Read Online Son of the Mob by Gordon Korman - Free Book Online

drop to the flat roof.
    Kendra sticks her head out the window. “But we’re not finished yet!”
    â€œSave my half of the stuff,” I call up to her. I roll to the edge, grab hold of the drainpipe, and heave myself over the side. The gutter comes away from the wall, and I crash painfully to the ground. And here I thought this kind of thing only happens in Adam Sandler movies.
    The drainpipe now hangs away from the porch like a grotesquely reaching metal sculpture.
    I consider trying to fix it, but then I hear Kendra’s voice: “You’re home early, Daddy.”
    I just run. With any luck, the guy isn’t a very good FBI agent and won’t lift my sneaker prints off his tube of Preparation H.
    My racing heartbeat is back to normal by the time I turn into the driveway at home. I park and sneak in the side door. I have no desire to explain what’s in my hair. Wouldn’t you know it? Dad notices me just as I make for the stairs. But it isn’t my hair that catches his eye.
    â€œGod, Vince, where’d you get that shirt?”
    Heart sinking, I look down, already knowing what I’m going to find. I’m still wearing Agent Bite-Me’s sweatshirt. My chest is a billboard for the FBI.
    â€œThat’s priceless!” howls my father, helpless with laughter. “Can you get a couple for me and Tommy? Better yet, a bunch. Some of your uncles would drop dead over them!”
    I mumble something about ordering an assortment from a novelty shop in the city and try to break away from him. But he gets a clean look at me, and probably a whiff, too.
    â€œJeez, Vince, when I was your age, I put grease in my hair, and that was bad enough. But you smell like a mortuary.”
    I don’t argue the point. That’s another thing there’s a lot of in the vending-machine business: funerals.

 
    CHAPTER SEVEN
    A LL TOLD , I THINK the permethrin spends about seventy minutes in my hair, more than double the recommended maximum. The good news is that no louse could survive it. The bad news is not much of my scalp does either. By morning, I’m sore and flaking. My hair is still attached, thank God. But what I can see of the skin underneath is bright red. Even my split ends have split ends.
    I’m not welcome at school; the twenty-four-hour ban is still in place. But rather than try to explain to Mom that her son—his head in particular—is “totally out of commission,” I take my brown-bag lunch and drive away.
    I cruise around for a while, idly calculating how many movies it’ll take to get me to three-thirty. I’m flush again—allowance from Dad. Just in the nick of time, too, since I blew all my cash on head-lice remedies. That’s when it hits me: Kendra still owes me my half of the stuff we got at the drugstore. I doubt that any lice could have made it through the nuclear winter on my head, but the nurse said school rules require me to go through the full procedure.
    I kill time until after nine and then head over to Kendra’s through the thinning Long Island traffic. Just to be on the safe side, I park three blocks away from her house. I don’t want Agent Bite-Me running my plates through the FBI computer. A Luca is visiting our daughter! Oh, joy! I don’t think so.
    Kendra’s home alone except for the guys from Secure-O-Matic, who are installing a new burglar alarm.
    â€œDaddy thought someone tried to break in off the porch roof yesterday,” she explains with a nervous smile.
    â€œThere are a lot of wackos out there,” I agree, poker-faced. “Good thing the FBI is on the job.” I hand her a brown paper bag. “Your dad’s shirt.”
    The alarm guys are snickering at us as we head for the basement. But trust me, it’s all business. We rub egg-loosening gel on our heads, rinse it out in the laundry sink, and then comb each other with LiceMeisters. The teeth on those things are so fine that