6

Los Angeles isn’t the place to make friends. Not anymore. You ask an Angeleno about his neighbors, six times out of ten he won’t know their last names; when he does, it’s because of the little signs on the mailboxes. Eight times out of ten, he won’t know their first names; if he does, it’s because the mailman screwed up a delivery and sent a piece of junk mail to the wrong address. Nine times out of ten, he won’t particularly care.

But back when I was growing up, when L.A. was still choked with cloying smog, when you were as likely to find a businessman catching a wave as in his office, when people still thought it was possible to come west and find your dream in sunny Southern California, Los Angeles was a place like any other, a place where you could meet your best pal right next door. I did. Then again, I was a kid, and that’s what kids do; we can’t drive, so we make nice-nice with the local folks and hope they turn out to like us back.

Still, I like to think that even if I’d first met Jack Dugan when we were eighty-year-old codgers sitting on the porch of a rest home, trying to keep our tails from sliding under our rocking chairs and talking about the grand old days while a steady stream of drool dribbled down our double chins, we would have hit it off just as swell as we did when we were ten-year-old tykes with hell to raise.

Jack’s dad ran a grocery store on Vermont Avenue, in a section of the city that’s now considered Koreatown. Drive down that street today and you’re lucky if you see two signs in English for twenty straight blocks; even then, it’s usually just to appease the few Caucasians who drive out there for the food. But back when Jackie and I were growing up, it was a mixed neighborhood, both in ethnicity and species. Asian, Hispanic, black—it didn’t matter, so long as you had a tail and didn’t mind flaunting it at the right place and time.

Dugan’s Produce was a busy little joint, with all the locals coming in for their herb fixes two, three times a week. And Harold Dugan—Hank to his wife, Pop to Jack and, by association, me—ran a tight ship. He knew everyone’s name, their jobs, their hobbies, and, of course, their personal vices. If Mrs. Dategglio hobbled in on a Wednesday, he had her grated parsnips ready to go; if it was Saturday, he doled out the cilantro. The main store wasn’t more than six hundred square feet, but the room in back—the special room—had shelves stocked to the ceiling with spices of every taste and effect, an herbaholic’s wet dream and nightmare rolled into one, and it all got replenished every two days. Ten-wheeled trucks would pull up to the loading docks and unload crate after crate of the stuff. Jack and I would help haul the pallets into the store, box by box, where Hank’s people would pat us on the heads, throw a few bucks in our direction, and take over from there.

Jack was a pretty big kid, his mop of hair hanging down low, the bangs nearly covering his eyes. I learned later that his pop had gotten into an argument with the wig manufacturer down at the chop shop where he bought his family’s guises, and he didn’t want to have the hair cut until he was sure it could be replaced, but at the time, I just remember thinking cool bangs. It was the seventies; sue me.

Now Jack was a Hadrosaur and I was a Velociraptor, and by all rights we should have hung out with different crowds. But it wasn’t like that where we lived; you mixed with the folks you got along with, and that was that. I knew a bunch of Raptor kids who went to my school, and most of ’em would sooner spit at you than say a friendly word. Don’t know why it is, but my species doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to preparing welcome wagons. Maybe if Custer had been an Ornithomimus instead, things would have gone better at Little Bighorn.

Most of the time, we biked around Los Angeles with the full blessing of our parents, who were either comfortable with the safety of the neighborhood at large or unconcerned about our well-being. Despite the cavalcade of adventures awaiting tourists and businessmen alike in the Greater Los Angeles Metroplex these days, there weren’t a hell of a lot of things for kids to do back then. The parks were overrun by vagrants, the museums dry and dull, and the movie theaters were filled with overlong epics or barely comprehensible psychodramas; even the cartoons flew over our heads. So it was the bikes, and endless riding.

Which is not to say we didn’t hop off for the occasional round of mischief. Between the two of us, we knew practically every prank in the book, and the rest we made up on the fly. Jack was the creative one; I was the problem-solver. Together, we could embarrass even the most self-confident of the neighborhood adults.

Most of it was little things, pranks designed to annoy and frustrate, maybe get a laugh or two out of our peers. One time, we covertly followed around the local dog catcher—the tax base was wide and strong enough in those days to allow for such frivolities—and waited until his truck was full of squirming canines, yelping and pawing for a way out of captivity. The next time he stopped to snare a pooch in an alleyway, we snuck into the back of the truck and unlatched every cage, keeping the outer doors closed but letting the animals roam free inside, their thick tongues lapping at our faces in premature gratitude. Jack and I worked hard to get ’em all riled up, scratching their ears, playing tug-of-war with a length of rope we’d brought along, until the small six-by-twelve cargo area was rocking with canine adrenaline.

