“We could get killed,” March whispered.
I shook my head. “All he cares about are the dogs. And tomorrow Crowley will probably take Genki somewhere…”
CindeeRae fiddled at a pile of Dubble Bubble bubble gum she had made. She flattened her hand in the middle of the pile and shook it. Pieces shot across the carpet and one hit the wall with a thud.
“Sorry.” She ducked her head as she searched for the missing piece of gum. “That just sounds really dangerous.”
March’s face was white and his eyes wide, but he didn’t shift his gaze from mine. There were no other arguments to make, and this problem was too big to solve with Janken. The TV blared as Poltergeist Mom tried to save her kids.
“Okay,” March said.
“What?”
“You’re right,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
My heart dropped to my gut; I hadn’t expected March to give in that easily. Alone I might not be able to sneak into Crowley’s garage and rescue Genki. But now, with him, I couldn’t backtrack on my own plan. A plan that came from a flaming thought in my brain—a thought I had spoken without really thinking through.
“Should we invite Madeleine?” I asked.
March and CindeeRae looked at each other. I could tell that after what happened at Magic Planet, March had softened toward Madeleine. She had saved him, after all.
“Yes.” He dug his flip phone from his pocket, where he had added her number yesterday.
“So,” I said, without enthusiasm. “Tonight we save Genki?”
CindeeRae unwrapped the bubble gum and dropped it into her mouth, chewing loudly. “My mom’s totally not going to be okay with this.”
I hadn’t gotten any sleep after they left, watching the minutes click away on my alarm clock. My bed was too big without Genki, and I twisted myself up in the blankets trying to get comfortable as I thought about our plan. March and I had done a lot of crazy things as detectives, but sneaking into someone’s garage was the craziest.
Once we had decided to rescue Genki, we planned out our mission—Operation: Save the Van Dogs—from my basement floor with Madeleine on speakerphone. We would meet at March’s gate and cut through all four backyards separating the Winterses’ house from the Crowley house, since the streetlights seemed extra glaring when you were doing something suspicious. We were prepared to pick the lock to the back door of his garage and even the back door of his house if we needed to find the van key to unlock his dognapping van. Madeleine had volunteered to sit outside as lookout, ready to call the police from her bedazzled cell phone in case we got caught.
As the seconds ticked away, I thought of all the things that could go wrong before I even reached the front door of my house, each of them ending with getting caught by my parents. Imagining the anger that would bloom on Mom’s face if she caught me sneaking out to do more investigating was enough to make me dizzy. Luckily, Mom and Dad were both deep sleepers and didn’t seem to stir as I crept by their open bedroom, down the stairs, and out the front door.
Turned out, my old black dance unitard and matching hoodie worked well as a snooping outfit.
March had waited for us at his fence, leading everyone through the side gate to his family’s backyard, where we now huddled on the porch.
March wore his dark Steve Jobs turtleneck, the white apple on his chest glowing like a target. CindeeRae and Madeleine both wore black, too, except Madeleine’s sweatpants had a white stripe down the sides. I had pulled the drawstring on my hoodie so tight it closed around my face, and my hot breath blew back at me. We lingered by the grill, which sat on the wraparound porch cluttered with lawn chairs and doggie toys. March pulled a ski mask over his face, but Madeleine stopped him when he began to put on a navy marshmallow jacket. The fabric rubbed together like packing peanuts.
“It’s cold.” Even though he whispered, his voice seemed to echo off the cinder-block wall separating his backyard from Lincoln Street.
“The adrenaline will keep you warm,” she said. “That coat’s like a burglar alarm.”
He shrugged it off and hung it around one of the plastic chairs. I handed them each a Zoo Crew pack loaded with all the spy gear: flashlight, pocketknife, binoculars, and kazoo. We also each had plastic bags loaded with a lock-pick set: two bobby pins bent to act as a lever, a lock pick, plus a handful of extra bobby pins in case we needed replacements. I gave them each a headlamp, too.
We slung the packs onto our shoulders and snapped the lamps over our headgear. I rubbed my mittened hands together even though I wasn’t cold. My fear radiated like a heater in my chest, burning my cheeks and arms.
“We move slowly,” I said. I had thought about our backyard strategy all night. “We’ll creep along the back fence in case anyone is still awake in the houses. Crowley’s neighbor is the only one with a dog, but they keep it inside. If it starts to bark, run as fast as you can to his yard.” Everything else had been decided in the basement a few hours ago.
“Ready?” I asked, the pulse in my ear thrumming. How did you get your legs to move when you knew they were taking you to danger?
Everyone but March nodded. His wide eyes peered at me from underneath the ski mask, his dark lashes blinking rapidly as if trying to relay a message via Morse code.
“We don’t say anything unless we have to, okay?” I shot them each a serious glance.
This time March nodded, too, a little longer than everyone else, and for a second I worried he’d faint before we even made it to Crowley’s house.
We climbed over the first fence—a shabby wooden number no higher than my stomach. The moon was a sliver—God’s fingernail, Dad always called it—but it was still bright enough to cast a blue glow on the string of backyards separating March’s house from Crowley’s. The first two plots were tidy little squares with neat borders around the grass and flower beds. The third had no grass at all, the earth upended to create a mini BMX track. And the last yard, Crowley’s neighbor with the yipping dog, looked like a graveyard for summer junk. The owner had laid to rest a broken kiddie pool, a handful of tricycles and Big Wheels, a push mower, garden gnomes, and enough folding chairs for an outdoor wedding. The grass, long and stiff, grew tall around it.
We kept along the back wall when we could, but there were stacks of wood against the fence that forced us from our cover, and we stalked in the open where the blue moonlight made the white apple on March’s turtleneck glow like a lantern. We had just reached the far back corner when the hem of CindeeRae’s black jeans caught the leg of a folding chair leaning in a stack against the shed, and they fell with a crash. She gasped, and a series of fireworks seemed to explode in my chest. Madeleine dove over the fence without us, and March moaned as the dog inside began its snippy call right before a house light flicked on upstairs.