Once I was sure that the massive fight I had staged among the group of bullies was out of control enough that the principal as well as both recess supervisors would need to help break it up and sort it all out, I snuck away to the East Wing. I had an office to reclaim.

Vince stood at the end of the hallway to keep watch for teachers or Suits. Yeah, we’d staged a massive diversion in the form of the largest school yard brawl in school history, but just the same, we still had to be careful.

Mitch tried to stop me from cutting in the line, which wasn’t nearly as long as it had been the last time I had been there. Word was obviously getting out that Jimmy Two-Tone was starting to have problems following through.

“Wait, you can’t just cut,” Mitch started.

I shoved his hand aside and walked through the door- way into the bathroom before he even had a chance to react.

“Hey!” Justin said.

“I need to see Jimmy,” I said.

“Well, he’s busy.” Justin stepped in front of me with his arms crossed.

I was starting to calculate places I could strike first to catch him offguard. Places where my first blow would incapacitate him enough that the fight would be over right then and there. Because I probably had no chance in a fight against Justin if it lasted much longer than that. But then Jimmy must have heard me.

“It’s okay, Justin. Jimmy has been expecting this dude,” Jimmy called out from the fourth stall from the high window.

Justin scowled at me, but he did step aside.

I entered the stall and sat down.

“Hey, Mac! Good to see you, bud,” Jimmy said.

“Hey, Jimmy,” I said. “So I talked to Kinko at Thief Valley Elementary.”

“What did he say, bro?”

“Well, she agreed to let us pay her back at a reduced rate, just as long as we do it within a week.”

Jimmy made a face like I had just told him we had to clean the faculty bathroom toilet, which every kid in school knew was probably the grossest in the state.

“How are we going to do that? I mean . . .”

“I think we can get the money together, but I need a home base. An office from which to conduct the operation.”

He nodded. “All right, you can have it back. But what about the Suits? Jimmy thought you couldn’t come back here, dude?”

“Don’t worry about the Suits. I’ve got that covered. I’m also going to want my own crew, as well. Can we move in during lunch?”

Jimmy nodded. “I think so, sure.”

I reached out and shook his hand like you’re supposed to after a business deal. Well, two things down, just about four hundred eighteen million to go.

And just like that, we were back in business. Despite all my efforts to retire, to walk away, here we were once again in the fourth stall from the high window, working to make money and solve problems. Of course, things were a little different than they had been the last time we’d been open for business at the end of the last school year. For one thing Joe was in high school now, so I had a new strongman.

Nubby was a pretty reasonable kid for a bully. A lot of his bullying came as a result of avoiding being teased over his stubby mallet of a right hand. So he wasn’t particularly mean, but at the same time he was big and strong and had just enough of an edge to keep kids in line. Plus, he was pretty smart. So I hired Nubby as my new strongman.

Fred, who used to keep the office records for us, instead was positioned near the end of the hallway to watch out for Suits. So far the bullies had already done a great job keeping their hands full, but we had to be extra careful anyway. All it took was one bully to squeal on me, and Dickerson would be marching down this way first thing. I hired a kid named Tanzeem, who had helped me in the past, to watch the East Wing entrance near my office, in case the Suits tried to flank us.

Another major difference with our business this time was that we took customers in three at a time. In the past we had only let one customer in at a time. But now with Vince having his own desk station in the corner by the sink and Jimmy setting up under the high window along the far wall, we were able to pull triple duty. That’s right. For the first time ever Vince would be taking customers on his own. He was nervous about it because dealing with the customers directly had never been his strong suit, but I was confident he’d be fine. After all, he was the smartest kid in the school, hands down.

It didn’t matter anyway; we had no choice. We had too much money to make and too little time to do it to worry about such things. We just had to get to work.

The next order of business was to hire a kid named Huston to oversee the implementation of our new lemonade stand venture. Huston was a good kid, if not a little odd. Growing up, most kids dream of playing sports . . . well, he’d always dreamed of someday becoming a referee for a professional sports league. By second grade he’d started wearing these homemade referee uniforms, which were white T-shirts with crude vertical black strips drawn on them with markers. And he had his whistle, of course, which all during recess he’d blow and then try to call penalties on kids for “unnecessary roughness on the teeter-totter, cherry bump with too much force” or “traveling, too much speed down the slide” or “illegal contact” when this one kid tried to playfully hug a girl that Huston had a crush on.

Anyways, he was perfect for the lemonade stand enterprise since it was a pretty large operation and it needed the leadership of someone who loved to order people around and could stick to a list of rules. They’d set up the stands behind the Shed and behind the skating rink warming house on school property during school hours. And then more stands would be all over the neighborhood in the early evenings and that weekend. Our business model would be simple: fresh, cold, quality lemonade, a premium product for a premium price. People would pay for quality.

Before Huston left my office that day at lunch, during which time we’d discussed business and drawn up the plans for the lemonade operation and everything, he blew his whistle.

“Unsportsmanlike conduct!” he shouted. “Number Mac of the offense. Being too good a businessman for the competition.”

At this he laughed uncontrollably. My guess was that if other umpires or referees would have been there, they’d have laughed, too. As for me, well, I politely faked it. Lame referee humor wasn’t my thing, but I didn’t want to insult my new Lemonade Stand Manager.

The next kid Nubby ushered into my office that day was the first regular customer of the day. Which made him the first postretirement customer of my career. And he turned out to be the sort of wacko that had partially pushed me into retirement in the first place.

He entered the stall and right away I smelled it. The smell of burned toast, or burned pizza, or camping. The smell of fire. His hands were black and dirty with soot, and one of his eyebrows was missing, presumably from some sort of fire mishap. A single match stuck out from the corner of his mouth like a toothpick.

