The Great Bike Rescue

by Hazel Hutchins

  The Great Bike Rescue

  The Great Bike Rescue

  HAZEL HUTCHINS

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Text copyright © 2013 Hazel Hutchins

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in

  any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

  recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be

  invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hutchins, H. J. (Hazel J.)

  The great bike rescue [electronic resource] / Hazel Hutchins.

  (Orca young readers)

  Electronic monograph.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-0479-1 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-4598-0480-7 (EPUB)

  I. Title. II. Series: Orca young readers (Online)

  PS 8565.U826G74 2013 jC813'.54 C2013-901903-0

  First published in the United States, 2013

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013935388

  Summary: Levi and Riley are determined to find out who’s behind a recent string of

  bicycle thefts after their own bikes are stolen.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs

  provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the

  Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of

  British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover artwork by Laura Bifano

  Author photo by Gaston Maqueda

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO Box 5626, Stn. B PO Box 468

  Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA

  V8R 6S4 98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  16 15 14 13 • 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter One

  It only takes a minute for a great summer to turn into something else entirely.

  “Levi! Come outside—quick!”

  My friend Riley almost spilled his slushie rushing back into the corner store. His eyes were round. His face was flushed. He was in a panic. But it wasn’t the fear kind of panic. It was something else.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  I was still paying for my own slushie at the counter. And I wasn’t worried about Riley. Riley likes excitement. He even exaggerates things in order to have something to get excited about.

  “Your bike,” said Riley. “It’s gone!”

  The clerk leaned back, his eyes seeking a gap between the sea of ads and posters that were plastered across the full-length windows of the storefront. He squinted as he looked out at the sidewalk.

  “A lot of bikes have been lifted from out front lately,” he said.

  I had to think about what he meant by the word lifted. Lifted up? Lifted over? Suddenly I understood.

  “Stolen? You mean someone stole my bike?” I asked.

  The clerk shrugged.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” he said.

  I raced outside. My bike had been leaning against a narrow pillar between the front windows. It wasn’t there now. I could see it wasn’t there. Riley kept telling me, “See? It’s not there, it’s not anywhere.” But still, I kept right on looking.

  Two wheels. Knobby tires. Silver and black frame. My bike isn’t the newest bike in the world, or the fanciest bike in the world, but it’s a great bike. It’s my bike! I stared as hard as I could at the place it had been. I was trying to make my bike appear before me. Nope. Didn’t happen.

  Something inside me started going thump, thump, thump, and a weird kind of energy was taking over. Do something! Find your bike! I felt like I was running in circles even though I was hardly moving at all.

  I looked up and down Battersby Street. No bike.

  I looked in the hidden doorway, the locked one the store doesn’t use. No bike.

  I looked around the corner. No bike.

  I looked at Riley, hoping against hope.

  “Did you take it? Just to fool me?” I asked. “Please tell me you took it.”

  “Nope. I didn’t take it,” said Riley. He shoved his slushie into my free hand and began to unlock his own bike from the light post.

  “I’ll check the alleys and the cross streets,” he said. “Super Riley to the rescue!”

  He took off around the corner, pedaling like crazy. I couldn’t just stand there! I raced inside and set both slushies on the counter.

  “I’ll be back,” I said.

  I was out of the store before the clerk could answer. I raced across Battersby and headed in the opposite direction from Riley.

  I went down the alley. Look for a thief on a bike. I ran again.

  Running didn’t feel nearly fast enough, but I kept running anyway. Riley would be able to circle around a bigger area, but at least I could cover some of it.

  I turned the corner. Look for my bike. I ran like crazy some more. Turned another corner. Run. I heard the squeak of bike brakes, and Riley pulled up beside me.

  “Any si…” I had to stop and gulp for air. “Any sign at all?”

  Riley shook his head. He’d been riding hard and needed a moment to catch his own breath.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I looked everywhere. Whoever took it is long gone.”

  He swung off his bike and bumped it up onto the sidewalk. We walked back to the store together. Riley pushed his bike. I didn’t push mine.

  An entire ocean of feelings was washing over me. Disbelief. Outrage. Even a crazy kind of hope as we passed a lady walking a dog and asked if she’d seen a black and silver bike.

  Nope.

  And beneath it all, there was a familiar feeling. A rotten and familiar feeling. I’d had stuff stolen before. It was four years ago when I was just a little six-year-old kid, even before Riley and I became friends. But he knew the story. I’d told him about it. I guess I’d told him more times than I realized, because it’s what he used now to try and cheer me up.

  “Well, one good thing,” he said. “At least this time it’s not that girl who drove you crazy when you were a little kid. What was her name?”

  “Emily Grimshaw,” I said.

  Emily Grimshaw was the world’s sneakiest little kid. She’d lived next door all through grade one. She’d stolen my things. Over and over.

