Shot Through the Heart (3 page)

On the way to Lowe’s, we circled by Drew’s and saw that I could use a squirt gun, no problem. A massive oak tree stands in the perfect spot at the side of his house, within easy shooting distance of both his garage and front door. The plan is for me to walk the mile to his place at four a.m., cutting through the woods between our houses to sneak into his yard from behind, climb the oak, then wait. That way, even if Drew leaves extra early, I’ll already be in position. Simultaneous hits will prevent Grayson and Drew from warning each other.

“Found it!”

I spin to see Peyton crouching down and reaching for something on the bottom shelf. Her shirt is hiked up in back to reveal a thin strip of skin that’s still tan from the summer. As I walk toward her, she bends further for a better look at the shelf’s contents, causing the front of her shirt to swing down enough in the front to give me a two-second peek at a flat, equally tan stomach before she yanks the fabric back in place. As much time as she spends sitting on her butt studying, it surprises me to see that she doesn’t have a bit of muffin top.

In fact, her bod is head to toe smokin’.
Seriously
smokin’.

Funny how, after all these years hanging out at the Lindors’ house, I haven’t noticed before. Has Peyton never been in a swimsuit near me? Or was I so busy horsing around whenever Josh and I went to the town pool that I didn’t enjoy the view?

Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to have Peyton as a fake girlfriend. I could certainly do worse.

I wipe my palm over my face, squelching the thought as soon as it enters my brain. The fake girlfriend idea has to be one of Josh’s craziest, not to mention the fact that Peyton is Josh’s
sister
. Zero possibility of a hook-up without Josh breaking my jaw.

“You find it?” I ask.

“I think so,” Peyton loops her blond hair behind her ears, then ducks her head between the shelves and reaches in. A few feet back, there’s a thick, industrial-sized spool wound with dark yellow tubing.

“No wonder we couldn’t see it.” I squat beside her to help. The shelf is an open metal grid, making it difficult to slide the spool out without the screws on its underside catching in shelf’s crossbars. We grab the sides of the spool, pulling it forward. I can’t help but laugh at how ridiculous we must look with our rear ends sticking into the aisle.

“Someone’s going to hit me with their shopping cart,” Peyton says as we heave the tubing a few inches closer to the front of the shelf. She looks around the back of the spool at me. “How would I explain that injury to emergency room docs?”

“I’m more worried about Josh,” I tell her. “If he sees my butt hanging out and realizes I can’t stop him—”

“He’d have a hard time deciding which of us to kick first.” She feigns a look of panic before sliding her gaze toward the aisle. “We should move faster. If he comes looking for us, the temptation will be too much for him.”

Finally, we maneuver the heavy spool to the front of the shelf. While I unhook my shirt from where it’s caught in the metal grid, Peyton wiggles her way out, then sits back on her heels.

“Peyton? What in the world are you doing down there?”

I nearly bang my head at the unexpected voice. I see feet behind me—two sets, both in jeweled sandals with painted toenails—but can’t tell who the girls are until I scoot backward into the aisle.

“Um, hello,” the taller one says to me. They’re both juniors whose names I don’t know, though I think the one who said hello is the twin sister of a guy on my soccer team. They’re looking at Peyton and me as if they’ve stumbled upon Eastwood High’s juiciest piece of gossip.

“Hi,” I say. Lame.

“Hey, Kerry, hey, Emily. How are you guys?” Peyton greets them with the same cheer as if she’d met them for a movie or game of putt-putt.

“Uh, we’re fine. So—?” The tall one, who I take to be Kerry, makes a swirly hand motion toward the bottom shelf and raises one dark eyebrow.

“Stupid errand for my mom,” Peyton says, a convincing level of irritation in her voice. “She’s packing a bunch of cartons and wanted me to find one of those supersize rolls of bubble wrap. The guy at the help desk said it was on a bottom shelf in this aisle, but I can’t find it. I figured it might be down here, but…” She shrugs. She’s babbling, but I don’t think the two girls have noticed. They’re still trying to figure out why I was crawling into the Lowe’s shelves with Peyton. They probably heard us laughing down there.

