Villain's Lair (11 page)

“I need to use the bathroom.”

“No, you don't! Leave me alone!”

But Evie, pesky little sister that she was, did not know how to leave her brother alone. What she did know, however, was how to tattle.

“Mo'Om! Dave's talking to himself again! Mo'Om! Dave won't get out of the bathroom! Mo-om!”

So Dave muttered, “Forget it!” and shoved everything inside his backpack.

Still, something about having a disguise (lame as it might have been) made Dave feel safer. He had no idea when he would ever need it, but there it was, in his new backpack, ready to conceal him at a moment's notice.

Meanwhile, across town, a truly poor boy named Luis happened upon a pair of tennis shoes while digging through garbage cans. He turned them over, not believing his luck. The shoes were worn but wonderful, with red piping and fat red laces.

He turned back to the trash bin.

There was a backpack, too!

A perfectly good (although well-worn and somewhat soiled) backpack!

And a super-cool ball cap with a radical diamondback snake design.

In his entire life, Luis had never felt this lucky.

He put on the shoes and the cap and strutted down the street feeling happy and extremely hip.

Poor, unlucky Luis.

He now looked just like Dave.

Luis, of course, did not look
just
like Dave. He may have had the same dark hair, but he was smaller and younger, with a broader nose, more closely set eyes, and rather large, floppy earlobes.

But to the Bandito Brothers (who saw no value in children) and Damien Black (to whom children were like cat-sized rats—vermin that were both interchangeable and expendable), Luis could easily be mistaken for Dave.

And that is exactly what happened one afternoon as the Bandito Brothers were strumming and strolling near Luis's neighborhood (working their way, day by day, ever closer to Dave's).

“Look!” Pablo gasped, reining back Rosie. “It's him!”

Angelo stopped mid-strum. “Finally!”

Tito, though, being quite childlike himself, studied the boy walking along the street and said, “That's not him. His earlobes are too big.”

“Earlobes?” Pablo asked with a squint.
“Earlobes?”

“You idiot!” Angelo said, thumping the back of Tito's head with his guitar.

“Ow!” Tito complained, but Pablo was already pulling a walkie-talkie out of his holster.

Now, when I say “walkie-talkie,” I don't mean the sort of slick model an ordinary person might purchase at an ordinary store. No, this particular walkie-talkie was a strange-looking contraption made by Damien Black himself. It was fashioned out of odds and ends, bits and pieces, and, of course, gizmos and gadgets and thingamajiggies.

It had the handle of a flashlight (so it fit quite
nicely into the six-shooter holster), but other than that, it wasn't like anything you've ever seen before. It had wires and glowing tubes and antennas, a rubbery ear on the side, and a mouthpiece in front with
lips.

Pablo switched on the power.

He extended a long, spirally antenna.

Folded out a grid-shaped doohickey.

Spread out a fan-shaped thingamabob.

Dialed a frequency knob until it was lined up with a picture of the mansion.

And at last he whispered into the rubbery ear.

“Mr. Black,” he hissed. “Come in, Mr. Black!” He waited a moment for a reply, and when there
wasn't one, he tried again. “Mr. Black! Come in, Mr. Black! We have found the boy!”

Suddenly there was a snap.

A crackle.

A pop!

And then the raspy voice of Damien Black came (quite eerily) through the lips. “Are you certain?”

Tito rolled his eyes and shook his head, but Pablo hissed, “Yes!” into the ear. “Come quickly! He's walking toward downtown.”

“Follow him!” Damien's voice commanded. “I've got your coordinates. I'll be right there!” Then the lips shouted, “And leave the communicator on, you fools!”

Now, when Damien Black says he'll be right there, trust me, he'll be right there. Not in a car or a plane or a helicopter, and certainly not on a buck-toothed burro. No, the way Damien Black moves from his monstrous mansion on the top of Raven
Ridge to anywhere in the city in a lickety-split get-there-quick sort of fashion is on his motorcycle.

Now, again. This is a Damien Black contraption, not one made by, say, Harley-Davidson. It's small, like a moped, but with gadgets galore and ape-hanger handlebars (because even dangerous, demented villains have their sense of style). It's black (for stealth in the night) and has a wicked rocket fuel-injected motor that can propel it from zero to one fifty in four point six seconds while sending bright orange flames out its twin exhaust pipes.

It is, in a word, bad.

And although most motorists would take the road to get to or from Raven Ridge, Damien Black was not most motorists. He was a diabolically demented villain, and diabolically demented villains prefer shortcuts when hurrying to perform diabolically demented deeds.

Damien Black had such a shortcut.

He hadn't built it himself. He had just connected to it via a ramp beneath the dungeon.

It was a shortcut that went under the city.

A shortcut that was wet.

And stinky.

A shortcut that most people would never consider taking themselves.

A shortcut known to the rest of the city as…the sewer system.

