Riley Mack and the Other Known Troublemakers by Chris Grabenstein Read Free Book Online

whatever it took to see that justice was served and that this long list of wrongs was rectified. You know what rectified means? Means you take those wrongs and you make them right! You rectify them!”
    â€œI gotta go.”
    â€œYou’re lettin’ down a whole lot of people, man. Some of them Valentine cards people sent you? They were homemade, man. The cookies, too!”
    Riley slumped his shoulders and headed up the corridor. He almost turned around and said, I can’t help you, Jamal, because I promised my mom and dad I’d stay away from Gavin Brown .
    But he knew that would only make him sound lamer.

10
    THAT SAME AFTERNOON, CHUCK “CALL me Chip” Weitzel sat in his office at the bank crunching numbers.
    Last weekend’s trip to Las Vegas had been the best ever. According to the little ledger he kept locked in his desk, he was currently up fifty thousand dollars for the first five months of the year. His revolutionary investment scheme was working. He could buy a new car. Heck, he could buy a couple new cars.
    But he wouldn’t.
    New cars would make people start asking questions.
    So instead of tooling around town in a flashy two-seater Corvette convertible, Chuck kept his cash wrapped in neat bundles, locked up tight inside hisFireKing Executive Safe, currently nestled in the bottom drawer (also locked) of his big mahogany desk. As advertised, its handy-dandy mounting system “allowed the compact but incredibly tough safe to be easily moved from desk drawer to car trunk to airplane” headed for Bermuda. Or Jamaica. Maybe Mexico. Someplace where it never snowed and you could drink umbrella drinks all day long and never pay taxes.
    Of course, the two thousand dollars Mrs. Rollison had wanted deposited in her passbook savings account last Friday was properly credited to her account first thing Monday morning. For the checks in Mrs. Mack’s teller drawer, he just took a “cash advance” from the vault, knowing the money would be returned before the start of the business week (he usually swung by the bank on his way home from the airport on the Sunday night of his Vegas weekends).
    Mr. Weitzel leaned back in his padded leather chair and put his feet up on the wooden deck of his boat-sized desk. He wished he could suspend the bank’s no-smoking policy and fire up a big fat cigar; then he’d look just like Uncle Pennybags from Monopoly—the guy on the old Chance card that said, “Bank Pays You Dividend of $50.”
    Yep, when you were the banker, life was a winning game. You took your Chance cards. You made your money.
    Chuck Weitzel didn’t have a care in the world.
    His eyes drifted over to the computer screen on top of his desk. All the bank’s security cameras fed into his office, where the digital images were recorded and stored on the hard drive of his computer. Through the matrix of windows on his screen, he could keep his eyes on the ATMs, the lobby, the vault room, the drive-up window, the tellers in their brass cages. Everything.
    Including a shaggy-haired, redheaded boy walking across the lobby.
    Apparently, Mrs. Mack thought today was “bring your troublemaker son to work” day.

11
    RILEY SKIPPED THE PIZZA PALACE after school.
    The rest of his gang had gone over to Mongo’s house to check out Noodle, the goldendoodle, which Riley thought sounded like a new kind of cheese curl.
    â€œIt’s a man-made dog,” Jake had explained. “Part golden retriever, part poodle.”
    â€œSo why didn’t they call it a golden poodle?” asked Briana.
    â€œProbably because it would sound too much like a Chinese restaurant,” said Riley. “And trust me—you do not want to know what the Golden Poodle puts in its secret recipes.”
    Jake did a quick Google search on his smartphoneand let everybody know that “goldendoodles were first bred in North America as a larger version of the popular cockapoo.