“Bwaa-ha!” he chortled. And as he paced the floorboards, he began seasoning his plan with a dash of evil here and a shake of vengeance there, until at last he began muttering, “Where are those buffoons? What is taking them so long?”
Yes, for the first time since they’d blundered into his life, Damien Black wanted the Bandito Brothers to be there.
His devilish plan required the Brothers.
They were, after all, delectably disposable.
And if all went well, they’d be the ones cursed, and that deceitful, duplicitous, double-dealing gypsy would be the one suckerooed!
Chapter 12
THE WINK OF A WICKED EYE
So! Now that you know what happened up on Raven Ridge, let’s quit stopping in our tracks and get back to Sticky and the sound he heard, shall we?
It was, as you may recall, a sound Sticky recognized.
One that was worse (much worse) than the hissing and spitting of a turbocharged cat.
“Reeeek?”
Sure enough, a satchel-toting monkey swung in through the Sanchezes’ kitchen window.
“Ay caramba, no!” Sticky cried, moving lickety-split across the kitchen ceiling. “Out! Leave! Vámonos!”
The rhesus simply bared his teeth at Sticky and ambled across the counter toward the coffeemaker.
Now, I’m sure you’re wondering why (given all the coffeemakers in all the kitchens in the city) the rhesus came to Dave’s apartment to brew his coffee.
It is, after all, a perfectly reasonable thing to be wondering.
The answer is (again) quite simple: Monkeys are creatures of habit. (Although, in this case, things were slightly more complex, as this monkey was a creature of habit with a habit.)
You see, aside from Damien Black’s house, the only place the little rhesus had actually brewed coffee was the Sanchezes’ apartment. And in the days since his last swing through the Sanchezes’ kitchen window, the little monkey had survived by snatching to-go cups from coffeehouses, haphazardly lifting straight brews, lattes, mochas, and double shots (with the occasional ptttttth-inducing chai).
And despite cries of “Hey, that’s my coffee!” and “Excuse me…. Excuse me…!” and (simply) “Stop that monkey!” he’d managed (for the most part) to avoid the debilitating headaches that are characteristic of caffeine withdrawal.
Still. Jacking to-go joe was a lot of work. And dangerous. Plus, nothing he’d snatched compared to Damien’s Himalayan blend.
So now that he had a supply of the good stuff and a coffeemaker within reach, the rhesus wasn’t going to let a little thing like an angry lizard stop him from brewing a wicked good cup of coffee.
“Reeeeeeek!” he warned Sticky, baring his teeth again.
It was clear to Sticky that there was no reasoning with this rhesus.
It was also clear that there was no fighting him. With opposable thumbs, a long, agile tail, and a killer craving for coffee, the furry beast was just too fearsome a foe.
But as he watched the rhesus slam through drawers and cupboards for a filter, a mug, and a spoon…as he watched the coffee sputter and steam and then stream into a waiting mug, an idea formed in Sticky’s little (but very powerful) gecko brain.
It was, as you might already be guessing, yet another very bad idea.
One that involved a certain potion that was still sitting on the counter near the coffeemaker.
“Ay-ay-ay,” Sticky muttered, and although “ay-ay-ay” can mean many things (or, on occasion, nothing at all), this “ay-ay-ay” meant one clear, specific thing:
“Do I dare?”
Ah, poor Sticky.
He was flirting with temptation.
In his head, a little voice was telling him that if he had a minute of super-strength—just one little minute—he could fling that monkey right out the window.
Adiós, monkey nose!
And…if he had another few minutes, he could lickety-split straighten things up quick before anyone came home.
And…if he had just a few more minutes…
Yes, this is what happens when you flirt with temptation—temptation is happy to flirt right back. In the wink of its wicked eye, you find yourself reaching for the potion, telling yourself you’ll only use it to help you through this bad situation, swearing you’ll only take one drop (or maybe, at the very most, two).
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), the monkey had been keeping a wary (and now re-caffeinated) eye on the lizard. So perhaps it was the way Sticky was approaching the bottle.
