Nanny X (10 page)

Boris sat in the front, his long legs bent at an angle that didn't seem good for driving.

“If we hold the bib under this light, we can see a map of Lovett,” I said, holding out the pacifier.

“That is one way,” Boris said. “Let me try something.”

He took the bib and crammed it into a slot just below the CD player. Suddenly colored dots, the same colors as the food stains, appeared on a purple screen in the dashboard.

“When we used Goldfish boxes, we just inserted them in here,” he said. “I hoped this might be compatible as well.” A monotone female voice called out:
Turn right on Coleman Avenue. Turn left on Watts Street
.

Boris followed the directions, glancing at the purple screen and making predictions. “It looks like they're headed into the District,” he said. “No. Wait. Maybe Leesburg?”

Turn right on Wallace Street
.

That reminded me of Howard Wallace, who is one of Jake's favorite baseball players. I wondered if my brother was scared. He has the Pringle Stomach, which means he gets kind of nauseous when he's nervous, like my dad. It was a good thing he hadn't eaten anything but radishes.

Here's something I have learned about torture devices: There are the ones on TV, where the bad guys stand around the good guy and shine a light in his face. There are the kinds teachers use, like squeaky chalk and spelling tests. Plus there's the wedgie, which is the type of torture device kids use on each other. And there's the Smoothie Torture. You're probably thinking: Drinking a bunch of free smoothies doesn't sound bad. It sounds
icy
! It sounds
tundra
! Wrong.

The coconut smoothie Big Adam gave me in the van was just the start. He fed me three more smoothies when we got to our destination, an old metal building that I decided was some kind of airplane hangar in the middle of nowhere. He had blenders all over the place. Even the chimp knew how to operate them. He'd waddle up, throw in some coconut guts from the big mound on the table, and press
Blend
with his hairy finger. I didn't think he'd made the coconut loaf
or creamed coconut casserole, which Big Adam also fed us. But I could have been wrong.

“Drink!” Big Adam said.

“I can't.” I never wanted to see a coconut smoothie—or anything else made out of coconut—again. The pulp kept getting stuck in my throat and making me cough. Then it sloshed around in my stomach, which was already nervous. Nanny X had been forced to drink the smoothies, too, but she was still sitting up straight with her legs tied to the chair next to mine. “Training,” she whispered. “With the guy who won the hot-dog-eating contest at Nathan's.”

The chimp stood next to us, keeping watch.

“That better be finished by the time I come back,” Big Adam said. He stalked off to another part of the hangar. The chimp watched me. His eyes were brown. He didn't look like one of the bad guys. I smiled at him, and he walked over. Yeti, who was tied up on my other side, growled, but not very loudly, as the chimp grabbed my smoothie, stuck the straw in his mouth, and slurped up the rest of it. He handed it back, and smiled and clapped.

“Hey,” I whispered. “Thanks, dude.”

The chimp clapped again.

People always say there are no bad dogs, only bad owners. Maybe there were no bad chimps, either. Except just then, Mr. Strathmore woke up. Or started to. He moaned on the floor next to us, loud enough for Big Adam to hear.

“Conk him,” Big Adam said, coming back toward us. The chimp scooted over to a pile of coconuts and grabbed one off the top. He conked Mr. Strathmore on the head without even blinking. There was another guy on the floor next to Mr. S, too, who was also unconscious. I figured he must be the missing guy from the planning commission. The chimp conked him on the head, too.

“Drink,” Big Adam said again. If I did, it meant a mouthful of chimp germs, but I didn't have a choice. I put the straw in my mouth and sucked. The straw filled with air and made a loud, slurping noise.

“I guess it's empty,” I said.

“You know what to do,” Big Adam told the chimp, who went over to the blender and pushed the button again. Yeti put his head on my foot and lay there. Some rescue dog. He didn't even eat my coconut loaf.

“It was the chimp,” Nanny X said over the sound of the blender.

“Hmm?” said Big Adam. He gave us a smile that showed all of his teeth. “What was the chimp?”

“He hit the mayor,” Nanny X said during a moment of silence. Then the chimp added some more pieces of coconut and pressed Blend again.

Big Adam went over to the blender and poured another smoothie into my cup. The chimp's eyes were sad, like those baby seals on the poster in the school library.

“Yes,” said Big Adam. “Pity. Two targets, and the fuzz ball didn't hit either of them.”

“Who was he supposed to hit?” I asked. If I kept him talking, maybe he wouldn't make me drink the next smoothie.

Big Adam looked at the still body of Rufus Strathmore, who was frowning in his sleep. “Him, for one,” Big Adam said. “But better late than never.”

“But why?” I said. “He was on your side.”

“
Sympathy, that's why!
” shouted Big Adam. “If the public saw him fall, they would have to be on the side of business. Someone harmed the business leader! Someone must be against business! All it takes to turn the tide is for the crowd to think you're the underdog. Someone doesn't want business in Lovett, they would say. Poor little business.
Business must be good. That's the way the human mind works. I know a lot about the human mind.” He walked over with the smoothie and handed it to me. “I know what it takes to crush it.”

“You won't get away with this,” Nanny X said, like she'd walked right out of a detective novel.

“I already have,” said Big Adam. “In just a few hours, the board will vote in favor of my project. Once something like this gains steam, there's no turning back.”

