Burning Midnight by Will McIntosh Read Free Book Online Page B

rise and stepped into a space littered with old tires, a rusting refrigerator, the front axle of a wagon, and plenty of broken glass.
    Hunter stopped, took a few steps back to the edge of what was obviously the Doodletown dump. She got on her knees. “I’ll start over here.” She pointed. “Why don’t you start at that end?”
    Sully surveyed the dump for a moment. “If we search this whole area it’s going to be too dark to find our way back.” The truth was, he was cold and tired. He wanted to go home and watch TV.
    Hunter looked at the sky. “We’ll leave ourselves time to make it back. It’s downhill, so it’ll be quicker. Let’s search as much of this as we can. We can come back if we don’t finish.”
    As Sully knelt on the frozen ground and ran his hand inside the rim of a tire, he realized something. As deadly serious as he thought he was about this, Hunter was more serious. Or more desperate. In the car she claimed she’d been hunting full-time for the past two years, and if she really meant full-time, she wasn’t in school. She had no parents to fall back on. This was all she had. The worst bottom line for Sully was living in a basement in Pittsburgh, and although his mom kept warning him that they’d probably be moving there this summer, he had to admit it was nothing compared with what Hunter faced every day.
    Sully watched her in the fading light as she brushed snow off the ground, her eyebrows pinched, all of her attention on the hunt.
    He imitated her movements, brushing drifts of snow off rusty tin cans and broken glass. What must it be like, doing this every day? He’d always romanticized the life of hunters, but now he saw it wasn’t all excitement. It was a tedious, detail-oriented job.
    He exposed a corner of a glass jar, dug around it, clearing dead leaves. It was a mason jar, tinged pink. Either that, or the food someone had stored inside had turned pink over the years….
    “Oh,” Sully said. He leaned closer, squinting. Beneath the smoky glass was a pink curve. “Oh,” he said again, his tone pinched with dread, as if he’d found something that might be awful. A skull, or a finger. But what he dreaded was that he might be wrong about what he suspected that delicious pink curve was.
    Hunter rose. “What is it? Did you find something?”
    Sully felt around in the snow, found a stone, and brought it down on the jar. “Oh. Please let it be—”
    The top of a Hot Pink sphere peeked through the hole.
    “It is.
It is.
Oh, my God.” He smashed the sharp edges of the broken jar until he could reach in. Fingers working frantically, he tugged at the hard, slick surface until the sphere came loose.
    Sully stood and held it to his face as Hunter shrieked.
    Hot Pink. There was no mistaking that color. Hot Pink.
    Shouting in pure primordial joy, Hunter collided with him. He shoved the sphere into her hand, wrapped his arms around her waist, and lifted her in the air. She held the Hot Pink over her head as they whooped.
    It was a rarity five, worth, what? Twelve thousand dollars? More, if he found the right buyer.
    Sully put Hunter down. She held the sphere out to him and he put his hand over the top of it, partially covering both of her hands.
    “Oh, my God. I can’t believe it,” he said.
    “I’ve never found a five before. I’ve never found a
four
before.” She raised a hand to her mouth; it was shaking. “I can get my own place. I can buy an old motorcycle to get around.”
    “You’ll still let me tag along once you have your own ride, won’t you?”
    Hunter grinned. “Are you kidding? Mr. Cherry Red. Big marbles roll right out of their hiding places when you’re around.”
    It wasn’t a Cherry Red, not even close, but his share would be, what, close to five thousand dollars? It bought them time. It meant Sully didn’t have to leave his friends, his school, or his town, at least for another year. And they’d find more. Maybe when he showed his mom the cash she’d look