Hit and Run Read online

  First U.S. edition published in 2014 by Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  Text copyright © 2003 by Norah McClintock.

  All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with Scholastic Canada Ltd.

  All U.S. rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

  Darby Creek

  A division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  241 First Avenue North

  Minneapolis, MN 55401 U.S.A.

  For reading levels and more information, look up this title at

  www.lernerbooks.com.

  Front cover: © Jan Stromme/Stone/Getty Images.

  Main body text set in Janson Text LT Std 11.5/15

  Typeface provided by Adobe Systems.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McClintock, Norah.

  Hit and run / by Norah McClintock.

  p. cm. — (Mike & Riel ; #1)

  Originally published by Scholastic Canada, 2003.

  Summary: Fifteen-year-old Mike McGill has been living with his Uncle Billy since his mother’s death. Only ten years older than Mike, Billy loves to party, and doesn’t pay much attention when Mike starts getting in trouble. But Mike’s history teacher, an ex-cop name Riel, does pay attention. Especially when long-hidden information starts coming to light that makes it seem that the death of Mike’s mother might not have been an accident after all.

  ISBN 978–1–4677–2605–4 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978–1–4677–2612–2 (eBook)

  [1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Teachers—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M478414184Hi 2014

  [Fic]—dc23

  2013017548

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 – SB – 12/31/13

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-2612-2 (pdf)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-5099-8 (ePub)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-5098-1 (mobi)

  PROLOGUE

  “Why?” I said the night before it happened. “Why does Billy have to come over?”

  “What’s wrong with Billy?” my mother said. “You like Billy.”

  Sure, I liked Billy. I liked him a lot. He let me watch TV as long as I wanted. All I had to do was promise that I’d scoot upstairs as soon as we heard Mom’s footsteps on the porch and that I wouldn’t tell on him. And he never made me brush my teeth. He never even mentioned teeth. But that wasn’t the point.

  “I’m nearly twelve,” I said. “I can look after myself. Vin’s parents don’t get a babysitter for him all the time.” Vin was my best friend.

  “Well, I’m not Vin’s parents,” my mother said. “And you’re barely eleven. Too young to be left home alone. When you are twelve, we’ll talk.”

  “But that’s almost a whole year away.”

  My mother smiled and kissed my cheek. “Then we’ll talk in almost a whole year,” she said.

  The day it happened, Billy picked me up at Mrs. McNab’s, where I usually went after school, and took me home to—I hated the word—babysit me. Still, if I had to have a babysitter—which, if you ask me, I really didn’t—Billy was probably the best choice. After all, he was my uncle. Up until a couple of years ago, he had lived with us. Even after he moved out, he came around a lot, usually at supper time. Mom never minded. Well, except lately. Lately, things had been a little rough between the two of them. They’d fought big-time when Billy showed up a while back with an Xbox console for me—an early Christmas present, Billy had called it.

  “It’s months until Christmas,” Mom had said. Then Mom and I had fought when she made Billy take it back.

  The day it happened, Mom didn’t come home after work. She said she had a million errands to run, which was why Billy was there. He ordered pizza, and we ate it in front of the TV. We were watching a baseball game when I heard sirens.

  “Jeez,” Billy said, grabbing the remote and pumping up the volume. “That’s one thing I don’t miss about this place. It’s like living in a war zone or something.”

  There’s a fire station a couple of blocks west of where I live, a police station a few blocks south, and a hospital a few blocks north. Fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances are always racing around, sirens blaring. I’m so used to it that I hardly notice it anymore. It’s just part of the noise wallpaper.

  Someone knocked on the door.

  Billy muttered as he heaved himself up off the couch to answer it. I felt sorry for whoever it was. It was never a good idea to get between Billy and whatever sporting event he happened to be watching.

  I heard the front door open. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Billy step outside. Then Bautista hit a home run, tying up the game. It wasn’t until the next inning was half over that I realized that Billy had been gone for a long time. When a set of commercials came on, I went to the door to find out what had happened to him. I saw flashing lights up near Danforth Avenue. There was a crowd of people in the street. Then I saw Billy walking out of the crowd, coming back down the street toward our house. Two uniformed police officers walked with him. They stopped on the sidewalk and stayed there while Billy came up the porch steps and said, “I’m going to call Kathy.” Kathy was Billy’s girlfriend. “I’m going to ask her to stay with you for a while, okay, Mikey? I gotta go somewhere.”

  “Did they arrest you?” I asked. I couldn’t think of any other reason why Billy would have to go with the cops, and why the two cops at the end of the walk looked so somber.

  When Kathy came over, Billy whispered something to her. She looked like she was going to cry, and that scared me. Now I was sure Billy had been arrested. I wished Mom would hurry home so she could straighten everything out.

  “You be good,” Billy said to me. “Don’t give Kathy any grief, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “What should I tell Mom when she gets home?”

  “It’s going to be okay,” Billy said. He hugged me, which should have told me something. Then he went with the two cops.

  CHAPTER ONE

  FOUR YEARS LATER

  “We’re waiting, Mr. McGill,” Riel said. Mister Riel.

