“No, Angie, an actual seventh-grade student. The caller claimed this student had a bedroom full of ‘money and gold.’ We checked it out and, of course, found a typical messy bedroom full of smelly clothes and presidential action figures, but no gold or money.”
“Director Dropbag, may I ask: Did the seventh grader even have a mustache?”
“Of course not, Angie. He did have a suit, but it was more of a hard-nosed businessman suit than a man-about-town suit. It was nothing but a waste of time and resources for the department.”
“I’m sure all of our viewers are hoping you can trace the call and severely punish the person who made it.”
“I wish we could, Angie, but there was some sort of glitch with the phone system, and that information wasn’t recorded last night. But I’ve been told that it has been fixed, so if any more jokers are thinking of calling, I’d like them to know that I will personally track them down and destroy them with great pleasure! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
“Well, thank you very much, Director Dropbag.”
“And thank you, Angie.”
“Actually, my name isn’t Angie, it’s Nancy.”
“Sorry, Nancy.”
“That’s OK, Director Dropbag.”
“Call me Marcie.”
“Marcie, are you ready to share your recipe for triple chocolate brownies?”
adzooks! If the FBI had traced that call, I would have been arrested! Outrageous.
But what I couldn’t understand is what DID happen to all that money Casper had in his room? I mean, it was billions of dollars. Where could it have all gone?
Then I heard Nancy the anchorwoman again.
“In other big news, the Heidelberg Novelty Company has been purchased in a cash transaction for a reported sum of two point four billion dollars. Sources say the new owner is billionaire hard-nosed businessman Fako Mustacho.”
And they showed a picture of Casper wearing his mustache! Didn’t they notice that the picture looked exactly like the one of the bank robber they were just talking about? And that name: Fako Mustacho? He was practically spelling it out for them!
But at least this explained where the money had gone.
The news went to split screen. Nancy was talking to one of those guys who looks like he knows everything.
“Welcome to the show, Barney. What can you tell us about billionaire hard-nosed businessman Fako Mustacho?”
“Never heard of him.”
“Me neither, but I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more from him in the coming days, Barney.”
“Because he’s so handsome?”
“No, Barney, because the Heidelberg Novelty Company is the world’s largest manufacturer of voting machines, and the presidential election is just a few days away.”
“Really? Wow.”
I stopped listening. I was beginning to wonder about something. Even though the FBI hadn’t figured out that I was the one who had called in the tip about Casper . . . maybe Casper had.
I mean, it must be obvious. I was in his room and saw the money. Then someone called the FBI and told them he had the money in his room. He must have known it was me.
But what would he do about it, I wondered. Would he be mad?
That’s when our front door was knocked open by a battering ram and fast-food restaurant employees burst through, pointing at me and yelling, “There he is! The Evil One! Grab him!”
uckily, I have spent many hours planning what I would do if someone broke into the house. True, I thought that it would be a burglar, not a horde of fast-food employees, but, still, it was a pretty good plan.
Step 1: Pick up sisters’ Jodie O’Rodeo DreamDoll Mall Adventure set and hurl it toward door. This caught a fry cook in the nose and made a drive-thru cashier trip. (I could tell he was a drive-thru cashier because he still had on his headset.)
Step 2: Throw TV remote controls with ninja-like speed and accuracy. Oof! Pow! Bam! Ouch! All that practice paid off!
Step 3: Grab flat-screen TV off wall and bash it over their heads. (It turned out that the TV was bolted to the wall, so I went to the next step.)
Step 4: Head for kitchen. Run around counter, pulling open oven door for them to trip over.
Step 5: Grab any dirty dishes from sink and throw them like lethal Frisbees.
Step 6: While they duck dishes, reverse direction, use stool to jump onto counter, and run back toward living room, leaping easily over their heads, landing with a tuck and roll, and running out the still-open front door. (The tuck and roll didn’t really work because I rolled right into Dad’s recliner.)
