“Are you sure about this, Kazu?” He covered his headlamp with his fingers so the light wouldn’t blind me. “This could be really bad if we get caught.”
“I’ve got to save Genki,” I whispered, and CindeeRae nodded. “But I would understand if you decided to guard the perimeter instead and let my parents know if we don’t come out.”
“Isn’t that Madeleine’s job?”
“Kinda.” I shrugged. She would actually be in the house with us, though, and it couldn’t hurt to have two people on lookout.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m coming.”
I unlocked the door and pushed it open. The lights on the main floor were off, so I turned on the flashlight and bounced the beam around Mrs. White’s living room. The house looked like a movie set from the seventies—the carpet, furniture, and wallpaper were old but looked new, as if no one had been allowed to move around inside.
We walked past the living room and through the kitchen, where a back door marked the top of the basement stairs: Madeleine’s mark.
Feeling like Genki’s escape was moments away, I tiptoed down the stairs as if each step contained an invisible booby trap. March and CindeeRae held back, and when I reached the bottom I had to wait for them to catch up.
Moonlight shone through the window on the landing. I caught Madeleine’s eye and flashed her a thumbs-up, which she returned.
March, CindeeRae, and I reached into our packs and pulled out two wraps each. When I touched the doorknob, I thought I heard Genki’s whimper. I swung it wide.
The basement was dark, but I could see the walls were covered with bumpy foam, and the back corner of the room was filled with bags and bags of dog food. Kennels lined the walls, but only a handful were occupied. The room exploded with barking, and dogs lurched at their kennel gates. The three of us rushed to deliver peanut-butter wraps to each of the kennels, and the barking slowly quieted. My chest tightened. Had we been fast enough?
Across the room I saw Genki in the last crate on the right, and my heart sped up. When he saw me, he did the little tapping dance he does when waiting to be fed, his tail beating the back of the kennel. I ran to him and dropped a wrap through the top of his crate, but he ignored it. I pushed my palms into the wires, and Genki licked my fingers.
From behind, I heard CindeeRae yelp, and a kennel door slam. I started to open the latch when March hollered in my ear, and as I turned I saw him fall to the floor, his eyes wide. “Run,” he screamed, but when I took a step toward him I was pushed down, too, my knees knocking on the concrete.
Mrs. White loomed above, her face grouchy, like when I accidentally flattened her tulips with the Sunday paper. She pinched Madeleine’s shoulders with craggy fingers and pushed her into another kennel. Madeleine’s cheeks were wet. “I thought I heard Lenny, so I followed you all downstairs. I’m sorry.”
Mrs. White snapped the padlock shut.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
I scrambled backward with March, pedaling my legs against the concrete floor. Mrs. White held out her cane, resting the end of it on my shoulder.
“Kazuko Jones,” she said. “Always curious. Always industrious.”
CindeeRae was weeping across the room, where she hunched in a kennel with a padlock on the door. I was so distracted with finding Genki, I hadn’t even heard Mrs. White come downstairs.
She snapped her fingers to get my attention. “When I started this whole project, I had hoped I’d get Seenile Gizmos up and running by the time you were old enough to work the register. You’re a dream employee, except for that darned nosiness. And now, you may have ruined everything.” With the cane she motioned at the largest kennel in the room. I looked at March. The two of us could knock Mrs. White down and escape, but then we’d be leaving CindeeRae, Madeleine, and Genki behind. March studied the floor, his eyes moving back and forth like he was ready to slip into a panic attack. We’re in this together, I thought. So I followed my best friend inside the kennel, and Mrs. White closed the latch and hung a padlock from the gate.
Mrs. White dropped a bedazzled phone into the pocket of her bathrobe, and then rubbed her hands together like she had pulled a weed from her garden and needed to brush the dirt from her fingers. So much for having someone on lookout.
“Let’s all hope you three don’t end up like Loralee Sanders.” She turned around, and, without looking back, walked toward the stairs and slammed the door behind her.
