The Adventures of Jack Lime by James Leck Page B

else’s problems.”
    â€œIt’s not like I go looking for trouble, Doc. Trouble just has a nasty way of showing up on my doorstep. Heck, I didn’t even get into the P.I. business on purpose. It found me.”
    â€œHow, exactly, does that happen?” he said, sitting forward in his chair.
    â€œI don’t know if you want to hear that long and sordid tale, Doc.”
    â€œJack, let me tell you something. Tonight Mrs. Potter plays bridge with the girls. And when Mrs. Potter goes out to play bridge, all I get to go home to is a half-blind dog and a cold dinner. So a good story sounds a lot better than that.”
    â€œSuit yourself, Doc, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
    Potter rolled his eyes.
    â€œI arrived in this little slice of heaven called Iona halfway through Grade 9. It ain’t easy making friends in a small town like this, Doc, especially when you’re the new kid on the block. For the first couple of months, I might as well have been a ghost to the kids at Iona High. To compensate for being on the bottom of the social pecking order, I threw around enough money to let everyone know I was a big-time player. See, back in the City of Angels, money equaled power, and power equaled popularity. I didn’t think Iona would be all that different. So I started spreading around my loot like it was going out of style. I always had the latest and greatest cell phone, I carried a flashy iPod, I had fourteen different pairs of sneakers and I dressed in enough labels to make it look like I just walked out of a magazine.
    â€œFYI — The only reason I could afford all that stuff was because I got a check in the mail every two weeks that came out of a trust fund set up by the executor of my parents’ estate. That’s fancy talk for me getting a tidy little bundle of dough every two weeks because my parents died in a car accident, and my Dad’s best friend back in L.A., who was in charge of it all, felt guilty about shipping me off to live with my grandmother in a go-nowhere town like Iona.
    â€œBut no matter how much cash I threw around, no matter how much I showed off all my cheddar, nothing changed. I kept right on being a big fat nobody. However, there is an upside to being a big fat nobody in a fishbowl like Iona. For one, you get to listen — and you get to watch, and all that listening and watching means you learn a lot of stuff about a lot of people. About a month after my arrival, a girl in my history class figured I might like to do some listening and watching on her behalf.
    â€œThe job was simple enough; I just had to watch her boyfriend, a sap named Ryan Morrison, and see if he was a two-timing fink. She offered me twenty bucks a day, and the way I was burning through my dough, I needed all the cash that I could get. As it turns out, Ryan really was a two-timing fink. I took a few snapshots of the dirty dog, she paid me forty bucks and we said our good-byes. That’s how I got started in the Private Eye racket.”
    â€œYou promised me a long and sordid tale, Jack, and that was just short and boring,” Potter said, raising one bushy gray eyebrow.
    â€œThat’s just how I got my start, Doc, but that’s not why I’m still in the sleuthing business. It was my second case that kept me in this dirty game. See, since I did such a bang-up job on that case, there were a few people who sat up and took notice of yours truly. One of those people was a girl named Jennifer O’Rourke. She tracked me down in the cafeteria one day, and I haven’t been the same since.”
    Thursday, March 12, 12:17 p.m.
Iona High, The Cafeteria
    Jennifer O’Rourke is the kind of girl you want to protect from all the nastiness of the world. She’s got silky brown hair that she pulls back in a ponytail, baby-blue eyes and freckles across her nose. She’s short and slim and has a way of bouncing when she walks that makes you think