Peyton turns to me, her blue eyes wide and apologetic, as if she’s embarrassed to have bothered me. “Thanks for stopping to help me move that thing out of the way so I could look for the bubble wrap. It was really nice of you, but the guy obviously sent me to the wrong aisle.”

“Yeah, you might want to find another person to ask. Good luck.” Taking the hint, I brush myself off and tell her I’ll see her around, give the girls a half-hearted wave, then go hunting for Josh. I spot him paying for the funnel and signal him to meet me at the car.

Once he’s outside, he waggles his cell phone at me, then points across the lot. “Pey says, ‘Subway in five, clerk cutting tubing.’ What happened?”

I explain as Josh and I cross the parking lot and enter the restaurant. While he’s placing his order, I receive a text from Molly asking if I had a good day and wishing me good luck in Senior Assassin. A second text arrives while I’m filling my soda cup, adding,
but u know im gonna win!

When Josh asks an employee for extra napkins, I turn my back to him and discreetly type a quick,
we’ll see…good luck
. Hopefully, Molly will view it as more friendly than flirtatious. I turn off the phone and slide it into my pocket as Peyton sails in through the glass door.

“Sorry about abandoning you, Peyton,” I say as she slides into the booth next to me and eyes the food I bought for her. Josh swore Peyton’s fave order is a footlong Veggie Delite with extra pickles on wheat bread, Baked Lays, and a Diet Coke. It looks bland to me—I’m all about the Chicken Teriyaki—but I decided that since Josh and I stuck her at Lowe’s buying our tubing, the least I could do was have her order ready when she arrived. “I couldn’t figure out why you were telling that bubble wrap story, but—”

“I didn’t want anyone putting two and two together.” Peyton lifts the top of the sub, inspects the contents, then smiles her thanks. “Grayson’s brother is tight with Kerry and Emily; he may even be going out with Kerry. If the either girl mentions seeing me buying rubber tubing with Connor right after Grayson’s brother saw me driving by his house, they might realize that you and Connor have Grayson as your target. And that you’re building a balloon launcher. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out where you’d need to set up if you wanted to attack him anywhere near his house.”

I can’t believe she thought of that on the fly. “I’m impressed.”

“No kidding. Thanks,” Josh says. He’s looking past Peyton, out the large glass windows plastered with posters of Subway’s bread selections, to study the comings and goings in the parking lot. Last year, Josh and I mocked the seniors and their paranoia. Now we completely get it. With so much money on the line, you can’t be too careful. At this very moment, anyone could be following us, studying our routines to map out the best places to hide and make a hit on us.

“See anything?” I ask, resting my arm across the back of the booth so I can turn and look over my shoulder without being obvious.

“Nope. No one out there but landscapers and contractors running into Lowe’s.”

My hand grazes Peyton’s back as I spin to face the table and finish my sandwich. She doesn’t look up from her soda, but I’m hyper-aware of how close we’re sitting. Her leg is so close to mine under the table that the hairs on the side of my leg keep brushing her jeans.

“Wanna spend the night at my house tonight?” Josh asks.

Peyton twitches. I feel it more than see it.

“I don’t know—” Now her leg is right against mine.

“We could build the launcher tonight, then I’ll drop you off at the end of Drew’s street early tomorrow morning,” Josh says between bites of his turkey sub. “My mom said she’d let me park in the garage tonight so no one can hit me in the driveway.”

“It’s a weeknight, so I probably shouldn’t.” Would Peyton think it’s strange? I’ve spent the night at Josh’s hundreds of times since we were little, but today feels different. Does Peyton notice what I’m noticing? “Besides, my parents are skeptical of all the time I’ve spent on Senior Assassin, and it hasn’t even started yet.”

“C’mon, Connor.”

My cell phone picks that moment to vibrate in my pocket. Five bucks says it’s Molly. Again.

“You two can argue in the car.” Peyton squashes up her sub wrapper and two-points it into the trash can. “I need to get that lab report done. Let’s go.”

When she leaves the booth, I miss the heat of her leg against mine. It’s annoying, and I blame Josh.

He never should have put the Peyton-as-girlfriend idea into my head. Because now I’m totally lusting after his sister.