Or the obvious intensity of Sticky’s mission.
Or perhaps the monkey was just in a playful mood.
Regardless, the little rhesus seemed to sense what Sticky was after, and with a playful swoosh-snatch he scooped up the little bottle of potion and smiled. “Reeeek?”
“No!” Sticky cried as he scampered up the monkey. “Give it back, you bobo baboon!”
The monkey gave him an insulted look, then simply shook Sticky off as he leapt onto the kitchen floor. “Reeeeek?” he said, wagging the bottle at Sticky.
Sticky knew that chasing the monkey would be, as he would say, estúpido.
So instead, he tried to outsmart the rhesus.
He zippy-toed across the counter and dragged a banana from the fruit bowl. “Here, monkey-monkey-monkey,” he said, hoping the monkey would just drop the bottle and take the bait.
Instead, the monkey tucked the bottle inside his satchel (which was still slung across his chest) and then snagged the banana.
“You zonzo Bonzo,” Sticky muttered, but when he tried to retrieve the bottle from the satchel, the monkey simply leapt to the floor again.
“Reeeek?” the monkey said. He bared his squishy-banana teeth and made a laughing noise, then scampered around the corner toward the bedrooms.
“What the jalapeño am I going to do?” Sticky cried as he zippy-toed after the rhesus. When he caught up to him, he found the monkey leaping around Dave’s room, tearing things up, tossing things around, making an eeky-shrieky mess of the place (as naughty, hopped-up monkeys are prone to do).
“Freaky frijoles!” Sticky cried. “Get out! Go! Ándale!”
But the monkey had discovered a stash of shiny objects, including the grill Dave had worn to make the Raven Ridge delivery. He cocked his head and inspected the silver and blue teeth. “Eeeek?” he asked softly.
Suddenly there was a noise at the front door.
The monkey froze.
His eyes went wide.
His mouth pushed out into a little “oo.” (Or, perhaps more accurately, a little “uh-oo.”)
And in a furry flash, he scampered into the kitchen, leapt onto the counter, took one last (extremely satisfying) gulp of coffee, then swung outside onto the flower box and escaped.
Chapter 13
WELCOME HOME
It was Dave who fumbled through the front door, famished and exhausted and just glad to be home. He’d been up half the night working on his social studies project, he’d had to run the mile twice in P.E. (once for health and once because Eli Unger had stolen Mr. Wilson’s whistle and nobody dared fink), and his after-school deliveries had taken him to far ends of the city (although, thankfully, to neither Moongaze Court nor Raven Ridge).
Dave needed food!
Rest!
(And, of course, to get going on his homework.)
Instead, he got a topsy-turvy house that smelled suspiciously of Himalayan coffee.
He pushed his bike farther inside, calling, “Mom? Dad?…Evie?”
There was, of course, no response from any of them, as Evie spent her after-school hours with her mother at the Laundromat where Mrs. Sanchez worked until five, and Mr. Sanchez rarely arrived home before six.
The response came, instead, from Sticky. “It was that crazy gata!” he cried, racing toward Dave. “And the monkey! It’s a miracle I’m alive! I told you that fuzzy-faced monster was trying to kill me!”
“But…,” Dave gasped, lo
oking around at the damage. “Topaz and the monkey? How did they get in?”
Sticky shot up to his familiar place on Dave’s shoulder. “The window!” he said, pointing.
Dave (certain that his parents would blame him for the chaos) began cleaning the kitchen. “So the monkey opened the window and then Topaz came in?” Dave asked, trying to come to grips with what had happened as he picked up the half-eaten banana.
“I tried to stop them, but what can one lizard do?” Sticky asked (neatly avoiding the question).
Dave was still stunned. “They were here at the same time?”
“Horroroso exploso!” Sticky moaned. “Monsters everywhere!”
“This place is a disaster!” Dave groaned, moving into the family room. “How long were they here?”
“A lifetime!” Sticky cried. Then (very slyly) he added, “The minute they heard you at the door? Zippity-doo-dah, they were gone!”
“So they just left?”
