“We’re so lucky we found you, Mummy!” the Hooligan said as we sat down at the table.
Only Goody and the Know-It-All didn’t hang around the card table. They were off in the corner whispering.
When Mummy went to use the outhouse, the Know-It-All dragged me and the Brat away from the others.
“I’m telling you, there’s something wr-r-rong here!”
“Wrong? What could be wrong?” the Brat said.
“M-M-M-Mummy is a rumrunner!” he said. “That’s wrong enough!”
“So?” the Brat said. “She’s like us. Naughty and no good.”
I didn’t remember seeing any Bootleggers or Smugglers on the Naughty List, but he had a point.
“Well, what about the t-t-t-tramp-girl and the two brothers?” the Know-It-All said. “I think they’re all c-c-c-criminals. And that knife!”
“They’re not criminals, they’re bootleggers,” the Brat said. “It’s different! I say they’re on the level. And I should know—I’m an excellent judge of character.”
Except, it wound up, he wasn’t.
16. THIEVES THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
I have no idea what time the night ended. It got to be hard to keep my eyes open and then they were burning from the cigar smoke, so I lay down on the floor and as soon as I did, I fell asleep.
The night didn’t end, however—at least not with falling asleep. Because it was still night when I woke up.
I had to pee!
But it was so dark, I couldn’t see anything but a bunch of dark lumps on the floor. My fellow No-Good Ninesters.
Then I heard
Creeeeeak!
Peering through the dark I saw another figure, but this one wasn’t a lump. It was standing up. And now it was kneeling. And opening something.
The lid on the Brat’s trunk.
Someone was going through his stuff! Someone—maybe—who knew he kept a whole lot of silver in there.
At first I thought it was the Hooligan—I mean, he was in a gang—but this person wasn’t that big. Then I thought the Rude, because of the cap. But I could hear the Rude snoring. (Geez could he snore!)
As it turned out, it wasn’t any of us.
It was Pearl—the tramp-girl.
“Stop!” I yelled. “Thief!”
The tramp-girl was startled and dropped what she was holding.
Silver coins went plinking and clanking and rolling across the floor.
Now everyone woke up. Including the kid all that silver belonged to.
“Thief?” the Brat said. “What—who—where?”
“I can explain!” the tramp-girl said, throwing up her arms.
The Brat scrambled to his feet and made a move to grab her, but she head-butted him and bolted away.
“I got her!” the Hooligan said.
But who he had was the Rude. “Get yer meathooks off a me, ya big oaf!”
“She’s over there!” Goody-Two-Shoes yelled.
The tramp-girl was racing for the door, right where the Cruel now stood.
The Cruel tackled her, and the tramp-girl hit the floor face-first, but came up swinging and caught the Cruel with a fist to the jaw.
“That hurt!” the Cruel said. Angry, she forced the thief to the ground and pinned her arms down with her knees, and then
BOOM!
The door slammed open.
A kerosene lamp lit the room, swinging from the outstretched arm of Mummy Rummy.
The yellow-red fire lit her face from below, which was kind of scary. So was the knife she was holding in the other hand.
“Mummy!” the Brat said. “Thank god you’re here. Your daughter was stealing my money!”
“She was what?” Mummy said. Her face turned furious. “She was stealing from you? My daughter? Now, what ’ave I told you about that, dear daughter?”
The Cruel got up off Pearl as Mummy took a few steps toward them, her lamp shining off the coins scattered all over the floor. Boy, were there a lot of coins.
“There’s more too!” the tramp-girl said. “Lots more—inside the trunk! I can show you!”
I gotta admit, I was confused. The tramp-girl was a thief—that was for sure. But was Mummy a crook, too?
Mummy walked over to her and knelt down. The tramp-girl was nursing a fat lip from the scuffle.
“Let me see that,” Mummy said, and lifted the thief’s face up by the chin.
Then
PUNCH!
Mummy hit her square in the face with the hilt of the knife and sent the tramp-girl reeling across the room. She went smack against the wall.
