The Amazing Beef Squad by Jason Ross

Author:Jason Ross [Ross, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2021-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

Would you believe it only took two days? Sometimes we impress even ourselves.

We used a motion-activated camera that Hogue’s dad still had from his old bow-hunting days. (“Back when I used to have fun” was how he described his time before fatherhood. “Fun? You play more video games than I do!” was Hogue’s reply.) The camera looked like a little one-eyed robot. I guess it actually was. It was covered with a leafy camouflage pattern. Since the door was tucked around in back of the hall, we decided a daylight mission to place the camera would be safe and would raise fewer suspicions than riding around in the middle of the night.

We chose the next day, Sunday morning. By tradition, the Butte Nuggets were churchgoing men. Whether or not that was technically true, we figured that the club would still act like it was true. Sunday mornings would be quiet at the hall.

When we rode up, we were relieved to find the back lot empty. A flowering camellia bush grew beside the door, giving us a great hiding place for the camera. Jared strapped it to a thick branch and broke away a handful of leaves that blocked the camera’s view.

“That’s it?” Hogue said as we rode back home.

“What do you want?” I said. “To get caught again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” Hogue said. “I just like feeling challenged, you know?”

On Monday afternoon—the fourth day of our five-day suspension—Jared asked his mom if she wanted anything from Leonardville Bakery. Of course she did. How thoughtful of him to ask! He rode out on his bike and came home with a loaf of fresh sourdough, four croissants, half a carrot cake, and—stuffed down into his tube sock—the camera’s memory card.

A half hour later, his mom brought the carrot cake up to Jared’s room for all four of us to snack on while Jared downloaded the files from the card.

“You boys, always keeping busy,” she said on her way out. “Even when there’s nothing to do.”

We thanked her for the cake.

“Six files,” Jared announced when she was gone. “The shortest one is nine seconds and the longest is forty-two seconds.”

“Play the long one,” Pratchett said.

“Long one, coming up,” Jared said, double-clicking a file.

“Awwwww!” Hogue said.

He was right—it was cute.

Totally filling the frame of Jared’s monitor was a fat brown bird trying to eat a worm longer than the bird was. The bird flipped the worm around in its beak, trying to find the end.

“Get it!” Jared said.

“You can do it!” I shouted.

The worm was having none of it. It twisted and writhed, wrapping itself around the bird’s head. The bird hopped around on the branch, blinded by its own lunch. Finally it grabbed the worm close enough to its end to begin swallowing it whole. Ten seconds later, it was all over and the bird fluttered out of the frame.

Our smiles had frozen, then faded.

“Dang,” Hogue said. “That was cold.”

“Ice cold,” Jared said.

But on the next video we hit gold. A man in a short-sleeved shirt and a ball cap entered the camera’s frame.

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