“How much?” Dani interrupted grimly. It wasn’t fair but there was no use trying to argue with a muscle-bound lump-head like Ronnie Grabler. Particularly when the lump-head’s father owned half the block. She was moving toward the cigar box when suddenly Stormy pushed her away, grabbed the money box and ran. And a second later Ronnie took off after him bellowing, “Come back here, dummy,” and some other insulting stuff. Stormy was yelling too, a high-pitched yelping sound like a scared puppy.
For a few seconds, while Stormy and then Ronnie crossed the highway and disappeared from view behind the gas station, Dani stayed right where she was. But then the noises, which were floating back across the highway, took on a shriller and more desperate sound. Changed into the high-pitched shrieking of someone who was scared to death, or maybe getting pounded to a pulp. A picture appeared before Dani’s eyes, a picture of Stormy sinking down to the ground under a rain of ferocious blows, and suddenly she was running too. She didn’t have the slightest idea what she was going to do when she caught up with them, but somebody had to do something—in a hurry.
She could tell now that the yelling was coming from Gus’s garage, but as she rounded the station, dodging old tires and car parts, the howls had a different pitch and tone. By the time she dashed into the garage she was beginning to wonder if the howler was still Stormy. And sure enough, it wasn’t.
The first thing Dani saw when her eyes had adjusted to the dim light of the garage was Gus standing beside his famous grease pit holding something big and heavy down over the edge. Dani had heard all the stories about how strong Gus was, but if she hadn’t seen it herself she wouldn’t have believed that anybody could dangle a big kid over the edge of a grease pit by the back of his khaki shorts. But that was what Gus was doing. Standing there straddle legged, holding the struggling, howling Ronnie with just one hand, he was grinning his snaggletoothed grin while, on the other side of the pit, Stormy grinned back, still clutching the cigar box to his chest.
When Gus finally pulled Ronnie out of the pit and put him back on his feet he slunk off across the highway, stopping only once to glare back threateningly at Dani and Stormy. Dani knew the threat was a real one, so the second Ronnie disappeared into the hotel she grabbed Stormy and headed for home. Stopping only long enough to rescue Linda’s pitcher from under the hotel awning, they made it back to Dani’s house without any more Grabler trouble. Linda was cooking dinner in the stifling heat of the kitchen so they sat on the back steps, drank up what was left of the lemonade, counted their money and talked about what had happened. Talked and snickered every time they thought about Ronnie and the grease pit. After a while Dani stopped laughing.
“Okay,” she said. “It was pretty funny but it won’t last, you know. Old Ronnie might be scared off for the time being, but he’d be right back if we tried it again.”
Stormy gulped, swallowed another snicker and stared at her. “I know,” he said. “He’ll wait until Gus is busy, and then—”
“Well, anyway,” Dani said, “we were pretty lucky to get out of the lemonade business while we were still ahead. I mean, four dollars is better than nothing, even if it’s not going to make much of a difference in …” She looked back through the screen door to where Linda was doing something with hamburger that smelled pretty good. Lowering her voice to a whisper, she went on, “… in the running-away fund.”
Stormy sighed. “I know. But it was a good idea. Gus thought the lemonade stand was a real good moneymaking idea.”
“Yeah.” Dani chuckled sarcastically. “He sure did. Greasy Gus, the world-famous moneymaking expert.”
Stormy frowned uncertainly. “Gus is my—”
“I know,” Dani interrupted. “Gus is your friend.”
Stormy’s frown deepened and for a while no one said anything more. Stormy was still probably trying to decide whether to slug Dani for calling Gus greasy. And Dani? Dani was thinking that whatever you thought about Gus, he had been a pretty good friend to Stormy when Stormy really needed one.
Thinking about needing friends led to wondering about why Stormy had gotten himself into such a mess. How he’d had the nerve to snatch the money box from right under the nose of someone as big and mean as Ronnie Grabler.
Of course it might have been that Stormy was just too dumb to know what a risk he was taking. Or else it might simply have been stubbornness. Everybody knew that Stormy Arigotti was major-league stubborn, so that probably was a big part of it. But then again, maybe it had something to do with—guts? With the fact that, along with being stubborn and reckless, Stormy Arigotti was also a pretty gutsy kid.