CindeeRae had calmed down, but Madeleine was still crying in her kennel, even after the dogs had calmed down and curled inside their cages. All except Genki, who whimpered and pawed at his metal crate no matter what I said to soothe him.
The basement was dark, the light from a back bathroom casting a shadow of the kennels onto the wall. My back was to the corner, the metal wiring biting into my skin and making me sore. March sat cross-legged next to me. His knees buckled at his shoulders, making him look like a frog.
“Now what do we do?” he asked.
I pulled the Gryffindor beanie from his head because he looked ridiculous. “I don’t know. We hadn’t planned for the possibility of being caged with the dogs. Besides, aren’t you the brainiac of this operation?”
“There’s nothing digital about breaking out of here.”
I threw my head back, and it banged on the kennel.
“Who’s Loralee Sanders?” March asked.
“What do you mean?” I remembered Mrs. White telling me about the papergirl who got disappeared by some wackadoodle while collecting payment for the paper. I shivered involuntarily.
“Mrs. White said something about Loralee Sanders.” He leaned forward to study my face. “You do know, Kazuko Jones. I can tell.”
My sigh came out in a long shudder. Telling the others about Loralee Sanders would freak them out. No, it would make them Barkley-level afraid—they might roll over and wet their kennels.
March glared at me.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “She was this papergirl who disappeared more than twenty years ago after collecting money from some crazy guy on her route.”
“What?” March said, his voice squeaky.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said to him, and then called across the room. “Madeleine, you’ve got to snap out of it. We have to get out of here.”
Madeleine was drawn into a ball, her knees pulled to her chest. She mumbled something, her words muffled by the barricade her arms made around her head.
“What?” March and I asked.
She looked up. “I was hoping Lenny would still be here.”
March and I looked around. Some of the kennels were empty, and some of them had two dogs inside. None of them had Lobster or Lenny. Madeleine ducked her head back behind the barricade while CindeeRae hooked her fingers through the kennel wires.
“I’m sorry, Madeleine,” March said. “I thought you knew they had probably already sent Lenny somewhere; it’s been more than seventy-two hours. But once the police know Mr. Crowley and Mrs. White are the dognappers, they’ll be able to track down all the missing dogs.”
CindeeRae said, “How are they going to find out? You heard her—Mrs. White wants to disappear us like Loralee Sanders.”
March looked at me as if he suddenly realized we were locked in a doggie kennel with two criminals deciding our fate. “She’s right. They’re gonna drop us into a well or something. If they don’t, we’ll rat them out, and they’ll be arrested. No dognapping empire for either of them.”
“Calm down,” I said.
March was breathing too fast. He began to rock back and forth, his leg rolling over my fingers each time he fell forward.
“Count to ten, slowly,” I said. I had seen this in a movie before—March was hypervasculating or something. “You’re going to pass out if you don’t slow down.”
March stopped rocking and unfolded his body, his back resting on the kennel and his feet touching the door. He was still too big to stretch his legs out, and they bent at the knee.
“They can’t do anythin
g to us if we escape first,” I said.
“How are we going to escape?” CindeeRae asked. “She’s pacing up there, grumbling about how we’ve ruined everything. Whatever they do, it’ll be before tomorrow morning when all our parents realize we’re missing. Until then, she’s not going to sleep or step out for coffee.”
I looked from March to CindeeRae to Madeleine, all of them staring me down. CindeeRae was right, but if we sat down here until the dognappers made a move, we’d never get away.
“Let’s wait awhile and see if the pacing stops,” I said. “She doesn’t expect us to get out of the kennels, so if she goes to the back of the house, we could sneak out without her even knowing. Until then, I’ll pick our locks, and we’ll be ready to make a run for it, no matter what happens.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
I pulled out my Zoo Crew pack and dumped everything onto the doggie bed cushioning at the bottom of the kennel. The night we had planned to break into Crowley’s house to save Genki, we had watched a YouTube video on lock-picking a handful of times and even tried it on my back door. It had taken a while, but the lock’s core had finally clicked, and the door popped open. I hoped a padlock worked the same as a door lock.
