Amos walked home with Alanah after many more slices of toast and another cup of tea courtesy of Mrs. Garcia. She had offered them coffee but Amos still thought coffee tasted like burnt dishwater so he stuck with the tea. He was mostly silent on the way home. Not because he was mad at Alanah for dismissing his plan. That did not matter as he really did not even have much of a plan.

  No, Amos was deep in thought because her plan was really good, maybe too good and he was wondering what could go wrong. By the time they got back to their new hideout after scaling the pipe to the warehouse roof Amos was willing to concede to Alanah that it was a great plan with very few flaws that he could see.

  “Well, I really think it will work. How did you come up with such a great idea?” Amos looked at Alanah, admiration in his eyes and a little bit of a fawning note in his voice. “Ahhh, well …I’m not expected to divulge my secrets to you am I? What if you start copying me and everything I do? What then? Alanah laughed quickly and easily but stopped when she saw the hurt look on Amos’ face. “Oh relax, I am just joking, here let me tell you where this came from.”

  As it turned out, Alanah’s most favourite childhood book was one her dad had read many times to her. It was an older novel called Danny, Champion of the World by Roald Dahl in which a young boy and his father got caught up in a pheasant poaching expedition. The father was a skilled poacher, but his son Danny gave him a whole new technique that used sleeping powder with wonderful results on the birds roosting in the trees at night. Alanah told Amos the whole story as best she could from memory, and she did a fine job of it having read and re-read that story dozens of times when she was younger.

  For Amos, it was a wonderful afternoon as he sat and listened to Alanah retell this story of a boy and his father from long ago in the English countryside. She began the tale on the walk back and then in a coffee shop and finally finished in the early evening in their new home.

  He thought it was a fantastic story, and he spent a lot of his time listening with his eyes closed, trying to imagine all of the details of the tale as best he could. With the last of the day’s sunlight streaming into their silent still corner of this old, stately almost abandoned building Amos felt a kind of contentment that he had not felt in quite some time, and he was more than a little disappointed when the story came to an end.

  It truly was an elegant plan. It relied not on violence or surprise but instead a clever deception that would prey upon Filthy Phil’s greed. Mrs. Garcia had never heard of sleeping powder, but she had lots of sleeping pills. “Mr. Garcia would snore the moment he closed his eyes until the moment he woke up.

  There was no safe place in the apartment free from that racket.” She had shaken her head from side to side with a sad solemn expression. “Now that he had gone, I have plenty left, enough to put an elephant to sleep I am most sure of that!.”

  Beyond the sleeping pills they really did not need much, it just took a couple days to plan and coordinate everything and everyone. Amos and Alanah met Mrs. Garcia in the Latin Panaderia y Café near the apartment building that she often patronized. Amos was a bit frustrated that he could not help with the first phase, but he knew it would be a disaster if the landlord saw him, especially since he was still limping and obviously still hurting from Alanah’s blow to his knee.

  Alanah finally agreed that he could discretely watch from across the street if he disguised himself and stayed on the other side of the street the entire time Mr. Phil was outside of the building.

  On the morning of the big day Amos did not even feel all that nervous. Alanah’s plan was so good it seemed almost risk free. As agreed, he was in place just before lunch on a sunny, late spring morning across from the building. Mr. Phil was loafing in front of the building, pretending to adjust an old garden rake but really just using this as an excuse to watch the residents come and go through the front door.

  Amos heard them before he saw them. Mrs. Garcia, Alanah, and a number of the other long-time residents were coming up the sidewalk talking and shouting happily amongst themselves. This attracted Mr. Phil’s attention right away as this kind of jovial mood amongst a group was a rare thing most days.

  The display had been carefully orchestrated by Mrs. Garcia. She knew that Old Man Dan was now coming out of the building and that Mr. Phil was loitering out front. She had timed her arrival down to the exact second it seemed.

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  Just as her group got close to the front door, she looked past Mr. Phil and called out “Dan, Dan Feliz cumplea?os mi amigo! Where are you going, you supposed to be at home. We are taking you to lunch but first we have gifts for you.” Old man Dan had come out the door and stopped in the walkway trying to look both genuinely surprised and embarrassed. Everyone ignored Filthy Phil and let Mrs. Garcia run the show.

