Sinister Substitute

Dave did, in fact, wake up the next morning.

  And Dave did, in fact, find himself in the midst of his same dilemma:

  Should he save the Crocodile?

  Or risk facing off with Damien Black?

  But… wouldn’t he also have to face off with Damien Black if he went to the mansion and set Ms. Krockle free?

  Wasn’t saving her like two hazards in one?

  Well… not if he went to Damien’s house while Damien was substituting at school. That might work.

  Might.

  More confused than ever, Dave did what any sensible boy of thirteen would do in such circumstances:

  He buried his head under the covers.

  “If you play hooky, señor,” Sticky whispered through a slit in the blankets, “you will give yourself away.”

  “He can’t keep coming back!” came Dave’s muffled response.

  “Sure he can, señor.”

  “The school’s gotta figure out that he’s a phony sooner or later!”

  “Most likely later,” Sticky grumbled. He crawled under the covers and began pulling on Dave’s ear. “Ándale, hombre! Quit being such a bobo slowpoke.”

  Pulling on Dave’s ear was something Sticky did out of desperation. Usually because, say, a boulder was about to smash them to mush. Or a snake was about to strike. Or Dave was looking left when a semitruck was bearing down on them from the right.

  He also did it when Dave was being just plain stubborn.

  As you might imagine, Dave hated it when Sticky pulled on his ear. Not only was it annoying, it reminded him of being a little kid.

  Of being at the market with his grandma.

  (His grandma who, it’s sad to say, had long since died.)

  “Stop that!” Dave said, flailing under the covers. “Leave me alone!”

  Unfortunately for Dave, his mother (who had just opened his door) came rushing in and pulled back the covers. “Mi’jo?”

  Sticky dived under the pillow while Dave bolted upright, caught his breath, and said, “Sorry. Bad dream.”

  Mrs. Sanchez looked at her son with concern. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “Uh, no.” He glanced at his clock. “Wow! Look at the time! I’m gonna be late!” And with that he got dressed and charged around the house, gathering his schoolwork, eating breakfast, brushing his teeth, and shouldering his bike.

  “Later!” he called to his family on his way out the door.

  “Have a good day!” his mom and dad called back.

  “Say hi to your girlfriend,” Evie singsonged.

  So Dave zipped down the stairs (without running into or over anyone), zoomed to school (without getting a flat), arrived on time (or, more precisely, early), and discovered (by over-hearing other students talking) that Dr. Schwarz was no longer substituting for Ms. Veronica Krockle.

  “Yes!” Dave said, pumping his arm. And as he headed off to his first-period class, he felt good all over. “See, Mr. Doom-and-Gloom?” he whispered into his sweatshirt, where Sticky was hiding. “She’s back, he’s gone!”

  “Ay chihuahua,” Sticky said with a little tisk. “Something’s not right about this, señor. That was waaaaaaay too easy.”

  “Maybe you’re what’s not right, huh? Maybe it wasn’t Damien Black to begin with!”

  “Ay-ay-ay,” Sticky said with a sigh, and really, what else was there to say? There was simply no talking to Dave when he was this happy. You see, the wiring in his thirteen-year-old brain had switched to silly-circuit, and the fact is, facts have no place in the snap-happy zapping of silly-circuits. Facts are simply powerless when a brain is in such a state, and nothing Sticky could say or do would pop Dave out of it.

  What would pop his silly-circuit, however, was walking into science class.

  Chapter 9

  WALKING INTO SCIENCE CLASS

  The teacher in the seventh-grade science classroom was not wearing a lab coat and black boots.

  Nor was she wearing a brown tweed suit.

  No, the teacher waiting patiently for her class to file in was just an ordinary, curly-haired, skirt-suited substitute, sporting a string of plastic pearls and a glittery I LOVE TEACHING pin.

  “Wow, another sub?” Calvin Jones whispered as students huddled outside the science classroom. “The Croc must be on her deathbed or something.”

  Guilt jolted through Dave. Where was Ms. Krockle? He had seen traps and cages and dungeons inside Damien’s monstrous mansion with his own two eyes. He’d almost gotten caught in a couple of them! Was she in one?