For some reason it was kind of an intriguing idea. So intriguing, in fact, that for a moment Dani actually thought about telling Stormy what she’d been thinking. But the more she thought about it, the harder it got to come up with the right words. In the end she didn’t tell him anything, but she did surprise herself by going in to ask Linda if Stormy could stay for dinner.
Linda said, “Certainly,” which wasn’t much of a surprise since she was always worrying about Stormy’s Beer Nuts and pretzel diet. And Stormy said, “Wow, would I!” which was no surprise at all.
Chapter 8
THE NIGHT AFTER THE lemonade disaster Dani was awakened twice by horribly realistic nightmares. The first one was a lot like a dream she’d had before. A dream in which she was minding her own business when suddenly a hand grabbed her shoulder and whirled her around to face a man wearing an oily denim jacket and a Gila monster’s head. The second dream started out just about the same but this time the strange creature had the body of a Gila monster—fat, scaly body, clawed hands and feet—and the head of Ronnie Grabler. It was a pretty awful combination.
What with the lemonade fiasco and the nightmares, Dani had completely forgotten about the possibility of getting an allowance when some very peculiar things started happening. The first strange event was when she looked out her front window just in time to see the geologists’ weird car heading into town on Silver Avenue. And the next day, there it was again, this time going out toward the ranch. And then on Monday, Linda came home from the bookstore with amazing news. The Smithsons had definitely decided to lease the ranch for six months if they could wire the house and hook it up to a generator. And they really were willing to pay seventy-five dollars a month.
Dani couldn’t believe it. She had been so sure that the whole thing had been just another one of Linda’s “happily ever after” pipe dreams. But now it looked as if it was really going to happen. By the middle of the next week Linda had signed a lease contract and picked up her first seventy-five-dollar check. It was great to get all that extra money but, as it turned out, Dani didn’t get any of it. There were, it seemed, too many overdue bills to be taken care of first. But her mother did say, “I really do think someone your age should have an allowance, if it’s at all possible. So we’ll see what we can do next month.”
Not till next month. Dani had stomped away angrily and later she told Stormy, “Next month will be too late. I’ve—We’ve got to get started a long time before that. Even if she’d let me have a huge allowance, like a couple of dollars a week, I won’t—I mean we won’t—have enough money for the bus tickets until way past the middle of summer.” At least not enough for two tickets, she added silently. Out loud she only said, “I wanted to get started right away, like before school gets out. I said I was going to leave right away, and I meant it.”
She had meant it, and she still did. That day in the graveyard when she’d yelled at the sky, she’d definitely meant to start off immediately. Like in a day or two. And at that moment she hadn’t felt frightened at all—only fiercely determined. But somehow putting it off had made the whole thing seem less like a real possibility, and also a lot more dangerous. As if, now that the desert had been warned, it would have time to think up ways to stop her. And the longer she had to wait the more time she spent thinking of things that might go wrong.
On the other hand, she had to admit that it mi
ght be slightly interesting to hang around Rattler Springs just a little longer. Long enough, at least, to see what the geologists were actually going to do way out there in Linda’s run-down, dusty old ranch house.
The first thing they did was to truck in a lot of heavy equipment. Only a few days after the Smithsons paid their first month’s rent, a lot of trucks began to head up Silver Avenue in the direction of the ranch. Big trucks that seemed to be carrying all kinds of lumber and strange-looking machinery. Linda said she thought the machinery was just the generator and maybe some scientific equipment, but other people had other ideas about what it might be.
One of the trucks looked like a big, long moving van. Dani was heading up Silver Avenue and just passing the Grand Hotel when the van went by. It was so long that it had to back and turn to get around the corner and for a while it got kind of hung up. Dani stopped to watch and before long some other people did too.
One of the first ones to show up was Stormy, of course, and a little later most of the people who’d been in the bar straggled out. Even Stormy’s mother, Gorgeous Gloria, came out and joined the crowd, wearing a stretchy red dress with a silver thread woven into it, and still carrying a dish towel and the glass she’d been drying. After a while Dani got bored with the truck and started watching Gloria instead. It was interesting because you didn’t see Stormy’s mother out-of-doors very often, at least during the daytime.
