“That’s right,” Skip growled. It was too dark to see the expression on his face, but from his tone it was obvious he wasn’t smiling.
Uncle Newt nodded gravely, as if he’d just heard disappointing news indeed.
“And I assume the same goes for super-strength?”
“Yes,” Skip said. He looked pointedly at his watch. “My, oh, my—is that really the time? I’ve gotta go.”
“But we haven’t even gotten to spidey-sense yet!”
Skip groaned.
At that moment, Ethel and Gladys burst out the front door, mops and buckets in hand.
“Leaving, ladies?” Uncle Newt asked.
“You bet we are,” Ethel said. “I’m about to miss the first spin on Wheel of Fortune.”
“And if I’m not home by eight, my dogs start pooping on my bed,” added Gladys.
Uncle Newt stepped off the path to let them scuttle past. Which was wise, because it looked as though the little old ladies were going to stampede right over him if he didn’t.
Skip took the opportunity to make his escape with them.
“Don’t forget to tell your friends and neighbors,” he said as he scurried off, “when Verminator sends pests packing, they won’t be back. Buh-bye!”
He gave Uncle Newt a perfunctory wave and practically sprinted for the street.
Uncle Newt returned the wave, then turned and went into the house.
The kids looked at one another.
“I guess it’s time for some good old-fashioned following,” Nick said.
“Right,” said Tesla.
She led the way after Skip, bouncing like a pinball from tree to tree, hiding spot to hiding spot.
Skip and Ethel and Gladys separated without a word when they reached the sidewalk, the exterminator turning left, the cleaning ladies heading right.
The kids veered left, too, moving parallel to their quarry. They stuck to the blackest shadows as they moved—shadows that proved too black, unfortunately.
Tesla bumped into something in the dark, and it toppled over just in time to crunch beneath Silas’s foot.
The kids froze.
Skip didn’t. Apparently, he hadn’t heard.
Before starting after him again, Nick and Tesla and DeMarco looked down.
Silas was standing on Julie Casserly’s new garden gnome. Its head was now nothing but pulverized plaster beneath his sneaker.
“Oops,” Silas said softly. “Maybe we can glue it back together later.”
“There’s hardly anything left to glue,” said DeMarco.
Nick had always assumed garden gnomes would be hollow, but he noticed what looked like the broken pieces of a little black skull mixed in with the shattered plaster.
“Wow,” he said. “Those things are even creepier than I thought.”
“Now is not the time to be critiquing garden gnomes!” Tesla said. “Come on.”
Thirty seconds later, they were watching from behind a bush as Skip stopped by a dark nondescript car, opened the door, and tossed his spray can inside.
Uncle Newt had been right: there was no Verminator Pest Control truck. Probably because there was no Verminator Pest Control.
Skip lowered himself in behind the wheel and slammed the door shut.
“So that’s the guy’s car,” DeMarco said. “Now what?”
“I wish you’d stop asking that,” said Tesla.
“I wish you’d give me an answer!”
Beside them, Silas was planting his hands on the ground while raising his butt high into the air.
“Are you doing yoga?” Nick asked him.
“No. I’m getting ready to sprint. You know, like they do in the Olympics.”
“You’re going to run after Skip’s car?” Tesla said.
“You got a better idea?”
“Of course. Nick and I will go back to Uncle Newt’s garage and get our bikes and—”
Skip started the car and drove off.
“Too late for bikes!” Silas said, and he took off running after Skip.
Almost immediately he tripped over a garden hose that someone had left lying out and ended up sprawled spread-eagle in the grass.
“Great,” DeMarco said to Nick and Tesla. “This is what we get for listening to your uncle.”
Suddenly, they heard a roar and a screech, and another car came shooting down a driveway nearby.
It was the Newtmobile—the half-jeep, half-boat, all-ugly monstrosity of a vehicle Uncle Newt had built for himself. It ran on used vegetable oil collected from restaurant fryers, which was why the smell of overcooked fast food began wafting over the neighborhood.