  And Sticky had told him about clammy walls in the labyrinth under the mansion where people could be shackled upside down until they cried for mercy. Sticky had told him about torture chambers filled with creaky, clanky killing (or contorting) contraptions! Sticky had told him … well, enough to make him shudder just thinking about going back to Raven Ridge.

  But… what if Ms. Krockle was on a deathbed? A deathbed Damien Black had strapped her to!

  What if, right now, that madman had her bound and gagged and was preparing to plunge a knife through her eeky-shrieky heart?

  Okay, so he might have to plunge the knife in a bunch of times to find it, but what if she did actually have a heart, and piercing it with a knife did actually kill her?

  This was the point at which the silly-circuiting in Dave’s brain shorted out.

  This was the point at which he started feeling like … a coward.

  “Hey,” Yasmine Branson said, nudging Fons Soto, “I am not sitting in someone else’s seat again. That was totally awkward.”

  “Yeah,” Eli Laslow said. “Me either.”

  And so the class filed in (dutifully taking their assigned seats) and sat quietly, gazing upon their new substitute (whose name, they learned from the flowery script on the whiteboard, was Ms. Dede Bartholomew).

  “Good afternoon, class,” the teacher said after the tardy bell rang, her double chin wiggling as she warbled. (She was, to dress it kindly, a plus-sized woman.) “I understand that yesterday’s substitute was a bit… strange.”

  “You can say that again,” students all around grumbled.

  “There were apparently complaints that all he wanted to talk about was geckos?”

  “Yeah,” Fons muttered. “What was up with that?”

  The substitute chuckled. “I could understand if he’d wanted to talk about the Gecko. After all, I’ve heard the Gecko goes to school here.”

  “Here?” Fons asked, sitting up.

  This was followed by a flurry of questions and comments:

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Yeah. My dad said he’s a field-worker!”

  “No way! I heard he’s in high school.”

  “Hey, if you could scale walls like he does, why would you even go to school? Or work in the fields?”

  “I sure wouldn’t.”

  Then Lily (who’d remained uncharacteristically quiet for two days now) said, “He does go to school. He goes to Yucca Middle School. I have a friend who knows him.”

  “You do?” everyone asked, turning to face her.

  “She’s lying,” Yasmine Branson muttered with a scowl.

  “Shut up,” Lily said, half getting out of her seat.

  “You’re always lying,” Yasmine said with a shrug.

  Then Dave (whose brain had not quite adjusted to the sudden switch in circuitry) said, “Uh … I’ve heard the same thing.”

  Lily turned on him. “What—that I’m a liar?”

  “No!” Dave sputtered, and turned a rosy red. “That he goes to Yucca.”

  “See?” Lily said, pointing an angry finger at Yasmine. “Who’s a liar now, huh?”

  Yasmine sneered, first at Dave, then at Lily. “Are you guys, like, going out or something?”

  “Shut up!” Lily said, flying out of her seat.

  Well! Just when it seemed the two girls would come to blows (or, at least, scratches), Ricky Zaragoza pointed at the ceiling and cried, “Look!”

  And t
here was Tyler Mills’s extra-credit gecko from the day before, hanging (rather miraculously) from the ceiling above their heads.

  “That dweeb sub from yesterday would be going crazy right now!” Reuben laughed.

  “Yeah. Ooooh, a gecko!” Fons said sarcastically.

  Now, as all heads (including the sizeable sub’s) cranked back to get a look at the gecko on the ceiling, all mouths dropped open. It is just a natural thing for a mouth to do when the head to which it’s attached cranks backward.

  And in the process of cranking heads and dropping jaws, Sticky (who’d been slyly watching the new substitute the whole time) got a lizard’s-eye view inside the gaping mouth of Ms. Dede Bartholomew.

  Suddenly his little gecko heart started clattering like castanets. “Señor!” he whispered up at Dave’s ear. “The tooth! Look at the tooth!”

  Sure enough, there it was, inside the gaping mouth of the double-chinned, apple-cheeked (and, I might add, completely whiskerless) substitute: a sparkling gold molar.

