The Giant Smugglers by Matt Solomon Page B

rough bark bite into his palms, and started climbing.
    A bigger kid might have weighed too much for some of the more slender branches, but they were sturdy enough to hold Charlie. He climbed like a natural, ascending fifty feet in only a few minutes.
    Soon, he arrived at the branch that bridged to the roof. The limb extended well over the top of the warehouse. Charlie straddled the branch and started shinnying across, feeling the substantial bough narrow with each incremental shunt forward. As he crept along, his weight bent the bough, but it still seemed plenty strong for the job. Piece of cake , he tried to convince himself. Then about halfway across, he looked down.
    In the alley below, broken pieces of glass glittered like they were in a far-off galaxy. Charlie couldn’t believe how high he was. His hands slicked with perspiration, and the limb got slippery. He sucked in air as if it could fill him with courage. He pried his eyes off the ground, training them on his destination. An inch at a time, shallow breath by shallow breath, he started forward again. The branch cooperated. Finally, he dropped down to the roof and approached the elevator shaft.
    Soot-stained from decades of absorbing exhaust from passing trucks, the bricked tower jutted skyward ten feet from the roof. A metal ladder ran up the side. Charlie took a quick look out onto the street. A lot of cars were already heading to the fair. Even though the ladder couldn’t be seen from the road, he’d have to jump quickly so no one saw him at the top of the elevator shaft. He grabbed hold of the lowest rung embedded into the brick and mortar, and started to climb. The rungs held firm all the way to the top.
    From there, he snuck a peek down into the dark shaft. He couldn’t even see all the way to the bottom. He swallowed, and the spit balled up in his throat so he had to do it again. For some reason he remembered a story kids told about a girl who ran off Bogus Bluff and fell to her death because Indians were chasing her. If the giant didn’t catch him, he’d end the same way. Splat.
    â€œCharlie!” The big voice boomed up the elevator shaft.
    There was a total break in traffic. The perfect time to jump. He had to go. C’mon, CUGoneByeBye— you can do this. Charlie tried to harness the fearlessness of his alter ego and pulled himself atop the chimneylike structure, but his legs still shook. It was like being at the end of the springboard on the world’s tallest high-dive, except there was a giant waiting below instead of a pool. He wavered. It was now or never.
    â€œGo,” said the giant.
    â€œI know, I know,” stammered Charlie. “It’s just hard.”
    Faced with a literal leap of faith, Charlie closed his eyes and hopped off the ledge. He plummeted down the shaft for what felt like long enough to die—only he didn’t. The giant was as good as his word. He caught the boy right in his fleshy mitt.
    The impact was still enough to knock the air from Charlie’s lungs. His head swam with stars as the giant pulled him out of the shaft and set him down on the cool concrete. The big guy held out his fist for Charlie to bump, which the boy managed despite his inability to pull in a solid breath.
    â€œGood job!”
    â€œWe did it,” Charlie said between gasps. “And I don’t think anyone even saw me!”
    He couldn’t have known about the satellite 200 miles above that was sending pictures back to Earth as fast as its digital eye could take them.

 
    11
    Jamie Fitzgibbons was facedown on his weight bench, as scheduled, an early Saturday morning ritual in the basement of the Fitzgibbonses’ rented house. He lowered his Hornets Football shorts and exposed his bare bottom like it was the most natural thing in the world.
    His father inserted a sterile twenty-two-gauge needle into a burnt-orange vial, turned it upside down, and drew out one and a half CCs of a performance