When the dog catcher returned with his latest conquest and opened the outer doors to make his deposit, a manic mass of fur and bad breath flew out of the truck, knocking him to the ground, trampling his squirming body beneath a hundred filthy paws. Jack and I managed to claw our way out during the confusion, woofing at the top of our lungs, hoping that even if the guy managed to get a glimpse of us, he’d be so shell-shocked he wouldn’t put two and two together.

Most of our pranks were of the garden-variety call-a-pizzeria-and-order-ten-pies type, the punishments, if it ever came to that, no more than a few days without television or the like. But there was one time when we laid it on a bit too thick, when our collective minds came up with a plan that outran our concept of the potential consequences. And it was only then, as we faced the heaviest of penalties, that we truly knew each other for what we were.

Jack’s mom, like a lot of mothers back then, was a housewife, but at the same time, she was a housewife who wanted to feel that she was doing her part to support the family financially. Dugan’s Produce was a popular spot, but the real cash cow of the business—the herbs—was somewhat dependent on the economy. During a dip, some folks could do without their basil and rosemary. If they were heavy into the stuff, real junkies, they could always go bulk or dried, the low-quality stuff that Pop Dugan disdained to carry. So during the down times, Jack’s mom found a way to help pay the bills.

Guises and their attachments are, for the most part, governed by the Councils at the local and regional levels, and, in a broader sense, by the National and World Councils as well. They’re the ones who license the manufacturers and distribute new permits to those wishing to enter the human costume business. Few are accepted; most don’t even have the money to apply for the permits in the first place, and those who do are often bankrupted by the staggering amount of bribery it takes to get any paperwork pushed through the Council offices.

But back in the day, one company was poised to make a splash in the guise community, and they had the wherewithal to do so, the salesforce to make it happen, and a smashing brand name already known and loved in households, dinosaur and otherwise, across America:

Tupperware.

Their business proposal to the Councils, as I understand it, was simple. They already had the manufacturing plants, the workers in place. Eight percent of their factory-floor workforce—every dinosaur member of the Tupperware organization—would be given a small raise and transferred to a new guise plant down in Chile, where, twenty-four hours a day, they would produce beautiful costumes of quality and style that—and here was the twist—were interchangable. No longer would you need to replace your entire guise if something went wrong on a leg or two; now you could simply reorder a section of the costume from the Tupperware corporation, and they would seamlessly attach it to the rest of your fake body and have it back at your home with a three-day turnaround.

Two years and, rumor has it, over fourteen million dollars in back-pocket exchanges later, the World Council approved the Tupperware business model and Chile had themselves a growth industry. Word came from South America that the local reptilian population, many of whom had been recruited to work at the factory once it was evident that the original workforce was too small to handle the immediate orders, had begun spending money like it was going out of style, buying themselves the lavish items they were never before able to afford, such as food and, in some cases, shelter. Life was good.

Back in the States, the Tupperware salesforce went into action. And, true to their word, the Tupperware folk did, indeed, have a ready and willing group of women eager to hawk their product in living rooms across America. They’d been doing it for years with plastic containers, and when it came down to it, a guise wasn’t much different, except that they didn’t require quite as much burping.

Jack’s mom was an arms dealer.

Oh, sure, she sold the other stuff too, they all did, but Jack’s mom had an eye for arms that outstripped even the professional appraisers; she could pick out a mismatched pair of triceps at thirty feet. And her knowledge of hand structure was such that she was once called down to the Tupperware branch offices in San Diego to give the supervisors a lesson on the metacarpal bones, and how they might best be enhanced in their well-known Society Matron line of guises.

And she had parties. Oh, did she have parties. Daylong affairs starting at noon and lasting until well after sundown, during which time the ladies of the neighborhood would pile into her living room, dressed to the nines, the tens, pillbox hats perched atop their fancy coifs, gold buttons and polyester a-shining. All horribly overwrought outfits, especially considering that they were coming off as soon as Jack’s mother—Tiffany—rang her little chime and announced that the festivities would begin. But they were there, they were giddy, and they were primed to buy.

Jack and I were usually banished from the house during these shindigs, and we weren’t exactly despondent over it. The last thing we wanted to do was hang out with all the old ladies in the neighborhood, listening to stories about ripped seams and how to fix a tail snag with a bit of household cleanser and tape. Most of the time, we’d head down to Dugan’s Produce and toss around the lettuce heads, or bike down to the reservoir and spy on the older kids making out.

But one afternoon, Jack had a better idea. It had come to him in a dream, he claimed, but I think he’d been cooking it up for a while, waiting for the right moment to strike. And on one hot August afternoon, the L.A. sun unforgiving in the sky above, we decided that the day of reckoning had finally come.

