Free Rebel Glory by Sigmund Brouwer Page B

by after the game, so I was still wearing my disguise. I took a good slurp of the milkshake, then read the brochure.
    “What?” I said a few seconds later. “Preserved cats for ten dollars each?”
    “Sounds gross, doesn’t it? My dad gave this brochure to me. He’s the one who suggested we try to track this down through the cockroaches.”
    Cats weren’t the only animals in the brochure. There were frogs—sold by the dozen—snakes, earthworms, grasshoppers, squid, minnows and monkeys. Some were sold dead, others alive.
    “Dead animals and live animals,” I said. “What’s the deal?”
    “For science labs in universities, colleges and high schools,” she explained. “Animals like frogs and snakes and cats to dissect don’t just wander into the lab and ask to be experimented on.”
    I put the straw to my mouth for another gulp of milkshake. I thought of slimy dead squid and changed my mind.
    “I think I understand,” I said as I set the milkshake aside. “If someone bought the cockroaches to put in Jason’s equipment, that person had to buy them from Biology Supply Importers.”
    “That’s the way Dad looked at it too.”
    “And you think I should go to their office and ask them if they sold cockroaches to anyone in the last couple of weeks.”
    “Yes,” Cheryl said. “Show them all the photographs too. Maybe the person didn’t use his real name when he bought them.”
    “If he bought them,” I said. “This doesn’t sound like a sure thing.”
    “It isn’t a sure thing,” she agreed, “but can you think of a better idea?”
    I stayed in a motel again that night. I was glad to be able to take the wig and false mustache off, but no matter how hard I scrubbed, the tattoos stayed on my arm.
    I fell asleep wondering about the cockroaches. Sure, you could dump a jarful into someone’s duffel bag, but how could you get them to bury themselves in all the cracks of a guy’s equipment? And how could you get them to sit still as Jason got dressed and then move as Jason began to skate? You couldn’t inject each cockroach with a sleeping potion and then push it into the equipment. Even if that were possible,how would you know that the cockroaches would wake up at exactly the right time?
    It was too much of a puzzle for me to solve. Thinking of cockroaches didn’t help my sleep much, either. I kept dreaming of giant ones chasing me around the ice.
    I was tired, then, when I woke up the next morning. The drive south to Calgary took me and my old truck about an hour and a half. I should have enjoyed the view as I drove. The highway is mostly straight and flat, which some people might find boring. But a prairie sky is a pretty picture, with colors from the blue of a robin’s egg to the oranges and yellows on sun-streaked clouds. Plus for much of the way to Calgary you can see the jagged edges of the Rocky Mountains against the western horizon.
    I couldn’t enjoy the view, though. I was too nervous, hoping that Cheryl’s plan would work. And what was I going to say once I got to Biology Supply Importers? Could I just march in and demand that they tell me what I wanted to know?
    When I got to Calgary, the first thing I did was stop by a one-hour photo shop to get Cheryl’s film developed. There were photos of the stickboys and of Teddy, the trainer. There were also some photos of Cheryl and me together, making goofy faces into the camera as I held it in my hand and pointed it toward us. I sure looked weird in the ponytail wig, but she was pretty, even with her tongue sticking out.
    After leaving the photo shop, it took me a half hour to find Biology Supply Importers at a small warehouse in the southeast part of Calgary. Not until I pulled into the parking lot had I decided how I would approach this. With honesty.
    “Hello,” I said as I walked into a tiny office to see a woman at a desk. She was an older lady with hair dyed an unusual shade of red. She looked up from the Calgary Sun newspaper in her