Episode 16 - The Night of the Sidewinder

Scottsdale house invaded by Russians!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:55

The Bay Village Chronicles. The Bay Village Chronicles, Book 14, Chapter 1. The house that looked like treasure. The thing about the Scottsdale house was that it looked, from the street, like the kind of house where rich people kept their treasure. It was not, in fact, that kind of house. The treasure was mostly pool noodles and a junk drawer and a freezer full of popsicles. But it had a tall stucco wall, and a cactus by the front door taller than Uncle Mike, and big glass windows that caught the last of the desert sun and threw it back gold, and to the wrong sort of person driving slowly past at dusk, it looked like exactly the kind of house worth breaking into. Two such persons were, at that very moment, driving slowly past at dusk. They had done this before, these two. That was the frightening part. In the long, dusty trunk of their long, dusty car, they kept a crowbar and a coil of rope, and three empty duffel bags waiting to be filled, and a flashlight with the bulb taped over so it would only show a thin red line of light. They had emptied houses in four states. They were very strong and very patient, and very, very bad at their jobs in the one way that matters most, which we will come to. The lean one was named Dmitry Ralovich. He had a face like a closed door and eyes that missed nothing, and he was the one who made the plans. The enormous one was named Vladimir Pupin. He had arms like Christmas hams and a neck you could not really find. And he was the one who carried things and ate things and broke things and was, generally, along. Big house, said Dimitri, killing the engine across the street. Rich house. Vladimir Pupin pressed his huge face to the window and squinted at the gold lit windows and the tall cactus. I like cactus, he said. We are not here for cactus, Vladimir. I am only saying, is good cactus. Dimitri Ralovich did not answer. He was watching the driveway where, just then, a car was backing out, with two grown-ups in the front seats dressed for dinner and not a single child anywhere in sight. He smiled the smile of a man whose night is going exactly to plan. He was wrong about that, but we will come to it. Chapter two four rules and a wave. Goodbye. Inside the house the four boys were standing in the front hall in the last of the porch light, waving as Uncle Mike's car disappeared around the corner toward dinner. It had been quite a week. After everything with the airplane, after the baron in the thunderpants and the long talking two in the Arizona dust, Uncle Mike had said that what he and Aunt Kelsey needed most in all the world was one quiet grown up dinner with no children, no propellers, and no barons. He had said the four boys were old enough now to hold down the house for a few hours, as long as they followed every single rule. The rules were four Doors locked, stay inside, don't touch the stove, call if anything is wrong. I intend, said Pierce, who had learned a great deal about rules lately, to follow all four of them to the letter. The girl cousins were off at a sleepover down the street, so it was just the original four Pierce the oldest and most careful, Henry the funny one, Duane the one with the dangerous mind, and Bear the smallest and the bravest, who still refused to wear shoes and who was, at that exact moment, the only one of them looking out the window, which is why Bear saw them first. Pierce, he said very quietly, in the voice that is not a game voice. Pierce, come here now. Chapter three The Bags in the Trunk They crowded at the dark window, four heads stacked one above the other, and watched the two enormous men get out of the long dusty car. They watched them open the trunk. They watched the crowbar come out, and the rope and the three empty bags and the red eyed flashlight, and a cold feeling went down the back of all four boys at once. Because toys and pool noodles do not come in bags like that. Those were the bags of men who took things and did not come back. Pierce, Henry whispered, and his voice had stopped being funny. Those are really big guys. I see them. Those are really big guys. I see them, Henry. Henry's hand went to his pocket and came out with a beef stick, the emergency kind he kept for exactly these moments, and he did not even unwrap it. He just held it tight, the way another boy might hold a flashlight in the dark. That was how Pierce knew it was bad. Henry always ate the beef stick. Tonight he only held it. Pierce did the right thing first and right away. He grabbed the phone off the counter and called Uncle Mike, and it rang and rang and rang. And then Uncle Mike's cheerful recorded voice came on to say he could not come to the phone right now. Please leave a message, date night. The phone was in his pocket on silent, the way grown up phones always are at exactly the wrong moment. Pierce set the phone down very slowly. He looked at the locked front door. He looked at the four little rules taped