  It figured. Every time homework was passed forward for him to collect, he went through the pile looking for mine. When it wasn’t there, he always said something—in front of the whole class.

  I ducked down and rummaged through my backpack. If you ask me, I put on a pretty good show too. Before I straightened up, I slapped a 100-percent-panic-stricken look on my face, like, jeez, how could this have happened—again?

  “Problem, Mr. McGill?”

  Someone near the back of the class guffawed. I would have bet every cent in my pocket that it was Vin.

  “Uh, I guess I must have left it at home,” I said. Where was the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences when you needed it? Hey, guys, it’s Oscar night, and I’ve just given the performance of a lifetime.

  Riel wasn’t impressed. “You don’t live far from here, do you, Mr. McGill?”

  “Couple of blo— ” Hey, wait a minute. How did he know that? The guy had been freaking me out for the past month. He was new to the school and brand new to teaching, but he had acted like he knew me the first time he saw me, and he’d been picking on me ever since.

  Riel glanced at the clock. He opened one of his desk drawers, took out a slip of paper, scribbled something onto it, and held it out to me. I stared at his outstretched hand.

  “Well, come on,” he said.

  I stood up and glanced at Vin, who shrugged. I shuffled to the front of the class and took
the piece of paper. It was a hall pass.

  “We’ve got forty-five minutes of class time left,” Riel said. “It shouldn’t take you more than fifteen or twenty minutes to get home, get your assignment, and bring it back here.”

  I stared at the pass. He was calling my bluff.

  “I could just bring it in next time,” I said. “That’d be easier.”

  “Bringing in your homework when it’s due would be easier, Mr. McGill,” Riel said. “I’m giving you twenty minutes. And I guess I don’t have to tell you what happens if you don’t show up here before the bell rings.”

  I shook my head. No, he didn’t have to tell me. I’d been around that dark corner often enough to know what lurked in the shadows. I glanced at Vin in the back of the room, then headed out the door and down the hall. I slowed down when I was out of sight of Riel’s classroom. Now what?

  I could go through the motions. I could walk home, stand on the porch for a couple of minutes, then walk back to school empty-handed. Or I could circle the block a few times. Or I could march back into Riel’s class right now and confess. It would all come down to the same thing—I had no homework to hand in, and that was going to cost me a detention.

  I decided to circle the block. Maybe inspiration would strike. Nothing’s impossible, right? Maybe I’d come up with the perfect excuse. Like, my house was robbed and the thief trashed everything, including my homework. Or, my uncle got tired of nagging me to clean up my room, so he scooped up everything in it and threw it in the garbage. Hmm, that wasn’t bad. Today was garbage day. There were empty garbage cans all over the sidewalk. And Riel didn’t know Billy was a slob. Or maybe—

  I spent the next fifteen minutes walking around, trying to decide whether to go back to school. And if I did, should I go back to Riel’s class or should I wait and go to my next class? Right, like math was going to be more thrill-packed than history. If it were day two, if I had music or gym, maybe I’d have gone back. But to show up and get ragged on by Riel and laughed at by everyone else in the class and then top off the day by sitting detention, what was the point?

  I walked up my street, right past my house, and kept going until I reached Danforth. From there I headed west, trudging past dozens of bars and restaurants until I reached the Bloor Viaduct. I walked across it, over the Parkway and the river, and kept on hiking until I hit Yonge Street. Then I headed south to the Eaton Centre. I groped in my pocket. Enough for a Big Mac and fries. And when I went to work tonight, my pay would be waiting for me. Considering my financial situation, though, it would probably be a good idea to talk to Mr. Scorza about getting a few more hours.

  I worked Friday nights and all day Saturday at a grocery store on Danforth. Box-boy/stock-boy/you-need-something-done-just-tell-me-boy. On Saturday I kept glancing up at the tiny, elevated office that perched in one of the front corners of the store. The glass was frosted so that it was hard to look in, but I’d been up there and I knew it was easy for Mr. Scorza to look out. The office was above the main floor, so he had a good view of the whole store, from the produce section to the left of the front doors to the dairy section in the back and all the aisles in between. I knew he was in there, too. I saw the boxy shadow of his body. I must have glanced at the door to that office a hundred times on Saturday, hoping Mr. Scorza would come out. If he did, I could check out what kind of mood he was in. If it seemed like a good one, I’d ask about the possibility of more hours. But Mr. Scorza didn’t come out, not once in the whole day, which was unusual. Did that mean he was in a rotten mood? Would his mood get even worse if I knocked on his door during my break?

  I decided to wait. I guess that makes me some kind of coward, afraid to go talk to the boss. But by the end of the day I’d bagged maybe five hundred sacks of groceries. My feet were sore. I’d been standing in practically the same place since I started at eight in the morning. Saturdays were always the worst. People just kept coming through, and they were all in a hurry. Some of them wanted their groceries delivered, which meant I had to pack them in cardboard boxes and staple order numbers on the boxes and carry them out to the delivery van. The rest of the people had to have their stuff packed in plastic bags. A lot of the bigger stores were strictly bag-your-own. The customers had to stand at the end of big metal counters and scoop their own groceries into bags. Some places even charged for the bags. But not Mr. Scorza. His place was too small to have customers standing around. And a lot of them came to the store because we delivered. That made Mr. Scorza’s store special in the neighborhood. It also meant that he needed a lot of help around the place.