Thirteen ladies at the house that afternoon, thirteen purses ready to be snapped open at a moment’s notice. Jack’s mom had just gotten in a shipment of new gams from the Tupperware folks, and the gals were eager to test drive the new line of thighs (now with SpringForm action!). They gathered in the living room, false hips pressed against one another, the noise level growing with each successive arrival, like a menagerie of birds squawking at the introduction of a new playmate.

Tiffany called us over. “Jackie, Vincent,” she said, holding out a five-dollar bill. “Go have a nice time, boys.”

Jack took the bill and gave his mom a peck on the cheek, but he had no intention of spending the money that afternoon.

“Thanks, Mrs. Dugan,” I said, and she tousled my hair playfully.

“Go on, run along.”

The other ladies paid us no mind as we trotted out the front door, hopped on our bikes, and took off down the street. We rounded the corner and quickly circled back, running our bikes over the small backyard lawns of Jack’s neighbors.

By the time we reached the back of Jack’s house, the ladies were at full volume, laughing and shrieking and generally reverting to adolescence in their prepurchasing frenzy. We could hear Betty Deruda above the rest, her girlish, high-pitched squeal sounding out across the not-so-open plains of the city.

“She’s gotta be first,” I suggested. “Just to hear the scream.”

“Oh yeah,” Jack said. “She’ll break windows.”

We waited a few more moments, just to allow the full crescendo to build, then slipped in through the back door, sliding through the laundry room and into the far hallway. It was only a few more steps into the master bedroom and an exceptional hiding spot inside the closet. From here we could still get a good view of the living room through the slats in the door, without giving ourselves away. It was crucial that we watch this stage; the rest of our plan hinged on it.

Five minutes later, Jack’s mom produced a small dinner chime, which she held aloft and struck soundly with a tiny ballpeen hammer. The ding was loud and clear, sending a strong, sharp note amid the assembled housewives.

“The Tupperware party,” she announced, “has begun.”

Jack and I stood slack-jawed as a whirlwind of activity enveloped the living room. Rather than the careful, orderly manner in which most of our kind remove their clothing—taking time to place every strap and tag of latex in a precise, logical arrangement—these ladies went at it like it was amateur night at the Go-Go-Club. First it was the dresses and hats, the undergarments, the shoes, piled atop each other in the mad rush to strip down to bare scales. They wanted at the new guises, and they wanted at them now.

Jack and I kept a close watch on each housewife—now naked as crocodiles, tails swishing across the shag carpet of the living room—as she gathered up her costume and brought it into the bedroom, placing it on the bed, the floor, the chaise. Both Jack and I had pretty good memories, and between the two of us, we kept a close tab on whose guise had been put where.

Soon enough, all of the ladies’ guises were in the bedroom and they’d reassembled in the living room to start the fun and games. Jack and I weren’t interested in this part of the festivities. We had our own fun and games in mind.

None of them heard us scamper out of the closet, and none of them noticed when the bedroom door swung closed. Now we were alone in the room: just two young boys, thirteen ladies’ costumes, and the twisted, bored imagination of youth.

“Where do we start?” Jack asked.

“Betty,” I said. “Betty and Mrs. Taylor.”

For every Betty Deruda in the world, there is a Josephine Taylor. Josephine was an older woman, her half-Tupperware/half-Erickson guise tailored to match her sagging frame. A bit heavy around the middle, she carried much of her weight in the hips, giving her human look an overall pear shape; the thick tail didn’t help matters, increasing the size of her mammalian rump. But it seemed that she was content in her guise, happy to live her life as part of the larger set.

Betty, on the other hand, was the youngest member of the Tupperware brigade; her son was only ten months old, and she’d moved to the neighborhood just a year before he was born. Betty was the girl all the other women talked about behind her back, the one the neighborhood boys—Jack and I included—would follow around town, offering to carry her bags, her baby, anything. She was the official Hot Mom of the bunch, and, as such, a natural target.

“You get Mrs. Taylor’s,” I told Jack. “I’ll get Betty’s.”

“Why do you get Betty’s?” he asked. “It was my idea.”

“Fine, fine,” I said, eager to get started. “Switch. Let’s just do this.”

It took only twelve minutes to go through the whole room, and once we were done, we didn’t linger at the scene of the crime. Jack and I pried open the bedroom window—too risky to try slipping back out through the laundry room—and fell into the rose bushes, laughing even as we cursed the thorns.

Once out front, we hopped on our bikes and rode down to Dugan’s Produce, where we fell in with the employees and helped them stack a new shipment of herbs in the back, grinning at each other all the while. It was the perfect alibi.