Now, because Damien Black lived among bats and rats and Komodo dragons, he did not mind the stench. He also did not mind the wetness, as he could tear right through it on his motorcycle when it was shallow, and if it got too deep, the wheels of his motorcycle turned sideways, transforming the machine into a sewage-spewing Jet Ski (which had the tendency to put the kibosh on anyone chasing him).

So it was with great speed that Damien Black left his mansion and traveled under the city toward the Bandito Brothers.

It was, however,
not
with great speed or stealth that the Bandito Brothers followed Luis down the street. They were, after all, on foot, dragging along guitars and a bucktoothed burro.

But even without the guitars or the burro, they were just not that sneaky.

In fact, they were bumbly.

Stumbly.

And they said “Shh!” to each other so many times that Luis finally noticed that he was being followed.

Now, if you were being followed by bumbly, stumbly banditos with a bucktoothed burro, you would, at first, think the same thing Luis thought:

What a joke.

But if those bumbly, stumbly banditos and that bucktoothed burro tailed you up one street and down another, across a park, and over a bridge, you might start to get nervous and wonder, as Luis did, what the heck was going on.

“Hey, you weirdos!” he finally called out to them. “Why are you following me?”

“We are just going the same way as you!” Angelo called back.

“And we are not weirdos!” Pablo shouted.

Tito nodded. “We're a mariachi band!”

This made Luis snort and roll his eyes, and for a moment he felt better.

But then he turned around and saw a manhole cover in front of him wobble and scrape to the side.

A dark-haired man with a twisty mustache and dangerous eyes emerged from underground.

The man sneered at him as he leapt to the street.

And in that instant, Luis understood.

He was in deep, diabolical doo-doo.

Being in deep, diabolical doo-doo causes the same reaction in all young boys.

They run!

But (after a short delay caused by his ape-hanger handlebars getting tangled in the manhole opening) Damien zoomed after him.

The Bandito Brothers piled onto Rosie any way they could, then joined the hot pursuit with Angelo shouting “Giddyap!” as Pablo mercilessly slapped the poor burro's behind with his guitar.

And Luis might have escaped, but he made the mistake of
thinking
he'd escaped. (And if there's another thing you should never do, it's think you've escaped while you're still escaping.)

Around one corner he flew, breathlessly checking behind him for the devilish moped man or the weridos on the bucktoothed burro.

They were nowhere in sight.

Around the next corner he flew, and again, no devil on a moped or bucktoothed burro.

Around the
third
corner he flew, and it was here that Luis, gasping for breath, finally believed he was safe.

Poor, poor Luis. He didn't realize he had circled the block!

And when he stopped looking over his shoulder and instead looked ahead, he bumped right into the devilish moped man.

“Aaaaaaah!” Luis screamed.

“Bwaa-ha-ha!” Damien Black laughed, grabbing the boy by the nape of the neck. “Gotcha!”

“Let go, let go!” Luis screamed, kicking and flailing his arms and legs.

It was then that Damien realized that nabbing a
boy by the nape of the neck on a busy street in broad daylight was maybe not such a swift move to make.

So he dragged him, kicking and screaming, across the street to a narrow alleyway between tall buildings. An alleyway with trash cans and mangy cats and broken bottles and not much else.

Unfortunately for Luis, people in the vicinity were distracted by a bucktoothed burro attempting to gallop up the street with three grown mariachi men on its back. And so they were unaware that a young boy was being abducted.

Luis was indeed in danger.

Terrible, mortal danger.

Struggle as he might, he could not free himself from the devilish man's clutches. “Help!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, but Damien just clamped a cruel hand over his mouth and whispered, “Help yourself, you fool. Where is it?”

“Wrar wrar wrar!” Luis cried from behind Damien's hand.

Damien released his grip on Luis's mouth.

“Help!” Luis screamed. “Somebody h—”

Fwap
went Damien's hand over his mouth, and this time he shook poor Luis's face as he demanded, “Where is it?”

“Wrar wrar wrar!” Luis cried from behind Damien's hand.

“I'm through playing games!” Damien fumed. He tried to frisk the boy's arms, but with all the flailing Luis was doing, it was impossible to tell anything. So he hauled Luis to a set of fire escape stairs that zigzagged up, up, up for eight floors.

He dragged him to the second level, where he felt it would be safe to slam Luis against the wall and frisk him.

“Hey, you!” someone cried from a window in a building across the alley. “Let him go or I'll call the police!”

It was just the distraction Luis needed to break free. And since Damien was blocking the
steps that went down, Luis ran in the only direction he could.

Up.

With each flight, the furious treasure hunter tried to nab him.

With each flight, the boy had only one place to go.

Up.

So up, up, up, up,
up
they both ran, until at last they were on the roof.

“Where are you fools?” Damien screamed into the ear of his communicator. “I need your help!”

But the Bandito Brothers were in no position or condition to help. At that moment, they and their bucktoothed burro were causing a metal-munching, windshield-crunching pileup in the street.

SCREECH!

BAM!

CRUNCH!

WHAM!