CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE: THE FURRY FRIEND
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
PART TWO: THE WRONG MAN
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
PART THREE: THE ULTIMATE TEST
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
STAY TUNED! PAGE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
PROFILE UPDATE
Name: Jimmy Bishop
Age: 11
Occupation: President and Founder, CrimeBiters
Interests: Solving crime, protecting society, Daisy Flowers
PROFILE UPDATE
Name: Irwin Wonk
Age: 11
Occupation: Best Friend and Cofounder of the CrimeBiters
Interests: Questioning everything I do
PROFILE UPDATE
Name: Daisy Flowers
Age: Just turned 11
Occupation: Cofounder of the CrimeBiters
Interests: Amazingly enough, wanting to hang around with us
PROFILE UPDATE
Name: Baxter Bratford
Age: 12
Occupation: CrimeBiter
Interests: Trying to make everyone forget he used to be a bully
Case File #1: The Bad Babysitter
Jimmy Bishop adopts a dog, Abby. He soon realizes that she’s a crime-fighting superhero vampire dog. Jimmy forms the CrimeBiters with his best friend, Irwin Wonk, his new crush—I mean friend—Daisy Flowers, and of course Abby. Together, they solve the Case of the Bad Babysitter and help catch the perpetrators, Barnaby Bratford and his sister, the evil Mrs. Cragg. Then they make friends with Barnaby’s son, the former bully Baxter Bratford, and he becomes the fifth CrimeBiter.
Case File #2: The Rotten Rival
Jimmy’s parents make Abby go to obedience school, where she becomes much better behaved, but also more like other dogs. Jimmy doesn’t like that very much. Jimmy joins the lacrosse team. Irwin doesn’t like that very much. Daisy makes a new friend named Mara. Jimmy and Irwin don’t like that very much. Baxter is on the lacrosse team too, but Jimmy quickly becomes better than him. Baxter doesn’t like that very much. Then a bunch of kids on the team start getting hurt, and no one likes that very much. Luckily, the CrimeBiters discover someone is trying to hurt the kids on purpose, solve the Case of the Rotten Rival, and save the day—and everyone likes that very, very much.
Oh, and Mrs. Cragg turns out to be nice.
Go figure!
HEY, YOU GUYS.
Haven’t seen you in a while. How have you been?
I’ve been pretty good: the school year is winding down, and things have been busy, with homework, friends, extracurricular activities—the usual stuff.
Oh, and Abby saved the day again.
You know, Abby, my crime-fighting superhero vampire dog?
Yeah, her.
She single-handedly (make that single-pawedly) foiled another villainous plot that threatened our very way of life.
Okay, okay, that’s a slight exaggeration. She had a little help, after all, from Irwin, Daisy, Baxter, and myself—we call ourselves the CrimeBiters.
Oh, wait. There was one other person.
Well, not a person, exactly.
A cat.
But I’m jumping ahead. I don’t want to ruin the ending!
So let’s go all the way back to the beginning.
Three weeks ago.
“SPIN!” I HOLLERED. “Weave! Crouch! Lean!”
Abby spun, weaved, crouched, and leaned.
We were in the middle of a training session in the backyard, and it was time to increase the pressure. I took the giant stuffed panda bear I won at a fair ringtoss two years earlier (it was a pretty lucky shot, I’ll admit) and held it over my head.
“Bad guy! Attack! Attack!”
Now, it may have had a little something to do with the peanut butter I smeared on the panda’s face, but Abby jumped so high I swear I thought she was going to leap over the house! She ripped the panda from my hands and started shaking it like crazy. Its adorable black nose popped off in two seconds, and three seconds after that, stuffing was flying all over the backyard.
“Stand down!” I hollered. “Suspect apprehended! Stand down!”
Abby stopped, released the panda from her death grip, and started licking peanut butter off the stuffed animal’s mangled left ear.
“That wasn’t such a great idea,” I muttered to myself, already regretting the decision to have Abby attack the biggest thing I’d ever won in my entire life. “Don’t eat that!” I said to Abby, as she started examining the panda’s insides. “It’s not turkey stuffing. It’s stuffed animal stuffing.”
The screen door opened.
“Jimmy! What’s going on out here?”
I looked up to see my dad standing there with a wooden spoon in his hand. That meant he was cooking something—never a good idea.
“Hey, Dad. Just, uh, running through some training exercises with Abby.”
“Training exercises?”
“Yeah, you know—”
“I know, I know,” my dad said, waving the spoon in my general direction. “Well, I appreciate all you’re doing for society, but let’s clean that mess up and call it a day. Oh, by the way, we’re having asparagus omelets for dinner.”
“Asparagus omelets?” I moaned.
FACT: The words asparagus and omelet should never be used in the same sentence.
“Yup,” my dad said, grinning. “Good, and good for you!”
He went back inside, and I looked down at Abby, who had moved on to the panda’s right ear.
