Sinister Substitute (3 page)

Something peculiar and suspicious.

In a word, fishy.

Especially since Dr. Schwarz didn’t move along to the subject of some other radical reptile. He stayed on the subject of geckos.

“What?” he asked the silent class. “Don’t
any
of you know someone with a pet gecko?”

Now, it is a well-known fact that middle-school children do not yet have the wisdom of adults. (Well, it’s a well-known fact among adults, anyway.)

What middle-school children
do
have, however, is a keen sense of manipulation. Not only are they experts in manipulating others, but they are also able to recognize when someone is manipulating them.

This is why the vibe in Ms. Krockle’s science room began to change.

Seventh-grade sonar went up.

Manipulation radar kicked in.

And as new vibes moved quickly from student to student, Dr. Schwarz stood there, oblivious. “How about extra credit,” he said, a testy edge creeping into his voice. “Extra credit for anyone with a gecko, or anyone who knows anyone with a gecko.”

It was at this point that Dave felt Lily Espinoza staring at him, and with a surge of panic, he turned to face her.

Lily knew he had a gecko!

(Or, at least, she’d seen him rescue Sticky from her cat a bunch of times.)

And Lily could really use some extra credit in science!

(And, for that matter, every other course she was taking.)

And although Dave was aware that Lily Espinoza thought he was a klutzy, dorky “delivery
boy” who liked to knock her flat with his bike, he still needed to at least
try
to keep her quiet. So, with his eyes locked on hers, Dave slyly lifted a finger to his lips and wobbled his head ever so slightly.

Lily raised one eyebrow, frowned, and looked away.

Meanwhile, Fons Soto (who, you may recall, was sitting in Dave Sanchez’s seat) decided to have a little fun. “Hey,
Calvin,”
he called, looking across the classroom at Ricky Zaragoza. “Where’s your gecko, man?”

“Me?” Ricky asked, pointing to himself (because he was, indeed, sitting in Calvin Jones’s seat). “Uh, I don’t have a gecko.” He hesitated, then looked over at Dave. “But I think, uh,
Reuben
might.”

Dave felt little beads of sweat pop from his forehead, but he acted as cool as possible. “Nah,” Dave said. Then he passed along the gecko baton. “But,
Fons
, don’t you have one?”

“Me?” Reuben Medina said, pointing to himself. “No way. But hey,
Tyler,”
he called toward Greg Lazo, “don’t you have one?”

It was, indeed, a big jumble of names and remembering who was sitting in whose seat.

Then Greg said, “Look, if I go outside and catch one, can I get extra credit?”

Dr. Schwarz frowned. “No.”

“Okaaaay …,” Greg said. “How about I catch one anyway, and we dissect it?”

“Eeeew!” all the girls squealed.

“No way!” all the boys snapped.

Dr. Schwarz, however, didn’t utter a sound. Instead, his frown deepened and his eyes narrowed as he peered at the students suspiciously.

This, of course, caused Dave to shrink into his seat and shudder. And if he’d had lingering doubts before, they were now gone.

There was definitely something strange about this substitute.

Dave had never been so glad to get away from Ms. Krockle’s classroom. (Which is, as you know, really saying something.)

He had also never been so spaced out during drama. He sat through this last class of the day blurry-brained with worry. Was Dr. Schwarz a reporter?

An investigator?

Why was he so interested in geckos?

Did he know the Gecko
had
a gecko?

How would he know that?

What did this all mean?

Dave was still spaced out when school let out. So much so that he circled the bike racks again
and again before he remembered that his bike was chained to a streetlight three blocks from school, looking forlorn and forsaken with its flabby flat tire.

Now, had this disastrous day continued in the same vein (or if I were, say, just making this up), Dave would have returned to the streetlight to discover that his bike had been stolen, and (hmm, let’s see) then a mugger would have pounced from a nearby convenience store, stripping him of his wallet (and, oh, maybe his
shoes)
, and Dave would have had to walk the rest of the way home barefoot and broke (facing off with a pit bull or two along the way).

But (fortunately for Dave) I’m
not
making this up. The fact is, Dave returned to his bike, fixed the flat, and set about making up for lost time. Dave, you see, was called “delivery boy” by Lily for a reason. He couriered packages and envelopes between businesses in the downtown area, and
besides building up a tidy sum of money for his efforts, he had also built up a reputation for punctuality, neatness, and speed.

On this particular afternoon, however, Dave’s hard-earned reputation was in danger as he was late, smudged, and (quite frankly) beat.

But Dave made his rounds with as much professionalism as he could muster and managed to drag himself (and his bike) up the stairs to his apartment before his parents and Evie returned home.

Dave would have liked nothing more than to simply collapse on his bed and forget about his horrible day, but he couldn’t.

He was still worried.

“Sticky?” he whispered, peering behind his bookcase, but Sticky was not there.

“Sticky?” he said more loudly, looking around his room, but Sticky did not appear.

“Sticky!” he called, wandering through the
apartment, at last venturing over to the kitchen window and lifting it fully open.

“Hey,
hombre,”
came a stretchy, sleepy voice from the flower box outside. “What took you so long?”

So Dave lifted his little buddy inside and told him about Dr. Schwarz and his keen interest in geckos.

“Are you serious, man?” Sticky asked.

“Of course I’m serious! I’ve been freaked out about it all day. I think he’s a reporter. Or some guy from the FBI or something.”

“Hmm,” Sticky said (in a maddeningly calm manner). He cocked his little gecko head.

He tapped his little gecko chin.

He hmm’d again.