Dani had always thought that Gloria Arigotti was very young looking to be the mother of a great big nine-year-old kid like Stormy. She had a movie-star-type figure and lots of superblond hair, and she always wore very glamorous-looking clothing, like tight sweaters and short skirts. But seeing her now in the bright sunshine Dani could see how she might be pretty old after all. Like maybe even thirty, which was nearly as old as Dani’s mother.
Gloria was chatting and joking with some of the other people who’d come out of the bar to watch. People, men mostly, seemed to enjoy talking to Gloria even though the rumor was that she could be pretty dangerous at times. Like getting mad at somebody and trying to hit them with a whiskey bottle. Or like the time she’d showed up at the O’Donnells’ in the middle of the night, yelling and screaming because she thought Stormy was staying over without permission. He hadn’t been there, so she’d gone off without him, but the next day he showed up with a black eye. Linda, who always worried about Stormy having a lousy mother, had been sure that Gloria had done it. Dani believed Stormy when he said he’d bumped into a door, and she’d told Linda so. She’d reminded Linda that the little klutz was always bumping into something or other, and she’d also hinted about how there were a lot of different ways to be a lousy parent. Right now, for instance, watching Gloria, it seemed to Dani that it might be kind of exciting to have such a glamorous mother.
Dani was still watching Gloria and the rest of the crowd and thinking about a town where there wasn’t anything more exciting to do than watch a stalled moving van, when someone punched her in the back. Hard. Not angry hard, actually, but just Stormy’s usual tooth-rattling substitute for a normal person’s “Hi” or “Hey, you.”
“Hey, watch it,” Dani said crossly, but then she saw his face and added, “What’s up?” Judging by his expression, something important definitely was.
There was a suspicious squint to Stormy’s eyes and his voice hissed excitedly when he said, “They’re spies. That’s what they are. Spies.”
Dani was puzzled. “What are you talking about? Who are spies?”
“Those ge—geo—” Giving up on ge-ol-o-gists, Stormy went on, “Those guys who are renting your ranch.”
“Oh yeah?” She couldn’t help grinning. “What makes you think they’re spies?”
“Because …” Stormy rolled his eyes around thoughtfully, and went on rolling them until Dani threatened to thump him on the head to get him started. “You know,” he finally said, “like in that book. The one about Jerry and the Nazi?”
“Jerry?” For a moment Dani couldn’t imagine what he was talking about, but then she began to get the picture. A year or so ago Stormy had been hung up on a series of dumb stories about this kid named Jerry who was supposed to be some kind of a superdetective. Even though he was only twelve years old he went around solving complicated mysteries about all sorts of criminals like cat burglars and smugglers. And there had been one story in which Jerry discovered that an apparently innocent toy maker was really a Nazi spy who hid government secrets inside his dolls and teddy bears. All the books were pretty unbelievable and the spy story had been especially stupid. She’d been glad when Stormy finally got tired of them, but now here he was back to imagining that he was Jerry, the detective.
“Oh, I get it,” she said, grinning. “Look, Stormy. The war’s over. The Nazis got wiped out. Or hadn’t you heard?”
Stormy glared. “I know that. But there’s other kinds of spies besides Nazi ones. Gus thinks so too. Gus says, why do they have to have all that scientific equipment just to look for minerals and stuff in the ground. Gus says he knows a guy who did that all his life, and all he needed was a donkey and a pickax.”
Dani shrugged angrily. Actually she was getting a little bit tired of all the famous quotations from Gus. Ever since the day when old Ronnie got dangled over the grease pit it seemed like all Stormy could talk about was his friend Gus. And as if hearing about Gus the champion muscle man wasn’t boring enough, now there was Gus the geologist. For some reason Dani found the whole thing pretty infuriating. Not that she wouldn’t be glad if Stormy found someone else to tag around after. Definitely not. As far as she was concerned that would be just great. And if Gus wanted to finish reading White Fang out loud, that would be great too. That is, if he could read, which probably wasn’t a safe bet.
