He was our nemesis and we were his.

Lempke whipped off his horn-rimmed glasses.

“For the last time, boys, this is not your playpen! Nor is this your playground shortcut!” He stuffed the glasses into the pocket of his tweed jacket and began stamping his way down the stairs. Each step revealed argyle socks so scrupulously arranged that the diamond patterns on either ankle were in dizzying alignment.

Tub affected a contrite posture. I followed suit, hanging my head.

“This is a vaunted institution,” Lempke continued, “filled with works beyond your conceptions of value. Should your horseplay knock a bust from its pedestal or a canvas from its frame, your parents would be in so much debt you’d be in the poorhouse before you could—”

“The poorhouse,” that was our cue. Tub jerked from his apologetic pose and went scrambling down the stairs. I was right behind him, beating at his shoulders, panicked and giddy all at once. Lempke knew he’d never catch us in his stiff jacket and argyle socks, but he bent himself over the railing and raised his clipboard as if it were a throwing spear.

“By my count, you each owe me over nine-hundred dollars in admission fees! Don’t think I won’t collect! As soon as I get a free minute, there’s a call coming to your mothers and fathers, mark my words!”

He had no idea that Tub lived with his grandmother and I only had one parent. Depressing thoughts usually, but for the moment the joke was on Lempke. We burst from a service entrance onto a loading dock, laughing like mad, and we didn’t stop running until we were back on the road. We hung on to each other for a few minutes until we got to the first intersection, reliving the escape through gasped sentence fragments.

We gathered our breath and grinned at each other. Our wounds from the long day no longer looked so pathetic. They looked like tattoos shared by warriors of the same tribe. I felt great. Then I noticed the sky. It was dark, almost full night. We must have spent more time in that parking lot than I had thought.

Tub grabbed me around the neck and expelled an affectionate sigh.

“I know your pop’s uptight,” he said. “But, seriously, how worried could he be?”

A siren squelched. We looked down the perpendicular road and were bathed in swirling red-and-blue light.

Word on the street was that Sergeant Ben Gulager had been born with that lush mustache, and many a playground bounty had been placed on photographic evidence. It was just Gulager’s third most notable physical feature. His hairpiece was also awe-inspiring, though only in its ineptitude, a black bowl-cut mop that always looked as if he had put it on sideways.

Yet no one dared laugh at Sergeant Gulager. The hairpiece existed to conceal his most defining characteristic, a gruesome, puckered scar on his right temple. Ten years before he had been the first responder to a domestic disturbance on the south side of the city, a garden-variety case of plate-throwing between husband and wife. But after Gulager arrived, things turned ugly, and the father whipped out a gun and started waving it at the triplets huddled behind the sofa. Gulager had not hesitated to throw himself in front of the girls, taking a bullet to the skull at nearly point-blank range.