Atty at Law Read online

  Cover

  A TRIANGLE SQUARE BOOK FOR YOUNG READERS

  PUBLISHED BY SEVEN STORIES PRESS

  Copyright © 2020 by Tim Lockette

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any

  form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic,

  photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the

  prior written permission of the publisher

  SEVEN STORIES PRESS

  140 Watts Street

  New York, NY 10013

  www.sevenstories.com

  College professors and high school and middle school teachers

  may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles.

  To order, visit www.sevenstories.com/textbook

  or send a fax on school letterhead to (212) 226-1411.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lockette, Tim, author. | Wardle, David (Illustrator), illustrator.

  Title: Atty at law / Tim Lockette ; illustrations by David Wardle.

  Description: New York : Triangle Square Books for Young Readers/

  Seven Stories Press, [2020] | Audience: Grades 4-6. | Summary: Atticus “Atty”

  Peale fights for the rights of animals, copes with having a racially-mixed family in small-town

  Alabama, navigates the social scene of middle school, and determines to help

  her father prove Jethro Gersham innocent of murder.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020009068 (print) | LCCN 2020009069 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781644210123 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781644210130 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Criminal investigation--Fiction. | Middle schools--Fiction. |

  Schools--Fiction. | Racially mixed people--Fiction. | Family life--Alabama--

  Fiction. | Alabama--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.L6233 Att 2020 (print) |

  LCC PZ7.1.L6233 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009068

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009069

  Book design by Jon Gilbert

  For Dottie

  1

  Hanging out at the Strudwick County Animal Shelter is like holding a baby with a dirty diaper. It’s the cutest thing in the world, if you can just stand the smell.

  Imagine the cutest puppies you’ve ever seen. Labrador retrievers as brown as buttery biscuits. Baby beagles who wag their tails when you call them Snoopy. Now imagine every cat you’ve ever seen on the Internet. Clumsy yellow kittens with hair that sticks straight out, so their faces look like cartoon suns. Fat old gray kitties who look at you scornfully, like angry librarians.

  Now imagine each of them in a cage made of chain-link fence. And imagine two rows of them down a long hallway. In a big cinder-block room with loud fans that blow the hot, humid air through. And the smell, everywhere, of a litter box that needs changing. A stink like the stink of the school bathroom. Even when it’s cleaned up, the clean smell just reminds you of how stinky it was.

  “I am not even here,” Martinez said, not bothering to look up from his vintage Game Boy.

  “Come on, man,” I said. “Look how cute these puppies are! You’ve got to take a look.”

  “I’m about to level up,” Martinez said. “Just find me a place to sit and do this. A place where nobody is barking.”

  Other girls have brothers who put their sisters in headlocks, or attack them with real darts, or mutilate their stuffed animals or show off their chewed-up food. I have Martinez, who wouldn’t put me in a headlock unless I were a Pokémon or an orc. Real life is boring to Martinez. Every moment not spent in a fantasy world is a moment wasted.

  “I bet I can find a dog so adorable, you’ll have to put the game down,” I told Martinez.

  “Try me,” he said, still not looking up.

  It’s this way all summer, every summer. Taleesa, my stepmom, is a freelance writer and photographer. In the summer, she drives all over Alabama, shooting photos and interviewing people, and she drags us along. We’ve been to the Burkeville Okra Festival, the Honda plant in Lincoln, the dragon boat races in Gadsden. We even waited for hours in the foyer of Holman Prison while Taleesa interviewed a guy on death row. I always bring a book, though usually I’m watching and listening. Martinez keeps his head down. When I close my eyes and think of him, I see him lit up in the blue light of a video game screen.

  This time we were close to home, wandering around the Strudwick County Animal Shelter while Taleesa talked to the director about the stray animal problem.

  So here we were in this cute, stinky place. I walked down the row, searching for an animal to melt my brother’s heart. In one cage, a basset hound waddled up and looked at me expectantly, as if I’d held out a treat. In another, a brown-and-white beagle writhed on the floor, trying to scratch his own back. I called him over for some through-the-fence scratching, but I guess I wasn’t good enough at it, because he went back to his own spot.