“Let’s go!” Uncle Newt called out from behind the wheel.
“You were saying?” Nick said to DeMarco.
The kids helped Silas to his feet and then raced to the Newtmobile and climbed in.
“Follow that car!” Tesla said.
She pointed at Skip’s red taillights dwindling into the distance.
“Don’t get too close, though,” Nick added. “The Newtmobile isn’t exactly inconspicuous.”
“Don’t worry,” Uncle Newt said as he pulled out into the street. “Skip won’t have a clue we’re behind him.”
The Newtmobile backfired explosively, sending a huge cloud of oily black smoke puffing out of the tailpipe.
“Ugh!” DeMarco coughed. “I feel like I’m being barbecued!”
Silas sniffed his T-shirt.
“Now I smell like french fries,” he said. He sniffed the shirt again, then grinned. “I like it!”
Uncle Newt gave the Newtmobile more gas, and it roared off after the lights a block ahead.
Silas giggled and stamped his feet with glee.
“A car chase!” he cackled. “We’re in a car chase!”
He and DeMarco high-fived as the taillights up ahead grew larger.
“We’re coming up on him too fast,” Nick fretted. “He’s gonna see us.”
“I said don’t worry, Nick,” Uncle Newt said. “Once we’re out of the neighborhood, there’ll be plenty of other cars to hide behind.”
“He’s turning!” Tesla cried, pointing at Skip’s car.
It was veering onto a side street, cutting deeper into the neighborhood.
The taillights disappeared.
“I don’t understand,” Uncle Newt said. “He should be heading straight for the highway. There’s nothing over there but more houses.”
“Whatever!” Tesla cried. “Just don’t let him get away!”
Uncle Newt turned onto the same street that Skip had gone down.
There was still no sign of his car.
“Where’d he go?” Nick asked.
“Maybe he lives here,” said DeMarco, checking the driveways nearby.
“Or maybe his car has, like, rockets and he took off and flew away,” said Silas.
Tesla shot him a disdainful look.
“Hey,” said Silas, “the guy is a spy.”
The Newtmobile pulled up to another intersection.
Uncle Newt looked left.
“He could have decided to go to the highway this way for some reason,” he said.
Nick looked right.
“But he didn’t!” he said. “He’s over there!”
Everyone followed his gaze.
In the distance were the red taillights they’d been following. Then they swung to the right and were gone again.
“What the heck is he doing?” Uncle Newt said.
“We’ll figure that out later!” said Tesla. “Just go, go, go!”
Uncle Newt spun the wheel and sent the Newtmobile careening around the corner and zooming up the block.
At the next intersection, he turned again.
The taillights were in front of them again, about forty yards away.
“This Skip—if that is his real name—might be some kind of super-sneaky secret agent,” Uncle Newt said, “but the man has no sense of direction. If he takes one more right turn he’ll have gone—”<
br />
The taillights swung to the right again.
“In a circle,” Nick and Tesla said together.
“Well, in a square, technically,” said Uncle Newt.
When they pulled up to the next stop sign, they could see Uncle Newt’s house just around the corner.
The taillights were nearby, too, though they weren’t moving anymore. After a moment, they went black.
Skip had turned off the engine. He was parked about half a block from the spot he’d left just a couple minutes before.
“Why would he circle back to the house?” DeMarco asked.
“Square back,” said Uncle Newt.
“Maybe he forgot something,” Silas suggested.
But Skip didn’t get out of his car and approach the house. They could see his silhouette in the driver’s seat. Motionless.
“I think he’s waiting for his boss,” Tesla said. “He had to move his car just in case we noticed it before, and now he’s going to rendezvous with whoever’s behind all this.”
“Ooo!” Silas said. “Rendezvous!”
Everyone looked at him.
“I just like the way it sounds,” he said.
Everyone looked away.
“I think he might be testing his bugs,” said Nick. “And if he is, he’s wondering why we’re not in the house.”
“Good point,” said Tesla.
“So what are we gonna do?” said DeMarco.
