Read Online Villain's Lair by Wendelin Van Draanen - Free Book Online Page B

You rotten little robber! You bungling burglar! You burrito bandito!”

    â€œHey!” the Bandito Brothers cried, for theywere sensitive to such insensitive remarks, even if they weren’t directed directly at them.
    But the treasure hunter ignored their com’ plaint and went on, his voice getting louder and more high-pitched as he trained the scope on Dave. “You crooked crook!” (As if there is such a thing as a straight crook?) “You pint-sized pickpocket! You nettling nuisance! You tricky trespasser! You confounded
brat!”
    And that’s what was really at the heart of the matter. You see, Damien Black had never been outsmarted by anyone.
    Anyone besides Sticky, that is.
    But still. It was one thing to be outsmarted by a talking lizard. The gecko, he assumed, was most likely bewitched or in possession of supernatural powers.
    But being outsmarted by a boy?
    A crummy, scrawny
boy
?
    It was an insult!
    A slap in the dastardly face!
    (And if there’s one thing a maniacal demon of a man cannot take, it’s a slap in his dastardly face.)
    So Damien Black watched Dave through the powerful lens, following him off the mountain, across the river, and into the city, vowing to catch him.
    Cage him!
    Take the powerband from him and have his revenge!
    He did manage to track him for quite a distance inside the city, but even the mightiest of mega-multiplying’magnification telescopes can’t see around corners, so at last he lost sight of him.
    â€œTo the map room!” he cried, and off they all scurried, through secret passages, down a rope ladder, along a pulley cart, inside a vacuum tube, up through the trapdoor, and into the map room.
    With great flair, Damien pulled down a detailed map of the area and stood staring at it as hetwisted his mustache and murmured such things as “Hmm-mm. Ahhhh. Hmmm.”
    Finally Pablo dared to speak. “What are you thinking, Mr. Black?”
    This made Angelo brave a question, too. “Do you have an idea where he might be?”
    Damien did not raise an eyebrow in their direction.
    He did not sneer or snap or shout.
    He simply nodded.
    Then he picked up a pointer and thwapped it against the map. “I lost sight of him here.” He dragged the pointer, zigzagging along roads until he reached a neighborhood on the outskirts of town. “This area
here
is a possibility,” he said, circling it with his pointer. “Or
here,”
he said, cir-cling another neighborhood.
    â€œHow do you know, Mr. Black? How can you tell?”
    Again, there was no shouting, no snapping, noraising of eyebrows. There was simply a smirk and a twist of the mustache as he replied, “Because no boy with money would risk his life that way.”
    The smirk grew.
    The twisting of the mustache became extra twisty.
    And in his fiendish eyes, the Bandito Brothers could see a devilish glint forming.
    Damien Black had a plan.
    A dastardly, dark, diabolical plan.

Chapter 14
DELIVERY BOY
    Dave did not think of himself as poor. (Of course, those who are rich with a family’s love never do.) His father worked at the neighborhood market, his mother at a Laundromat. “Your dad and I are a good team,” Dave’s mother would say. “Between the two of us, you’re always clean and fed.”
    So Dave didn’t notice that the streets in his neighborhood were narrow and crowded or that nobody drove fancy cars. He also didn’t think twice that the playing fields at school were more dirt than grass. Or that his principal made the morning announcements through a megaphone from the middle rung of an A-frame ladder.
    Ms. Batista was, after all, a little bit quirky.
    It wasn’t until he began couriering—or delivery-boying, as Lily would say—that he started noticing how different life was outside his neighborhood.
    Now, you may be wondering how a boy like Dave, whose father works at a corner market and whose mother works at a