  She stole my plastic baseball bat. I saw her using it to whack dandelion heads down at the end of the lane. She stole my kite. I saw her through the chink in the fence, in her own yard, trying to untangle the snarl of string. The list goes on and on. It was all stupid little-kid stuff, but it made me really, really mad. I tried telling Dad, but Emily was way too fast and sneaky to let an adult catch her with anything.

  When my toboggan went missing that winter, I knew who had it. I gathered up my courage, knocked on Emily’s front door and asked her mom if I could have it back.

  “Emily does not steal,” said her mother. “We don’t have your toboggan.”

  And she slammed the door in my face. Do you know what it’s like to be six years old and have an adult slam a door in your face?

  The happiest day of that entire year was the day a big green truck drove up and Emily moved away. Except f
or the fact that I never did get my toboggan back.

  “Emily Grimshaw was your nemesis,” said Riley. “She was the Evil Person Who Can Never Be Defeated. It’s a good thing it’s not her this time. A stolen bike is bad enough without having a nemesis involved.”

  I looked at him sideways.

  “Don’t be so sure,” I said. “She’s still around.”

  Riley looked surprised.

  “You told me she moved,” he said.

  “She did,” I said. “But not that far away. Every once in a while, I still see her hanging out around here. And she still looks sneaky.”

  Riley stopped abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at me. Slowly he raised his fingertips to his forehead.

  “What?” I asked.

  He was pretending to read my innermost thoughts. Apparently, he figured he could. A slow grin spread over his face.

  “Ha!” he said. “Even you don’t think it was Emily.”

  Riley was right. I didn’t think it was Emily. As much as she’d driven me crazy back then, things had changed. She lived in a different neighborhood. She went to a different school. The few times we’d seen each other at the park or the pool or the store, we’d ignored each other. She probably didn’t even know who I was anymore.

  But my bike was definitely gone. Someone had stolen my bike!

  Chapter Two

  Do you want to know the first thing people do when your bike is stolen? The first thing they do is ask a question.

  “Was it locked?”

  It was the first thing the store clerk asked when we went back for our slushies. When I didn’t answer right away, he pretty much figured out the answer.

  “If you don’t lock your bike, it’s almost like you want it to be stolen,” he said.

  I didn’t want my bike to be stolen!

  But he was right about it not being locked. I was supposed to always lock it. The cable was wrapped around the seat post, with the lock and key attached, to make it easy to lock. I was foolish not to lock it.

  Still, it hurt when those were his first words. And they were the first words from everyone on the street as well, the people we asked as we made our way to Riley’s house.

  “Unlocked bikes disappear fast around here,” said the waitress who was clearing tables outside the coffee shop.

  She said it like it happened every day. Did it really happen that often?

  “Do you know how many times people ask us about stolen bikes?” said the city workers with the garbage truck. “People are crazy not to lock things up.”

  I wasn’t crazy!

  “If it’s not locked…” said the guy at the gas station. His name was AJ, or at least that’s what was written on his shirt. He finished the statement with a what-do-you-expect kind of shrug. But then he looked sympathetic and added, “I’ll keep an eye open for it. I see a lot of things from this corner.”

  After AJ, we saw the perfect sisters. They aren’t really sisters, but they dress alike, talk alike and always do what they’re supposed to. Even their bikes are the same.

  “Watch out if you’re headed to the corner store,” Riley called to them. “Levi’s bike just got stolen!”

  In unison, they swerved across the street toward us. Synchro-biking. Maybe it could be a new sport.

  “Was it locked?” they asked together.

  “I was only inside for a minute,” I said. “It was the middle of the day. It was right in front of the store.”

  “We always lock our bikes,” said Julia.

  “No matter how long we’re going to be,” said May.

  “Or where we leave them,” said Julia.

  Of course they did. They were the perfect sisters. They smiled at each other and pedaled away, side by side.

  It was the first question Riley’s mom asked too. Except Riley’s mom is really nice and her very next words were, “Sorry, Levi. No matter how it happened, I know how much you and Riley like your bikes. You must feel awful.”

  She was right. I do like my bike. Riley and I have all kinds of adventures on our bikes. I did feel awful.

  Besides his great mom, Riley also has a dad, a little sister, an older brother and a bunch of cousins that come and go. Usually I liked to stay at Riley’s house for a while. But I knew it was time to go home and tell Dad. Telling Dad was going to be the hard part.

  My dad doesn’t yell or shout—he’s not that kind of dad. But he’s big on responsibility. It’s one of a whole list of things he says Mom would have wanted me to learn. Locking up my bike was the responsible thing I was supposed to do. I couldn’t even argue with him about whether or not that kind of stuff was important to Mom. My mom died when I was too little to remember. I guess you already know the first thing he asked.