“What’s so funny, you two?” Pop Dugan asked us. “You look like the T-Rex who ate the Compy.”

“Inside joke,” Jack told his dad, and the old man left it at that.

Six hours later, we figured the party would be ready to break up, so we pedaled back to the neighborhood and waited a block down, keeping our eyes trained on Jack’s front window. As soon as we saw movement inside, we made a beeline for the house and strode up the front walk, just as the first ladies began scurrying out to their cars.

There was Jean Gordon, clutching a shopping bag full of accessories, only she was walking along inside Susie Fenster’s lower body. And Susie Fenster, normally content inside her tall, lanky frame, had to make do as a short, rotund size twelve. Similar guise troubles had befallen Sue Klau and Cathy Vargas, JoEllen Zalaznick and Patti Goldstein, and every other lady who had the misfortune to attend Jack’s mom’s Tupperware party that afternoon.

We’d switched the guises. Heads to bodies, a great swap-around, mixing and matching, using our creative talents to decide whose mask went “best” with whose body, doing all we could to create the ultimate incongruities in size, shape, and color. And, just to make sure they wouldn’t catch the error and swap back before Jack and I got an eyeful, we used Super Glue to hold the additions in place. A lot of it.

The last pair to emerge from the house, though, represented our crowning achievement, the real reason we’d concocted the scheme in the first place:

Betty Deruda and Josephine Taylor.

Josephine was walking tall, her wrinkled mask set in a wide, thin-lipped smile, the sparkle in her eyes belying the words coming out of her mouth. “I’m so sorry,” she rasped, turning to face Tiffany in the doorway. “Tell Betty I’ll get it back to her as soon as I can. I’m so, so sorry.”

But beneath that sixty-year-old face was a curvy, sexy, twenty-four-year-old body, the hips sliding out from beneath that slim waist, the breasts shaped and angled in all the right places. It was a knockout guise for a knockout gal, but Josephine Taylor was its proud owner now, and she swiveled her rump with the best of them.

And then came Betty. At first, only her head appeared in the doorway, poking out and quickly back in again, like a tortoise deciding that the world was still too dangerous a place to enter. Jack and I exchanged a quick glance—this was odd.

A moment passed, and then Betty popped her head out again, her eyes downcast, dull. Her cheeks twitched in spastic, arrhythmic contractions, brow tight and furrowed, and it took me a second to realize what was going on.

“She’s crying.”

She stepped out like an outcast, like a leper, trying to maneuver that big body out the door and down the front walk, unable to control the oversized legs after so many years of piloting a much smaller ship. She tripped, stumbled, and righted herself, bracing Josephine Taylor’s body against a nearby tree. A false layer of fat, designed to jiggle precisely so, crested up and down across her midsection.

“Let me help,” Tiffany said, stepping forward to catch Betty/Josephine by the arm, but the neighborhood’s Hot Mom shrugged Tiffany away and waddled toward her car, fumbling for the keys, fighting back a fresh round of tears.

Jack and I couldn’t take our eyes away. This wasn’t in the plan, this flood of tears, all this sadness. At the most, we expected a few indignant huffs, maybe a shriek or two. But the absolute defeat in Betty Deruda’s eyes instantly told us all we ever needed to know about this lady. She’d lived her life inside her looks, and Jack and I had inadvertently shown her that it could all be taken away in an instant. Hard enough to accept after years of slow and steady decline; an impossible pill to swallow when it bats you over the head all at once.

I tried to hop back on my bike, to get out of there, flee the scene. Maybe if I wasn’t present, it would all go away, and everyone could go back to their normal guises, no harm done. But I wasn’t looking where I was stepping, and suddenly I was crashing down hard on the bike, the metal clattering to the ground, the scraping sound of pedal on asphalt echoing through the cul-de-sac.

Betty stopped cold, one hand on her door handle, one clutching the massive, drooping breasts hanging off her once-petite frame, as if struggling with heavy groceries. Her head swiveled around, and she looked straight at us, straight at me and Jack, standing there, dumbfounded, stupid grins plastered across our lips. From her point of view, it must have seemed that we were mocking her, that we were poking fun at this young broad turned old.

Her lips moved, and though I couldn’t hear the words, I knew instantly what she was saying. You did this.

And before we could react, apologize, or somehow make it up to her, Betty was in her car and shooting down the street, off to the safety and shelter of her own home, where she could shut the blinds, seal the windows, and rip off the humiliating folds of human skin.