  “They’re adorable, if you’d just look,” I said.

  “Mmmph,” Martinez replied. “I’m fighting a boss.”

  Then I saw him. A mutt built like a Labrador, mostly black but with patches that were spotted black-and-white like a dalmatian. One eye completely circled by a black dot. Seeing me, the dog stood up, and for just a second he looked like one of those broad-chested bird dogs you see in the hunting magazines at Red Creek Barber Shop. But when he moved toward me, tail wagging, he seemed to crumple a little. He walked with a limp.

  “Look at you,” I said. The dog’s nose was cold and his tongue warm as they pressed against my palm through the fence. “Look at you, you’re hurt. Martinez, look, he’s hurt!”

  The dog had a big red welt down his left side.

  “Ooh,” Martinez said, finally pulled away from the game. “A bullet wound.”

  “Come on,” I said. “Who’d shoot a dog like this? You’re too obsessed with shooting things.”

  “How else would you get a big long gash like that? Grazed by a bullet, I’d say.”

  I didn’t really want to think about what other ways a dog could get a big slash in his side. Sometimes I think that for boys like Martinez, shoot-’em-up stories are a kind of security blanket. As if a villain with a gun were the only thing that could hurt you.

  “Want to take him out to play?” asked a voice behind us. It was Megg Sample, the woman who runs the animal shelter. Make that Miz Megg. She looked kind of official—like a Boy Scout troop leader—with her tan animal shelter uniform shirt and her short brown hair. She’d been sweet and friendly to us all morning, and yet somehow I got the feeling we should call her “ma’am.” She had a no-nonsense air about her like a teacher who knows when you’re lying.

  “Can we take him out, Miz Megg? Really?” asked Martinez. Now the video game was snapped shut, and my little brother was a real, live nine-year-old.

  “Absolutely,” Megg said, opening the cage door and getting out the leash. The dog burst out of the cage to a kneeling Martinez, knocking him over and licking his face. “Now, now,” Megg said. “Calm down. We’ll get that energy out of you. Maybe it was a mistake to call you Easy.”

  “So that’s his name,” I said. “Easy.”

  “When he came to us yesterday, he had a collar,” Megg said. “On the collar, a tag with the letter ‘E.’ No name of owner, no address. But he did have an immunization tag, so we know he’s had his shots. Anyway, Easy seemed to fit. Just look at him. You’re easy to get along with, aren’t you, boy? Yes, you are.”

  I know. It’s dumb to ask a dog ques
tions, and then answer them yourself. But everybody does it, even me. Even Martinez, who would rather text than say the simplest things out loud.

  After I got Easy on the leash, Megg led us out into the fenced-in courtyard beside the animal shelter. Slobbery rubber balls lay here and there on the grass.

  “This is our play area,” Megg said. “Easy’s been limping a little, but he needs his daily workout. I’ll leave you to it.”

  I’ve never seen Martinez happier. Easy did seem to favor the leg closest to the wound, but when Martinez threw the ball, he trotted to it, ears bouncing. Then he would bring the ball back and lay it at our feet, tail wagging, and look up with friendly brown eyes, as if we’d known him for years.

  “I want a dog now,” Martinez said. “I want this dog. He’s magical.”

  I guess Martinez looked at me as he said it, but I was looking away. I’d heard the sound of a car door closing. Looking up, I saw a man walking across the parking lot, a man with a cloud of white hair, a flat face with beady brown eyes and eyebrows so faint it was like they didn’t exist. Like Easy, he walked with a limp.

  What caught my eye was the way he scowled at us. A long stare that seemed more than a little angry.

