are now officially ready to plan.

“Got any ideas?” I say.

“Nah,” he says. “You?”

“Nothing good.”

We start in on our food. Then we try again while we wait for our coffee to cool down a little more. I start with the general mission statement: “The basic thing is, we need to force Mars to do what he said he was going to do anyway. Really, we’re just cashing a check he’s already written so —” I take another bite of my donut.

“I’d never take a check from Mars,” says Rudy. “Can you imagine? He’s never going to have viable credit.”

I laugh with my mouth full and a tiny fleck of donut shoots off to my left. I’m never really sure if Rudy says things like that to make fun of his parents or because he’s been corrupted by all the secondhand realty he’s exposed to. I’m not sure he knows, either.

“You know what I mean,” I say. “But we really need to motivate him this time, because he’ll need to really work on his parents. Or, we can try to work on them, but that’s trickier.”

“And when you say, ‘work on’ …”

“You know, get something on him,” I say.

“And when you say, ‘get something on him’ …”

“What are you, wearing a wire?”

He laughs just as he’s taking another trial sip of his coffee and sprays some out the side of his mouth.

“Nah,” I say. “No cop is that bad at drinking coffee. Anyway, what I mean is, well, blackmail is kind of a loaded word but …”

“But blackmail.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Or extortion? Is that better? Maybe not.”

“We could plant something on him,” says Rudy.

“Dude, this is Mars we’re talking about. He’s probably got something on him right now.”

“Good point. So what do we do, like, a citizen’s arrest?”

“I’m not sure we’re the right citizens for that.”

“Pictures, maybe?”

“Maybe,” I say. “But of what?”

“This is harder than I thought,” he says.

“Yeah, really.”

Our coffee is cooler now, so we spend some time drinking it, looking out the window, and thinking. Or at least the first two of those, because I’m drawing a blank.

“We could beat the crap out of him,” says Rudy, after a few minutes.

“We should do that anyway,” I say. “Not sure how it helps in court, though.”

“We can just be like, ‘But, Your Honor, he’s a total jerk.’”

We drink the rest of our coffee. This stuff is kind of growing on me.

“You know,” I say, “he’s probably at school now.”

Rudy doesn’t understand at first, and then he does. “What about his folks?”

“I think they have jobs, right?”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Yeah, you know, like his dad’s at the meth lab and his mom’s obviously on the stroll.”

“Yeah,” says Rudy, already sitting back and getting ready to stand up. “He probably has all kinds of stuff in his room. The whole place to ourselves, lots of potential.”

“Yeah,” I say, gathering up my stuff. “You know on TV how you see people get busted for growing a bunch of marijuana in their garden or whatever?”

“Yeah?”

“Total DiMartino thing to do.”

“Totally.”

“Your phone take pictures?”

“Yeah, good ones.”

“Mine, too. This is going to be perfect. If we find something like that, it’s not even blackmail. It’s like, ‘You drop the lawsuit or we’re going to the police.’ It’s just a trade.”

“It’s the American way,” says Rudy, nodding.

And just like that, we head off.

“So basically we’re on a reconnaissance mission,” says Rudy as he pushes through the doors.

“Yeah, it’s an intelligence-gathering operation,” I say as we step out into the parking lot. Say what you want about our lack of details or clear objectives, but we definitely have the lingo down.

Step one is easy: We just drive around for a while. In the Fiesta, driving slowly is a given, which is perfect. We need to give everyone time to clear out of the DiMartino family residence, which we’ve more or less convinced ourselves is one of the region’s major pot farms, meth labs, and/or porn distributors.

It occurs to me at some point that we should probably be more nervous about this than we are, but we’ve got too much going for us: caffeine, sugar, and camera phones, mostly.