  It wasn’t just any molar either.

  It was the first molar behind the top left canine.

  When Dave saw it, his skin did not just crawl. It crept and prickled and shivered and ran cold and then hot, and then crawled.

  He now realized that he could no longer bury his head under the covers and hope Damien Black would go away.

  Damien was like a recurring nightmare.

  In one form or another, he would keep coming back.

  And so it was that Dave decided:

  It was time to return to Damien’s monstrous mansion.

  It was time to rescue Ms. Veronica Krockle.

  Chapter 10

  THE BOXING MATCH

  The minute Dave realized that their female substitute with the curly hair and jostling jowls was, in fact, Damien Black wearing another (amazingly elaborate) disguise, a boxing match began inside his head.

  In one corner: Stay in school until the end of the day.

  In the other: Ditch.

  If he left school early, he could ride up to Damien Black’s mansion, sneak inside, rescue Ms. Krockle, and get out of there before Damien had had the chance to peel off his latex face. JAB, SMACK, BAM. With quick moves and fancy footwork, he could (perhaps) land a knockout in round one.

  But rallying back from the other side were some simple, indisputable facts: Getting inside Damien’s nightmarish mansion had never been easy. (JAB!) The place was huge. (PUNCH!) And he had no idea where Ms. Krockle was being held, or if she was even still alive. (BAM!)

  Plus, Dave had never ditched school.

  Not even one class period.

  To the Sanchez family, ditching school was like stealing. “Just because you don’t have to pay to go to school,” his parents had told him, “doesn’t mean it’s not expensive. It’s a gift that you must respect and appreciate.”

  So, despite all the reasons it would make his life easier, Dave did not feel right about cutting school, even if it was just for one class period.

  It would be wrong.

  Disrespectful.

  A big, bad no-no.

  So! This might well have been the knockout blow to the ditch-school side, had it not been for Sticky helping it to rally back. “What will you be missing if you leave school now?” he whispered. “That silly acting class? You think that goofy gaucho will even notice?”

  Which, Dave had to admit, was true. His last course was drama, the class was huge, and Mr. Teevo rarely took roll.

  “We need a head start, señor,” Sticky whispered. “You may be speedy on your bike, but not speedy enough to beat that evil hombre to the mansion!”

  Which was also true. Damien would certainly be able to get up to Raven Ridge in his car much faster than Dave could on his bike.

  “And your deliveries, hombre,” Sticky said, landing a final blow. “You need time for those!”

  Dave had only three deliveries that afternoon, but most businesses closed at five-thirty or six o’clock. Without the extra time, he would never make it.

  And so, in the end, not only did the ditch-school side rally back, it won.

  Now, rather than go through the school and risk being seen, Dave clicked the Wall-Walker ingot into the powerband, scaled a back wall, sneaky-toed along the roof, and scurried down to the bike racks, where he unlocked his bike, hopped on, and pedaled away.

  But as he was tearing through town on his way to Raven Ridge, he started wondering how in the world he was going to rescue Ms. Krockle without giving away who he was. His Gecko disguise of a black T-shirt, ball cap, and sunglasses would probably not fool Ms. Krockle. She’d had him in class all year!

  He also started worrying about Damien Black. If things went wrong and he did run into him, would Damien recognize him from school?

  These growing worries were rumbling through Dave’s brain as he went by a thrift store. A thrift store that had a window display that caused Dave to come skidding to a halt.

  “What the jalapeño are you doing?” Sticky cried, for the sudden stop had practically thrown him off Dave’s shoulder.

  “I just had a brainstorm!” Dave cried, whipping the bike around.

  “Uh-oh,” Sticky said, which was completely out of character for the lizard. In normal circumstances (as well as stressful ones), Sticky would say, “Ay-ay.” Or “Ay-ay-ay.” Or “Ay-ay-ay-ay!” But “Uh-oh”?

  Sticky was worried.

  “Just stick to the plan, señor.”

  “What plan?” Dave said, heading inside the thrift store. “We don’t have a plan!”

  “Get up to that crazy casa, set her free, get out of there! That’s the plan.”

