Read Online The Great Bike Rescue by Hazel Hutchins - Free Book Online

I answered truthfully. I thought I knew at the time, but now I wasn’t so sure.
    Dad took his coffee upstairs. I took my dishes to the sink. That’s when I realized the message light on the phone was blinking. I pushed the button. A girl’s voice came over the speaker.
    â€œLevi. Meet me tomorrow. Ten o’clock at the corner store. Be there.”
    You guessed it. Emily Grimshaw.

Chapter Eleven
    Sometimes you don’t know what you’re going to do until you do it.
    I’d planned on ignoring Emily. It was one thing for me to track her down and surprise her with questions. It was another thing entirely to show up because of a message that sounded like a royal decree. But at ten o’clock the next morning, I found myself walking past the corner store. Emily fell into step beside me.
    â€œOkay,” she said. “I know where the bikes are being stashed.”
    There was a determined energy about her today. It was as if something had been decided and, one way or another, things were going to happen. If I was going to be part of it, I wanted details.
    â€œWhere?” I asked.
    â€œI can’t just tell you. I have to show you,” said Emily. “Otherwise you won’t understand.”
    Alarm bells went off in my head. I didn’t trust Emily Grimshaw.
    â€œAre some friends of yours waiting there to beat me up?” I asked.
    â€œI don’t have any friends…not even when they’re the same age as me and live right next door,” said Emily.
    That one I could ignore for now.
    â€œAre you one of the people stealing bikes?”
    â€œI don’t steal,” she said.
    That one I couldn’t ignore. I turned and walked in the opposite direction. Two steps and she’d caught up with me.
    â€œBorrowing is different from stealing,” she said.
    I walked faster.
    â€œWhen you’re little, you don’t always know the difference,” she said, keeping pace.
    Ha! When you’re six you know the difference. I didn’t say it. I kept walking.
    â€œOkay, in grade one I was kind of a weird little kid,” she said. “Get over it. Do you want to know where the bikes are being stashed or don’t you?”
    I stopped. I looked at her. I opened my mouth to say something, realized I’d just come as close to hearing an admission of guilt from Emily Grimshaw as I was ever likely to hear and closed it again.
    â€œLook, let me make this easy for you,” she said.
    With a flick of her fingers, as slick as any thief, she grabbed my cap from my head and raced away.
    Emily Grimshaw drives me crazy!
    I took off after her. Across Battersby and through a parking lot. Along the side street. Through a drive-through. Across a playing field. Down three more blocks. We were headed in the general direction of the bike shop. Were those guys involved after all? I didn’t want those guys to be involved!
    Nope, we turned again. The houses were getting older. The neighborhood had a harder edge. Past a school, down three more blocks, across a park, and abruptly Emily ducked into an alley. I found her waiting beside an overgrown hedge, my cap held out before her. I grabbed it.
    We looked at each other. Something had shifted. For a heartbeat, Emily Grimshaw was unsure of herself. Not scared, but a tiny bit worried. She didn’t know, not for sure, what I was going to do next.
    The decision was mine. Stay or go. She knew it. And I knew it.
    Back when I was six, I would have grabbed my stuff, gone back into my house and sulked. But I wasn’t six anymore.
    â€œI didn’t run all this way for the exercise,” I said. “Or for my hat.”
    Emily nodded. She made a little motion with her hand.
    â€œThe garage behind the purple house,” she said. “But wait until I’m at the fence. There’s a dog.”
    That’s all I needed. An unfamiliar part of town. A back alley. And a mean dog.
    â€œHe’s not mean,” said