“Sí, señor.”
Dave was righting the furniture in the family room when he noticed the scratch marks on the wall and the claw marks in the ceiling. “How in the world…?”
“That cat went loco-berry burritos trying to get me! Now do you believe me?”
Suddenly Dave was mad. Lily’s cat was a beast! She really could have caught and killed Sticky!
He also suddenly felt guilty. Why hadn’t he paid attention to what Sticky had been saying about the cat? He’d been complaining about Topaz for weeks.
Now, a calm, collected person would have realized that a normal cat (ill-tempered or otherwise) could not possibly have created such chaos. But Dave was neither calm nor collected. He was shocked, stunned, and now angry.
And so it was that Dave took Sticky at his word and marched out of his apartment and pounded on the Espinozas’ door.
A short minute later, Lily answered and (with her typical sassy scowl) said, “Wassup, delivery boy?”
“Your cat tore up our apartment, that’s what’s up!”
Lily gave him a smirk. “Oh, really.”
“Yes, really!” Dave said, then grabbed her by the arm and pulled her along.
Now, Dave was never commanding or demanding (or even firm) with Lily. And this change in him was so surprising to Lily that she simply let him drag her next door.
“See?” he said, pointing at the scratched wall.
Lily, however, didn’t look at the wall. Instead, she took in the topsy-turvy state of things. “Nice housekeeping,” she said.
“Thanks to your cat,” Dave snapped. He moved across the room and pointed above his head to the gouges in the ceiling. “See those? Your cat is a monster!”
Lily looked around. “You think a cat did this?” She laughed. “You’re funny, delivery boy.”
Dave started throwing cushions back onto the sofa and chairs. “She came in through the kitchen window, she tore around after my pet lizard—”
“Oh, so now you’re admitting it’s your pet?”
“Look,” Dave snapped, “it comes in and out, okay? It’s, you know, a good-luck charm.”
She sniggered as she looked around. “I can see how that’s workin’ for ya.”
“The lizard’s not the problem, your cat is! She’s possessed!”
“Oh, really?” Lily said, then hurried out of the apartment, only to return a minute later with one very droopy-looking Topaz. “You think this cat is possessed? You think she tore through your house and gouged up your ceiling?”
Topaz did seem like nothing more than a helpless, hapless furry blob. (One that might have a propensity for ramming walls with her face, but catapulting eight feet to sink her claws into a ceiling? Not likely.)
Still, Dave held his ground. “Yes!”
Dave and Lily locked eyes for a moment. “Well,” Lily said (in her sassy, saucy way), “you’re crazy.” She eyed the ceiling. “There’s no way any cat can get up that high.” She shrugged. “Besides, Topaz has been sacked out since I got home.”
“Oh yeah?” Dave challenged, but something about what she’d said gave him pause. “Uh, when did you get home?”
She shrugged again. “A while ago.”
Dave simply stood there, thinking and blinking.
Now, the truth was that Lily had not been home that long, but she’d been home long enough to blow Sticky’s story wide open. And after she left with a “See ya, delivery dork,” Dave took a deep breath and said, “Stickyyyyyyy?”
The little gecko peeked out from his hiding place inside Dave’s sweatshirt and looked at Dave with extreme innocence. “Sí, señor?” But as Dave studied him, the lying gecko started to feel the heat.
His eyes went a little shifty.
His face went a little twitchy.
And as Dave’s eyes narrowed, Sticky knew he was busted.
“Ay-ay-ay,” Sticky moaned. “I gave that evil gata some of the potion, okay?”
Dave’s eyes flew open. “You WHAT?”
“It was just a drop. How was I supposed to know it would make her as strong as an ox?”
“That’s the whole point!” Dave shouted. “You didn’t know! What if it had killed her?”
Sticky looked off to the side and gave a little shrug.
“Sticky!”
“Hey! She’s been trying to kill me for weeks and you didn’t care about that!”
“So you were trying to kill her?”
“No!”
Dave spittered and spattered and sputtered until at last he gave up trying to figure out what to say to Sticky and got busy putting the family room in order.
