My Partner In Crime

Chapter 4

"Hey, Dodge." I said when we were driving.

"'Sup." He nodded.

"What do you call a guy with a rubber shoe?" I asked, voice trembling. It did this whenever I was about to tell a stupid joke.

"What?" He asked with a flat voice.

I was silent for half an instant. "Roberto." The corners of his lips turned up, but he stopped the car (it was okay because it was an empty road).

"Get out." He said, shaking his head. After another second on the road, he posed the question: "What about a lady with a rubber shoe?"

"Roberta?" I tried. Dodge did the quick breathing thing that people do when they see something funny on the internet.

We were soon at our destination, where we were met with busted silos and old, abandoned barns. There were old 'relics'  like rinky-dink old cars and stuff. Tall grass was clustered around the area like in bunches. I fixed the collar of my shirt and we got out of the car. 

"How about I go this way and you go that?" Dodge proposed. I nodded and we went our separate ways. I picked through the grass and found myself in an old barn. The smell of dust and rotted wood was so thick in the air that I could barely smell the dead cat carcass in the corner. I looked over the walls and at the worn shelves, inside of rusty buckets full of cobwebs, and around all the corners. 

"Hey Dodge, come over here!" I yelled. He was in the barn in a matter of seconds. 

"Did you find something?" He asked, looking around the hay bales.

"No, but I feel like there's going to be something in here and I think we should work together to find it so it doesn't take as long." I said. He nodded in agreement and we began looking. After the two of us searching the barn as thoroughly as the FBI, I sat down on a hay bale and pondered. Dodge saw that I had stopped scouring the barn, so he sat beside me. 

"Why can't they just email us?" I muttered. 

"Maybe they like to see us struggle." Dodge said with a shrug. "But hey, we can agree that these puzzles won't be our downfall." He held his hand out to me like we were about to close some major business deal. I shook it, and much to my shock, he gripped that hand and pulled me close to him. It was so quick, I didn't have a chance to fix myself. At this point, our faces were just an inch apart. "Is this okay?" He asked.

I didn't give him a verbal answer. Instead, I swiftly draped my arms over the back of his neck and pulled him over to me and kissed him. His right hand found the small of my back and pushed me so close to him that there was no distance between our bodies. His other hand was on the back of my neck. He then lowered me down onto the bale, so that I was laying and he was leaning over me. We were about to resume kissing when I noticed something spray painted across the ceiling in white.

CCILLO

"Dodge, look." I said, breaking the kissing. He pulled me back up and we worked to decode it.

"Cuh-killo?" His brows furrowed.

"Cuh-sillo?" 

"C... See." He said, having solved the first bit of the weird riddle.

"Silo!" I shouted triumphantly.

"See the silo." Dodge said slowly, soon grabbing my arm and us running to the bunch of silos. There were lines and numbers all across one in white spray paint. "That wasn't here before!"

"It wasn't?" My eyes widened. Dodge picked up and rock and threw it up. It landed with its side dotted with wet paint.

"We should go." He decided. We went back to the car.

"What did it say?" I asked after he had started driving. It became a sort of unspoken agreement not to acknowledge what had occurred in the barn.

"We go back tomorrow night," he said, "but whoever wrote that was obviously still there."

"That's so vague and scary." I said, looking at my side mirror and watching it fade into the distance. 

"Want to get some lunch or something?" He asked.

"Sure." 

We ended up going to some small place on the way outskirt of Carp, where they turned out to make absolutely massive sandwiches that were always accompanied by potato chips. 

"What's your favorite movie?" I asked when we were waiting for our food.

"My favorite movie?" He looked up. I nodded. "Beetlejuice."

"Safe choice." I said with a smile.

"Yours?"

"The Breakfast Club." I said.

"I love The Breakfast Club!" He exclaimed. (I wrote a play based on The Breakfast Club and the Churchill Club) 

"What, because you relate to Allison?" I joked.

"Hard blow. Yes, I love the because Allison, the super-freak, is my spirit animal." Dodge added, a small smile on his face. "But if I'm Allison, then you're John."

"That's horrible!"

"John was a good guy!"

"Have you seen the movie?!" 

"Yeah!"

"John was such a man-whore!" I said pointedly. "He banged Claire at the end!"

"Okay, he did not bang Claire." Dodge leaned back.

"He was probably going to, though." I pointed out.

"Probably, but he didn't." He said. "Let's compromise: he probably banged her, but didn't during the film."

"Deal." I nodded, holding my hand out for him to shake. His grip was firm. I didn't realize that he had put something in my own hand until I retracted it. There were three dollars in my hand. "Hey!"

"You paid five dollars when we drove to the lake, but you only had two apple juices. That's your change." Dodge shrugged. "I'm paying, by the way.

"No." I shook my head. 

"What, because you have your wallet?" Dodge retorted.

"I don't, but guess what!" For years, I had been hiding money in a pocket I had carved into the sole of my shoe.

"What are you doing?" He peered over to see my take one of my shoes off and uncover sixty dollars. "Are you kidding me?!"

"I have been waiting for this moment since I was twelve." I declared. "I'll pay."

"Split the bill?" Dodge suggested.

"Split the bill." I agreed.