  “Look what we have for you, so many presents.” Mrs. Garcia made a big display out of showing Old Man Dan what was in her shopping bag. Three bottles of a very, very nice wine her friend had just made, some fresh cupcakes and some lovely spring flowers they had gathered. “It’s not much I know but the wine is very, very good and so are the cupcakes. Let’s put them safely away in your apartment and then we are taking you to a nice bodega for your birthday lunch.”

  While the others waited outside by the front Mrs. Garcia and Old Man Dan took his gifts inside. The entire time the whole group ignored the landlord, no one so much as even glanced in his direction. “He’s a big ego that one is, even bigger than his big nose that he always stickin’ up in everyone’s business. He don’t like being left out, it’s gonna make him mad.” Mrs. Garcia had told the kids all of this and then later on the group the same thing along with her strict instructions to ignore Filthy Phil.

  Once Mrs. Garcia was inside Amos hurried across the street, down the lane and up and over the rooftop via the gas pipe and finally into the stairwell and then the vent. He made his way down the main shaft counting off the separate ducts until he got to Old Man Dan’s. He needn’t have bothered because his headlamp showed him the path he had already made in the years of accumulated dust and it was pretty obvious which ducts led to his old apartment, Ms. Murphy’s and then Dan’s. Amos had his kneepads on as well and he moved silently and efficiently through the hallway ceiling with almost no sound whatsoever.

  Amos had made such good time that he had a few minutes to wait before he heard someone at Dan’s door. This was fortunate for him because it had taken him a full minute before he remembered to switch off his headlamp, a lucky catch as it would have looked like a spotlight viewed from the apartment below the vent. Cursing himself for his mistake Amos also took stock of the apartment. The wine and the cupcakes were left out in the open on Dan’s dining table and Amos thought that there was no way they would be missed.

  The noise at the door was Mr. Phil. He hadn’t even bothered to knock, so sure was he of Dan’s absence. The landlord closed the door behind him and made straight for the table having seen his prize almost at once.

  Mrs. Garcia had left a good number of chocolate cupcakes with a glistening chocolate fondant topping sitting out on a large plate on the table. They were not organized in any pattern, and it would be impossible to tell if one went missing.

  Filthy Phil seemed to think it would be impossible to tell if three went missing because that was the number of cupcakes he ate in just under two minutes. They did look good; Amos’ mouth seemed to water every time he looked at them and Mr. Phil had not seemed to hesitate while wolfing down one after another.

  Once his third cupcake was finished the landlord proceeded to suck the icing off of his fingers that Amos could see were still visibly dirty from the yard work he had previously been pretending to do. After he had rinsed his fingers in his mouth Mr. Phil dragged them back and forth across his stained tank top and then turned and headed for the door. Amos was amazed that during this entire time Filthy Phil had apparently ignored the possibility of cleaning up in the sink. When the big man suddenly stopped on his way to the door Amos thought that now he might actually wash up.

  This was not to be, instead, the sweaty, rumpled looking landlord turned and went back to the table for a fourth cupcake and the bottle of wine. Then, while holding the cupcake in his mouth and the bottle under a fleshy arm, he stepped out the door, closed it and locked it.

  That cupcake is not long for this world Amos thought to himself as he reversed out of the vent. Once he got to the main shaft, he made his way down the hall and carefully climbed out into the stairwell and snuck across the roof. Five minutes later he had joined Alanah and his new friends from the building at the Latin café and told them of their success. “Four cupcakes…oh my goodness…he doesn’t stand a chance…hah…he won’t even be able to finish a glass of wine.”

  Mrs. Garcia had a big smile on her face. “It is that icing, once a long time ago we had a community party, and I brought a cake with that icing and he kept pawing at the cake when no one was looking with those dirty fingers.” She shuddered with disgust while reliving that memory from the past.

  “Should we worry about him, did he take too much?” Old Man Dan asked out loud, not really to anyone in particular. “No, no, es ok…this is not dangerous, he’s just gonna sleep all afternoon now and then wake up still tired I bet” Mrs. Garcia said with a laugh.

  “How long do you think before it works” Alanah asked. “I think your friend here can go now to see, I bet Filthy Phil is sleeping on his couch already!” Amos took his cue and got up to leave.

  “Come and listen at his door, if I need help, I will yell” he told Alanah, “We will meet the rest of you in a bit at Mrs. Garcia’s apartment.” The two kids grabbed their bags and left the café and headed back to the building to see for themselves if the cupcakes had worked as intended.