to the fridge in Aunt Kelsey's neat handwriting. And then he looked out the window at the two men crossing the dark street toward the house. Unhurried, certain, the way you walk towards something you have already decided is yours. And something in Pierce went quiet and clear and cold. Okay, he said. They think the house is empty. That's the only thing we've got. They don't know we're here, and they don't know there's four of us, and they definitely don't know about you. He turned to Duane. How fast can you build? And that, friends, was when Duane smiled the smile. The dangerous one, the one Uncle Mike called a concerning hobby. Pierce, he said, I have been waiting my whole life for tonight. Chapter four The Sidewinder. You will remember that Duane makes traps. He had been making them his whole life in a small way, a bucket of water over a bedroom door, a tripwire of fishing line, a careful row of marbles at the top of the stairs. But those had been practice. Those had been sketches. What Duane had been carrying around in his head all these years, drawing on napkins, dreaming about in the back seat on long car rides, was something much bigger, a single connected machine that turned a whole house into one enormous trap, and he had never, until tonight, had a house he was allowed to wreck. Now he had one, and about fifty minutes before the men decided the family was asleep. Listen, Duane said, and the other three leaned in, because when Duane talks about traps, even Pierce listens. We do not fight them. We are small, and they are refrigerators. We do not even let them see us. We let the house do it. We turn the whole place into one machine, and the machine has stages, and each stage hands them off to the next. And by the time they figure out what's happening, they're already at the end. I call it the sidewinder. Why the sidewinder? asked Bear. Because by the time it's done with them, they'll wish they'd stayed in the desert, said Duane, who had clearly rehearsed that line, and the other three decided to let him have it. What do we do? said Pearce. Duane's eyes went bright. Everything, he said. Everything we've got. What followed was the busiest, quietest, most magnificent fifty minutes of the entire summer, and it went something like this. Stage one The Patio Henry emptied two full bottles of Aunt Kelsey's coconut sunscreen across the smooth tile that ran along the lip of the pool, and worked it invisible with a beach towel until the whole back walkway was a sheet of grease you could not see and could not stand on. Then Duane rigged the leaf blower from the garage to the patio chair, aimed low with a fishing line running to the door handle, so that the moment the back door opened, the blower roared to life and shoved anything standing on that grease tile straight toward the deep end. Stage two, the kitchen. Pierce laid the minefield, every marble in the house, every lego, every small hard plastic dinosaur from the bottom of the toy bin, scattered thick across the kitchen tile, glittering in the dark, and above it, Duane balanced the entire ten pound bag of flour on top of the open cabinet door, held by a single propped spoon, with a tripwire at shin height, so that the first person to stumble through the marbles would yank the wire, free the spoon, and bring a white avalanche down on his own head. Stage three. The hall This was the aqueduct. Duane ran a chain of three plastic storage bins along the top of the hallway cabinets, each one full of pool water hauled in by the bucketful, each one balanced to tip into the next like a staircase of small cold waterfalls, all of it triggered by a second tripwire and ending with the laundry room cooler, forty pounds of ice water, rigged on a pulley to come straight down on whoever made it that far. Stage four The Living Room Here Duane went a little mad. He dragged Bear's old toddler trampoline into the dark living room and laid a bed sheet over it so it looked like an ordinary rug in the dark. He strung the entire box of Christmas lights from the ceiling fan in a great tangled net, and wound the fan back by hand so it was loaded like a slingshot, and he greased the floor on the far side of the false rug too, so that anyone who bounced off the hidden trampoline would skid helplessly into the waiting net of lights, and the fan, released, would wind them up like a fly in a web. And then, in the garage, Duane built the thing he had been dreaming of his whole life. He would not let the others watch. He worked alone in the dark for the last fifteen minutes, and there were sounds, rolling sounds and clicking sounds, and once a small crash and a word Aunt Kelsey would not have liked, and when he came out, his hands were black with grease and his eyes were shining. What is it? Pierce asked. The last stage, Duane said. If they make it through everything else, it's all connected. One marble starts it, it does the rest. He would not say more. Just get them to the garage door. If they get to the garage door, I've got them. Then they took their stations in the dark, four