Villain's Lair (9 page)

Again.

Cats also have very good memories. And what this particular cat on this particular sill remembered was that the last time the boy was talking to the flower box, she had managed to get outside and almost caught one fat and (surely) tasty lizard.

The memory made her pace the windowsill. Made her mew pitifully. And that pitiful mewing is what brought Lily, the sassy, saucy, thirteen-year-old girl who lived there, to the window.

“Whatssamatter, sweetie?” she purred to her kitty (whom she found adorable, despite the tiger-temper and squooshed-in face). And that's when she heard Dave's voice scolding the flower box.

Again.

What a geeky, dorky weirdo, she thought. And since geeky, dorky weirdos are too easy a target for sassy, saucy girls to resist, she lifted the window farther and called out, “Talking to yourself again, Dave?”

Well! There went Topaz, like a bolt of fuzzy, squooshy-faced lightning! Out the window, across the flower box, and then
whoosh
, over seven stories of nothingness (into which you and I would have plummeted to our deaths) and onto Dave's flower box.

“Catch her!” the sassy, saucy girl cried. “Grab her quick before she falls!”

The minute Sticky saw Topaz coming, he abandoned his siesta and zoomed lickety-split across the box and up Dave's arm. ‘Ay
caramba!”
he panted. “Here we go again!”

“Grab her, Dave! Grab her!”

Sticky's preference would have been to let the
cat fall on its face, but it would have made no difference (to its face, anyway).

Besides, cats have nine lives.

She would be back.

“Dave, what are you waiting for? Grab her!”

Evie was at the window now, singing, “Davy's got a girlfriend, Davy's got a girlfriend!”

“Shut up, Evie!” Dave snapped, lunging for the cat. He snagged her by the nape of the neck and hauled her in, clawing and mewing like she was being tortured. (Which, in fact, she was not. She was just furious that she'd missed the lizard again.)

Dave held her out like a furry, clawy, stinky diaper and met Lily in the hallway. “Oh, thank you! Thank you so much!” she gushed, acting neither sassy nor saucy.

“Hasta la vista
, uuuuuugly,” Sticky muttered at the cat from inside Dave's sweatshirt.

“What did you say?” Lily asked.

“Huh? Oh.” Dave cleared his throat. “Hasta
be awfully hard for her, being cooped up inside all day.”

Lily smoothed back Topaz's fur, making the cat's flat face seem even squooshier. “Don't I know,” she grumbled. “I'm grounded for grades.” She gave him a sassy, saucy smirk. “Why are you home? Don't you have rounds to make, delivery boy?”

She was making fun of his after-school job, but this was nothing new. And he might have said, I don't do deliveries on weekends, but instead, something inside him made him want to brag.

“Nah. I'm grounded, too.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “You?
Grounded?”

He nodded, pleased with her reaction. “Got home too late on Friday night.” He turned to go back into his apartment. “Well, see you at school tomorrow,” he said, then left her in the hallway with her jaw dangling.

It was enough to make him forget all about his
troubles. You see, in addition to being a sassy, saucy thirteen-year-old, Lily Espinoza was quite a looker. One of those girls whose mere presence turns ordinarily coordinated boys into blushing, bumbling fools.

But for once Dave hadn't stuttered in her presence.

He hadn't tripped.

Hadn't bashed into her with his bike.

For once he'd been smooth. (Or, as Sticky might say,
suavecito!)

Yes, at that moment, the Bandito Brothers and Damien Black were the furthest things from his mind.

Too bad for Dave, he was the only thing on theirs.

Meanwhile, back at the mansion, Damien Black had survived his own dragon's attack. So, too, had the Bandito Brothers, but that was only because they had traded their lives for loyalty. (Which is to say they were now firmly aligned with the evil treasure hunter.) (And
that
is to say they'd promised to help Damien find the boy.)

But where to begin?

Damien Black's mansion loomed behind the city in an otherwise uninhabited area known as Raven Ridge. Like an eerie shadow, it was present yet overlooked by people as they hustled and bustled through their lives. A tingling of the spine, a sudden chill or a shiver…these were felt by the
people of the city, but they were largely shaken off, dismissed, or ignored.

It was only if one paused to consider the shiver, paused to look up at the house, that the source was revealed. The house was, as you already know, wholly and totally spooky. But it's a well-known fact that adults don't buy into wholly and totally spooky. They buy into terms like “antique” or “fixer-upper” or “old and decrepit.” (Perhaps because they, too, are becoming old and decrepit, and would rather be viewed as antiques.)

But a young person calls a dog a dog (not a canine or man's best friend or hunny-bunny-poochy-woochy). So a young person calls a wholly and totally spooky house (or person) exactly what it is—wholly and totally spooky.

