Then one scorcher of a day in August (middle school, as I recall), a thresher shark showed up when he caught the attention of the local police. It seemed one freckled boy told every other boy in the school yard that my brother had bragged he owned a shed containing every automatic weapon imaginable, even (I kid you not) a suitcase nuke straight out of Fallout. They all bought this lie, of course, only one of the ugly kids hed teased had ratted him out. Shocker, right? Next thing you know our puritan principal summoned him and the cops and when the boys in blue arrived, they cuffed him like hed pinched every girls pink bum in the yard.
I sat there mumbling and trembling in Ms. Needles math class thinking I was next on the hit list. Had I overheard the words search warrant? And that odd scent that one of the cops dragged with her. A dead animal? No not quite. It reeked of a dead human.
Truth be told I was more worried about my secret stash. Theyd steal my porn stash and take Suzanne Somers away from me forever, I was sure of it. Asses would sting (mine) and if not by Dad than surely that sharkey cop with the razor-thin mustache whose last name sounded an awful lot like thresher.