Step 7: Jump over porch railing and land on bike.
Nobody can catch me when I’m on my bike.
r at least nobody on another bike can catch me. I wasn’t expecting someone on one of those little motorized scooters.
As I was pedaling toward the streetlight on the corner of Custer Street, I heard a whiny motor fire up. I looked back and saw the drive-thru cashier on a scooter. He was gaining fast.
I leaned hard to the right and hit my back-wheel brake to go into a skid, taking the corner fast and tight. Drive-thru took it wide and sloppy, but then he hit the accelerator and came flying after me.
I knew I couldn’t beat the scooter on the open road.
I turned onto Morton Avenue, raced past one house, and turned up the alley to Broken Swing Park.
He was still behind me. I could hear him talking into his headset, calling for backup. I was pedaling as hard as I could, but he was gaining. That actually helped, because it was still pretty dark and the scooter’s headlight showed me what I was looking for: the little gap in the fence around the McClains’ backyard.
I shot through the gap and picked up speed fast. The McClains’ backyard is a steep hill where everybody goes sledding in the winter. I was flying now, but the bumps made my teeth almost shake out of my head.
There’s a creek at the bottom of the hill that goes right through the backyard, and I was aiming for the little wooden bridge that crosses it. But then I remembered Tony McClain’s ramp.
Tony’s a high school kid with a real BMX-type bike. He built a ramp to make jumps over the creek. He can do it pretty easy, and a couple of other bigger kids in the neighborhood have tried it, but I never have. I’ve thought about it and even tried to try it one time, but then I chickened out before I hit the ramp.
I didn’t chicken out this time. It was just barely light enough for me to see the ramp, but I hit it dead center and at full speed. I had plenty of air over the creek. But I didn’t have any idea how to land. The bike seat seemed to be moving away from me. If I landed like this, I’d bust my behind, so I pushed the bike away and got ready to land on my feet.
I tucked and rolled and almost broke my ankle.
I bolted up and started to reach for my bike when I saw Drive-thru about to hit the ramp. He was going way too fast. If he hit the ramp, he’d kill himself.
“Look out, man!” I shouted, forgetting that if he killed himself, he wouldn’t be able to kill me.
He swerved and braked, missed the ramp, and crashed into the creek. I knew this was my chance to get away, but it didn’t seem right to leave him lying there. I peeked into the ditch.
The guy was staggering to his feet.
“Is this Burger King?” he asked.
“No! This is a ditch in the McClains’ backyard, and you’ve crashed your scooter here in the wee hours of the morning while trying to kill me with your insane fast-food coworkers!”
“Do you want the value meal or just the Whopper?” he asked.
I was back on my bike in a second and out of there.
wasn’t checking my e-mail right then, obviously, but this message showed up in my in-box right around the time Drive-thru hit the creek. I didn’t see it until much later, but I’m putting it here because it’s important to the story.
Saturday, Oct. 31, 5:30 A.M.
Dear Sir,
I can’t believe you tried to turn me in last night. That really hur
t my feelings. I thought you were supposed to be my best friend. I’m too upset to write any more right now. My tears are dripping on the keyboard.
Boo hoo hoo!
Brokenhearted, but always . . .
Yours faithfully,
Casper Bengue
P.S. It’s Halloween tonight. You want to meet at my house and go trick-or-treating?
stopped pedaling like crazy when I was a few blocks away and realized nobody was following me anymore.
I had no idea where to go next.
My house was no longer safe. And it was Saturday morning, so I couldn’t go to school. That wouldn’t have been safe anyway. If Casper—aka the billion-dollar bank robber, aka Fako Mustacho—could somehow control school librarians, he could probably control teachers as well!
What exactly was he doing, I wondered. How did he get this power to make ordinary accordion players, librarians, truck drivers, party clowns, and fast-food employees turn into his henchmen and henchwomen?
Brainwashing? Hypnosis? Some kind of zombie-mind-power magic?