He was looking at Tesla and Nick, but it was Uncle Newt who answered.
“We’re going to sneak back into the house,” he said, “and then we’re going to fight fire with fire.”
The kids all gaped at him in surprise.
“What do you mean?” asked Tesla.
Her uncle grinned at her.
“Hey, I’m a M.A.D. Scientist, remember?” he said. “Do you really think Skip’s the only one around here with high-tech spy gadgets?”
“Wow! Incredible!” Uncle Newt raved as he and the kids walked in the back door. “The Nuttall’s woodpecker was neat, but that flammulated owl? So amazing! Thanks for showing me.”
“We knew you’d like it,” Tesla said.
The sound of quick, heavy footfalls rang up from the lab, and Oli burst through the door from the basement, gasping for breath. He was back in his trench coat and fedora, which couldn’t have made it any easier to hurry up the stairs.
“Oh, hello! I was just down in laboratory doing things normal interns do!” he wheezed. “Dinner is in refrigerator. I put on table for a while, but your cat keeps stealing the cheese from the pickle salad.”
“You put cheese in your pickle salad?” Nick asked, his face going white.
“Yes! It is needing protein, so I improvise,” Oli replied proudly. “And with the mustard-and-olive sauce I create, it is really quite delicious.”
“Silas, DeMarco—you two love cooking,” Tesla said. “Maybe Oli could show you how he made the pickle salad while we go upstairs and check on that thing we were discussing.”
“What a lovely idea,” DeMarco grated out through gritted teeth.
“Mm hmm,” said Silas (who’d again been ordered not to talk).
Both boys were throwing resentful looks at Tesla as she and her brother and uncle headed out to the hallway. They’d known it would be their job to keep Oli from wandering into the middle of anything, but obviously they hadn’t counted on doing it with pickle salad and cheese.
Nick, Tesla, and Uncle Newt kept up a stream of meaningless chatter about flammulated owls as they went up the hall, up the stairs, and up the stepladder into the attic. That was where Skip had spent most of his day, so they didn’t stop their owl-babbling even as they gathered their supplies. For all they knew, Skip could hear everything they said.
Uncle Newt dug a thermal camera out of a box marked ORTMANN EXPEDITION—LEFTOVERS. Tesla took a pair of night-vision goggles off the plastic Santa in the corner. And Nick went to get a parabolic microphone from a dust-covered shelf—and managed not to scream when he saw the giant, deformed skull resting next to it.
Once they had everything in hand, they gathered near the attic’s only window. When they’d been piecing together their plan out in the Newtmobile, Uncle Newt had said it would take some work to get the window open because it had been painted shut years before. Yet with a single, one-handed push from Uncle Newt, it slid up smoothly.
Uncle Newt smiled at their good luck, gave his niece and nephew a thumbs-up, then climbed through the window to the roof.
Nick followed cautiously, making sure one foot was planted firmly in the darkness outside before daring to bring the other out with it. While Tesla waited for him to get out of the way, she noticed white flakes of paint on the floor beneath the window. Before she could bend down to examine them, Nick walked out onto the roof and waved for her to join him.
Tesla went through the window as slowly as Nick had. Their parents let them do almost any kind of experiment or project they wanted to, but one thing was always forbidden: anything to do with the roof. The one time Nick had climbed out a window to test a homemade parachute (with one of Tesla’s old Barbies doing the parachuting), he’d been grounded for two weeks and lost chemistry-set and rocket-building privileges for four. Neither he nor Tesla had set foot on a roof since.
They stayed motionless, backs pressed against the side of the house, as Uncle Newt slid the window shut.
“You don’t have to be so nervous,” he said, voice low but not a whisper. It was pretty unlikely Skip would have bothered hiding cameras or microphones out there where no one ever went. “This part of the roof’s so flat I’ve been meaning to put a deck up here. It’d be a great place to stargaze, don’t you think?”
“Or look for UFOs,” said Tesla with a roll of the eyes she assumed her uncle couldn’t see.