“Two targets,” I said. “You said there were
two
targets. One was Mr. Strathmore. Who was the other one?” Maybe Big Adam knew Nanny X was more than a regular nanny. Maybe
she
was the target.

But Nanny X said quietly, “It was the boy.”

“Me?” I said.

“Not you, Jake Z,” she said. “Daniel.”

“Stinky?”

“He was in the crowd,” Big Adam said. “No one would have seen it happen. He would have just quietly crumpled to the ground, and he wouldn't have been able to hold up that annoying sign and continue that annoying chant.”

“Slides are cool,” I said. “Slides are cool!”

“Yes,” said Big Adam, wrinkling his nose. “He got the crowd going. If we had made the sign disappear, the sound would have stopped. Well, it stopped anyway, didn't it? All in all, a successful day. Now
drink
.”

I wondered if the coconut smoothies had some sort of chemical in them that would hypnotize me into believing Big Adam was a good guy. Nope. I still knew he was bad. B.A.D.

The chimp looked at me with those brown eyes again, and I knew he would take that smoothie off my hands if Big Adam would just turn his back. But he didn't.

We were stuck in the hangar until the vote, at least. But what if it didn't go his way? What would he do with us then? And what if it
did
go his way? How could he release us, knowing what we knew? Maybe he'd erase our memories to keep us from talking. Maybe coconuts worked on your memory and—

“When you don't return home this evening, people will think you disappeared from the park,” Big Adam said. “They'll think public parks are dangerous and that I'm doing everyone a favor by replacing it with my little ‘business.' ”

Something about the way he said “business” didn't feel right, but then, nothing Big Adam said felt right. But he was forgetting one thing: Ali and Eliza were still out there. Ali would tell everybody where we
really
were when we disappeared. Unless somebody had gotten to her, too.

“Drink,” Big Adam said for the kazillionth time. The chimp looked at me as if to say
I tried
, and shrugged. I took another sip of smoothie, my stomach feeling like it was full of rocks instead of coconuts. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the flower on Nanny X's hat move. It could have been the wind, only there wasn't any wind in the hangar.

The rocks moved up from my stomach to my chest, kind of like lava, except not as hot.

Even if I wanted to be polite, it was impossible. There was only one thing left to do:
BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRPPPP
.

You know how you can recognize someone's voice? Well, I recognized my brother's burp, right through the walls of the airplane hangar.

“That's Jake,” I told Boris and Stinky. “They're in there.”

“Then we have to get in there, too,” Boris said. He put his ear against the cold metal wall. I did the same. We could hear voices, although nothing was as distinct as my brother's burp. There was a mumble that sounded like Nanny X, and a mumble that was definitely Jake. And then there was another mumble that sounded like “bwahahaha,” which had to be Big Adam.

“What is he doing to them?” I asked, not that I wanted an answer.

“They're going to be okay,” Stinky said.

“Es!” Eliza seemed to agree with Stinky. I wished I could be that calm.

We pressed our ears to the side of the building again, and this time we heard an “eee eeee” sound—the same
sound we had heard through the sippy cup. If only someone hadn't stomped on the teething biscuit, we could use it again and really hear what was going on.

“At least we know Big Adam is working alone,” Boris said.

“No,” I said. I remembered where I'd heard that “eee eeee” sound before. And those bananas in Mr. Strathmore's office? They weren't just there by coincidence. “He has a partner. This is going to sound crazy, but I think he's working with a monkey.”

Boris smiled. “In the spy biz, we call them rats, not monkeys, Alison,” he said.

“No,” I said. “He's working with a
real
monkey. Eliza and I found banana peels everywhere, and that ‘eee eeee' sound we keep hearing—I'm sure it's a monkey.”

“The rock,” remembered Stinky. “Or the coconut or whatever. A monkey could have thrown it.”

“A real monkey?” Boris repeated. “Now things are beginning to make sense, no?” When he said “things” it sounded more like “tings.” “I'm going in. Let's see if Big Adam can handle a NAP attack. Wait for my signal; I'll let you know when it's clear.”

“Can't we come, too?” I said. I sounded like a whiny kid.

But Boris chose that moment to hand me Eliza. I got his point right away: It was safer if he went first. He was in NAP. And Stinky and Eliza and I, we were just the cover. We were the reason he got to carry around a bunch of explosives in a diaper bag.

“Wish me luck,” Boris said. He and Stinky did a handshake thing that ended with their thumbs pointing upward. Maybe Nanny X would teach us a secret handshake, too. If we got out of this.

I wondered if Nanny X would even want to stay out the week. I hadn't been exactly nice to her since she started working with us. I'd yelled at her for letting Big Adam take Jake, and she'd given herself up to be with him. And Jake—he
wouldn't have been caught in the first place if I hadn't fallen when I was trying to climb up the bathroom walls. It was
my
fault my brother and Nanny X and Yeti were all locked in that hangar. And I hadn't even gotten any valuable information—all I'd seen over the stall was Big Adam rattling around with two coconut halves. Two perfect halves.

But wait.

Maybe that
was
important. He hadn't been trying to take the coconut apart when I saw him. He'd been trying to put the pieces together. And what else had I seen? Not milk, not the white coconut flesh, but the glimmer of something shiny. “In the bathroom,” I told Boris, “I saw Big Adam with two parts of the coconut. He was fitting them together. Like those plastic Easter eggs.”