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was there last night. I saw it myself. I—”
    He stopped talking when the first two cops came back down the driveway. He went over to them. I guessed he was asking them about what had happened, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. A few minutes later, as I was getting ready to move on again, the man came back.
    â€œJust as I suspected,” he said to the other people who lived on the street. “Neil’s suv was stolen.”
    That caused a buzz.
    â€œBut I thought he had one of those new vehicles, you know, with a key that has a computer chip in it. You can’t start them unless you have the key.”
    The man nodded somberly. “They broke into the house,” he said. “I told the cops Neil keeps his keys hanging near the phone in the kitchen. You know what the cop told me? There’s no key there now. They’re going to try to get in touch with Neil and Melanie and see if they can figure out if anything else is missing.”
    â€œPoor Melanie,” a woman said. “She’s been looking forward to this trip all year. This is going to ruin it for her.”
    Yeah, poor Melanie, I thought. She’s off there in France, and someone broke into her house and stole her car that costs more than my mom probably makes in a year, maybe in two years.
    I packed my gear into the milk crateand was just getting on my bike to ride to the next job when a cop came toward me.
    â€œHey, buddy,” he said. “Come here.”
    I told myself again that this time I was the good guy, that I was doing this neighborhood a favor. But that didn’t stop me from feeling sick inside.
    I started to push my bike over to the cop. But he said, “Leave the bike where it is.” He said it in that bossy way cops have. I don’t think a cop has ever talked to me without ordering me around, letting me know who was boss.
    I put the kickstand down on my bike and walked toward him. My knees were shaking. My mouth was dry.
    â€œWhat’s your name?” the cop said.
    â€œColin Watson.”
    â€œYou live around here?”
    â€œNo, sir.”
    The cop looked hard at me, like he was trying to decide if I was trying to be smart, calling him sir like that, or if I was just a nice kid.
    â€œI saw you over at that utility post,” the cop said. “What were you doing?”
    â€œCleaning up graffiti,” I said. I unclipped my id from my belt and handed it to him. He studied it.
    â€œWhat time did you arrive here?”
    I told him.
    â€œDid you see anyone enter or leave that driveway?”
    He pointed to the driveway where all the cops were.
    â€œNo, sir.”
    He wrote down the information from my photo ID , asked me for the name of my supervisor and told me I could go.
    I was glad to get away from there.
    A couple of hours later, I found a shady spot in a small park and sat down to eat my sandwich and drink my juice box. I pulled out my sketchbook. But instead of sketching what was in front of me, I sketched some graffiti. I even played with turning my initials into a tag. Then I looked at what I had done.
    Dave Marsh was wrong. This wasn’t art.It was territory marking, like what dogs did. The markings said, Hey, look at me, I was here. It wasn’t even nice to look at. For sure the letters and numbers were stupid. Why did kids—I was betting most of the taggers were kids—get such a charge out of spraying their initials everywhere? What was the big deal?
    I scrunched up my empty juice box, tossed it into a garbage can and went back to work.

chapter five
    A couple of days later I was studying the utility control box in the middle of that traffic island. It was like the thing was lit up or something, the way it attracted tags. I recognized a couple of them—the same tagger, marking his territory over and over again with his initials, the style as recognizable as handwriting. That made me nervous. If the same taggers kept coming back, then