“Maybe Jake can help us,” Nick said. He turned to the giant. “Do you know how to get to the lower level of the school?”
Jake dropped his comic book and put his hands over his face, swaying back and forth.
“I don’t think he’s going to be much help,” Carter said. He patted Jake’s shoulder and gave him back his comic book. “Look at this page. That’s Emma Frost. She’s totally hot.”
“Great,” Nick said. “So we have to break into a locked school, locate a hidden entrance, and avoid Dr. Di—I mean, you know who.”
“It might be worse than that,” Tiffany said, fanning her toenails to help the polish dry. “Has anyone considered that since Jake is still here, maybe the rest of the students are too? They weren’t exactly friendly the last time we were there.”
Nick groaned. This was beginning to sound impossible.
“There might be a way,” Dana said. “Give me control of the screen.”
Angelo raised his eyebrows and changed a setting on the screen-share program so the half without the picture showed Dana’s computer screen. She typed in the web address for the city of Diablo Valley and clicked on a link that said Official City Use Only.
“You have to have a password to access that,” Angelo said.
Tiffany sniffed, put down her polish, and inserted a thumb drive in the computer’s USB port. She typed in a series of commands, waited, typed in a few more, and suddenly she was in the locked section of the site.
“How did you do that?” Angelo asked as Tiffany returned to her toenails.
Angie chuckled. “Maybe you don’t know as much about us as you think.”
Tiffany was a computer hacker? Nick would never have guessed that in a million years.
“Let’s see now.” Dana explored the website until she found what she was looking for. “Streets and sewers,” she murmured. Engineering plans whizzed by. “Here we go,” she said, stopping on the section of the map where Sumina Prep was located.
Nick studied the streets. “I don’t see the school.”
“That’s because these are plans from ten years ago,” Angelo said.
“Right.” Dana moved the mouse. “There used to be a factory where the castle is now. I read an article about it getting shut down in the paper. A lot of people lost their jobs, and some questions were raised about why Dippel was moving his school from Transnistria to California in the first place. It seems Transnistrian officials were looking into his experiments right before he left.”
“Then why did they let him open the school?” Carter asked.
“Dippel paid off enough officials that they stopped complaining. And, he promised a winning football program. It was the perfect combination. He could test his minions in public without anyone asking questions, and the city got their first winning sports team.” She traced a thin gray line. “This is an old maintenance tunnel. It looks like it’s still there, but I can’t tell if it goes all the way to the school.”
“I don’t know,” Angelo said. “For all we know, the tunnel’s been filled in since this, or it dead ends.”
Dana printed a copy of the plans and closed the city website. “It’s still our best shot. Unless you’d rather face you know who and his army of you know whats.”
Carter groaned. “Some fall break this is turning out to be.”
“Fallsies breaksies being turning,” Jake agreed.
The next morning, Nick woke up with a stiff neck from sleeping on the floor in Angelo’s room. “What’cha doing?” he asked Angelo, who was leafing through a thick electronics catalog.
“Making a parts list,” Angelo said. “Once we get into the school, we still have to figure out a way to stop Dippel.”
Angelo’s closet door swung open and Carter stumbled out, rubbing his eyes.
“Did you sleep in there?” Nick asked.
Carter groaned. “Tried to. Jake snored so loud I’m surprised he didn’t collapse the roof. Even closing the closet door didn’t help.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Nick said.
“That’s because you were asleep.” Carter groaned and stretched.
Nick glanced around, suddenly realizing Jake wasn’t in the room. “Where is he?” he yelped, panicked at the idea of the giant wandering around the neighborhood.
Angelo pointed down the hallway, still studying his catalog. “My mom went in to the office this morning, so I let him watch TV. He’s a big fan of Dora the Explorer.”
“You can’t let him watch that stuff,” Carter growled. “It’ll rot his brain.”
The three boys walked down the hall to find Jake sitting in the living room, eyes glued to the TV. Surrounding him on the floor were three cereal boxes, a bread wrapper minus the bread, and an empty jug of orange juice.