Jack’s mom stood in the doorway, staring at us. Hers was the only guise we didn’t mess with, and her arms hung loosely by her sides, her face slack with dismay. It would have been easier if she’d had her hands on her hips, her lips turned in a scowl, but this expression of profound disappointment was worse than any scolding we could imagine.

“Vincent,” she said flatly as we stepped toward the house, “you’d better go home.”

“Mom—” Jack started, but he didn’t get far.

“Go home, Vincent,” Tiffany repeated. “I’m not going to call your mother. You tell her what you feel is right.”

I nodded—no clue what I was going to do, but I sure as hellfire wasn’t going to let my parents in on the deal—and Tiffany took Jack by the shoulder and calmly led him inside. I got a last-second glance from him, a terrified look that said all that was needed, and then he was gone, inside the house, the door locked up tight.

I never saw him again.

Nah, I saw him two days later, after his mom had laid down the law and taken away his bike and his football and his television time and all the other things that made life worth living.

Tiffany also insisted that Jack help out at future Tupperware parties, and that he serve punch and treats to the attending ladies; she thought it was only fitting, especially considering he had damaged her credibility among the housewife set. So Jack was fully expecting to have his Saturdays booked up for many many weeks to come.

What he wasn’t expecting—and neither was I—was how much more there was in store. Because while most of the women who had been at Jack’s house that day went home, undressed, reguised themselves in a spare costume, and then swapped with their counterparts as soon as it was convenient, there was one who didn’t take it so lightly. One who saw no humor in the matter, and who couldn’t understand why the culprits should go unpunished.

Betty Deruda went to the Council.

At first it was just the local Southern California chapter, where she supposedly harangued them about declining moral values in the youth today—herself only a scant five or six years removed from that youth, but no matter—but eventually her complaint was remanded to a higher court.

By the time the Regional and Western councils got to it, a month and a half later, they barely needed to hear the facts before they realized it was not in their jurisdiction. Situations like these had to be handled on a higher level, and they promptly sent Betty and her claims further up the ladder.

This was a National case. Minor though it was, insignificant though it might have been, it nevertheless fell under their auspices. Because in the rigid, precise, yet always confusing code of the Councils, all manner of dinosaur misconduct can be categorized in one of three ways:

Indiscretions are those infractions of the rule book that are either accidental, minor, or both, and do little, if anything, to jeopardize our place in society. A businessman who wants to lose a little weight off his human guise, for example, will often decide to purchase his new stomach through a black-market guise dealer instead of through the proper channels, because they’ll carve in an extra-nice six-pack of abs for him, or they’ll give the guy a break on the price if he pays in cash. Or two friends will be chatting at work near the watercooler and some human or another will overhear them referring to the “filthy mammals” scurrying around the workplace. Such infractions do little to put the dinosaurs at risk, and the punishments are usually meted out in dollars and cents. There’s nothing like a healthy budget surplus to mollify Council members.

Violations are more serious, and it’s in this category where most of the major crimes are classified. Most of the dino-on-dino crimes are listed here, including murder, which you’d think would come in the most serious category, but the Councils don’t exist in order to prevent actions that society would otherwise cover. Murderers can go to a normal death row just like anybody else; more care is simply taken within the penal system to make sure they’re separated from the other inmates when need be. So under Council rules, dino-on-dino murder is considered a violation. This is also the category that covers all the infractions by which our security might be compromised, such as failure to properly dispose of a deceased dinosaur via a dissolution packet, or improperly buttoning one’s costume so that a hint of scale pokes out for all the world to see. Most dino-human relationships are covered under the Violations rule, as well, including the most carnal of transgression. I remember seeing the rule book back when I was on the Southern California Council, and the list of violations went on and on; it was longer than the L.A. phone book, and only slightly more interesting. Punishments here can range from heavy fines to imprisonment, though usually not for an extended period of time. In the case of a greater societal crime, the Councils will often allow the criminal to get off with time served, as long as he’s spent a few good months in a state-run lockup.

The third category is reserved only for those crimes that carry the most serious threat of exposing our existence to the humans, and the punishments, as a result, are proportional to the act. There have been moments throughout our history when certain crimes have been perceived to be so great, in fact, that the perpetrators have been put to death, to serve as a warning to future lawbreakers. The last time such a punishment was exacted was decades ago, but since that dark day back in 1953 when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sent off to meet the Great Ancestors, no one else has merited the ultimate penalty.

These are the High Crimes of dinosaur society.

And that’s what Jack and I were charged with.

Yes, long before I was ever brought up on various indiscretions and ousted from the Southern California Council, years prior to getting myself run out of New York for investigating Dr. Emil Vallardo’s experiments into human-dino crossbreeding and generally making a mess of things during the infamous McBride case, yours truly was a hardened criminal of the reptilian underground. Top of the world, Ma!

