And the next.
And the next.
“Asombroso!” Sticky cried as Dave got the hang of it. “I’m a flying leeezard! A flying leeezard!”
The two got to the heart of Moongaze Maze much faster than they would have on Dave’s bike, but as they neared Moongaze Court, Dave heard a strange noise and came to a stop. “What is that?” he whispered.
“Ay-ay-ay,” Sticky moaned. “That’s the Brothers. I’d know their singing anywhere!”
“But they’re singing about…underwear?”
Now, you may recall that in this part of Moongaze Maze, the trees and animals seemed to take over. The foliage was fuller. The goats had more horns. There were also birds and snakes and toads and squirrels. It was like a little jungle, really, and when you think of jungles, what one animal always springs to mind?
(Ah, what animal indeed!)
“Eeeeeek-reeeeeeek?” came a cry from across Moongaze Court.
“The monkey?” Dave gasped, and flew forward to get a better look.
“Not him!” Sticky groaned when they spotted him at the base of a tree. “Not again!”
It was, indeed, the monkey. (A fact easily confirmed by the satchel strapped across his chest.) The little rhesus had found refuge from honking horns and angry merchants and rabid animal control agents in this tranquil neighborhood jungle. But as the procession of Bandito Gypsies and kids and goats and dogs turned up Moongaze Court, the monkey shrieked and bounced and pointed.
It was as though he was trying to warn people about the phony gypsies.
It was as if, despite the elaborate costumes, he recognized the Brothers.
Dave soaked in the sight. “Why are they dressed like that? Why did they bring Rosie? What are they doing?”
“The big question, señor, is where’s that evil hombre?”
Dave looked around quickly. Sticky was right—the ruthless treasure hunter had to be nearby. What if he already had them in his sights?
Now, while Dave was worried about Damien, and the procession was making its way up Moongaze Court, a cautiously curious six-horned goat approached the monkey from behind. And finding the scent of the satchel quite compelling, the goat became more curious (and less cautious) and began nibbling on the bag with its prehensile lips.
And its tongue.
And its teeth.
The monkey, however, was so intent on eeeking and screeching out a warning that he did not notice the goat, or that it had now ripped a hole in the bottom of the satchel.
Himalayan coffee grounds began pouring out of it.
One ounce.
Two.
Three and four!
And as the grounds ran onto the ground, out fell one coffee-dusted squirt-top container.
“Reeeeeeeeek!” the little monkey cried when he noticed that his coffee stash had been compromised. Clutching the hole to stop the flow, he scurried up a tree, leaving the goat to nibble and gnaw (and, yes, puncture) the squirt-top container.
Chapter 25
SHOWDOWN!
While Dave and Sticky watched the Bandito Brothers approach the vardo from a rooftop, Damien Black kept an eye on the action from beneath the manhole cover. And as the parade moved farther and farther from him, Damien found it more and more difficult to stay undercover.
Before too long, he had pushed the lid to the side.
Before too long, he had stepped up a few rungs on the portal’s metal ladder (which is, in case you didn’t know, how city workers get down the manhole to enter the sewer system).
“Get Pablo into the wagon quickly!” Damien hissed into the communicator. “Tell him to silence the gypsy, but nothing more! I need him alive!” Then he grumbled, “At least for now.”
“Go!” Angelo commanded Pablo, and (grabbing his skirts so he could move faster) Pablo immediately mounted the vardo’s steps and entered without even knocking.
“He’s in!” Angelo whispered into the communicator.
“Very good!” Damien replied. “Now announce, ‘Rejoice, good Romany people, Yanko Purran is to be healed!’”
Angelo made this announcement (in an exuberant, theatrical manner), then whispered, “Now what?” into the communicator.
“Now hitch up the mule, you fool! Then grab the handles and go!”
So Angelo and Tito removed the vardo’s steps and began hitching Rosie to the wagon. But as they did so, a voice boomed down at them from a rooftop nearby.