  We get that sometimes. I’m white and my brother is black. It’s not that hard to explain, really. My mom was white. A few years after she died, my dad married Taleesa. To me, the only odd thing about our family is that there are a couple of family members no one ever sees. Sometimes I feel like if we all sat down for an old-timey black-and-white picture, my mom would appear as a faint image behind Dad, like in a ghost story. Maybe I think of it that way because of what Taleesa always says about her first husband. He’s “not in the picture.”

  So, we’re like a lot of families. But other people don’t always see it that way. They take long looks when we’re out as a group, as if they’re trying to figure out what we really are, or who goes with who. It’s not all bad. When we went to Disney World, the cast members were always extra chipper when they saw us together, as if they were saying “Welcome to our country!” You’d think all that attention would get old, but I liked it.

  Sometimes the whole thing is just funny. I remember one time we were at Walmart, and I was really annoyed with Martinez. Among other things, he wouldn’t stop shaking boxes of Cheez-Its like they were maracas. I ordered him to stop, and I guess I was mean about it, because an old black woman shook her finger at me.

  “Young lady,” she said. “What gives you the right to talk to other people like that? This young man is not your servant to boss around. I don’t care who you are or where you’re from.”

  “Ma’am,” I said. “He’s my brother.”

  That changed everything. She turned on Martinez and cranked the anger up a notch. “You listen to your sister! Put those boxes down, stop being a fool! Your sister loves you, she’s your elder, you need to have respect!” And on and on. It was awesome.

  Anyway, this guy, limping across the parking lot, was not awesome. He glared at us. I glared right back. What else are you going to do with people like that?

  Then Easy dropped the ball at my feet. My turn to play.

  As I threw the ball, Martinez and I talked about whether or not we could convince Dad and Taleesa to let us have a dog. This dog.

  “We’d have to do all the feeding and stuff,” I warned. “Dad’s in court all the time. Taleesa can barely remember to put her pants on in the morning, when she’s writing.”

  Just then the door opened, and the cloudy-haired man limped out in to the courtyard, with Megg right behind him. He pointed at Easy.

  “That’s him,” Cloudy Hair said. “That’s the one that bit me. You need to put him down immediately.”

  Easy crouched at my feet, his tail wagging, his paws on either side of the slobbery red ball. That expectant, hey-there-friend look.

  “Kids, step away from Easy,” Megg said. “We may have a biting dog on our hands. I can’t let you be near him.”

  Megg took the leash from me and reattached it to Easy’s collar. When she leaned over to do it, Easy rolled over on his back, as if hoping for a tummy scratch.

  “He doesn’t look like a biting dog to me,” Martinez observed.

  “You want to see, boy?” Cloudy Hair said. “You want to see what he did to me?”

  The man rolled up his pants leg and, sure enough, there was set of teeth marks on his right leg, all purple and black.

  Megg hustled Easy back into the shelter and slammed him into his cage. Then she wrote a note and affixed it to the door. “SUSPECTED BITING DOG. NO RELEASE.”

  “This dog should be destroyed,” Cloudy Hair said. “Under Alabama law a biting dog has to be destroyed.”

  I shuddered. Who talks like that? Who threatens to destroy someone? Just villains in the video games Martinez plays. Or so I thought.

  “Not so fast,” Megg said. “The law says a dog with no owner, if it bites someone, will be destroyed after the health officer does an investigation to determine that the dog has no owner.”

  Cloudy Hair’s face scrunched up in a scowl for just a moment. Then: “Well, I’m the owner of the dog, then.”

  Megg crossed her arms. “Really? Prove it.”

  “What?” Cloudy Hair said, his voice cracking. “What are you talking about? Any fool can show up here and take a dog home. If I show up and say this is my dog, who’s to say it isn’t?”

  “In my experience,” Megg said. “People don’t show up asking for their own dog to be put down. Come with me to the office, and we’ll fill out some paperwork.”

  Now Cloudy Hair’s face was flushed with rage. “This dog is my property,” he said. “Why should I have to prove—”

  “Hey, Mister,” Martinez burst out, interrupting Cloudy Hair mid-sentence. “Hey! Hey! If this dog is yours, maybe you can explain why he has a bullet wound.”