“Look,” she said. “There’s nothing mysterious about the Smithsons. They just happen to be perfectly innocent geologists. Everybody with any sense knows that.”
But the next day it turned out that everybody didn’t. At least not at Rattler Springs school. The favorite topic of conversation at school that day, and pretty much all that week, was what the Smithsons were up to, out there at the ranch. Bob Bailey said he’d heard they were government agents looking for a place to test atom bombs. And some other kids seemed to think the Smithsons were counterfeiters, and the stuff in one of those big trucks had been presses for printing money. But the craziest idea was Clara Mason’s.
Clara, who was the only other girl in the seventh grade besides Dani, was a horror-story nut who was always reading about vampires and demons and monsters. And it was her idea that the Smithsons were really Frankenstein types, and all that machinery was some kind of monster assembly line.
Dani thought the whole thing was pretty ridiculous. “Look,” she told Bob, and a couple of other people who happened to be standing around listening. “Just because their clothes don’t look like they bought them at a rummage sale, and they drive a custom-made car, doesn’t make them into some kind of mad scientists. It just makes them a little bit different than most of the people around here. Okay? And you know who’s always suspicious of anyone who’s a little bit different? Hicks and hillbillies, that’s who.”
It was the truth but, as usual, no one appreciated it much. In fact, when she told them that stuff about hicks and hillbillies Bob muttered, “Okay. So I’m a hick. I’d rather be a hick than a stuck-up know-it-all.” And of course some of the other kids who heard what he said went around the rest of the day making cracks about stuck-up know-it-alls.
It wasn’t fair. Just because Dani wasn’t a natural-born desert rat, and because she got pretty good grades without having to study much, the other kids at Rattler Springs Elementary School thought she was conceited.
She walked home that day telling herself she wasn’t ever going to try to tell anybody at that crummy school anything ever again. It wasn’t the first time she’d told herself to keep her mouth shut about how she felt about living in Rattler Springs. But then somebody would start teasing her and she�
�d forget and start shooting her mouth off again.
Sometimes, when she cooled off, she knew that a lot of her problems at the Rattler Springs school were her own fault. She knew that the reason she got teased so much was because she’d gotten off on the wrong foot when she first came, complaining about everything and bragging about how much better it had been back home. Of course, she’d only been a stupid little homesick eight-year-old at the time, but she still ought to have known better. And she certainly ought to know better now than to go around calling people hillbillies and hicks. But she’d done it, and she knew that for the next few days she was going to have to pay for it.
The next morning she thought about staying home with a planned stomachache. Not an imaginary stomachache. She didn’t go in for imaginary stuff. A planned one. And she probably would have except that at eight o’clock it was already over a hundred degrees in her bedroom and it was obviously going to be a lot hotter before the day was over. So she gritted her teeth and went to school—and nobody even mentioned stuck-up know-it-alls. Or anything else about Dani O’Donnell.
Not that the Rattler Springs student body had suddenly turned over a new leaf. Not a chance. What made the difference was that they suddenly had somebody else to torment. Somebody named Portia Alexandria Smithson.
Chapter 9
PORTIA ALEXANDRIA SMITHSON WAS as skinny and blond as her geologist parents and, like theirs, her features were normal enough, but nothing special. All except for her eyes and ears. Her eyes were big and round and bright blue and her ears were big too, and stuck out on each side through wispy blond hair. She looked okay but definitely different and, as Dani had good reason to know, different was dangerous in Rattler Springs.
For one thing her clothes were all wrong. She came into the sweltering, sweaty classroom that first morning wearing a fancy, long-sleeved white blouse, with a monogram on the pocket and trimmed around the collar and cuffs with blue braid. Her skirt, also blue, was sharply pleated, and her saddle shoes looked brand new. It was an outfit that might have been terrific at some big-city school, but the reaction in Rattler Springs was … Looking around the classroom, Dani felt like she was watching a bunch of alley cats reacting to the new cat on the block. It was easy to conjure up a mental image of arching backs and bristling tails. You could, that is, if you were interested in that kind of imagining stuff, which Dani definitely wasn’t.
Runaways Page 5