“STOP! These men are thieves! Don’t let them do that!”
“We’re not thieves!” Angelo replied, looking around for the source of the accusation.
“We’re jolly gypsies!” Tito cried.
Then they saw where the voice had come from. “Oh no!” Angelo gasped. “It’s the boy!”
“What?” Damien gasped back through the communicator. “Where?”
“On a roof, boss!” Angelo whispered frantically. “Right next to us!”
The Bandito Brothers had no idea what it was that “the boy” had that Damien wanted. They just knew that Damien wanted whatever it was very, very badly.
They also knew that “the boy” could somehow walk on walls, and because of this, they believed he was bewitched.
Or possessed.
(Or maybe both.)
And now when they saw Dave fly from the neighboring rooftop to the vardo’s rooftop, they froze in fear.
“He can fly?” Angelo gasped.
“He can fly,” Tito confirmed.
Now, had Damien shown some restraint, things might have played out differently. But hearing this unhinged his already precariously hinged mind. “He can FLY?” Damien demanded. “What, exactly, do you mean by ‘fly’?”
“Uh,” Angelo said, “he can, you know…fly. Without flapping?”
Damien (who was already half emerged from the sewer system) now leapt to the street. And as he marched toward the vardo, he produced a pistol and shouted, “Just grab the wagon and go!” into the communicator (even though he could be heard perfectly well through the air).
Well! The children and goats and dogs and chickens (and, for that matter, snakes and squirrels and a certain monkey) had all been startled into a moment of silence when Dave’s voice had boomed from the rooftop. But now they noticed an angry-looking man (in a whoosh-swooshy black coat) with a pistol in his hand.
“Hey!” one girl in the gathering called to her friends. “That’s the creepy guy I told you about! And he’s got a gun!”
The children scattered, hiding behind trees and shrubs, as Damien approached. And Angelo (realizing he was going to lose his promotion if things fell apart) hitched Rosie up to the vardo, grabbed one handle, and barked at Tito to grab the other.
But just as they were pulling the wagon forward (yanking it free from its service connections), Dave flew down from the vardo’s roof and hovered above them. “Put it DOWN!” he commanded.
As much as Damien was in a state of disbelief over how Dave had managed to obtain the Flying ingot, he now knew that Dave did, in fact, have it, and the thought of this invasion, this violation, this…this confiscation made his blood boil.
His veins pop.
His temper snap.
“KEEP MOVING, YOU FOOLS!” Damien shouted. And as Angelo, Tito, and Rosie bolted forward and pulled the vardo down the dirt road, Damien raised his pistol, taking careful aim at Dave.
“Señor!” Sticky cried. “He’s deadly with that shooter!”
Ah, yes.
Deadly and merciless.
And in his cold, calculating heart, Damien Black had never wanted anything dead as much as he wanted Dave dead.
It wasn’t just that it would stop the boy from (yet again) putting a monkey wrench into one of his plans.
It was that killing Dave would deliver a doubly diabolical dividend: The nettling nuisance of a boy would be gone forever, AND he would be able to snatch back the powerband.
A feeling of felonious glee ran through Damien.
A little bwaa-ha-ha bubbled up insid
e him.
He couldn’t have planned this more perfectly if he’d tried!
And so the hard-hearted, cold-blooded demon of a man pulled the trigger.
Which dropped the hammer.
Which hit the percussion cap.
Which ignited the gunpowder.
Which sent a musket ball of solid lead flying straight at Dave.
Chapter 26
A ONE-SIDED DUEL
A bullet fired from a dueling pistol has a muzzle velocity of approximately eight hundred feet per second.
That’s more than 545 miles per hour.
(Which, to put things in perspective, is approaching the speed of sound.)
There is no time to react.
No dodging to be done.
You’re hit before the sound of the shot even registers in your brain.