“I see he’s still got his appetite,” Nick said, kicking a cereal box. There wasn’t a single crumb left at the bottom.
Angelo shook his head. “All I have to say is I’m not going to be the one who shows him how to use a flush toilet when this stuff works its way through his digestive tract.”
A few minutes later, as the boys were making their own breakfast from what little Jake hadn’t devoured, the doorbell rang. Angelo went to the door and let Angie, Dana, and Tiffany in.
As soon as Tiffany walked into the house, Jake jumped to his feet. The giant sniffed. “No flowersies?”
Tiffany blushed. “No. No perfume today.”
“Nice call,” Carter whispered to Jake.
“Okay,” Angie said, pulling a handful of papers out of her backpack. “I’ve been putting together a plan.”
“Who put you in charge?” Nick asked.
“Do you have a plan?”
Nick scratched the back of his neck. He turned to Angelo, hoping he had put something together, but his friend appeared deeply engrossed in his catalog. Carter, despite his earlier complaints, was sitting beside Jake, eating cereal and watching Swiper the fox try to steal Dora’s lunch.
“Right then,” Angie said. “Back to the plan. The first thing we need to do is get in and out of the castle. I’m taking that part. Once we get there, we have to figure out how to stop Dippel.”
Angelo raised his hand as though they were all in a classroom and Angie was the teacher. “I’m working on it.”
“Perfect,” Angie said, checking off a box. Nick couldn’t stand the way she was bossing everyone around, but since he hadn’t thought to come up with a plan of his own, he had to let her continue. She also seemed to be enjoying this way too much, like it was some kind of school science project instead of a matter of life and death. “Next on the list are weapons.”
“You mean like guns?” Nick asked. The idea of blazing into Dippel’s castle with machine guns and rocket launchers was way cool. If Angie could get her hands on some serious artillery, he wouldn’t mind her being in charge at all.
“Do you have any guns?” Angie asked.
“Not really,” Nick admitted, pretty sure paintball and airsoft didn’t count.
“Then we need to come up with some weapons of our own. Who can I put down for that?” Angie held her pen poised above the paper, waiting for volunteers.
“I’ve got some ideas,” Dana said.
Angie nodded and made another check.
“I’ll do some too,” Carter called, still watching the television.
“You’re going to make weapons?” Nick asked. “Real weapons. Not like Nerf swords and stuff.”
Carter snorted. “Leave it to me. I’m the master of arcane and ancient armament.”
“Good enough,” Angie said. “The last problem is, how we are going to get big boy to the castle without being spotted?”
“He can run beside our bikes,” Nick said. “He’s heck’a fast.”
Angie shook her head. “Have you looked outside? It’s stopped raining for a while. But it doesn’t look like it’s done. Besides, it’s freezing out. I’m not riding my bike all the way to Diablo Valley.”
Tiffany tapped her lips with one finger. �
��Hmm,” she murmured. “I might have an idea.”
“I’ll put you down for it,” Angie said. She turned to Nick. “What are you going to do?”
“Don’t worry about me.” Nick sneered and tapped the side of his head. “I’m hard at work in here.”
Angie rolled her eyes and scribbled on her paper. “I’ll list you as doing nothing.”
The truth was that Nick really didn’t know what he was going to do. When it was him, Angelo, and Carter, Nick had usually been the one in charge, making decisions and coming up with ideas. As he walked back to his house, he tried to think of some way he could help. But all he could think about was how Angie had taken over everything. Even his own friends were treating her like the new leader. He wished it was just the Three Monsterteers again, even if Angie and her friends did have some pretty good ideas.
“How was the sleepover?” Dad asked when Nick walked through the door. He was still working on his wrecked plane.
“Okay, I guess.” Nick washed a green apple and took a bite.
“Where are the guys?” Dad ripped a long piece of duct tape off the roll and wrapped it repeatedly around one wing.
Nick sighed. “Letting Angie Hollingsworth boss them around.”
