Pressure - By Jeff Strand Page 0,18

totally sick.”

“I know.”

“He should go to jail. I’ll bet you anything he killed the dog.”

I shook my head. “He couldn’t catch and kill a dog like that with a pocketknife.”

“Why not? Sure he could. Maybe Killer Fang was hurt. Maybe he did get hit by a car, but it only broke his legs, and so he couldn’t get away when Darren found him. You could kill a dog with a pocketknife, easy.”

“Maybe.”

“What are we gonna do?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “What do you think Peter would do if we told him?”

“Freak out and kill Darren.”

“He won’t kill anybody.”

“He should.”

“C’mon, we need to be serious. Nobody is going to kill Darren. We need to figure out what we’re going to tell Peter.”

“Everything,” said Jeremy.

“No. You’re right, he’d freak out, and then everybody will find out. You know Darren’ll tell about the strip club. And then we’ll all pay for it, big-time. Mr. Sevin will take away every bit of free time we’ve got until summer. We might even get kicked out.”

Somehow I didn’t think my parents would welcome me back into their home with open arms if I got expelled. My next stop would be military school. Probably in a remote location. Somewhere chilly.

“So we’re gonna let him get away with it?”

“No, but…” I trailed off, unable to think of an alternate solution. We certainly had to let Peter know that his dog was dead, but while I hated the thought of letting Darren go unpunished, was it worth getting in that much trouble ourselves?

I truly believed that Killer Fang had been dead when Darren found him. But maybe next time the dog wouldn’t already be dead.

Would he stop at dogs?

“What if we…I don’t know, what if we kept it between us, and we just made sure he never did anything like that again?”

“Kept it between the three of us or the four of us?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I’m not gonna babysit him for the rest of my life. I don’t care if I do get in trouble. He’s not gonna get away with this. Peter loved his dog!”

“I’m not saying he has to get away with it, just that we don’t have to get anybody else in on it.”

“So, what, you want us to give him a spanking or something? He cut our best friend’s dog’s tongue out! Just for fun!”

Jeremy was right; we couldn’t let Darren get away with this. But there had to be a way we could take care of the problem on our own. Maybe just knowing that he’d been caught would keep Darren from doing this kind of thing again, or maybe…

“I know what we could do,” I said.

“What?”

“We could scare him. You, me, and Peter can figure out a way to scare the hell out of him. We’ll scare him so bad that he will never, ever do something like this again in his entire life.”

Chapter Six

Getting back into the residence hall was ridiculously easy. Parents who paid the tuition with the expectation of a secure environment were getting ripped off, big-time.

On the way back, Jeremy and I worked out a plan. I would have preferred something a little more subtle and a little less cruel, but the end result was one that we could both live with. We also played Rock, Paper, Scissors to determine who had to tell Peter about Killer Fang. Paper covered rock and I won, but after we snuck back into the room I decided that Jeremy’s rage about the entire situation meant that he might reveal too much before we were ready, so at the last minute I offered to take on the miserable task.

Peter was still snoring. I shook him gently until he opened his eyes.

“What do you want?” he asked sleepily.

“I have to tell you about Killer Fang.”

Peter immediately sat up. “You found him? How is he?”

“He got…” My throat closed up and it took me a few seconds before I could continue. “He got hit by a car.”

Peter’s lower lip began to tremble. “He’s okay, though, right? He’s a pretty tough dog. I bet he made it through okay.”

“He got killed. Darren found him.”

“Darren doesn’t know for sure, does he? He could be wrong. Killer Fang’s a pretty smart dog. I don’t think he’d let himself get hit by a car. He wouldn’t do that.”

“He got killed,” I repeated.

“Oh.”

Peter rolled over on his stomach and buried his face in his pillow. His whole body began to quiver. I wasn’t sure how to console him, and after standing

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