It seems that while unauthorized guise manipulation is a minor indiscretion when done to one’s own costume, the infraction gets bumped up to a violation when it’s performed on someone else’s skin. And there are a host of special circumstances that can drive it up even further into the High Crimes category. Multiple victims, for example, or serious costume mutilation, two addenda of which Jack and I were most certainly guilty, sealed the deal.

The National Council headquarters are located in central Alabama; no one has ever properly explained to me the reason for this. I always assumed that Washington, D.C., would be the logical place to locate our seat of power, but it’s been Alabama since long before the elders can remember, so Tuscaloosa it is, and Tuscaloosa it will remain.

We were allowed to stay with our parents until the trial—the hearing, they called it, but we knew what it was—yet were not allowed to see each other whatsoever. That had never stopped us before; it wouldn’t then. One night, at 11:37 on the dot, we snuck out of our respective homes and met under an elm near Dugan’s Produce.

“You’re not gonna say anything, are you?” Jack asked me. “All they got is what Betty saw.”

“Or thinks she saw.”

“Right. And some of my glove prints on Mrs. Taylor’s guise—”

“But she’d just come over the day before,” I said.

“Exactly.” Jack and I had gone through this once before; it was important to get the story straight.

We both knew that the consequences could be serious. High crimes were never dealt with lightly; the stories that dinosaur parents tell their children are fraught with villains plotting to expose the race, or of humans learning of our existence and threatening to do away with us, and the messy ends of these characters were meant to help guide our moral compass. And though some of the stories were probably apocryphal, the punishments were real. Death was a long shot in our case, but imprisonment—especially at one of those dino-juvie workcamps out in the Louisiana bayou, where sweatshop labor produces the finest discount-quality clothing money can buy—was a very real possibility.

“We stick together,” Jack reiterated, “and we’re cool on this.”

I nodded. I’d seen enough movies in which coconspirators eventually cracked under pressure and gave up their friends; these flicks weren’t the feel-good films of the year. Watergate had just passed us by, and though I’d barely followed the events (to a kid, politics is like imagining your parents kissing—you know it happens, but it’s easier not to think about it), I was nevertheless aware of the fact that some bad folks had snitched on some other bad folks, and that if they’d all just kept their damn mouths shut, no one would have been the wiser.

“No matter what they do to us,” I said, envisioning torture chambers and cattle-prods, lie detectors and bare lightbulbs swinging back and forth in a darkened room, “we keep it quiet.”

Jack took my forearm in his and stared intently into my eyes. “Scratch on it.”

I solemnly unsnapped my glove and pulled off the index finger. My claws had yet to come in fully, but I was able to slide a single dark tip out from between the scales. Jack did the same with his, and I used the tip of my claw to scratch a small white line into the surface of his own black spur. Then Jack marked me similarly. It was less painful than becoming blood brothers, comparatively hygienic, and, to us, infinitely more meaningful.

They separated us for the plane flight and kept us in different locations down in Tuscaloosa. I don’t remember much about Alabama, except that the bugs were gigantic and fearless. In L.A., the roaches run when you turn on the light; in Alabama, they all scurry out to sunbathe and demand that you fetch them daiquiris.

The National Council headquarters, like most of the Council offices around the world, is located underground. Six stories under, to be precise, and in a place like rural Alabama, that means no elevators and a lot of stairs. That’s the overriding memory of my journey down to the trial chambers—step after step of damp, mildewy staircase, the smell of fungus wrapping around my sinuses and daring me to run away, the fear starting deep in my belly and slowly crawling up into my chest. My father’s hand on my shoulder, pressing down hard with every step. As if he knew something I didn’t. As if he already knew how this was all going to play out, and that the audience wouldn’t be leaving the theater humming any happy tunes.

“You will tell the truth,” I heard my father say, his voice a low whisper.

“Sure,” I responded.

His hand dug further into my shoulder, and he repeated himself, the words tight, clipped. “You will tell—the truth.”

I didn’t need to be told twice. I also didn’t need to listen. Jack and I had sworn on our claws, and that was that.

The sixteen Elders—three of them female, even back in the seventies—sat in a circle, their seats ringing the walls, each atop its own alabaster pedestal. The lighting was dim, save for one brightly illuminated spot in the center of the room. There was a single chair in the middle, a simple wooden seat, and it was this area to which I was directed.

“Leave him,” a voice called out, and my father, understanding the instructions, backed out of the room without question. This was the National Council, and the only dinosaur dumb enough to disobey them was a preteen dinosaur.