  When my shift was over I took another look at the frosted glass. I knew he was in there. But the store was crowded. Everyone would see me climb those stairs, which meant that everyone would see me come down again, and if I didn’t look happy when I did, everyone would know.

  Vin and Sal were waiting for me out on the sidewalk. Sal was sucking back root beer from a can. An unlit cigarette dangled from Vin’s mouth. The story he told everyone was that he was trying to quit. The real deal was that smoking made him sick. But cigarettes made you cool, according to Vin. Even better, he said, girls admired a guy who was trying to quit.

  Vin—Vincent—Taglia is my best friend. I’ve known him since kindergarten. He used to steal my toy cars, right up until the day I hauled off and punched him in the eye. After that he stole other kids’ stuff, and he and I played with it. Salvatore San Miguel is a newer friend. His family came here from Guatemala a few years back. Sal’s dad was a university professor back home, only he got on the wrong side of politics and got himself arrested and tortured, according to Sal. Sal says the family had to run away in the middle of the night. They had to leave behind everything they owned. Sal’s dad was so messed up by prison and everything that happened to him in there that he never managed to get his act together and start teaching again. He works nights as a cleaner in an office building downtown. Sal’s mother has a job teaching other immigrants how to use computers. They get a lot of help from Sal’s aunt, who came here a long time ago to go to medical school. She’s a doctor now.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  Vin grinned but said nothing.

  “He’s got a big night lined up,” Sal said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  I looked at Vin, who smiled again. As we walked down Danforth he told me about a girl he had met at a party at his cousin Frank’s place. Vin comes from a big family. He has a couple of dozen first cousins, and they all live in Toronto. They all seem pretty tight, too.

  “She’s in a play at Frank’s school tonight,” Vin said, his eyes gleaming. “She invited me to come.”

  “She probably invited everyone she knows,” Sal said. “You know, fill up all the seats so she can feel like a big success.”

  Vin punched him on the arm.

  “What about you?” I asked Sal. “What’re you doing tonight?”

  Suddenly he didn’t look so happy.

  “My aunt is having a party for my father,” he said. “It’s his birthday, and she wants to cheer him up. Probably it’ll just make him suicidal. One more year when he isn’t teaching.”

  “Yeah,” I said. If I’d been a girl, maybe I would have given him a hug. Sal always talks about his dad like it was no big deal—yeah, my dad’s kinda nuts, yeah, he’s always reading books of Spanish poetry, always mumbling poems under his breath, so what? Sal’s dad is a short, wiry guy who has this strange, sort of haunted, look in his eyes, like maybe he sees things that other people don’t and those things are scary. But when Sal talks about him, what he says sounds like it’s just life, just the way it is. Maybe that’s what he really thinks. Except that if it is, how come you can always see these tight little lines at the corners of his mouth when he mentions his dad? And how come, when he says those things, he never looks you in the eye? Never.

  “Great. While you two are partying, I’ll be sitting home watching TV,” I said.

  “No Jen?” Vin said.


  I shook my head. An old school friend of Jen’s mother was visiting for the weekend. The friend just happened to have a kid Jen’s age so, of course, Jen had to be there to entertain. If I knew Mrs. Hayes, she had made it clear that entertaining did not mean introducing the kid to me. But there was no point in explaining that to Vin, not unless I wanted him to go on and on about how I was probably missing out on a threesome, like that was something Vin knew anything about as opposed to just something he had read in a magazine.

  We turned off Danforth and fanned out across the sidewalk. Vin was telling us about the girl again. She was fashion-model hot, Vin said. He’d met her at the party and she had flirted with him. Sal laughed so hard that root beer shot out of his nose.

  “Yeah, right,” he said. “Some model is gonna flirt with you.”

  “Hey, I’m telling you,” Vin said. Either it had really happened, or he had managed to convince himself that it had. Maybe he should be trying out for a part in a school play. He definitely had sincerity nailed. The girl had hung around him all evening, he said. She’d danced with him almost exclusively.

  “Yeah, right,” Sal snorted. “You. Dancing.”

  “Slow dancing,” Vin said. The dreamy look in his eyes was also convincing.

  We were heading over to Vin’s place when I heard a clattering sound. I looked across the street and saw a metal shopping cart crash to the sidewalk, spilling cans and vegetables and fruit everywhere. Mrs. Jhun was standing midway up the steps leading to her porch, one arm outstretched, one hand clutching the railing. She was staring straight ahead but didn’t seem to be looking at anything. Then her whole body wavered like an unsteady pile of boxes that was about to topple over. I dashed across the street. I probably should have looked both ways first. A taxi honked at me and zoomed by so close that I swear I felt the door brush my arm.

  “Hey!” Vin yelled after me.

  I bounded up the steps and caught Mrs. Jhun by the arm. She was tiny. The top of her head barely reached my shoulder. I could have picked her up like a sack of groceries, there was so little to her.