Whatever it was, that mustache must be the key.
It also meant I had no idea who might come after me next. I saw a lady getting into her car to go to work. Was she going to come after me too? No, she didn’t. But I had no way of knowing who was working for Casper. I could trust no one!
That gave me two options: I could hide in the woods, where I wouldn’t have to worry about anybody, except maybe brainwashed forest rangers.
Or I could do what Casper had done and get a disguise. A disguise would allow me to keep an eye on things and try to figure out what Casper was up to. I mean, if I went off and hid in the woods, there would be no one to stop him from doing whatever it was he was doing.
It was hard to believe that Casper was really a bad guy. He had always been pretty nice to me. Maybe he had gone crazy. Either way, I had to get that disguise. And there was only one place I could think of to get it: Sven’s Fair Price Store.
It was a long ride there on my bike.
By the time I got downtown it was 7:45, but Sven’s hadn’t opened yet. A sign said EXTENDED HALLOWEEN HOURS—8 A.M. TO MIDNIGHT. Today was Halloween, I realized. I would only have a little while to wait.
I went down a back alley and found a good place to hide my bike. There’s a stream that runs through downtown, but it’s mostly under stuff like parking lots and buildings. But there are a couple of places where it comes out into the open and you can see the tunnel-like place that it comes out of. I put my bike just a little way back into one of these, just far enough so that it would be out of sight. I didn’t know when I’d be coming back for it. Depending on my disguise, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to ride the bike. If I got a disguise like a doctor, for instance, it would look suspicious if a doctor was riding around town on my bike, as awesome as it is.
I waited until eight o’clock and then went into Sven’s.
nside the store a weird guy was arguing with Sven. “Where is the Heidelberg Handlebar Number Seven?” he yelled in what seemed like a European accent. Not exactly French but sort of French.
“I told you,” Sven said. “I sold it a few days ago.”
“To whom did you sell it?”
“I’m sorry, but all transactions are confidential.”
“We’ll see about that!” the man shouted, and he spun around and stomped out the door. I noticed two things about him. First, he already had a mustache, but it was thin and wispy, as if he had just started growing it. Second, he had the steel-gray, unblinking eyes of a professional assassin, full of cold, calm hate.
Then he stuck his head back in the door.
“By the way, is there a bicycle shop around here? I need a quick way to get around town without burning fossil fuels.”
“The bike shop closed when Walmart came,” said Sven.
“Oh. OK, thanks,” the man said, and left.
t wasn’t until I was walking down the costume aisle that I thought about money.
I had fifty-three dollars saved up at home, which could have bought me a really, really cool costume of some sort—like a biker outfit with a helmet, goggles, and a jacket with SMELL’S ANGELS and a picture of a tattooed skunk with wings and a halo on the back.
But when I checked my pockets, all I had was that stiff ten-dollar bill Casper had given me. I had been planning on giving it to charity, since it was probably stolen, but now I needed it.
Even so, ten dollars wasn’t going to get me much. Everything was at least $9.99, and with tax it would be more than ten.
But in the back of the store I found a pile of clearance costumes.
They were really, really lame. That’s why no one had bought them in the first place. I mean, who would want a boxing hot dog costume? Or who would want to be a capybara? I like capybaras, but I wouldn’t want to be one for Halloween.
Even if I had wanted to be a boxing hot dog or a large South American rodent, these wouldn’t have made very good disguises.
Then I saw a cowboy hat, and I thought, Yeah, I could be a cowboy. But when I picked it up, I saw it had long pink hair coming out of it in two big ponytails or pigtails or whatever girls call them.
It came with a pink vest, a pink shirt, a pink skirt, and a pink guitar. The hat, the shirt, the vest, the skirt, and the guitar all had fancy sparkly writing on them that said JODIE O’RODEO.
I threw the costume down in disgust. It seemed really creepy to dress up like a girl that I have a crush on. Really creepy!