When he’d done as much as he could, his head was at least clear enough to form a question. “So,” he asked, “where’s the potion?”
“Ay-ay-ay,” Sticky replied.
Dave stopped in his tracks. “What? Where is it? What happened to it?”
And so the story came out about the monkey and the potion and Sticky’s efforts to recover the powerful liquid. “I tried, señor, but that monkey was jumping all over the place, throwing things around…. You should see your room! And he stole your grill!”
“I don’t care about that stupid grill!” Dave snapped as he hurried toward his room. “It wasn’t even mine! You stole it from someone else!”
And then Dave saw his room.
“I can’t believe this!” he wailed.
But as he staggered through the mess, the thing that dealt the final blow was his social studies project.
It was, without question, destroyed.
(It was also, without exception, due the next day.)
And between the missing potion, the chaos throughout the house, and the lies (and yes, the mutilated school project), Dave had had enough. “You quit going to school with me, you hang out with criminals, you steal stuff, and you give cats potions that could kill them. Plus, you made me look like a total idiot in front of Lily!” He shook his head. “That’s it. I used to think you were a good gecko with a bad habit, but I was wrong.”
He opened his bedroom window and placed Sticky on the wall outside. “Enough is enough.” And with that, he closed the window, shutting Sticky out of the apartment.
Chapter 14
SHUT OUT
That night, Sticky tried to talk to Dave through the bedroom window. “Psst, señor! I know you’re one steamed tamale, but don’t forget who gave you the wristband.”
“Leave me alone!” Dave whispered through the pane.
“But someday we’ll get the Buzzy Bee and the Half-a-Man from that evil hombre. Someday you’ll—”
“I don’t care about flying or being invisible. I don’t care about any of it! It’s brought me nothing but trouble. You’ve brought me nothing but trouble!”
“You cut me to the quick, señor!” Sticky cried, and this time there was only hurt in the little gecko’s voice.
Dave sighed and dropped the blinds. “Just go away!”
It was at this point that Dave’s mother entered his room. “Mi’jo? Are you all right?” sh
e asked.
“Uh…yeah,” Dave replied. “I’m just, uh, practicing my lines for drama.”
Mrs. Sanchez was concerned (as Dave had acted anxious throughout dinner and, despite his explanation, seemed very keyed up now). But she didn’t press him. He was, after all, thirteen, and she remembered all too well what that was like. Instead, she simply said, “Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with.” She looked around the room, which was still quite messy. “This weekend, let’s get this cleaned up, okay, mi’jo?”
Dave nodded, wondering what his parents would do when they finally noticed the damage to the family room wall and ceiling.
However, whether because of their exhaustion or having to deal with more pressing matters (like paying bills), they didn’t seem to see it. And as evening turned into night, then ticked toward bedtime and beyond, Dave’s frayed nerves seemed to weave themselves back together. At midnight, he declared his social studies project to be done enough and went to bed.
As Dave drifted off to sleep, he did have a brief relapse of panic over the missing potion, but he pushed it aside. What did it matter? If the monkey had it, he wouldn’t actually eat it. It smelled terrible! And if anyone found it, they would take one whiff and throw it away.
No, instead of worrying about the potion, he thought about what a relief it was that he was done being the Gecko. He took off the powerband and hid it under his pillow. He hadn’t gotten to do anything super with it, anyway. Not really. All it had done was attract the wrath of Damien Black.
So, despite the traumas of the day, Dave slept well, and after the usual morning rush, he headed off to school, balancing his project on his bike.
That same night, however, Sticky did not sleep a wink.
He knew that the things Dave had said were true, and he felt terrible. And as he clung to Dave’s bedroom window hoping that Dave would have a change of heart, he wondered what in the world he could do to make it up to Dave.
How could he get him to forgive him?
How could he prove that he was a good gecko?
How could he convince Dave that he couldn’t quit being the Gecko? Didn’t he know that Damien Black was a menace not just to them but to everyone in the city? Didn’t he know by now that Damien Black wasn’t someone you could turn your back on?