  “That’s no plan!” Dave said, opening the door and hurrying inside. “And even after we set her free, that’s not going to stop Damien from coming back. And we might not recognize him next time!”

  “So true,” Sticky mused. He cocked his head, looking at Dave. “So what’s your plan?” he whispered.

  Dave hurried over to the window display, taking down a faded yellow sweatshirt that had large brown lettering across the chest spelling out YUCCA.

  Yucca Middle School.

  “Señorrrrr!” Sticky said. “This is a brainstorm.”

  Dave looked very pleased. “And,” he said, picking up a worn, very traditional-looking black bandanna, “I’ll use this to cover my nose and mouth. Like a field-worker keeping the dust out!”

  Sticky gave him a sly grin. “Very confusing, señor.”

  Dave grinned back. “Exactly.”

  So Dave paid for the sweatshirt and bandanna, then continued up to Raven Ridge, where he found a secluded spot in the forest on the outskirts of Damien Black’s mansion to hide his bike and put on his disguise.

  When he was ready, Sticky said, “Híjole! You look crazy good!”

  And with that they sneaky-toed through the fearsome forest, determined to get in and out of Damien’s mansion before the dastardly villain returned home.

  Chapter 11

  MEANWHILE, INSIDE THE MANSION

  While Dave and Sticky were sneaky-toeing through the fearsome forest, the Bandito Brothers were inside the mansion drawing straws.

  Now, by “drawing straws,” I do not mean that they were broadening their artistic horizons by putting the finishing touches on, say, a still life of a bottle of soda with straws poking out of it.

  No, by “drawing straws,” I mean that they were choosing who would be saddled with the distasteful task of delivering a very late lunch to Ms. Veronica Krockle.

  And although they were drawing straws, the Bandito Brothers were actually using weeds.

  Weeds that were strewn (or clumped in great messy piles) around the mansion.

  Weeds that were a seasonal mix of tall (and short) grasses, delectable dandelions, thorny thistles, wild arugula, and the occasional stick. Weeds that were used for the care and feeding of a buck-toothed burro named Rosie.

  These weeds were (as you might imagine) an on-going source of annoyance to Damien Bl
ack, but Rosie was part of the Bandito Brothers package. She was (aside from their well-callused feet) their sole source of transportation. And although she’d been banished by Damien Black to the outside of the house, as the old saying goes, when the cat’s away, the mouse will play. (Or, in this case, when the villain’s away, the mariachi band will play. And no, I am not referring to their instruments.)

  Tito, in particular, had a soft spot for Rosie. So much so that he had (without Damien’s knowledge or notice) sawed and chiseled and nailed and drilled away at a remote back entry until he had, at long last, installed …

  A donkey door.

  The donkey door was very much like a doggy door only considerably larger. In fact, it took up over half the door. And the flapping rubber shield that is typical on most doggy doors was, instead, a large black trash sack.

  Which didn’t always keep out biting bugs.

  Or skittery squirrels.

  Or… But no matter. After being guided through the donkey door a few times by Tito, Rosie got the hang of it and the donkey door served its purpose beautifully. The moment Damien was out of sight, Tito removed the cover (a sheet of plywood, painted to match the door), thereby giving Rosie full access to the house.

  Or, at least, access to the part of the house that the Bandito Brothers had access to, which (in the scheme of the entire mansion) wasn’t much. Damien couldn’t very well have them nosing through his gizmos and gadgets and priceless possessions! So he’d locked the Brothers out (with multi-linked, chunky-clunky, skeleton-keyed locks), or booby-trapped them out (with trapdoors and boinging knives and slipknotted ropes), or scared them out (with pre-recorded groaning, whoooing, whooshing noises that no ghost-fearing mariachi band would dare investigate). These fellas were, undeniably, thieves, and if he couldn’t get rid of them, he at least needed to contain them.

  But let’s get back to the drawing of straws, shall we?

  The Brothers are, after all, about to determine whose job it will be to face the fierce and frightening Veronica Krockle.

  “Over here, boys,” Angelo called, holding three long (but pathetically limp) blades of grass. “We’ve got to get this done before Mr. Black gets home.”