Junior's Luck

Junior's Luck-Chapter 15

Still tugging at his zipper, which had stuck part way up, Kelsey trotted across the barn to where he had directed the flashlight earlier. He found the ladder to the loft in the striped light that filtered through the front doors and wall.

"You first," he said to Junior, who had followed him without discussion or argument. "It leads to the loft."

Junior was only a few rungs up the ladder and climbing ‌when Kelsey heard vehicle doors slam shut, followed by crunching footsteps and the metallic jingle of keys. Someone yanked on the double doors at the front of the barn. Kelsey joined Junior on the ladder, pushing against his friend's butt, trying to force him to climb faster.

The huge doors swung open. The striped light became solid and bright. Kelsey looked down from the ladder before he slid onto the deck of the loft. He saw everything now, including the puddle in the far corner where he had peed. A thin stream of his pee trickled across the floor. What would the people entering the barn suspect when they found a pool of piss? Kelsey wished he had waited.

He located the trapdoor and something else that made his heart contract and sent an electric shock through his arms and legs. There, in the middle of the floor, was a long, narrow, rectangular pit. Somehow, he and Junior had not fallen into it. Junior's luck must still be strong, Kelsey thought.

There was a hole like that in the floor of the old shop at the farm implement company where his father was the manager. It was a grease pit. Mechanics used to go into it to work under trucks and tractors in the days before hydraulic lifts. That's what Kelsey's father had told him. So the building wasn't a barn at all, but a large garage.

The light below changed from the harsh beams of headlights to the cold white glow of buzzing fluorescent tubes. Kelsey and Junior remained in a kind of twilight and watched. It reminded Kelsey of observing a lighted stage from the balcony of a theater. He and Junior waited for the actors to take their positions.

Outside, an engine revved and grew louder until the noise filled the garage. The back of a large van rolled into view and stopped short of the grease pit.

Two men appeared from around either side of the truck and opened the rear cargo doors, while a third man descended the ramp that led into the pit. He unlocked and opened a door. Using hand trucks, the three men, plus a fourth one who joined them, unloaded wooden crates from the back of the van. They wheeled them into the grease pit and through the doorway, disappearing from view for several minutes, then reappearing to take on another load. They worked in methodical silence, occasionally giving each other brief commands.

This continued for about thirty minutes. The last man out of the pit closed the door and turned off the lights. The truck pulled away, and the doors to the garage thunked shut. Kelsey heard the click of a lock, the truck's engine, and the shifting through the gears as it drove off.

"Drugs," Junior said in that same ominous voice he used when he said the word domes. "I counted them. They took out forty-two crates of drugs. Probably worth millions on the street."

Junior had picked up this kind of talk from the TV news.

"What's ordnance?" Kelsey asked.

"I don't know." The question seemed to have annoyed Junior. "Why do you want to know that? You just saw forty-two crates of drugs? That's the evidence we need to get these guys."

"The crates said 'Danger: Military Ordnance' on the side. Something about rockets."

"Rockets? Are you sure it said rockets on those boxes?"

"Yeah, didn't you see it?"

"I don't see so good when I'm tired like this. Wait! Rockets? That's it!"