“If you get caught, I pay everyone fifty-four bucks out of my own pocket—no loss to you, except maybe loss of life—but that’s a real long shot.” I was only kidding, but he took it seriously. I began to feel a bit lousy for rushing into the dare without checking out his feelings first.

“We can always back out,” I told him.

He didn’t like the sound of that either—it would make him look chicken. “It’s just that everyone’s heard how creepy Old Man Crawley is. There are all these rumors about him.”

“So? There are rumors about you, too.”

“Yeah,” said the Schwa. “And some of them are true.”

He had me there, although I didn’t have the nerve to ask which ones. “Listen; if you actually go in there, you’ll be going in as just some guy—but you’ll be coming out as a legend: the one kid ever to penetrate Brooklyn’s last great mystery.”

That hooked him. “People remember legends, don’t they?”

“Always.”

The Schwa nodded. “Okay, then. I’m gonna nab myself a dog bowl.”

5. Which Is Worse: Getting Mauled by a Pack of Dogs, or Getting Your Brains Bashed Out by a Steel Poker?

We set the operation for Sunday morning, 10 A.M. Wendell Tiggor and a cluster of Tiggorhoids showed up to witness and make sure we didn’t just go out and buy a dog dish somewhere, then say we got it from Crawley’s. A bunch of the other kids who had bet against us were there, too, leaning against a railing across the street, so when the Schwa and I ride up on our bikes there are all these kids already there, looking way too suspicious. It’s called loitering, which is like littering with human beings as the trash. I checked to see if Crawley’s looking out on us, but all I see in the dark windows above the restaurant are a couple of furry dog faces in front of closed curtains.

“So we thought you’d chickened out,” Tiggor says.

The Schwa took off his jacket. He was strategically dressed in dark brown; the same color as Crawley’s curtains. He walked over to the railing that overlooked the murky water of the bay, and stretched like this was an Olympic event.

At this point I was beginning to get nervous for him. “Listen,” I say, “you might go unnoticed around people, but I don’t know about dogs. Our experiments didn’t include dogs. What if you’re like one of those whistles that people can’t hear, but dogs can—or what if they can smell you? We don’t know if you got a stealthy odor.”

He sniffed his armpit, then looked at me. “I smell stealthy to me. Want a whiff?”

“I’ll pass.”