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puke-ugly
sign. "Nobody lives here, nobody's gonna care. They'll just fix it
up again."
    "Yeah?"
    I smiled my sweet, innocent smile. "Yeah.
It'll make them happy, give them more work to do. They'll get more
money. Everybody's happy when they have more money."
    "What if we get caught?"
    "We're not gonna get caught."
    I slugged him in the arm, not hard enough to
hurt, just hard enough to let him know I was getting tired of his
shit.
    "Don't be stupid," I said.
    I walked to the back yard gate and pretty
soon Bobby followed me like I knew he would. The sidewalk around
the side of the house was littered with cigarette butts.
    "Look at this." I kicked at a cigarette butt
with my toe. "I bet they'll blame the whole thing on these guys,
smoking on the job."
    "Smoking'll kill you," Bobby said.
    Bobby's old man smoked but it hadn't killed
him yet. Drinking hadn't done it either. Maybe he should take up
running. I heard that killed a lot of people.
    I opened the gate. The hinges creaked and
the gate sagged, its wooden slats scraping against the concrete
sidewalk. Bobby winced and looked over his shoulder like it was an
alarm or something, but I knew it didn't matter. All the houses
around here have tall wooden backyard fences. Everybody wants
privacy, and everybody else gives it to them. It's rude to peek
through the cracks in the fence to see what's going on in your
neighbor's back yard. Once we got behind the fence, we could do
almost anything and no one would know.
    Bobby walked through the gate and I closed
it behind us like we belonged there. No sweat.
    Most of the backyard was just dirt, but some
of it had been lawn before the workmen trampled it down. Their big,
ugly boot prints were all over the place. Scraps of lumber and
little bits of chalky walling and rusty nails were ground into the
dirt right along with more cigarette butts. In the back corner a
couple of piles of dog shit drew flies. I wrinkled my nose against
the smell. Debris from inside the house—big pieces of walling and
insulation and scraps of wood and little bits of wire—was piled
against the inside of the fence, and more stuff was jammed in a
battered metal trash can next to the back gate.
    The guys who worked here were slobs. Good
thing. Hidden underneath all that debris was the little red "Sold"
sign I pulled off the top of the Realty Masters sign the day
before. If they'd cleaned up their mess they would have found it.
Some people make it so easy to play the game. They deserve what
they get.
    The sliding glass patio door was unlocked,
just like it was yesterday.
    "Easy," I said. "Told you."
    I slid the door open and grinned at Bobby.
It wasn't my sweet, innocent grin, more like a shared secret kind
of grin. My playing the game grin. The best grin of all.
    The door opened into a room I guessed was
supposed to be the dining room. A paint-splattered plastic sheet
covered dirty carpet. The room was empty except for three doors
propped up against the walls. Yesterday the white paint on the
doors had still been wet. Now the doors were dry, but the house
still stank as bad as it had the day before, maybe even worse
because it was so hot inside.
    I looked at the white door closest to the
patio door. The scratches I'd made the day before with a nail in
the new paint at the bottom of the lowest panel were still there.
Not quite my initials—I'm not stupid—but enough of a mark that if
anybody looked close, they'd know somebody did it on purpose. I
wondered if anybody would notice before they put the door back
where it belonged.
    "You do that?" Bobby asked, leaning in to
look at the door.
    "Yeah." I laughed. "Cool, huh?"
    "You're a freak, you know that?"
    If anybody else had said that, I would have
slugged them. But Bobby knows he can call me that and I won't get
mad.
    "And you're the freak's friend, so what does
that make you?"
    "Freak Man!"
    Burger Man. Rebound Man. Now Freak Man. That
was just too much. Bobby could always make me laugh. We stood there
on that