“Hey, can I get some of that peanut butter?” I asked.
She ignored me.
“JIMMY?” SAID MY dad.
I pushed the omelet around the plate and didn’t look up. Whenever my dad said “Jimmy?” like that, it usually didn’t lead to good things.
“Yeah?”
“Let’s talk about the summer. There’s only a few weeks left in the school year, and we should get it settled.”
Oh boy. I had my whole summer planned out in my head, and it wasn’t really up for discussion.
“What about it?” I asked.
My big sister, Misty, who loved asparagus omelets, grinned with excitement. “I am so psyched for the summer! Jarrod invited me to drive across the country with his family!” Jarrod Knight is Misty’s boyfriend, and he’s actually a really nice guy, as long as you don’t hold his questionable taste in girls against him.
My dad raised his eyebrows. “Excuse me?”
“Yup, they’re renting a big mobile home thingy!” she announced. “Sounds great, right?”
“Uh, yeah, other than the fact that if you think you’re going, you’re completely crazy,” said m
y dad. “Do Jarrod’s parents have any clue about this invitation?”
“Er,” said Misty, which I think is another word for no.
Headlights flashed across the living room, which was Abby’s cue to run over to the front door and start wagging her tail like crazy. She likes to greet every family member like a warrior returning from battle.
This time, it was my mom, getting home from work. “Easy, girl,” she said, giving Abby a hug. “Easy.” Mom and Abby had had a few run-ins in the past, which usually involved a chewed-up item of expensive clothing, but they were good pals now.
After several jumps where her head almost scraped the ceiling, Abby decided the greeting could end. My mom sat down at the table, and my dad picked up where he left off.
“Misty wants to spend the summer driving across America in a giant trailer with Jarrod and his family.”
My mom’s eyes went wide, then narrowed down to little slits. “Over my dead body,” she said.
“Mom!” Misty whined, in full drama-queen mode. “I’m going to be a junior in high school! I’m practically an adult!”
“I totally think you should let her go,” I said, but not out of brotherly love or anything. I was just thinking about getting Misty’s bedroom for the summer—it’s about three times bigger than mine.
“See?” Misty said, grabbing on to my uncharacteristic generosity as if it were a life raft. “Even Jimmy says I should get to go!”
“You’re not going,” said my mom, with an end of discussion tone of voice. Misty slumped back in her seat, while Mom turned her attention to me.
“What about you? Time to start thinking about summer plans, right?”
“I have it all figured out,” I told her, hoping she would accept that and just move on.
“Oh yeah?” Mom asked. “Like what?”
“Oh, mostly CrimeBiters stuff,” I said. I looked down at Abby, kind of wishing she would do something distracting like eat one of my mom’s shoes, but she was busy running in her sleep.
FACT: Dogs run in their sleep more than most people run awake.
“I’m also going to keep volunteering at Shep’s shelter,” I added. Shep Lansing ran the Northport Animal Rescue Foundation—which is where we got Abby—and I helped him out three days a week after school, feeding the dogs, cleaning up, and doing other odd jobs. “Plus, I want to go to lacrosse camp, and make sure I read everything on the summer reading list for school, stuff like that.”
“Good plan,” said my mom.
“Sounds like a great summer,” my dad chimed in.
I stared at them both in shock. “Really? I can just … kind of do what I want?”
My mom kissed my cheek. “Or less,” she said. “Sometimes it seems like you take on too much, and we just want you to have fun. Summer is a time to relax, right? No stress.”
She turned back to my sister. “So, should we talk about your summer, and what you might actually do, instead of running off with your boyfriend?”
“NO!” said Misty, who then got up from the table and ran up the stairs, went into her bedroom (which was much bigger than mine, did I mention that?), and slammed the door.
“Jeez, what’s her problem?” I muttered, but I was giggling inside.
I take back everything bad I ever said about big sisters.
They really come in handy sometimes.
THE NEXT DAY was Saturday, which meant one thing: our weekly CrimeBiters meeting! By the time Abby and I got to the Boathouse, my friend and fellow CrimeBiter Baxter Bratford was already there, but he wasn’t doing either of his two usual activities—eating something chocolate, or sleeping.
Instead, he was hunched over a notebook, scribbling away like a madman.
Abby went over to say hi, which meant plopping herself in Baxter’s lap and refusing to get up until he started petting her.
“Whatcha doing?” I asked Baxter.
He sighed so deeply, he almost fell over. “Ugh,” he said, but I immediately knew what he meant.
FACT: Homework is such a scary concept that sometimes it’s difficult to even utter the actual word.
“Seriously?” I said. “It’s Saturday! What class?”
“I don’t even know,” Baxter muttered, but I knew that couldn’t be true. Or could it? I knew Baxter wasn’t exactly Albert Einstein, but I was pretty sure he could tell the difference between social studies and science.
