Chapter 10: The Fifteen-Hundred-Dollar Lesson

Chapter 10: The Fifteen-Hundred-Dollar Lesson

For nearly a month, an unsettling peace settled over the neighborhood. The beige Camry sat in the cousins' yard like a tombstone, a silent monument to their second failure. Randy and Billy were ghosts, rarely seen, their brief flicker of hope extinguished. Jake allowed himself to believe, cautiously, that the lesson had finally been learned through sheer, repetitive force. He had restored the balance. He could finally put the whole ugly business behind him.

He was wrong.

It was a Saturday morning, bright and painfully clear. Jake was on his porch, enjoying a rare moment of quiet with the newspaper, when a vehicle he didn't recognize pulled up to the house across the street. It was a tow truck, but not the city-impound kind. This one was clean, professional, emblazoned with the logo of a local used car dealership. Randy and Billy emerged from their grandparents’ house and watched as the dead Camry was unceremoniously hooked and hauled away.

An hour later, it arrived.

It rolled down the street with a low, confident rumble, its polished black paint gleaming in the morning sun. The chrome on the grille flashed like a predatory smile. It was a Ford F-150, maybe five or six years old, but in immaculate condition. It was powerful. It was expensive. And it was, down to the trim level, almost identical to Jake’s own truck parked in his driveway.

They parked it in the exact spot the Camry had occupied, as if swapping out a dead pawn for a new queen. Billy and Randy climbed out, not with the furtive energy of thieves, but with the swagger of conquering heroes. They strutted. They admired their new prize from every angle, running their hands over the fender like it was a holy relic. Then, Randy looked across the street, found Jake sitting on his porch, and gave him a slow, deliberate nod. It wasn't a wave this time. It was a challenge. A declaration that the game had been elevated.

Jake folded his newspaper, the cheap ink feeling like grit on his fingertips. A cold, heavy pressure began to build behind his sternum. This wasn't just a replacement car. This was a personal, direct insult. They hadn't just gotten another ride; they had bought his ride. They had taken his identity as a capable, hardworking man, symbolized by his truck, and had put it on like a cheap costume.

Sarah came home from the grocery store a short while later, her arms full of bags. "Did you see it?" she asked, her voice a cocktail of disbelief and exasperation. "Randy and Billy's new truck? Can you believe it?"

"Where did they get the money for that?" Jake asked, his voice dangerously calm.

"Tax refunds," she sighed, setting the bags on the kitchen counter. "Apparently, they got a huge windfall from some earned income credit or something. Aunt Carol is convinced this is the turning point. That a nice, reliable truck will finally motivate them to get real jobs. She called it 'an investment in their future'."

An investment. The word was a parody. They hadn't invested; they had won the lottery after robbing a bank. All of Jake’s careful work, his two perfectly executed lessons, had been wiped out by a government check. They hadn’t learned a thing about consequences, only that if you wait long enough, a lifeboat full of cash will eventually float by.

The challenge nod from Randy replayed in his head. The sight of that gleaming black truck, a mirror of his own, sitting on their blighted patch of gravel. The memory of Boris’s words echoed like a prophecy: Class isn't over.

That night, long after Sarah had gone to sleep, Jake went to the garage. He didn't turn on the main overhead lights, working instead by the cold, sterile glow of a single fluorescent bulb above his workbench. There was no thrill this time, no heady rush of a new idea. This was grim, necessary work. This was extermination.

He took down the painted can, its familiar weight a comfort in his hands. He began to brew his third and final batch, the most potent and unforgiving engine poison he could conceive. He started with the usual base: gasoline, waste oil, and a heavy pour of diesel. But this time, he went further. He remembered an old mechanic's trick for finding hairline cracks in engine blocks, a fine, almost invisible abrasive powder. He retrieved a small tin from a high shelf. It was meant to be used in microscopic amounts. He dumped the entire contents into the can. Then he added a half-cup of brake fluid, a substance he knew would swell and destroy any rubber seals and gaskets it touched.

He swirled the concoction, the ‘Rotten Egg Gas’ evolving into something truly malevolent. It wasn't just designed to make an engine fail; it was designed to make it tear itself apart from the inside out, to score the cylinder walls and warp the heads, to inflict a wound so catastrophic and expensive that no amount of charity or tax refunds could ever fix it. This wasn't a lesson anymore. It was a verdict.

Setting the trap was the riskiest part yet. The lawnmower trick was too obvious now. He had to deliver the poison directly. Around 2:00 AM, under the faint light of a crescent moon, he slipped out of his house. He was a shadow in the sleeping neighborhood. He carried the heavy can, his heart a steady, cold drum against his ribs. He crept across the street, his work boots silent on the asphalt.

As he'd suspected, the driver's side door of the F-150 was unlocked. Idiots. He pulled the lever for the fuel door, the soft click echoing like a gunshot in the silent night. He unscrewed the gas cap, the scent of fresh fuel a stark contrast to the chemical death he was about to pour into its belly. He emptied the entire five-gallon can into the truck’s tank. He didn't spill a drop. He replaced the cap, wiped his fingerprints from the fuel door, and slipped back across the street, melting into the shadows of his own home. The deed was done.

The next morning, he watched from the window, his nerves stretched taut. At around 10:00 AM, the cousins emerged, ready for a Sunday joyride. Randy got behind the wheel and turned the key.

The F-150’s powerful engine turned over, but it didn't roar to life. It coughed, sputtered, and caught with a rough, rattling shudder that Jake could feel in his own bones. A plume of sick, bluish-grey smoke puffed from the exhaust pipe. Randy revved the engine, and it protested with a horrible grinding sound, a metallic shriek of agony.

This was the moment of truth. Jake expected them to ignore the warning signs, to put it in drive and roar off down the street toward their own destruction.

But for the first time in their lives, they learned.

Randy immediately shut off the engine. He looked at Billy, his face a mask of pale horror. The ghost of the Cavalier, the specter of the Camry—the lessons had finally, partially, landed. They knew that sound. It was the sound of the end.

But their next move sent a jolt of pure ice through Jake’s veins. Randy didn’t get out and pop the hood. He didn't call his grandpa. He pulled out his phone.

Jake watched, frozen, as his carefully controlled experiment spun out of his hands. Twenty minutes later, a professional tow truck from “Dave’s Auto Repair” pulled up. A mechanic in clean overalls got out and had a long, serious conversation with the two cousins. Randy pointed at the engine, then at the exhaust pipe. The mechanic nodded grimly, scribbled on a clipboard, and began hooking the pristine F-150 up to the lift.

This was a new, terrifying variable. A third party. A professional whose entire job was to diagnose problems. He wouldn't just see a dead engine; he would look for a cause. He would drain the oil. He would test the fuel. He would put the truck's lifeblood under a microscope.

From his living room window, Jake watched as their nicest vehicle yet, containing five gallons of his meticulously crafted, chemically undeniable guilt, was carefully towed away. It wasn't headed for a scrap heap or an impound lot. It was headed for a brightly lit garage, an operating table where a trained surgeon was about to perform an autopsy. And Jake knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the core, that the mechanic might find something far more sinister than just bad luck. He might find a murderer.