“You tabarnouche of a child!” Mummy said. “You think you can rob these Americans without me? Were you going to run away with the money? With this money!” Mummy sent a bunch of silver coins flying with a kick.
Then she turned toward us.
“Now, you American children listen to me and you listen to me good!” she said, shaking the point of the knife at us. “You tell me what I want to know, comprenez? And if you tell me more lies, I swear you will wish I only beat you as bad as ’er!” She spit in the direction of Pearl.
Her daughter.
“You start!” Mummy said, pointing her knife at the Brat. “Or do you need more of that poison I gave you?”
“That wasn’t rum?” the Brat said.
“Hah! I wouldn’t waste my rum on you! That was water and gasoline!” Mummy went over to the Brat and pressed the tip of the knife to the tip of the Brat’s nose. “Now talk.”
It was amazing—even with a knife in his face, the Brat was still a brat. A temper tantrum rose right up into his ripening face.
“This is an outrage! You are just as bad as your daughter! Why, you probably taught her to steal,” he said. “We’ll call the authorities and then you’ll be sorry. Real sorry!”
Mummy grabbed the Brat by the hair—the long flap on top of his head that he took such care to mold into place—and jerked him up
“OW!”
Then she took her knife and sawed that chunk of hair right off, giving him an instant flattop.
I might have laughed. If I hadn’t been the most terrified I’d ever been in my entire life, that is.
“Now, if you don’t want this to be your ’ead,” Mummy said, wagging the sliced-off hair in front of the Brat’s face like a dead muskrat, “talk!”
For the first time—maybe in his life—the Brat had a temper tantrum snuffed out. The red dropped right down his face, leaving his skin as white as a ghost.
“What-what-what,” the Brat stammered. “What do you want to know?”
“EVERYTHING!” Mummy shouted so loud, her voice shook the walls of the shack.
It was at that moment that someone peed their pants.
It was not me.
I swear.
“’Oo are you supposed to meet?!” Mummy shouted, tapping the Brat’s nose with the knife.
“What do you mean—who?” he said.
“You think I believe you are in a circus! You think Mummy Rummy is a fool!” she shouted, and banged the hilt of her knife against the wall behind the Brat, putting a hole in it. “I know why you came to Quebec! American bootleggers ’ave sent you. You could buy ’alf the liquor in Canada with all the silver you ’ave in ’ere!”
It sounds crazy, right? That Mummy thought we were rumrunners, too? But the thing is, bootleggers and rumrunners used kids to commit crimes all the time. Because if a kid got caught, they’d only get sent to reform school. If an adult got arrested, they’d get twenty years in the pen. So she thought some American gangsters had sent us here to make a buy. Besides—how else would we have gotten a trunk full of silver?
“’Oo is it you are supposed to buy the liquor from? Is it Monkey Paul? Is it Stumps McCoy?” Mummy stabbed the table with each name
>
POK!
POK!
“Non! I know ’oo it is!” she said. “Frère Balzac! That pig!”
I looked at the Hooligan and the Rude. They were both as confused as me.
“Now tell me ’oo sent you! Was it the Syndicate?” Mummy said. “No, wait—with this much money, it ’ad to be Capone! Tell me it was Capone!”
“Capone! Al Capone?” the Brat said, frantic. “No! It’s not like you think! No one sent us!”
“You do think Mummy is a fool!!” she yelled, pressing her knife to the Brat’s throat. “I will show you ’oo is the fool! Now TELL ME!”
“Tell her! Tell her why we’re here!” the Brat said to the Know-It-All.
“Me? Why m-m-m-m-m-me?”
Mummy turned to the Know-It-All, and as soon as she pointed the knife in his direction, it all spilled out of him.