  “I—I tried to shoot him after he bit me,” Cloudy Hair said. “I missed him, and I been looking for him ever since.”

  “Are you going to shoot him now?” Martinez asked. “Is that why you got a gun?”

  My brother pointed to Cloudy Hair’s hip. Sure enough, under the tail of his flannel shirt, you could see a bulge of something attached to his belt just above his right butt cheek. Too small for a fanny pack, too big for a cell phone.

  Maybe it was just instinct, but Cloudy Hair reached back and put his hand on whatever it was on his belt back there. Megg stepped between us and the old man, her hands up in front of her.

  “That’s it,” she said. “Kids, you go out in the yard. Sir, if you do have a gun on your belt, I’m going to have to ask you to leave. That’s not permitted here.”

  “I have a right to open carry under Alabama law,” Cloudy Hair said.

  “Not here you don’t,” Megg said.

  Cloudy Hair stared Megg down for a second. Then he barked out a cussword and stormed out of the room, hitting the swinging door so hard it slapped against the wall.

  Martinez and I didn’t go out to the yard. Megg followed Cloudy Hair out of the room, and we followed her. Cloudy Hair stomped past the front desk and out the door to the parking lot, nearly plowing into a teenage volunteer who was cuddling a kitten. Megg went to the front desk and picked up the phone, holding the receiver as she watched Cloudy Hair climb into his truck and squeal out of the parking lot.

  “You were about to call 911,” I said.

  Megg nodded.

  “Sheriff’s office,” she said. “We work with them a lot. They know us.”

  “Well, I’m glad he’s gone,” Martinez said. “Can we go back and play with Easy, Miz Megg?”

  Megg shook her head vigorously. “Oh, no,” she said. “If we’ve got a report of a dog bite, even from somebody we don’t like, we consider that dog a biting dog.” She sighed. “So Easy will get the treatment any other dangerous dog would get.”
<
br />   That made me feel queasy.

  “Destroyed,” I whispered. “That’s what he said. That’s what’s going to happen to Easy.”

  What a word, “destroyed.” I imagined a dog being locked into some mad scientist’s machine and blasted into millions of green atoms.

  Megg nodded.

  “If someone else doesn’t show up to claim the dog, we’ll put him down,” she said. “A little injection, and he falls asleep painlessly. And never wakes up.”

  Martinez, who’d killed a thousand dragons on a Nintendo screen, looked like he’d seen a zombie.

  “How can you do that?” he asked. “To a doggie? Just kill it.”

  “It’s terrible,” Megg said, “But it’s something we have to do. There’s not enough room here for all the stray animals in Strudwick County, and not enough people adopting them. So every third Monday of the month, we put down two dozen or so. It’s heartbreaking to do it to any of them. But I couldn’t put down an innocent dog to make room for one suspected of biting.”

  “But Easy is innocent,” I said. “Innocent until proven guilty. What if that man shot first, and then Easy bit him in self-defense? It’s not fair.”

  “It’s not fair,” Megg agreed. “But under the law, animals are property. They don’t speak for themselves. Owners speak for them. And unless an owner shows up by the next time we put animals down, Easy will be on the list.”

  “And when is that?” I asked.

  “This coming Monday,” Megg said. “Three days from now.”

  My heart sank.

  2

  I’m weird about crying. I’ve never shed a tear over my own mother’s death. I never knew her, really. But when Taleesa’s dad died, I lost it.

  I’d never met the man. I never saw him before I walked up to the casket. I was shivering. We’d flown up to Milwaukee in a hurry, and our Alabama winter clothes weren’t warm enough for the cold. Every woman in the church was wearing a hat, the way they do in some black churches, and Taleesa and I didn’t have hats. The whole family walked down the aisle and looked into this casket where a bald, dignified-looking man looked like he was sleeping with his hands folded. His suit was salmon-colored. I remember a tiepin with a big rhinestone on it.