“Oh, don’t get the wrong idea about that,” Uncle Newt said. “I wasn’t worried about aliens. I’d spotted a literal UFO—an unidentified flying object—coming down over the state park just east of here. It looked like a meteorite to me, a big one with quite the fireball, and I was worried it might start a forest fire. But somehow when I called the police to tell them about a UFO raining fire from the sky, they got the crazy idea I was calling about an invasion!”
Tesla quietly recalibrated her assessment of her uncle’s mental health. He still didn’t qualify as normal, but at least he was a step closer to sane.
“Anyway,” he said, “we’re not out here to talk about meteorites, are we? Let’s go.”
Uncle Newt got down on his hands and knees and began crawling toward the roof’s edge about twenty feet away.
Nick and Tesla warily did the same.
“That’s close enough,” Uncle Newt said, stopping them when they were only halfway to the edge. He stretched out one of his long arms and pointed at the street below. “There it is.”
Nick and Tesla looked down and saw Skip’s car.
It was too dark to tell if Skip was still behind the wheel … or if anyone was sitting beside him. So Tesla strapped on the night-vision goggles while Uncle Newt turned on his thermal camera. Nick put on the earphones for the parabolic microphone—a long-distance, handheld mic with a clear plastic dish for a receiver.
Through the goggles, Tesla could see a hazy, green-tinged image of a man sitting in Skip’s car. He wasn’t wearing Skip’s tan jumpsuit, though. Instead, he was dressed in solid black from the chin down.
“Someone’s in the car. Alone,” Tesla said. “I assume it’s Skip, but I don’t know. If it is, he changed clothes. What do you see, Uncle Newt?”
“The heat signature of a human being,” Uncle Newt reported. “It appears to be male and it doesn’t seem to have a fever.”
“Why do you have a thermal camera anyway?” Nick asked.
“For the same reason I have night-vision goggles and a parabolic microphone. I needed them to hunt Bigfoot.”
Tesla sighed. Just when she thought maybe her uncle wasn’t that weird …
“Someon
e was trying to get a monster scare going out in the redwoods,” Uncle Newt went on, “and I decided to set the record straight.”
“So you were trying to prove there wasn’t a giant ape-man running around in the woods,” Nick said with a pointed look at his sister. He knew what her sigh had meant.
“Exactly. I collected tracks—blatantly fake—that led to that skull in the attic. Also fake. So I called the police to say that I’d found Bigfoot.” Uncle Newt said, raising his hands and curling his index and middle fingers twice. “But they took it totally the wrong way. I guess that’s what I get for using air quotes over the phone.”
“Do you know who made the fakes?” Tesla started to say.
Nick shushed her.
“I hear something!” he said. The parabolic mic looked a little like a gun—it was mounted on a handle grip, with the dish and mic on top—and Nick used both hands to steady it. “It’s Skip. He’s talking to somebody.”
“But there’s no one with him,” Tesla said. She adjusted the lenses on her goggles, and the image sharpened. “Wait … he’s on his phone. I bet he’s reporting in to his boss! Nick, what’s he saying?”
Nick listened intently.
“Small pepperoni,” he said. “Small Caesar salad, dressing on the side. And a Coke.”
“He’s ordering a pizza?” Tesla said, incredulous.
Nick nodded.
“He says he’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“I don’t get,” Tesla said. “Why would Skip pretend to leave, just sit there for a while, and then go get dinner?”
“Maybe we can ask him,” said Uncle Newt. “Look.”
Through her goggles, Tesla saw a grainy-green image of Skip getting out of his car and moving quickly toward the house. He was obviously in a hurry to get away from the street and anyone who might drive by and see him.
“He’s got something cold over his right shoulder,” Uncle Newt said.
“I see it,” said Tesla, “but I can’t tell what it is.”
And then Skip was gone. He was so close to the house they couldn’t see him from their position on the roof.
“What’s he doing?” Nick asked.
The answer came flying out of the darkness, landing on the roof not twenty feet away.
Nick and Tesla's Secret Agent Gadget Battle Page 10