Realizing what I was doing, March pulled his headlamp from where it lay next to his Gryffindor beanie, and snapped it into place on his forehead. We both knelt next to the kennel door, and I pulled the padlock as close to me as possible. March held it in place and focused the beam of his headlamp on the keyhole while I went to work.
One bobby pin was bent in half and acted as the lever I would use to put pressure on the lock and eventually open it. The other was bent straight with a little hook on the end, the tool I would use to open each pin in the locking mechanism.
I pushed the lever into the lock, holding it down and to the left. I shoved the pick above it and began the slow work of listening as I lifted each of the five lock pins. While some of them popped up easily, some were stuck in place and required jiggling. I got to the fourth pin when I lost my hold on the pick, and they all snapped down.
“Remember—slow, deep breaths,” March whispered, his mouth at my ear, and only then did I hear my quick and raspy breathing. It filled the basement and sounded like a wounded animal. I pulled the tools from the lock and took slow, deep breaths with my eyes closed until I calmed down.
“Do you want me to try?” March asked.
I shook my head, and March returned the beam of his headlamp to the padlock. The clicking of pins as they were pushed into place sounded like money dropping into a coin purse—the happiest of sounds. A chill traveled down my back as the final pin clicked into place and the padlock dropped open.
After picking one padlock, the rest were easy. We crouched by Genki’s after releasing him and waited for the noise upstairs to stop. Like a frenzied melody, the pacing slowly subsided and was replaced by silence.
“When should we leave?” March breathed.
“It’s pretty quiet right now,” CindeeRae whispered.
I turned my ear toward the ceiling, as if that might help us know what Mrs. White was doing. The house creaked as it settled, and our breathing synced as we waited.
The phone rang, a low guttural sound that made us jump. We heard Mrs. White patter across the house to the spot above the stairs.
“Hello?” A short pause followed without sound.
Her voice was muffled as she spoke, but I could have sworn I heard her say “get rid of them.”
“Oh no,” I murmured. “They’re going to come down here.”
Mrs. White walked across the kitchen floor, and I imagined her pulling the long cord behind her. She could probably go to the bathroom and still talk on the phone, the cord’s slack pooling in the hallway.
“Thirty minutes? I’ll be ready….”
She paced some more, her footfalls faster, heavier. Then, suddenly, she was pounding down the stairs toward us. Without thinking, I pulled a red lightsaber from my Zoo Crew pack.
The basement door opened and light from the stairwell flooded behind Mrs. White’s stocky body, creating an ominous silhouette and trapping us in the back of the room. She held the phone in one outstretched hand and her cane in the other. Her robe was open, revealing an oversize sweatshirt that hung right above her knees, BEST GRANDMA printed across her chest. A low growl rumbled from the base of Genki’s throat as Mrs. White yelled into the phone. “They got out. Get over here. NOW!”
I stood and took a couple steps toward her, and Genki followed while March and CindeeRae hung back. The dogs in their kennels began to bark again, and I wished we’d had time to release them all to cause a distraction.
She dropped the receiver. The springy cord pulled it from the air, and I heard it hit the stairs out of sight.
“Mr. Crowley’s on his way,” she said. “He was on his cell phone in the truck. He’ll be here any minute.”
Catching my gaze, she pointed her cane at us. My throat tightened, making it hard to breathe.
“Guys,” I screamed. “Go out the back door!”
I rushed forward, waving the red lightsaber back and forth like a sword. Genki sped ahead of me, and, like he had trained for this one moment his entire life, backed Mrs. White against the wall, his teeth bared like a frothing were-monster. March, CindeeRae, and Madeleine bolted up the stairs behind us.
Mrs. White stabbed at Genki with the cane, and he yelped as his back leg buckled.
“You are a very mean old lady!” I swung the lightsaber at her leg and it bent in half, taking a second to spring back into place. Mrs. White tried to reach for the plastic, swinging both hands and dropping her cane.
“The door’s jammed!” March called down the stairs, distracting Mrs. White as Genki recovered. He stood with his back arched, barking so loudly my ears hurt. The other dogs barked even louder, and soon the entire basement was throbbing with the noise.