small shadows in a house that had quietly become a weapon, and they waited and they listened, and somewhere out in the night a man's deep voice said Now is time and the back door handle began, very slowly, to turn. Chapter five Pupin Goes Swimming. The two crooks came in through the back, the way large men always do, because the back is where they think nobody's watching. Vladimir Pupin came first because Dimitri made him. He slid the glass door open. He stepped one enormous foot onto the dark patio. The fishing line went tight, the leaf blower roared awake like a dragon, and the grease tile did exactly what Grease tile does. Vladimir Pupin's feet went one way and the rest of Vladimir Pupin went the other, and the blower gave him a great shove in the back, and he sailed across the patio with a long rising howl and went into the deep end of the pool like a refrigerator dropped off a roof. The splash put out the patio motion light. It also soaked Dmitry Ralovich standing in the doorway, who did not go in the pool because Dmitri was watching because Dmitri was always watching. His cold eyes narrowed. Is trap, he said softly, to the dark. Children, this is the part where the story gets frightening, so hold on. Because Dmitri Ralovich did not panic, and he did not stampede, and he did not do any of the dumb large man things the boys were counting on. He stood very still in the doorway and he looked, and his sharp, mean, patient mind began stage by stage, to take the sidewinder apart. He saw the glitter of marbles on the kitchen floor before he stepped on them, and he did not step on them. He walked the narrow clean edge along the cabinets instead, slow and careful, and the shin high tripwire he found with his fingers and lifted his foot over, and the flower avalanche stayed up in the dark cabinet, unsprung because Dmitry Ralovitch did not stumble. In the hall he saw the fishing line glinting and he stepped over that too, and the great cold aqueduct never tipped, and the forty pound cooler hung above his head and never fell, and he ducked under it without even looking up, as if he could smell traps the way Vladimir could smell a fridge. From their hiding spots the boys watched in horror as the lean man came through the gauntlet, untouched, dry, silent, getting closer, his red flashlight sweeping the dark in a thin line. And then the line found Bear. Chapter six The Man Who Saw the Traps Little Bear frozen behind the couch, shoeless, wide eyed, lit up red in the dark. There, said Dmitry Ralovich, and he smiled with no warmth at all, and he came around the couch with his big hands open. Between Bear and every single one of Duane's traps, all of which were now behind him, all of which had failed, and Bear had nowhere to go and nothing left, and a refrigerator with a closed door face reaching down for him in the dark. Pierce, Bear said, very small, and Pierce, hidden across the room, watching the whole careful plan come apart, did the only thing left to do. He stopped being careful. Hey, Pierce yelled, standing straight up in the dark so the red light swung off Bear and onto him. Over here, you big ugly door, come and get me. Dimitri turned. Run, Bear, said Pierce. Living room, now. Authorized improvisation, whispered Duane, from somewhere in the dark with enormous approval, because if there was one thing Duane loved almost as much as a plan, it was the exact right moment to throw the plan away. Chapter seven The Angriest Pinata in Arizona. What happened next happened fast. Bear ran for the living room and Dmitry Ralovich, forgetting his patience for one single furious second, ran after the smaller, slower target, ran straight across the dark floor toward the boy, and his careful eyes missed the one thing in the room that did not look like a trap, the rug. His enormous foot came down in the center of the hidden trampoline, and the trampoline did what trampolines do. And Dimitri Ralovich went up, a lean man flung suddenly at the ceiling, arms wheeling, a look of total surprise breaking across his closed door face. For the first time all night, and he came down on the grease floor on the far side and skidded, helpless, right into Duane's hanging net of Christmas lights. Duane pulled the pin. The wound up ceiling fan let go and spun, and it spun Dimitri Ralovich up in a thousand feet of tangled Christmas lights, around and around, until he hung there from the fan in a glowing twinkling cocoon, blinking red and green and gold, completely wrapped, completely stuck, twirling slowly in the dark like the world's angriest pinata. Children, he said, twirling, I hate children. And from the deep end of the pool, very faint and very wet, came the voice of Vladimir Pupin. Dimitri, Dimitri is nice pool. You should come in. The boys came out of their hiding places into the wrecked, glittering, magnificent living room, and stood looking up at the twirling, glowing crook, and for one second they thought it was over. It was not quite over. Because down in the pool, Vladimir Pupin had finally found the steps and was