The Long Way Home by Andrew Klavan

Author:Andrew Klavan [Klavan, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Law & Crime, Adventure stories, Action & Adventure, Health & Daily Living, Juvenile Fiction, Adventure and adventurers, Amnesia, Diseases; Illnesses & Injuries, General, Fugitives from justice, Political Science, Terrorism, Fiction, Political Freedom & Security
ISBN: 9781595547132
Publisher: Thomas Nelson Inc
Published: 2010-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

Hunt

Wyatt High School is a pretty rough place. It’s in a rundown section of town—the section Alex had to move to after his dad left. A lot of the kids who go to Wyatt have really hard lives: no fathers, not enough money, sometimes violent homes and stuff like that. They have a big problem at the school with booze and drugs. They also have a big problem with gangs—a lot of the kids belong to them. A couple of times, the police have had to rush to the school to break up fights on the field out back. These weren’t just schoolyard punch-outs either, they were full-scale melees with knives and baseball bats and so on.

The idea of skinny, pale-faced, geeky Josh with his big glasses and his goofy smile wandering around asking these kids questions didn’t make me feel any better about the situation. But there he was.

Josh spent some time fumbling around in the car getting his spy gear all hooked up. He was wearing slacks and a checked button-down shirt with a tan windbreaker over it: sort of the official geek uniform. He hooked his webcam up to the collar of his windbreaker. We couldn’t see it, but he told us it was made to look like some kind of medallion so it wouldn’t be so noticeable. He hooked his microphone up to his shirt collar near his mouth, under the windbreaker so no one could see it. Then he pulled a watch cap down over his head. It was a little warm to be wearing a watch cap, but it hid the earpiece. Finally, he strapped a laptop case over his shoulder. He had to carry it with him so the webcam and mike would work.

Now he stepped out of the car.

In the empty parlor of the Ghost Mansion, with the cool air blowing in from the graveyard through the broken window, Beth and Rick and Miler and I crowded around our own laptop, watching the monitor intently. We couldn’t see Josh, but we could see whatever was in front of him. At first, as he climbed out of his mom’s Camry, the scenery swung around wildly in this kind of sickening way. We caught tilted, pixilated glimpses of the parking lot and the school’s grassy backfield and the school building itself—which was one of those old-fashioned brick buildings with the clock tower and the white cupola up top.

Then Josh started walking and the picture steadied. It still kind of bumped around with his footsteps, but at least it didn’t swing back and forth anymore.

Josh narrated into the microphone under his breath. “Here I go, moving across the field . . .”

“We can see that, Josh,” said Miler. “You’re wearing a camera on your shirt.”

Josh ignored him. “I’m looking around now to find someone I can talk to . . .”

“Dork,” muttered Miler with a sigh.

As Josh turned to look this way and that, we got a pretty fair view of the field. We could see that even now, about an hour before lunchtime, there were a lot of kids out there.

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