“Have a seat,” I said to the kid, who was fidgeting nervously with an empty matchbox.

He sat down.

“Name?”

“People call me Matches,” he said.

“What can I do for you, Matches?” I asked, making notes in my Books.

“I want this new video game, but I can’t get it because it’s rated M and my parents won’t let me get it.”

“Yeah, we got you covered, no problem,” I said. This was a pretty routine request. Easy money. “We’ll need cash up front for the game itself plus a twenty-five-percent service charge for acquiring the game for you. Does that sound good?”

Matches nodded and pulled out a wad of crumpled cash. I never understood why so many kids kept their money balled up into little piles, but over the years I’d gotten used to it.

“Great,” I said, counting out the necessary cash. “Do you want to pick up the game here? Or do you want to pay another three dollars for locker-side delivery?”

“Delivery,” Matches said, practically salivating.

“Okay, what game title and platform are we getting for you?” I asked, stacking the money neatly on my desk and then making notes in my Books.

“It’s called Arsonist,” he said. “I need it on Xbox 360.”

I stopped writing and gave him a look. Seriously? He just grinned at me, the match dancing on the corner of his lip.

“I’m afraid to even ask what the game is about,” I said.

“Basically, you’re this arsonist, right? And it’s an open-world format game like GTA or Fallout. So you just go around this city and set stuff on fire and then collect more tools of the trade along the way so you can set even bigger fires. And then, once you start burning buildings, you get bonus points for the more people that are inside them.”

“That’s the sickest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said simply. I didn’t think much more needed to be said.

“What?” Matches laughed. “You sound like my mom. I know the people aren’t real! It’s just a game.”

I shook my head. “All right, whatever, Matches. We’ll deliver it to you Friday.”

He grinned again and got up. I watched the psycho leave, making sure he wasn’t going to start my office on fire on the way out. Man, kids these days. I mean, I liked FPS and war games as much as the next guy, especially for multiplayer, but that game sounded like it was taking it a little too far. Then again, considering the things I’d seen and witnessed the past year while running my business, maybe that game wasn’t all that ridiculous after all.

Part of me even considered hiring Matches. I mean, a kid like that could cause some massive diversions to attract the Suits’ attention. But then my common sense got the better of me. I mean, there was a limit to the kind of activities I would let myself fund; I had to draw the line somewhere.

So for the rest of that day we worked as hard as we ever had before. And with us pulling in three times the amount of customers as usual, we made a record profit. So we were off to a good start. But there was just one little problem: I still had no idea how to get the permanent records.

The next day at morning recess I met up with iBully in my office. I told him what I needed. He could hack into anything, so I was convinced he could get me into the school’s servers. But turns out I was wrong.

“No can do,” he said.

“Why not? I thought you could hack into anything within the school’s network?”

“Well, for one, there are a huge number of files. I don’t think I could get enough uninterrupted time in the school’s mainframe to download them all to my computer to save them to a drive. And also, they’re kept on a separate server than everything else. They’re only on the district’s server, which can only be accessed through Dickerson’s computer.”

I nodded. “No problem. We’ll break into his office at night. We’ve done it before, broken into a principal’s office. Easy.”

iBully shook his head again. “No, that won’t work either. It’d be way too detectable and traceable, for one, because he will know he wasn’t at his computer at night. And two, the system that houses the records shuts down for backup and program updates every evening. If we try to get the files once that process has started, we could crash the whole system and erase the files. No, the only way I could get them for you is if you got me into his office in the middle of the day for close to an hour without any interruptions.”

I sat back in my chair and sighed. That would be impossible. I mean, with the amount of bullies getting in trouble, Dickerson was spending tons of time in his office disciplining them, calling parents, and crying in frustration, probably.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll figure something out. I’ll be in touch.”

I slid a five across my desk for his time. iBully picked it up and left.

At afternoon recess Vince and I took a quick break to discuss a few cases before we let in the first few customers. So far Vince had done pretty well for himself. Not that I was surprised. He knew the business as well as I did; he only thought he didn’t.

It was nice to take a quick break to catch up. We’d been working nonstop for two days. The night before, we’d spent the whole evening helping to get the lemonade stands set up so they’d be ready for business after school the next day. We were even going to stock them with Rice Krispie treats. I couldn’t believe how much money could be made on those. They were so cheap to make, especially when parents were footing the bill for ingredients.

So it had been a busy evening. Vince and I had even established a new after-hours office in the playground behind his trailer. The same playground that we’d first built our business in. We were open every night from five to seven thirty and had been telling kids all day to spread the word, not just to kids around here but to their friends and family at other schools, in other towns. Anybody who needed help could come and get it for a fee behind the slide in Vince’s trailer park playground.

“So, ready for the ultimate trivia challenge?” Vince asked me after we’d finished discussing our cases.

“Actually, I think I’ll pass,” I said. “We just can’t waste any time right now.”

Vince made a face, but he knew I was right. He eventually nodded and grinned.

“Yeah, it’s like my grandma always says, ‘If there’s work to be done, then there’s no point to stuffing your pockets full of feathers because, after all, a spaceship is only as heavy as the talking goats that are driving it, unless of course they’re transporting gold. Then it’s even heavier. And tastier.’”

I laughed. Which was nice to do. I hadn’t even taken a break long enough to laugh since my meeting with Kinko a few days before.

“You mean she actually manages to say all of that without passing out?”

Vince shrugged. “She’s amazing, what can I say? There’s actually even more to it, but I condensed it to save time.”

I couldn’t argue with that. And so we went back to our desks in separate corners of the bathroom and signaled to Nubby to start letting the customers in. There was much work still to be done.