  “Was it locked?”

  I could feel the word yes forming on my lips. If I asked Riley to go along with it, Dad might never find out!

  But I didn’t lie. I shook my head no.

  Adults always say that it’s best to tell the truth. I’m not so sure. Dad was even more disappointed than I’d expected. He looked tired and he looked discouraged. He poured himself a cup of coffee. He goes through a lot of coffee these days. He is trying to work from home because I’m too old for a babysitter, but he doesn’t want me on my own all summer either. Responsible kid, responsible parent. I’m not sure it is working out.

  “I know,” I said. “I should have locked it.”

  “Locked or unlocked, it needs to be reported to the police,” he said. “Give me a few minutes to finish what I’m doing. We’ll take the car.”

  As we drove, I looked hard out the window, trying to see through fences and behind trees just in case I saw my bike. I didn’t.

  If you’ve ever thought that a police station might be a fun place to visit, forget it. Cameras watched us walk from the parking lot to the door. We had to ring an intercom buzzer and ask to come in. The door was made of heavy metal—really heavy, as in bulletproof. It closed behind us with a loud metallic click. Yup. First we’d been locked out. Now we were locked in. Visiting the police station makes you feel like a criminal.

  A uniformed officer was doing paperwork behind a tall counter. For a moment, I thought things might be getting better. She was about the same age as Riley’s mom. Maybe she had kids of her own and might even care about someone whose bike had been stolen.

  Nope. Wasn’t going to happen. The set expression on her face didn’t change when Dad explained why we’d come. She simply passed a form across the counter.

  I filled it in—part of Dad’s latest lesson in responsibility. The bike was secondhand and we didn’t have a receipt, and I’d never written down the serial number. Luckily, there were other things I could remember, like exactly what was written on the frame and which tire had been replaced. Dad signed the form and gave it back to the officer.

  “A lot of bikes have been stolen lately,” she said, looking down at me with her official police-officer expression. “You should have locked it.”

  She was right. Everyone was right. On the way home, I scrunched myself up small on my side of the car. We aren’t poor, but there isn’t a lot of extra money at our house either. I couldn’t believe I’d made it so easy for someone to steal my bike.

  But there was something else bugging me. Really bugging me. Dad must have felt it, because he glanced across the seat.

  “What is it, Levi?” he asked.

  I pressed my lips together. I didn’t want to make things worse than they were. But I was mad.

  “Just spit it out,” said Dad. “You’ll feel better.”

  “I know I messed up,” I said. “But just because something isn’t locked that doesn’t make it right for someone else to steal it!”

  Dad drove in silence for a few moments.

  “No,” he said at last. “That doesn’t make it right.”

  That’s when I stopped feeling sorry for myself. I hadn’t even known I’d been feeling that way! But I had. And now, all of a sudden, I was ab
le to think more clearly.

  The store clerk, the people on the street and the police officer had all said the same thing. My bike wasn’t the only one that had been stolen. If it had happened more than once, it would happen again. If there’s one thing Emily Grimshaw had taught me, even at age six, it was that criminals always return to the scene of the crime.

  The phone was ringing when I stepped in the door. It was Riley.

  “We can’t just give up on your bike,” he said. “It’s a great bike. Superheroes don’t just let people walk away with things!”

  I don’t want to be a superhero and I’m not sure Riley really does either. But I’m glad he’s my friend.

  “I’ve got a plan,” I said. “Can you help me out tomorrow? Can I borrow The Flame?”

  Chapter Three

  “Go, go, go!” called Riley.

  My legs were already cranking so fast that I felt like a hamster on an exercise wheel. The Flame was Riley’s bike from two years ago, and it was too small for me. If I sat on the seat, I felt like a circus clown on a tricycle. If I stood up, I felt like Frankenstein’s monster on a dinky toy. And I had to pedal like crazy to keep up even when Riley was coasting.

  “If I ever get my own bike back, I’m going to put thirty-seven locks on it and weigh it down with bricks,” I called, pumping my legs even harder.

  But the paint job on The Flame—deep red with tongues of orange and yellow fire—made it the kind of bike people noticed. It was exactly what we needed.

  I must have been pedaling harder than I thought, because a few moments later I shot past Riley. The next intersection was Battersby Street. I hit the brakes and rounded the corner.

  There’s always a hum of traffic on Battersby. Pedestrians flow up and down the sidewalk, different numbers at different times of the day. I leaned The Flame against the front of the store, exactly where I’d left my own bike a day earlier. I looked around.

  A delivery driver was carrying packages through the door of an office building. The waitress at the café was outside, talking to a man in a black T-shirt. One of the perfect sisters was dropping a letter into the mailbox down the street. No one was looking in my direction. I took a few steps and ducked into the unused doorway, the one the store keeps locked.