So the house (and all the activities within) had a certain immunity. Adults ignored it, and children avoided it. This, then, explains how oddly jutting rooms could be built or dungeons
created or Komodo dragons introduced, all without notice. It also explains how a telescope of mega-multiplying magnification could poke out of the window of one of those oddly jutting rooms without objection from the neighbors below.

Nobody noticed.

Now, the amount of time it took Dave and Sticky to get out of the mansion and onto the bike was exactly the amount of time it took Damien Black and his new cohorts to get out of the dragon pit and up to the mega-multiplying-magnification telescope (or, as the brass plate on the side of the telescope boasted, the Mighty Triple-M).

Damien put one of his dark and dangerous eyes up to the Mighty Triple-M (which, I think you'll agree, actually makes it a
Quadruple-M)
.

He swiftly moved the telescope across the landscape.

“Bwaa-ha-ha!” Damien laughed when he caught
sight of Dave racing off on his bike. “Bwaa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

“You spotted him, Mr. Black?”

The treasure hunter raised an eyebrow in Pablo's direction as if to say, Why
else
would I be bwaa-ha-ha'ing, you fool? then resumed tracking the boy with his Mighty Triple-M.

“What does he have, anyway?” Angelo asked.

“What are those coins about?” Pablo added.

“They were very shiny!” Tito said with a head-bobby nod.

Again, Damien gave them a look. A long, hard, dark look, which meant, Ask any more
questions and I'll feed you to the dragon. The Brothers took a step back. Even Tito gulped.

Damien continued to stare until, with a jolt, he realized that his long, hard, dark look had gone on way too long. What if the boy had gotten away? He quickly turned

back to his scope, and when he found Dave again, he began muttering things like “You pesky little thief! You rotten little robber! You bungling burglar! You burrito bandito!”

“Hey!” the Bandito Brothers cried, for they
were sensitive to such insensitive remarks, even if they weren't directed directly at them.

But the treasure hunter ignored their com' plaint and went on, his voice getting louder and more high-pitched as he trained the scope on Dave. “You crooked crook!” (As if there is such a thing as a straight crook?) “You pint-sized pickpocket! You nettling nuisance! You tricky trespasser! You confounded
brat!”

And that's what was really at the heart of the matter. You see, Damien Black had never been outsmarted by anyone.

Anyone besides Sticky, that is.

But still. It was one thing to be outsmarted by a talking lizard. The gecko, he assumed, was most likely bewitched or in possession of supernatural powers.

But being outsmarted by a boy?

A crummy, scrawny
boy
?

It was an insult!

A slap in the dastardly face!

(And if there's one thing a maniacal demon of a man cannot take, it's a slap in his dastardly face.)

So Damien Black watched Dave through the powerful lens, following him off the mountain, across the river, and into the city, vowing to catch him.

Cage him!

Take the powerband from him and have his revenge!

He did manage to track him for quite a distance inside the city, but even the mightiest of mega-multiplying'magnification telescopes can't see around corners, so at last he lost sight of him.

“To the map room!” he cried, and off they all scurried, through secret passages, down a rope ladder, along a pulley cart, inside a vacuum tube, up through the trapdoor, and into the map room.

With great flair, Damien pulled down a detailed map of the area and stood staring at it as he
twisted his mustache and murmured such things as “Hmm-mm. Ahhhh. Hmmm.”

Finally Pablo dared to speak. “What are you thinking, Mr. Black?”

This made Angelo brave a question, too. “Do you have an idea where he might be?”

Damien did not raise an eyebrow in their direction.

He did not sneer or snap or shout.

He simply nodded.

Then he picked up a pointer and thwapped it against the map. “I lost sight of him here.” He dragged the pointer, zigzagging along roads until he reached a neighborhood on the outskirts of town. “This area
here
is a possibility,” he said, circling it with his pointer. “Or
here,”
he said, cir-cling another neighborhood.

“How do you know, Mr. Black? How can you tell?”

Again, there was no shouting, no snapping, no
raising of eyebrows. There was simply a smirk and a twist of the mustache as he replied, “Because no boy with money would risk his life that way.”

The smirk grew.

The twisting of the mustache became extra twisty.

And in his fiendish eyes, the Bandito Brothers could see a devilish glint forming.

Damien Black had a plan.

A dastardly, dark, diabolical plan.

Dave did not think of himself as poor. (Of course, those who are rich with a family's love never do.) His father worked at the neighborhood market, his mother at a Laundromat. “Your dad and I are a good team,” Dave's mother would say. “Between the two of us, you're always clean and fed.”

So Dave didn't notice that the streets in his neighborhood were narrow and crowded or that nobody drove fancy cars. He also didn't think twice that the playing fields at school were more dirt than grass. Or that his principal made the morning announcements through a megaphone from the middle rung of an A-frame ladder.

Ms. Batista was, after all, a little bit quirky.

It wasn't until he began couriering—or delivery-boying, as Lily would say—that he started noticing how different life was outside his neighborhood.