“Ahhh, girl trouble.” Dad set down his plane and crossed his legs. “Well that’s one area where I can definitely help you. What would you like to know about? How to get a girl to like you? What it means when she punches you over and over on the shoulder until you get a really nasty bruise and have to go to the school nurse? Or do you want to know about smooching? There’s a reason I was known as Luscious Lips Braithwaite back in the day.”
“I heard it was Liver Lips,” Mom called from the other room.
“No, it’s nothing like that,” Nick said. “I just want things the way they used to be.”
Dad tilted his head, looking critically at the plane that Nick suspected would never fly again. “Things change, Nick. That’s the way life is. You can either spend all your time wishing for the way things were or adjusting to how they are. But I can tell you this much: People who spend all their time wishing for the past don’t accomplish much in the future.” He winked at Nick and whispered, “Your mom almost never punches me in the arm anymore. And she called me Luscious Lips just last night.”
“Gross,” Nick said. He took his apple up to his room and thought about what his dad had said. Not the kissing part, which was just nasty. But about recognizing that things changed. Maybe he was right. Maybe he needed to live with the fact that it was never going to be just the three of them again. The thought made him a little sad.
The rest of the day he tried to think of anything that might help with the plan. For a while he tried dreaming up useful inventions. But inventing was really Angelo’s thing. He thought about trying to find a way to make flaming paintballs. But he was pretty sure paintball guns weren’t allowed on the BART trains anyway.
Eventually he turned on the TV and watched a Harry Potter movie marathon until it was time to meet his friends.
At eight he headed out the door. “I’m going to hang out with Carter and Angelo,” he called.
“And Angie?” Dad asked, wiggling his eyebrows.
Nick snorted.
“Be safe,” Mom said. “The weather is supposed to get pretty bad tonight. They’re saying there’s supposed to be lightning storms tonight, and maybe even snow.”
Nick was surprised. Snow in the mountains was common in California, but they almost never got it where he lived. The idea of facing Dr. Dippel and his minions in a fierce winter storm was almost too much to deal with. For a moment, he considered giving the whole thing up.
Instead, he headed out the door. Angie might be bossy, and Angelo and Carter might be annoying at times. But he’d promised them he would be there and he wasn’t about to let them down.
They met in front of Angie’s house at 8:30. Dana was standing beside a large canvas bag and Angelo was messing with another of his gizmos when Nick pulled up. “Where’s Carter?” Angie demanded, bossy as ever.
“No idea,” Nick said. “Where’s Jake?”
Angie pointed toward the house. Angelo tweaked something on his gizmo and it gave a shrill wail of feedback before he turned it down.
“What’s that supposed to be?” Nick asked.
Angelo turned off a switch on the side of the box and wrapped a pair of black and red cables with alligator clips on their ends around it. “I call it my polarity-reversing overload generator. PROG. If we get close enough to whatever Dippel is doing, I should be able to blow out all of his electrical circuits with this.”
A couple of big wet raindrops hit Nick on the top of his head. “My mom said it could snow tonight.”
“That will make even better cover,” Angie said. If she was nervous, she didn’t show it.
A bike came speeding down the street. “Sorry I’m late!” Carter yelled.
“Keep it down,” Angie whispered. “My mom’s at work. But I don’t want any of the neighbors telling her I had boys over.”
Nick eyed the white case Carter had hung over his shoulder. “Is that a pillow?”
Carter bit the inside of his cheek. “Sort of.” He pulled out his feather pillow, his face turning red.
Angie frowned. “Please tell me that’s not your idea of a weapon. Somehow I don’t think animated corpses are going to be scared off by a good pillow fight.”
“Unless you’re planning on singing them to sleep,” Dana said with a sly grin.
“Very funny.” Carter fished around in the pillowcase. “My weapons are inside.” He pulled out a handful of white packets.
Nick groaned. “Itching powder? You brought itching powder?”
“That’s not all.” Carter reached into the pillowcase again and removed a glass of blue liquid.
Angie giggled. “Your weapons are itching powder and aftershave.”
“What?” Carter turned the bottle around. “Oh, I thought it was rubbing alcohol. You know, to throw in their eyes or light on fire.”