I’d like to say I was brave, but the little swagger I felt was overridden by the knowledge that these sixteen creatures held my life in their claws. They were Caesar in the Coliseum, and I was the unfortunate gladiator under the sword. One thumb down, and it would be curtains for young Vincent Rubio.

So when they told me to sit, I sat, and when the Brontosaur representative stood and began to speak, I listened to every damn word he had to say.

“Vincent Rubio,” he began, his deep, rich voice singsonging my name, “you have been charged with the High Crime of unwarranted guise alteration in a public setting, and despite your young age and lack of prior befoulments of the law, we have nevertheless decided to take this case quite seriously. Do you understand the charges brought against you?”

I nodded, and tried to say the words I do. But my throat was dry, my larynx vibrating too rapidly, and all they got was a squeak, a croak, and a head bob.

“And how do you plead?”

I took a breath, thanked my stars that my father had left the room, and muttered, “Not guilty.”

From there, it was an hour of testimony, all depositions, none live, from the ladies at the Dugan house that afternoon, along with a little forensic evidence introduced by an associate member of the Council. It was hard to get past the sound of my own heartbeat, the flow of rushing water enveloping my head, but I was alert enough to realize that for all of their high talk and bluster, the Council had very little evidence by which to convict either Jack or myself. It was just a bunch of old folks blowing hot air, and as long as we stuck to the plan, we’d come out on top.

After all of their evidence had been presented, the Brontosaur rep—clearly the one in charge—stood again and asked if I wished to change my plea, or if there was any additional information I would like to provide at this time. I said that there wasn’t, and a light murmur went through the Council members.

“You do know,” the Brontosaur continued, “that your friend has confessed.”

A shock ran through my body, a sudden jolt of electricity, and I concentrated hard to keep my legs stiff, my hands steady. It had to be a trick; that was why they were keeping us apart. I’d read 1984 in school—well, the last few pages, anyway, but I got the gist—and knew that this was a common tactic. Separate and destroy.

“Confessed to what?” I said, keeping the front.

“Come,” said the head Council member. “It will be easier if you just tell us what happened, and we can all get on with this. Jack has done his part. It’s your turn now.”

But I held fast, and despite a fifteen-minute barrage of questioning, I stood fast, the whole time wondering if Jack really had cracked. They seemed to know an awful lot about what we’d done that afternoon; could they have picked that up from the testimony? From conjecture?

They were about to start in on me again when a shadow separated itself from the wall and stepped into the light. It was the Velociraptor representative, a small, thin fellow who moved with effortless grace, slipping to my side before I even noticed.

“Please,” he said, his sibilants slightly occluded, just short of a lisp. This happens sometimes with both Raptors and Ornithomimi—our elongated snouts can get in the way of the tongue. “Let me speak with the boy.”

The others shrugged and backed off as the Raptor led me from the chair, out of the Council chambers, and into a small, darkened room off to one side. There, we both sat on the floor, across from one another, the tone light, almost friendly, despite the chill that was creeping from the tile and up my spine.

“You understand why you’re here?” he began, and I nodded. “Of course you do. You’re an intelligent young Raptor, Vincent. I can tell that about you. And you’ve been put in a terrible situation.”

He seemed to be waiting for me to speak, so I grunted lightly. “Yeah.” Ever the chatterbox I was.

“These old dinosaurs—the lot of them—they’re not out for revenge, though it can seem that way. They have constituents, they have rules, and they’re just trying to do what’s expected of them.

“But,” he continued, “they often get caught up in their work. All crazy, like you saw them back there. Teeth gnashing, claws flying—wild things—”

This got a little laugh out of me, and he grinned back. “All I’m saying,” the Raptor rep said, “is that we don’t have to go through this. If they had their way, they’d have you down there all week. Asking questions, breaking you down, and in the end, I bet you’d tell them what they wanted to hear. I’ve seen it before, it’s not pretty.

“But here it’s just you and me. And I’m going to let you in on the truth, okay?”

I was ready for some straight talk. “Okay.”

“They’ve got Jack. The prints, the bike tracks, someone catching a whiff of his scent all over their guise. They’ve got him dead to rights, and the Council isn’t letting go of this one.”

“He—he talked?” I asked.

“No,” the Raptor said. “He’s kept quiet, I won’t lie to you about that. But he’s in a big mess of trouble, and they’re thinking about some serious punishment. It won’t be juvenile workcamp for him. There’s been too much frivolity with the guises lately—all that B-strap burning up in San Francisco threw them into a tizzy—and they’re looking for a scapegoat. Looks like Jack’s the one.”

I swallowed hard. This was never part of the plan. “Will they . . . I mean . . . a high crime—”

“Will they kill him?”

“Yes,” I said breathlessly.