Chapter Four |
Connor

T
wo thousand dollars. Two thousand dollars.

Two friggin’ grand.

Well, one grand, once Josh and I split it. But repeating the larger number to myself as I shiver in the tree alongside Drew’s house makes the leg cramping tolerable. I check my watch for what feels like the zillionth time. Five-thirty and still no sign of movement inside the house.

I’ve never considered it before, but being a real-life sniper must suck.

Resting my cheek against the cool, rough bark of the trunk, I survey the grass. I left footprints in the dew as I crossed Drew’s lawn, but now, ninety minutes later, they’ve shrunk until they’re nearly impossible to detect. When I first climbed the tree, I worried the well-defined footprints leading from the woods to the oak would give away my hiding place. I stared at the discolored grass for a long time, wondering if I should climb down and try to brush it over. In the end, I decided that being out in the open posed a greater risk. If Drew didn’t see me fluffing the grass, the neighbors might, and grass-fluffing is highly suspicious behavior in Eastwood, Massachusetts, at 5 a.m.

It’s risky enough that I’m lurking in a tree.

My perch is level with the top of the garage doors, high enough that Drew shouldn’t be able to see me if he scans the yard from the front door or his living room windows before venturing outside, but low enough to make an accurate shot when he approaches his car. His ancient green Hyundai is parked about halfway down the driveway, so he’ll have to pass under me to get to it if he comes from the front of his house or the garage. It’s the perfect spot, as long as the neighbors don’t look my way when they hop in the shower. If I twist to look behind me, I can see straight into their bathroom window. No shade or frosted glass to obscure the view, either.

If the neighbors call the cops, my parents will veto any more early morning stakeouts, if not my participation in the tournament altogether. They’ve warned me since I was a little kid that they never, ever wanted to see my name in the police log. We’re a small enough town that it’s still printed in the local paper; the log’s the first thing everyone reads when their free copy of the
Eastwood Chronicle
arrives each Thursday. They’re dying to know who was nabbed for DUI, who hosted a loud party past midnight, or—in the most hilarious entry of all—who sang in the shower in such a screechy voice that Eastwood Animal Control received multiple reports of an injured raccoon.

A low clunk comes from inside Drew’s garage. I think. I’ve heard so many chipmunks and squirrels rustling in the woods since I arrived that my mind is starting to play tricks on me. I anchor my feet in the vee of the trunk, then remain motionless, gun aimed down, hoping it really is a human making the noise this time.

The sound of a deadbolt flipping cuts through the morning air. The side door to the garage creaks, then opens. I swallow, my heart beating so hard I can feel it in my throat as I shift the gun to point the muzzle at the door. A blond head pops out, cautiously looking left, then right, to see if anyone’s around. I freeze, finger still on the trigger, as Drew’s mom lets the dog out to pee.

She’s in a thin pink nightgown and from this vantage point, I can see right down the front. She isn’t wearing a bra.

Please, please, don’t look up.
If she catches me, I’m going to catch hell. I suspect my mom would rather get a call from the cops than one from Drew’s mom. My mom won’t want to hear my explanation that dozens of my classmates are hiding out in trees and behind bushes all over Eastwood, and that Drew himself is no exception. She won’t care that I had no intention of seeing what I’m seeing. All she’ll know is that I caught Drew’s mom in next-to-nakedness.

The dog snuffles around the azaleas near the side of the garage before lifting its leg. It’s nearly done when its ears prick up and it swivels its wide head, sniffing.

My face heats. Dread sours my gut. I’m so busted.

“Angel! Get in the house. Come on!”

The dog remains still, its gaze riveted on the woods, despite its owner’s begging. A low growl comes from the depths of its chest. I bet it can smell me, or maybe hear me breathing, but can’t figure out where I am.

Drew’s mom tiptoes into the wet grass and grabs the dog by the collar, urges it inside, then slams the side door and clicks the deadbolt. A few seconds later, there’s the thunk of an interior door. The street returns to silence; nothing more can be heard than the trill of early-morning birds and the occasional scuffle of chipmunks. I close my eyes in relief at the near miss, only to scrabble and grab at the bark to keep from falling out of the tree when I lose my balance.