I carried the packet up to my room and placed it on my desk next to my more-than-ancient computer. I pulled the khakis I’d been wearing earlier in the day off my chair and stuck my hand in the front pocket. My hands still shook as I dug out the crumpled slip of paper and dialed the number written there into my cell phone.
It rang four times and then someone picked up.
“Hello?” a guy’s voice said. My sensitive ears picked up music and what sounded like shouting in the background. He must have been back at The Depot.
“Talbot? This is Grace.”
“Hey, kid. What’s up?”
I sucked a deep breath in and blew it out and then said, before I could change my mind: “I want you to train me. I want to find my brother—and hopefully take down that gang that’s been terrorizing the city in the process.”
Talbot laughed. I could hear the smile in his voice when he said, “I thought you’d never ask.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Test
TUESDAY AFTERNOON
“You ready for this?” Talbot asked as I climbed into the van.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.” I plopped my backpack on the seat between us and pulled out my running shoes from deep inside my bag. I kicked off my school flats and changed into the sneakers.
“So where’s your partner? Ditching out again?”
I smirked. “I arranged for him to find twenty dollars in quarters on his bus bench. That should keep him busy at the arcade for a few days.”
Talbot laughed. “I like the way you think.”
“So what’s in store for today? Are we going to have any time for, you know, training?”
“I actually took care of our assignment before I got here. Plus, we’ve got an extra hour before the bus returns, so we’ll have plenty of time for going over the basics.”
“What basics?”
“You’ll see,” he said.
We drove into an area called Glenmore on the outskirts of the city, a neighborhood that had probably been nice in the mid-twentieth century but now was a weird mix of low-income apartments, the original homes of elderly grandparents, and old houses that had been turned into stores. We were only a couple of blocks from the highway when Talbot pulled the van over near a pawnshop called Second Chances. The first thing I noticed about it was the X of police tape across the doorway, and another one over the shattered storefront window.
Talbot grabbed his large backpack from behind his seat and got out of the van. I followed. He walked right up to the storefront. Talbot looked back and forth along the street and then twisted hard on the door handle. I heard a pop as the door unlocked and opened. Talbot pulled the police tape aside and gestured for me to go inside the shop.
“Um, isn’t that kind of illegal?” I wasn’t exactly big on sneaking into places.
Talbot shrugged. “Sometimes you’ve got to bend the rules in this line of work.”
“What if we get caught?”
Talbot tapped beside his ear. “The place is empty. The security cameras are still disabled. And we’ll be in and out in a matter of minutes. I just want to test something.”
“What?”
“You.”
I looked into his green eyes and cocked my head, but I didn’t say anything.
“Come on, before we lose our chance,” he said.
I hesitated for only a second longer and then ducked under the tape and into the store. Broken glass crunched under my shoes as I did a little circle, inspecting the damage around me. All the display cases had been smashed in, and it looked like all the merchandise was missing.
“This place got hit last night,” Talbot said. “Whoever did it cleared out the entire inventory and walked off with a six-hundred-pound safe in less than the six minutes it took the police to respond to the silent alarm.”
“How do you know all this?”
“It helps to have an in with a detective.”
“Oh. So let me guess, no security camera footage?”
“Nope. I questioned my detective friend this morning about it, and he says it’s the same as all the other supposedly invisible bandit jobs. No fingerprints, no camera footage, everything gone in a matter of minutes.”
“So what are we going to do here?”
“Take a deep breath.”
I gave him a quizzical look.