“No. He’s young, and word is that no mammals caught on to what was going down. But that doesn’t mean they’ll let him off easy. He’ll be considered an adult during sentencing. That means one of the prisons up in Canada.”

Canada. Three syllables, one terrifying word. No one knew exactly what happened in the reptilian lockups way up in the frigid northland, but the very thought that Jack might be force-fed a diet of bacon and snow was enough to throw me into panic mode.

“He can’t go up there,” I said, scooting forward, keeping my voice low, even as the words poured from my mouth. “He’ll be—he can’t!”

“I agree. Jack’s tough . . . for his age. But they’ll eat him alive. Quite literally, I’m afraid. You’ve heard the stories.”

I had. Tales of cannibalism and rampant violence inside the prison system, aggression not only unchecked but encouraged by the guards who ran the place. Jack would be little more than an appetizer to those monsters from the Great White North, and suddenly it was up to me to save him.

“What do I do?”

“We’ll go back in there,” the Raptor said, his eyes soft and bright, his long snout curled at the corners in a simple, easy smile, “and I’ll ask you what happened. You let it all out, explain how it was all just a simple boyhood prank, a nothing incident. No one was hurt, no one the wiser. They’ll give you both a small fine, you can work it off at a Council rec center, and within six months we’ll all forget it happened.” He paused and caught my eye. “Does that sound like something we could do, Vincent? Together, you and me?”

Before I knew it, I was nodding and being led back into the Council chambers. The Raptor gave me a sly wink and took his seat among the other Council members. I kept my head down, staring at a mosaic of the Council seal—the Earth, covered in green scales—embedded into the floor.

“All right now, Vincent,” said the Raptor, taking the lead as he’d promised. “Why don’t you tell everyone what happened?”

Moment of truth. Fork in the road. Jack and I had discussed our options, but it had never come down to this. I had a chance to save my friend from certain doom, and all I had to do was tell the truth. It seemed like an easy choice. A few months of work detail, just like the nice Raptor said, and we’d be free. If half a year scrubbing floors and cleaning up toddler puke would keep Jack from the dregs of Canada, I was willing to do it. And despite our solemn vow never to speak about that afternoon, the oaths we had scratched upon each other’s budding claws, I knew that in time, once he’d been told of the choices with which I’d been presented, Jack would understand.

I opened my mouth to speak, feeling every muscle in my jawbone creak wide. Tongue dry but ready, preparing to spill all the secrets of that summer afternoon. “It was like this,” I began—

That’s when I smelled the prunes.

Forget about the scent of fear as a stench of decay or the odor of sweat—no, fear is prunes, ripe and redolent, and this time the odor wasn’t coming from me. It was streaming off the Council members. Fear that they were going to let me get away. Fear that they’d screwed up yet another national-level investigation. Instantly I knew that they had nothing on Jack, that the Raptor had made it all up, and that if I gave up the goods, Jack wouldn’t be the only one rotting away in Ottawa.

“We were at the store all day,” I said, repeating pretty much what I’d been saying for the past month straight. “We didn’t have anything to do with it.”

There was a moment of stunned silence as the elders realized that I wasn’t going to fold under their pressure, and then the Raptor was out of his chair and lunging at me, roaring furiously, teeth bared and headed for my throat. But he was old and I was hopped up on adrenaline, and I easily dodged out of the way as he slammed into the wall behind me. Before he could rise to mount another attack, the other Council members rushed their comrade and restrained him; it’s one thing to interrogate a child, another to dismember him in a legal forum. Claws flew; teeth gnashed.

A Compy squirmed his way out of the melee and hooked his beak toward the stairs. “Get outta here, kid,” he sighed. “You’re free to go.”

I was still too scared to toss out any parting shots—for all I knew, this was yet another trick designed to get me to confess further—so I scampered to my feet, dashed through the Council chambers and up the six flights of stairs, falling into my father’s arms at the uppermost landing.

I slept well on the plane ride home.

After we got back to L.A., Jack and I were tighter than ever. We’d made it through their interrogations, their Cheshire grins and crocodile tears, and come out on top. Jack told me he didn’t say a word during the whole ordeal; he just sat back and shrugged a lot. I told him I’d done pretty much the same. There was no need to let him know about the Raptor rep, or our talk behind closed doors, or the fact that we were five seconds away from a lifetime of misery and that only my sensitive snout saved us from extreme Canadian justice.

As far as I know, he still has no idea.

So that’s not why he’s hugging me to his breast, loving me and hating me, contemplating whether he should buy me dinner or take me out in the alley and put this PI out of his misery.

It’s all because of what I did to his sister. Noreen, well . . . that’s another story.