But it was only four dollars, and I couldn’t find anything else.
went up front to pay for it. Sven was running the register, and I was prepared for her to be nasty to me like the last time.
But she gave me a big smile when she saw what I was buying.
“Oh, you’re buying the Jodie suit. That’s so sweet. I’m Jodie’s biggest fan.”
“Me too,” I said. “But this is for my sister.”
Sven then talked for ten minutes about the time she saw Jodie in concert and almost got to give her a hug before some security guards grabbed her and wrestled her to the ground while Jodie sprinted for the tour bus.
“I know Jodie didn’t mean it,” said Sven.
“I’m sure she didn’t,” I lied.
“You seem like a nice boy,” said Sven as she rung up the sale and counted out my change without even looking. “Didn’t you buy one of those elastic sticky hands that’s connected to a sort of sticky-stretchy rubber kind of thing the other day?”
“Yes, I did. It’s really great!” I lied again.
“Well, looky what we just got in ... the deluxe model!”
She held up an even bigger plastic egg, which presumably had an even bigger sticky hand inside. A sticker said SUPERLATIVE DELUXE GRABBER HAND! STRETCHES 20 FEET! The price was $8.95.
“That looks wonderful,” I lied a third time, “but I don’t think I have enough money.”
“Money! Bah! What is money? Just pieces of paper. Never let money stand in the way of your dreams, kid. Never! Look at me. I lose thousands of dollars on this place every month. But I always say that the smiles on the faces are payment enough.”
I smiled.
“So take the deluxe sticky hand! Go follow your dreams! In your darkest hour, it will be there for you. A beacon of hope and love!”
I took it. “Thanks. Hey ... uh ... do you mind if I use the changing room?”
“For the costume? I thought it was for your sister.”
“Well, no, it’s for me, actually.”
“Follow your dreams! Never stop dreaming!” Sven sang out.
She handed me the key to the changing room, which was chained to a big piece of wood with glittery golden letters: LOSE THIS KEY AND I’LL RIP OFF YOUR FACE—SVEN.
When I got out of the changing room, Sven got one of her employees to take a picture of us together.
“You look just like her!” Sven shouted, and she gave me a big hug.
I could see why the real Jodie had run for he
r tour bus. But I was starting to like Sven. A little scary, but not likely to become an evil mastermind and send fast-food employees to kidnap me.
As I walked out the door, she waved. I think she was starting to cry.
I decided that it would be OK for Jodie O’Rodeo to ride a bicycle. People might expect her to ride a horse, but since she was a kid, I figured she might ride a bike sometimes.
So I went back through the alley and climbed down to where the stream goes under the streets.
My bike was gone!
But I could see a wet tire track leading farther into the tunnel.
Then I saw that someone had left a little note. “For borrowing your bicycle I am very sorry! I will return it to you after I finish my mission of revenge and destiny!”
“Hey, bring back my bike!” I yelled into the tunnel, and it made a booming echo.
Then I started thinking about what would happen if the bike thief actually heard me and came back. I decided to get out of there.
Anyway, now that I had the disguise, I didn’t really need the bike so much. It should be safe for me to walk down the street—or even ride the trolley.
decided to go home and see what was going on there. My parents were probably worried when they noticed that the door had been busted open, the kitchen had been trashed, and I was missing.
I got on the trolley expecting everybody to go, “Oh, look! There’s Jodie O’Rodeo!” Or worse, “Look! There’s a boy dressed like Jodie O’Rodeo!” But that’s not what happened.
Instead, everybody had this weird hypnotized look. A guy in a suit asked me, “Have you seen the Evil One?”
And a lady in a suit said, “If you do, you must capture him and take him to Fako Mustacho.”
“Duh,” I said. “I’ve known about that for hours. How did you find out?”
“I was lucky enough to see Fako Mustacho on the Good Morning Hairsprinkle show. He inspired me with his vision of a New World Order, and he shared his recipe for real Southern-style coleslaw—”
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