Nick felt like pulling his hair out. He grabbed the pillowcase and looked inside. Other than the itching powder and aftershave, the only things in the case were a down pillow and a bunch of chocolaty granola bars. He glared at Carter.
“Okay, fine.” Carter sighed. “I was tired because I didn’t get any sleep last night. I was just going to take a short nap. But when I woke up it was eight. So I grabbed my pillow and threw in anything I could find.”
Carter was a good friend, and as loyal as could be. But sometimes he was absolutely maddening. “Tell me you did better,” Nick said to Dana.
Dana emptied her bag on the ground, and at first Nick thought it was going to be Carter all over again. Lying on the grass at her feet were three fishing poles, a pair of baseball bats, and what looked like soda cans wrapped in duct tape.
Carter laughed. “So I’m going to put my monsters to sleep while you take yours fishing.”
Dana picked up one of the poles. Two hooks hung from the end of a pair of silvery strings. She pointed the fishing rod toward a lamppost. But instead of casting, she pushed a button on the side of the reel. A powerful spring launched the silver lines. The hooks hit the post and tangled around it. Dana pushed another button and an electrical arc raced from one hook to another. Overhead, the light exploded, sending showers of blue sparks to the street below.
“Whoa!” Carter gulped. “That beats my itching powder.”
“Over fifty thousand volts of electricity,” Dana said.
“It’s a homemade Taser,” Angelo murmured, clearly in awe.
Nick rubbed his hands together nervously. “Would it kill someone?”
Dana walked to the lamppost, untangled the hooks, and reeled in the line. “No, but it will temporarily disrupt their sensory and motor-control nerves. One shot from this and they’ll be out of commission for a good ten to fifteen minutes.”
Angie nodded, pleased. “And the bats?”
“Just over seven hundr
ed thousand volts. More like a stun gun. Each of the poles is good for five stuns. The bats will run out of juice after two or three.”
Nick whistled. This was some serious hardware. He pointed at the cans. “I take it those aren’t Diet Cokes then, huh?”
Dana hefted one of the tape-wrapped cylinders. There were six of them. “Classic smoke grenades. Pull the tab, count to three, and throw. Two yellow, two white, and two purple.”
Angelo shook his head. “I’m impressed.”
Carter dropped the itching powder and aftershave back into his pillowcase. “Anybody want a granola bar?”
Tiffany snorted.
“Now all we need is Jake,” Angie said. “Tiffany’s working on a way to get him onto the train without freaking people out.”
Nick glanced around the yard. “If she got him camouflaged, she did an amazing job.”
“Ha ha,” Angie said sarcastically. “You should be a comedian.” She walked to the door and knocked. “You ready in there?”
The door swung partway open and Tiffany stepped onto the porch. “Before I bring Jake out,” she said, “I want to remind you all that he’s sort of sensitive about his looks. So don’t make fun of him.”
“Why would we make—” Nick started to ask when Tiffany opened the door the rest of the way and Jake stepped through.
Nick’s mouth hung open. He blinked, unable to believe what he was seeing. Tiffany had dressed the giant in red, white, and blue stripes. His face was covered with white makeup, except for the blue triangles around his eyes and the red on his lips. His nose was covered by a bright red ball and his hair was tucked under a rainbow-colored wig.
“A clown?” Carter gasped in horror. “You turned Jake into a clown? How could you?”
Jake shifted from one foot to the other, seeming uncomfortable with all the attention he was getting.
Nick tried to catch his breath. He’d never seen anything like it before. “Okay, I give up. How are we supposed to sneak a seven-foot clown onto the train?”
“You aren’t,” Tiffany said. “That’s exactly the point. I kept trying to think of a way to hide a seven-foot giant. Until I finally realized you can’t. He’s huge. There’s no way people aren’t going to notice him. That’s when I knew I had to go the other direction. People see a bunch of kids with a seven-foot man, they start to ask questions. They see a bunch of kids with a seven-foot clown, they think they must be coming back from a circus. It’s called hiding in plain sight.”
Case File 13 #2 Page 12