Pandora's Gun Read Online Free Page A

the trunk of the 1958 Ford Fairlane Dad had been restoring for the last half-dozen years. He couldn’t think of a safer place to hide it.

Last year, when Peter was a freshman, the school newspaper did an article on first kisses. Peter read the article with interest later. Most of the girls didn’t think much of their first kisses, evidently. They said that either the kiss surprised them (one quote read, “Out of the blue! I reached for popcorn, and bam! Out of the blue!”), that the boy who kissed them was totally not who they wanted to be kissing, or that the kiss itself was sloppy, slurpy, or clumsy. One girl said he chipped her tooth. Another, somehow, got poked in the eye, and spent the rest of the evening being able to see clearly on only one side.
    The boys told different stories. The girls, they said, thought they were great kissers, and their first kisses were “hot,” “romantic,” or both. One boy claimed he’d had so many first kisses that they blended together.
    A student reporter, a girl with gold, wire-rimmed glasses, a splash of acne on her cheek, and a devastatingly nice smile, had interviewed Peter for the article. She gave him a short survey that included how old he was for his first kiss (Peter wrote, “13”), how romantic it was on a scale of 1-10 (9), whether the kiss was repeated later (yes), and whether they were still together (no).
    The reporter said, “Do you have any advice for the way to make a first kiss memorable?”
    Peter thought for a moment before saying, “Make sure you always have breath mints.”
    She said, “Good one,” wrote it down, and the quote ended up in the article.
    Everything was a lie, of course. Peter had not been kissed yet. Dante teased him about the article for six months.

There’s forty-six other apps on the gun,” said Dante. He’d worn the military-green duster that he’d found at the Salvation Army before school began. Peter thought it made him look like a Columbine shooter. “We’ve got to try them all.”
    Peter watched students streaming past where they stood near the pop machines. “Sounds dangerous to me. What we ought to do is figure out who else visited the dump. Maybe the gun belongs to them.”
    “You’re getting scared in your old age.” Dante grinned at a freshman girl as she passed. “Going to school is like a coed buffet. All you can eat, all the time.”
    Peter couldn’t laugh at the joke. It wasn’t funny. “Someone’s going to hear you say something like that, and you’ll regret it.”
    Dante admired the girl until she entered a classroom. “Maybe you’re right and someone is looking for the gun. We should take it someplace else. No sense returning to the spot where whoever owns it might be looking for it. How about the old softball field at Slessing Park? Nobody goes there except pot heads, and that’s only at night.”
    Peter shrugged. “Okay.” He knew Dante wouldn’t give up until he’d tried the gun again, and he was interested too, even if the memory of the heat waves around the tree before it caught fire were still vivid.
    Dante grinned. “Great! See you 5 th hour.” He pushed away from the wall and joined the crowd moving toward the classrooms.
    Peter worried about strange adults. Suddenly the hall in his own school seemed threatening. A man in a business suit, carrying a briefcase, walked by purposefully. Probably just a sub, Peter thought, but the guy looked like he was on a mission, checking students as they passed him. What would he be looking for? Would someone who used the gun have traces of it on him? Maybe all the owners would know is that the people at the dump wore running shoes. He and Dante must have left footprints everywhere in the clearing. Peter watched his classmates’ feet as they walked by. There were a scattering of sandals, cowboy boots, and deck shoes, but most students had running shoes, some of them even the same kind of shoe that Peter wore.
    Another man, wearing a tool belt with