About us getting coal in our stockings. About him finding the Naughty List. About how we wanted to play with the toys of the Nice kids of the world. About the article that had the interview with the lighthouse keeper. About how we were gonna signal Santa with Morse code. About how a magical narwhal would arrive with a golden barge and whisk us off to the North Pole. About how all the houses in Santaland looked like they were made of gingerbread. About—
The Know-It-All stopped.
Mummy’s eyes had turned from angry slits to wide-open circles of amazement. Then she burst into laughter.
“That! That is the best story I ’ave ever ’eard!” Mummy said. Tears filled her eyes and she slapped her thigh, again and again. “A light’ouse! Morse code to Santa! And the narwhal—oh, mon dieu, not the magical narwhal! AH-AH-AH!”
I turned to the Know-It-All—all of us did. His face was red with shame.
It suddenly occurred to me, as Mummy sat there laughing—it did sound like a stupid plan. And I still didn’t know what the heck a narwhal was.
“You want to go to Santaland, children?” Mummy said. “Oh, I will send you right to Santaland!”
17. A TURN FOR THE WORSE
Y’know, I kinda shoulda hated Pearl the tramp-girl thief. I mean, she was the reason we had gotten into this mess. If it wasn’t for her, we’d have still had the silver and not been trapped with a maniacal gold-toothed bootlegger lady holding a knife on us.
But what Mummy was about to do to her—well, it was awful. Scary awful. The tramp-looking girl might’ve been a thief, but she didn’t deserve this.
Pearl’s eye was puffed and turning black from where Mummy had hit her, but that wasn’t the awful part. The awful part came when Mummy opened a trapdoor in the floor.
You would never have noticed it, but once Mummy opened it, it was like she had opened a door to hell.
You always think of hell as this really warm place full of flames, but in that moment I knew it wasn’t like that at all. It was like this—a hole in the ground that opened to nothing but darkness and cold and had the smell of mold and rot.
“Please, Mummy! Don’t!” the tramp-girl begged, but Mummy Rummy had no pity.
She grabbed her daughter and shoved the girl down into the shallow pit, giving her a hard push to the back that landed her somewhere down in the darkness with a
THUD!
Then Mummy kicked the trapdoor shut.
“I will deal with you later!” she said.
Then Mummy told the Hooligan and the Rude to move the Brat’s chest over the trapdoor, but it was so heavy—and they were so scared—they had trouble pushing it.
“Tabarnouche!” Mummy shouted. “American weaklings!” With one kick of her boot, the chest went shooting across the floor.
Mummy’s sonny-boys—Rooster Jack and Black Jack—were there now too, and they didn’t lift a finger to help their little sister. In fact, they were grinning at her banging and pleading like it was hilarious. What a couple of jerks! Worse than jerks. My big brothers were capital-J Jerks, and even they wouldn’t have left me trapped under a floor!
This was some kind of family. And if they had done this to their own flesh and blood, what the heck were they gonna do to us?
The Brothers Jack herded us outside and marched us up the rickety steps to the street. They put us in the back of one of the trucks and
CLANCK!
loudly locked the doors shut.
It was pitch-black, and now we were the ones trapped. Even though we had each other, I didn’t like our chances any better than the tramp-girl’s.
The engine came spitting—rumbling—roaring to life, and the truck took off. It was even bouncier in the back, and noisier, with empty liquor bottles jangling and clinking and jumping around.
The Know-It-All was squatting clutching his briefcase, which—along with Goody-Two-Shoes’s sewing kit—was all that any of us had managed to take.
“What are we g-g-g-going to do do?” he said, whispering.
“Where are they taking us?” Goody said, also whispering.
“Why are you WHISPERING?” the Cruel said loudly. “They can’t hear us with that engine! We can barely hear ourselves!”
“She seemed like such a nice lady. . . .” the Hooligan said. “She reminded me of my momma. My momma . . .”
His eyes started to tear up.
“Oh brother,” the Cruel said.
No one talked for a while. The Hooligan pulled himself together, then started sniffing. I thought it was from the crying, but he was sniffing me.
“What are you, a dog?” I said.
“You smell like pee,” he said.