I swung the lightsaber at Mrs. White’s shoulder, and this time the plastic stayed bent. She jolted, banging her head against the wall and bending to grab her cane from the ground. I beat her to it and swatted at her feet; she lost her balance and tumbled to the ground.
“Go to the garage,” I yelled to March as I ran up the stairs, Genki following behind me.
“You won’t get away,” Mrs. White called after me. “It never takes him long to get here.”
Sure enough, as soon as we entered the garage, the large door began to crank open, activated by a remote outside. With Mrs. White behind us and Crowley ahead, we had nowhere to go.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The beams from the DineWise van slowly filled the garage as the door rose. I hit the button on the keypad, which paused it a foot above the cement floor, and I ran to the one window in the garage across from the door. I stood on my tiptoes and slammed the base of the lightsaber into the window, shattering it.
“What are you doing?” March called at me, his voice shaking.
“Hide behind the garbage cans!” I yelled back as the garage door was activated again, opening wider. I slid next to March, CindeeRae, and Madeleine, and pulled Genki down to the floor, his tail still wagging. “Quiet!” I commanded Genki as the garage door reached the halfway point, and light from the truck flooded the garage.
We huddled in the shadows of the three garbage cans, between an upright freezer and Mrs. White’s gardening tools hanging from hooks on the wall. I didn’t think Crowley would be able to see us, but that was only if he wasn’t searching. He shut the garage door before getting out of the truck and rushing into the house without even glancing around the garage.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” I mumbled at them as I stood and swung open the lid on the garbage can next to the house steps. I pulled Genki to the top step and held the can at an angle for him. “Come!” I said as I pointed inside. Like we were playing Simon Says, March, CindeeRae, and Madeleine followed my commands and crowded into garbage cans.
The dark room shook like an earthquake. I jolted, feeling the walls around me tig
ht like a coffin, and realized Genki was curved around my feet, his head resting awkwardly on the hook of my heel. Then I remembered that I was hunched over in Mrs. White’s garbage can, and the rumbling was probably Allen pushing her trash to the curb.
I must have dozed off after Crowley came. He had gone into the house, leaving the door open a crack, so we could hear his angry conversation with Mrs. White. Then he tore back into the garage, noticed the broken glass, and ran out back, trying to follow our trail out the window and through the neighborhood. I assumed he hoped to catch us before we found cover or made it back to our families.
His frustrated return was followed by more commotion as Crowley and Mrs. White loaded the truck and drove away. We whispered back and forth for a bit, and decided the safest place was in the garbage cans; I was certain they would come back for the dogs and catch us all as we tried to flee. I must have fallen asleep soon after, no longer bothered by the smell of the spoiled DineWise tins and orange peels I had used to cover Genki and me.
My garbage can stopped, and I listened as Allen pushed the other cans to the curb. When I heard his car pull away, I rocked my bin back and forth until it toppled over. I pushed the lid open, the early morning light blinding me as Genki tentatively pushed his way out. March’s eyes peeked from under his lid.
I laughed at the smudge of dirt on his fingers, which hung over the can’s rim. “We did it,” I whispered, still afraid someone might hear us. “Mission accomplished!”
The lid of the last can flew back, and CindeeRae and Madeleine sprang up like a two-headed jack-in-the-box.
“We’re alive!” Madeleine cried.
Genki circled me a couple times before crossing the street to our house. Two police cars and one black SUV were parked at the curb, and Detective Hawthorne’s hulking back blocked all the light in the doorway.
I grabbed March’s arms and pulled him from the garbage can, which toppled onto Mrs. White’s front yard. CindeeRae and Madeleine had already scrambled from their bin, which had been halfway full of recyclables, and the plastic bottles and tin cans clanked onto the street. Detective Hawthorne turned toward the noise. Mom pushed past him and darted across the yard in her bare feet, even though the grass was crunchy with frost.
Kazu Jones and the Denver Dognappers Page 18