So to say that Dave dodged Damien’s deadly wad of lead would be to imply that he purposely reacted to the trigger pull and moved to avoid being hit.
He did no such thing.
It was simply his inability to fly in a straight line (or hover in the same spot) that saved his life.
It was, if you will, the bumble in the bee that caused the bullet to blast past him instead of into him.
But hearing the bullet whiz by made Dave lose his levitation concentration, and before long he was frantically flapping, then flailing, and finally falling to the ground.
Dave landed on his arm with a painful thump, and although he broke no bones, the Flying ingot was jarred loose and tumbled from the powerband onto the ground beside him.
In the wink of a deadly eye, Damien was upon him with his second pistol drawn.
“Well, well. See what we have here,” he hissed, pinning Dave’s arm with one big black boot. Slowly, he reached down and plucked the Flying ingot from the dirt and slipped it into his coat. “How clever are you now, hmm? You pesky little pickpocket.”
Dave’s heart hammered in his chest. The children were gone. The vardo was gone. All that remained in the isolated area were Damien and Dave (and, of course, Sticky).
Things had come down to a showdown of good versus evil.
Only in this case, evil held both pistols.
Good, it seemed, was doomed.
“I give myself up!” Sticky said as Damien placed the loaded pistol at Dave’s head. “Take the powerband. Take me! Just leave the boy. He only did what I told him to!”
Damien sneered. “I don’t need you, you pesk! I’m through with both of you!”
Now, in your life you will have moments where all will seem lost. The good in you will seem completely quashed by forces beyond your control, and it will take every fiber of your being to believe that all is not lost, that somehow, someway, you can get out from under the painful pinning of the Boot of Evil.
You must make yourself believe.
Around the next corner, past the next bend, at the end of the tunnel, somewhere, there is light.
Or help.
Or, in this case, a goat.
A six-horned goat, in fact, that remembered this baaaaaad black-coated human from a previous encounter.
A six-horned goat that was (for reasons it couldn’t quite understand) really feeling its oats.
And as Damien held the pistol to Dave’s head and (in a classic villainous manner) savored the deliverance of his dastardly revenge, the goat lowered its head and charged.
Now, a charging goat goes nowhere near the speed of sound, but before Damien could react to the sound of pounding hooves, the goat butted him from behind.
KA-BLAM! the pistol fired (into the dirt, not Dave).
KA-ZAM! went Dave’s and Sticky’s eyes as they watched Damien fly through the air.
KA-THONK! Damien landed nearly twenty feet away.
“Quick, señor!” Sticky cried. “Get the shooter!”
Dave snatched the pistol from the ground but said, “I don’t know how to use it!”
“Just conk him on the cabeza! It’s only a one-shooter, anyway.”
But as Damien attempted to stagger to his feet, the goat (having displayed just a fraction of the Moongaze potion’s power) curled a lip and charged, butting the wicked villain from (and in the) behind.
Damien flew forward, then tumbled over and over and over (and over and over some more).
“Ouchie-huahua!” Sticky cried. “That has got to hurt!”
With the pistol in hand, Dave chased after the villain, determined to not let him get away (if, that is, he survived his tumbleweed experience).
Damien’s trip ended, however, where it had begun.
At the (still open) lid to the sewer system.
(The goat, it seemed, had butted a hole in one.)
And although in tremendous pain and only borderline conscious, Damien managed to grasp the edge of the manhole and growl, “I’ll get you, boy!” before he slipped down the hole and disappeared into the stinky river below.
Chapter 27
CIRCLING THE WAGON
After Dave shoved the manhole cover back in place, he put the Wall-Walker ingot in the powerband and rushed off to intercept the Bandito Brothers. And I’d like to report that Gecko Power is what stopped the vardo heist, but it did not.
The children of Moongaze Maze did.
First, there was the matter of the Brothers making a wrong turn.
Then there was the matter of a dead end.
Then there was the ambush of children with jump ropes and baseball bats and rocks.