“That’s not me!” I whispered. “I think it’s the Rude!”
Which was a good person to blame it on, since he always smelled like something.
The truck must have hit a rock, because it suddenly went tilting over to one side, knocking me right into the Hooligan.
“Oh gross!” he said. “The Liar touched me! Now I got his pee on me!”
“Shouldn’t we really be talking about something else?” I said. “Like how we’re all about to die?”
That got everyone real quiet again.
The ride was long and rough, and only got longer and rougher. It felt like we weren’t even on a real road anymore, and the bottles got so knocked around that a few of them smashed, and we were all banging into each other too. It was terrible and terrifying. But what was worse was when it all went still. And silent.
“Are we stopped?” the Rude said.
“Yes, we’re stopped!” the Cruel whispered. “And now you should whisper.”
We heard footsteps and
CLANCK!
someone unlocked the rear gate of the truck. It swung open to the blinding morning sun. The snow everywhere made it worse—it was like we were on the sun—and the hurt in my eyes shot straight into my brain.
When my eyes finally adjusted, I saw Mummy and her sonnies. They were holding tommy guns.
Gulp.
18. WHERE IT ALL FALLS APART
Do you know what a tommy gun is? It’s the kind of gun that fires bullets
bapbapbapbapbapbap
all in a row, without the gunman ever having to take his—or her—finger off the trigger. It was the favorite weapon of bootleggers, gangsters, and rumrunners.
Mummy waved her gun for us to start walking, and she and her sonny-boys herded us into the middle of the open, snowy field. It was like standing on an empty sheet of paper you couldn’t see the end of.
Was this it?
Were they going to kill us? And leave our dead bodies out here in the middle of the snowy nowhere?
It was kind of hard to see at that moment what else they might be planning.
Mummy smiled—her gold tooth glistening in the sun—and
“Pop! Pop! Pop!”
I closed my eyes—this was it!
But . . . it wasn’t.
I was still alive.
She hadn’t even fired the gun. (But she’d done an awfully good imitation.)
“AH-AH-AH!” she laughed at us flinching and covering ourselves.
“Never say Mummy didn’t give you a sporting chance,” she said, and pointed with the tommy gun in the direction of the truck. “Quebec is forty miles back that way—if you can find the way!” she said. “If any of you manage to make it back alive, I’ll be impressed. And ’ere’s this—” she said, flinging a tin of Mummy Rummy’s Home-Baked Yummies at us. The top popped off, and biscuits skidded across the crusted-over snow. “In case you get ’ungry! AH-AH-AH!”
Still laughing her evil laugh—I think it’s fair to call it evil—she and the Jacks got back into the truck, shut the door
SLAM!
turned on the motor, and sped off, leaving a trail of black smoke and tire tracks.
We kept watching until the truck was out of sight.
Then the Rude and the Hooligan descended upon the biscuits.
“These aren’t so bad!” the Rude said, gnawing.
“Yeah, you just hafta make sure you don’t bust a tooth,” the Hooligan said.
“I can’t believe you two can eat at a time like this!” Goody-Two-Shoes said. “What are we going to do?!”
“Well, if Mummy is right, and Quebec is forty miles that w-w-way,” the Know-It-All said, “then it should take us thirteen hours and twenty minutes to get there, given the average human walking pace of three miles per hour. Considering the declination of the sun, I’d say we have r-r-roughly seven hours and thirty-six minutes of sunlight left, which means we will have five hours and forty-four minutes of walking in the dark to get back to the city.”
“Are you joking?” the Cruel said.
“What?” the Know-It-All said. “Do you think my c-c-c-calculations are off?”
“I’m not talking about your calculations, Know-It-All,” she said. “I’m talking about the idea that we are going to follow you anywhere!”
The Know-It-All’s expression went meek.
“We were supposed to hop a ride to the North Pole aboard a magic narwhal?” the Cruel said. “That was your brilliant plan?”
The No-Good Nine Page 8