Baxter suddenly flung the notebook down in frustration. “It’s all so hard! I need a nap.” He lay down on his back and closed his eyes, which was definitely a more natural position for him than crouched over a book. “My parents are really starting to get mad about my grades,” he said. “They said I might have to go to summer school.”
Now, this was a very surprising statement, but not in the way you might expect. Nope, it was surprising because Baxter said “parents.” Meaning, mom and dad.
I hadn’t heard him use that word since his dad had been put in jail, and that was almost a year ago.
FACT: To learn more about Barnaby Bratford and his jewelry-stealing crime ring, and how Baxter himself used to be a bully but later became my lacrosse teammate and part of our gang, please read the earlier CrimeBiters books. You can even read them right now if you want to! It’s okay, I’ll wait.
“Summer school? Yikes,” I said, but before I could figure out what to say after that, I heard a high-pitched, lispy voice squeal, “What up, bros?”
That sound could only belong to one person.
Baxter and I looked at each other, rolled our eyes, and waited for our friend Irwin Wonk to climb the stairs to the roof.
“What did you just say?” I asked Irwin, as he stood there, huffing and puffing.
“Uh, what up, bros?” Irwin said, with a little less swagger this time.
Baxter got up from his pre-nap, walked over to Irwin, and put his hand on his shoulder. “Irwin? Can I tell you something? You’re a lot of things—a lot of good things, even—but cool isn’t one of them.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s probably best you stay away from language like that.”
“You know what?” Irwin said. “You guys are dorks.”
“True,” I said. “But we accept it.”
“We own it,” Baxter added.
“We embrace it,” I finished, and Baxter and I started dancing around in a circle, chanting, “You’re one of us!”—which may have been the dorkiest move of them all.
“Cut it out!” Poor Irwin. He was the very definition of nerdy, but he wasn’t quite ready to give up on his dream of making it to the other side.
Irwin looked around, ready to change the subject. “Where’s Daisy?”
Baxter and I stopped in our tracks. “Yeah, where is she?” we both wondered aloud. Daisy was never, ever late—which was one of the 4,392,955 good things about her.
As we were trying to figure out where Daisy could have been, Abby’s tail suddenly shot skyward, as straight as a fishing pole.
“What is it, girl?” I said, but Abby didn’t move. She looked like a statue, staring down toward the front door of the Boathouse.
“She must see something,” Irwin suggested.
“Or smell something,” I said.
“Something bad,” Baxter added.
FACT: See previous fact.
Abby started slowly walking toward the door, and I heard a soft, low sound coming from deep inside of her. It was more of a rumble than a growl. It was a sound that meant, I sense danger. And danger makes me angry.
We all got up and watched her. She cocked her head, and for some reason, Baxter and I cocked our heads too.
“What are you guys doing?” Irwin said. “You’re not dogs.”
We uncocked our heads.
Then a familiar voice said, “Sorry I’m late!”
“See, Abby?” said Baxter. “It’s just Daisy. No big deal, right?”
Abby didn’t answer though, because she was still on high alert.
“We’re almost there!” Daisy added, w
hich was a little confusing. We’re?
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I ran to the door and threw it open, just as Daisy was about to open it herself from the other side.
“Hey, guys!” she said brightly. “What’s up?”
Now, ordinarily, we all would have said, “Not much.” But this was the opposite of ordinary. This was extremely extraordinary. Because Daisy was holding something in her arms. And that something was alive.
“Oh, right!” she chirped, noticing our stares. “Where are my manners?” She thrust out her arms, so we could see the something-that-was-alive up close.
It was a cat.
“This is—” she began, but none of us could hear the rest, because that was when Abby started barking her head off.
FACT: Cats and dogs don’t get along at all. In fact, they usually fight like, well, cats and dogs.
“ABBY, STOP BARKING,” I said. Then, louder: “ABBY, QUIET!” But it wasn’t any use. She was yowling and howling and I was a little worried that she was going to leap one of her famous leaps and break out her famous fangs and clamp her jaw right down on that kitten’s cute little head. But she didn’t, probably because she loved Daisy, and was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Up to a point.
Finally, I fished a treat out of my backpack and gave it to Abby as a distraction, so the rest of us could find out a little more about our unexpected guest.
Irwin pointed at the little fur ball. “What is that?” he said, getting right to the point.
“This is my new cat!” Daisy said, with a giant smile on her face. “Her name is Purrkins! Get it? PURR-kins?” She nuzzled the cat’s face with her own. “And she’s PURR-fect!”
Abby didn’t think Purrkins was purr-fect though—not by a long shot. Abby wasn’t growling anymore, but she was eyeing the cat with a menacing stare.
“Oh, Abby,” Daisy said, rolling her eyes. “Stop being so ridiculous. Purrkins is the sweetest little thing. You and her are going to be bestest buds!”
“Bestest buds?” I asked. “I don’t know. Dogs don’t generally like cats very much. And Abby doesn’t like any animal until she gets to know them.”
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