And as if that weren’t enough to control Damien’s dead-ended henchmen, there was the small matter of Pablo being tossed from the vardo by the blind (but apparently deft) potion man, causing the children to discover that he was a hairy-legged man.
The jeers and jokes that followed were merciless and set into motion the children circling the wagon, brandishing their weapons, and (most frightening of all to the Brothers) calling for their parents.
Getting no reception from the communicator, Angelo at last shouted, “We give up!” Then the three Brothers abandoned their mission, rushing past Dave and Sticky as they headed for the hills.
Or, rather, the ridge.
Yes, the Brothers may have ditched their gypsy getups, but they did not ditch their boss. They, instead, returned to the mansion to nurse the battered and bruised (and direly dirty) Damien Black back to health.
Pablo and Angelo kept his wounds clean and his bruises iced.
Tito fed him flaky biscuits and crow stew.
(For the record, Damien didn’t know it was crow—he thought it tasted like chicken. Although the occasional piece of clinging black fuzz should have given it away.)
Despite eating crow, Damien never actually admitted to the Brothers that he’d done anything wrong. He, instead, blamed them and “the boy” and vowed a comeback. (And although Damien displayed great bravado, his cursed nightmares continued, worsened by the fact that some hairy, scary spiders had made wrong turns in the confounding corridors of his mansion and were now roaming about, looking for something to soupify.)
Rosie (who was apparently the smartest of the bunch) did not return to the mansion. She liked being in the mini jungle of Moongaze Maze, and none of the other animals—not even the potion-powered goat—seemed to mind her. (After three solid days of sleep, the potion-powered goat was confused to see her, but it was confused by a lot of things after that. Besides, it had such a fierce and frightening headache that it couldn’t be bothered getting territorial.)
I should also, I suppose, let you know that the gouges in the Sanchezes’ family room ceiling (and wall) were blamed on Evie.
Dave could not believe his ears, as his extremely sly sister never got blamed for anything. But Evie made the mistake of catnap ping Topaz from next door (because she really, really, really wanted a kitty of her own). It became clear to Mrs. Sanchez from the cat’s screeching and hissing that Evie had tortured the poor feline (which she had, in fact, not), and that the claw marks had come from her swinging the cat by the tail and catapulting her
around the room.
The catnapping, of course, gave Lily and her friends something more to tease Dave about, but he just tried to tune them out.
After all, he was the Gecko.
He could walk on walls.
He had flown.
(Well, sort of.)
And he and Sticky were tight again.
(Very.)
Sticky had even resumed spending his days at school with Dave, and promised to keep his sticky fingers to himself.
(Or, at least, to try.)
So here we are at the end of the adventure. All the loose ends are tied up and—
What’s that?
Oh.
Oh, right.
The monkey.
Well!
The monkey did, in fact, return to Damien’s monstrous mansion.
Not to reunite with that deadly, diabolical demon of a man.
Oh no.
He returned because he ran out of coffee. (Or, more accurately, the coffee ran out on him.) And (addict that he was) he decided once again to risk life and limb for a new supply of the good stuff.
Unfortunately for the monkey, Damien had set up an evil-eye monitoring system in his espresso café, and when he saw the monkey pinching the grounds, he hobbled and wobbled through the mansion in time to corner him.
Unfortunately for Damien, however, the cornered monkey curled back his lips and flashed a familiar silver and blue grill, shocking Damien so much that he let the monkey get away.
After that, Damien returned to his great room and paced the floorboards (in a stiff, sore, and painfully slow manner), trying to piece everything together and plot a diabolical comeback. When he did, at last, have a tiny little hiccup of a new plan, he hobbled up to his inner sanctum, snatched up his funkydoodle phone, and placed a call to—
Ah, but I’m getting carried away.
I really must stop.
Who Damien called and what dastardly, diabolical plan it set into motion is, I’m afraid, a story for another time.