And at last he said, “Do you think he’ll be there tomorrow? I could check him out,
señor.”

“Tomorrow? No! Krockle’s not going to miss
two
days. It’s a miracle she missed one!”

But Ms. Veronica Krockle was, indeed, absent the next day.

And Dr. Schwarz was again her substitute.

“Uh-oh,” Fons Soto said when he saw Dr. Schwarz through the open doorway. “Same seats as yesterday,” he whispered to the kids around him. “And don’t get busted!”

So once again Fons sat in Dave’s seat, Dave sat in Reuben’s seat, Reuben sat in Fons’s seat, and so on and so forth. And when they were all seated, Dr. Schwarz smiled across the expanse of somewhat guilty faces and said, “So! Who brought in extra credit?”

Tyler Mills had, in fact, brought in a gecko. He had spent his lunchtime searching, and had finally captured a very handsome banded gecko.

Unfortunately for Tyler, he was in a terribly uncomfortable position. Raising his hand and saying, “I have a gecko!” would result in Eli Laslow getting the extra credit (as that’s whose
seat Tyler was in). Yet explaining who he really was would result in his ratting out the rest of the class.

Ah, the hazards of pranking the substitute.

To circumvent the problem, Tyler slipped the gecko to Greg Lazo (as Greg was, once again, sitting in Tyler’s seat) with the understanding that Greg would continue the seating charade by raising his hand and saying, “I have a gecko!”

Unfortunately for Tyler, Greg had seized upon this as an opportunity for blackmail. “It’ll cost ya five bucks,” he whispered.

The whole situation had become one big jumbled shouldn’t-have-pranked-the-substitute mess, but what could Tyler do?

He slipped Greg a five.

Now, Greg did hold up his end of the bargain, but for all the interest Dr. Schwarz had professed to have in geckos, he paid the one Greg held very little attention. “That’s it?” he asked after giving the banded gecko a quick inspection. “No one else has one?”

No one volunteered, but someone else did (as you know) have one.

One that was staying uncharacteristically quiet.

One that had been watching the professor’s every move from a sneaky-peeky spy spot inside Dave’s sweatshirt.

One that had been thinking how this strange man in the tweed suit and horn-rimmed glasses was strangely familiar.

(Dr. Schwarz was, in fact, wearing the exact same outfit he had worn the day before, something that further raised the growing
ewww
factor in the eyes of the girls.)

And then Dr. Schwarz moved slowly, purposefully toward Dave’s assigned seat, where he stopped.

He gazed down at Fons Soto and raised one
dark eyebrow. “I’ve been told that
you
have a gecko, Mr. Sanchez. Why didn’t you bring him in?”

And then Dr. Schwarz made a fateful mistake.

He smiled.

“Hopping
habañeros!”
Sticky gasped (ever so quietly) from his sneaky-peeky spy spot. “That’s no teacher! That’s Damien Black!”

Ah, yes.

Damien Black.

Is there a more diabolical villain on the face of the earth?

I think not.

Besides being a ruthless treasure hunter, Damien Black is many things:

For one, he is a builder. His mansion (which looms large and lonely atop an area of the city known as Raven Ridge) was once simply a spooky old house with the classic dangling shutters and pointy spires and slipping shingles (and, of course, owls that went
whooo
in the night).

It is still that, but it is now much more.
Damien, you see, added mysterious rooms (which jut out at odd angles), secret passages (which go to sinister places), strange elevators (which can be quite deadly), and confounding corridors (which lead everywhere or nowhere, depending on when you turn).

Beneath the mansion, Damien has done extensive and expansive (and, without a doubt,
expensive)
excavation. There’s an entire city of caves and cages and cavernous closets (not to mention a gilded coffee café, which, until recently, was tended by a java-junkie monkey, but that’s another story).

Damien Black is also an inventor. From wacky walkie-talkies to spiffy Sewer Cruisers to funky-doodle infrared glasses, Damien Black is a fiend for kooky (and complicated) contraptions. And since he always seems to have a need for things you just can’t buy, Damien builds his own thingamajigs and thingamabobs, and cobbles together
death-dealing doohickeys, villainous whatsits, and widgety-gadgety gizmos.

Over time he has amassed an enormous arsenal of wicked, tricky toys.

Damien Black is
also
… Well, really, you don’t want me to list them all, now do you? I could go on and on about him being (among other things) a stealth pilot and a dragon trainer and a man who despises children, but let’s just fast-forward to the particular thing that matters at this particular point, shall we?

And that particular thing is: disguise artist.

Damien Black is, without question, the Master of Disguise.

Hmm. It occurs to me that since I mentioned
dragons
before, you may be thinking that by “Master of Disguise,” I mean a shape-shifter.

I do not.

I
would
not.

This is, after all, a
true
story, not one that
resorts to fabricated powers and spells and people who can willy-nilly their way through difficult circumstances by miraculously changing their shape.

Please.

Everyone knows there’s no such thing as a shape-shifter.

And yes, I did refer to a dragon before, but I was talking about Damien’s
Komodo
dragon (not some mythological beast found in stories with willy-nilly shape-shifters).

No, when I say that Damien Black is the Master of Disguise, I mean that the man knows how to masquerade as people (and, for that matter,
things)
that in no way resemble his dastardly, devilish self.

This talent does not come easy.

Or cheap.

He has an enormous underground cavern-like closet that holds (aside from several well-positioned cheval mirrors) all manner of disguises. From wigs to warts to wingtip shoes, he has it all (in, I might add, many assorted styles, colors, and sizes).