climbing out, all four hundred dripping pounds of him, and his tiny brain had narrowed to one simple and terrible idea, which was that these children had ruined a perfectly good robbery and somebody was going to pay. He came through the back door dripping and roaring. He hit the marbles and the Legos and the dinosaurs at a dead run, and this time nobody was being careful, and the tripwire caught his shin, and the whole ten pound bag of flour came down on his head in a great white cloud, and he kept coming, a roaring flowery ghost through the hall, where every bin of the aqueduct tipped at once and the forty pound cooler caught him square on the top of the head, and he kept coming, soaked and flowered and furious into the living room, where the four boys stood with no traps left between them and four hundred pounds of wet white monster. There was only one thing left Bear, Pierce said quietly. The garage. The cactus is out front. You know what to do. And Bear, who was the smallest and the bravest, and who had been waiting for exactly this, looked up at the roaring flowery giant and said, Hey, ugly, bet you can't catch me. And he ran. Chapter eight. The Cactus Bear ran for the garage, and Vladimir Pupin ran after him, all that wet weight and no brakes, and Bear hit the button that raised the big garage door, and there, waiting on the cold garage floor was a single small marble at the top of a long wooden track. Bear kicked it as he ran past. The marble rolled down the track and dropped off the end and landed in a paper cup, and the cup, suddenly heavy, tipped off its shelf and pulled a string, and the string released a toy car, which shot across the floor towing a fishing line, which yanked a row of dominoes made of stacked popsicle boxes, which knocked over a broom which fell against the handle of the air compressor, which Duane had spent fifteen secret minutes connecting to the thing he was proudest of in all the world, the leaf blower, the skateboard, and the entire forty-eight can flat of soda from the garage fridge, shaken to a fury, taped into a launcher aimed at the open garage door. The sidewinder fired. Forty-eight cans of soda went off at once in a great foaming roar, and the blast hit Vladimir Pupin square in the chest and shot him backward out the open garage door on the rolling skateboard. Faster and faster down the driveway, flowered and soaked and screaming, completely out of control. Straight toward the one thing in all of Arizona that Bear had not forgotten was there. The cactus. The sound Vladimir Pupin made when he hit it does not have letters in it. He did not get up for a while. Chapter nine Pancakes That was how Uncle Mike and Aunt Kelsey found things when they pulled into the driveway. One enormous Russian removed very slowly and with many small whimpers from the cactus by the front door. One lean Russian hanging from the living room ceiling fan in a glowing cocoon of Christmas lights, twirling gently, refusing to make eye contact, a pool with a duffel bag floating in it, a kitchen knee deep in flower and marbles, a hallway like a riverbed, and four boys, perfectly fine, standing in the wreckage of the most beautiful machine ever built, soaked and floured and grinning so wide it hurt. The police came. It took two officers and a stepladder to get Dmitry Ralovich down from the fan, and even then the two crooks were still arguing as they were marched to the car. Is your fault, Dimitri? No, Vladimir, is your fault you went in pool. All the way down the driveway and into the night. When they were gone, Aunt Kelsey hugged each boy so hard their ribs creaked, and would not stop checking them over, and only let go when Bear pointed out that he was getting flour on her dinner dress. Uncle Mike just stood for a long, long moment in the middle of his wrecked, dripping, glittering, magnificent house. He looked at the ceiling fan, he looked at the pool, he looked at the soda blasted garage and the cactus and the riverbed hallway, and finally at the four tired, proud faces in front of him. You called me, he said. You didn't pick up, said Pierce. So we followed the rules. Doors locked, stayed inside. He paused and looked at the open garage door and the cactus and Vladimir Pupin's deep dent in the front lawn. Mostly inside. Uncle Mike looked at Duane. Did you build all of this in under an hour? Fifty minutes, said Duane. The garage stage came out a little rough. I'd want to redo the soda launcher. The timing was off by like half a second. Uncle Mike opened his mouth. He closed it again. It was perfect, said Bear loyally. I used the cactus. And Uncle Mike, who had spent the entire drive home worrying about whether four boys were ready to be trusted alone in a house, looked around at the most thoroughly defended home in the history of the state of Arizona, and at the smallest, bravest, shoeless boy standing proud in the middle of it, and decided, for the second time that week that he was both extremely angry and extremely impressed, and that the second feeling was, once again, winning. Pancakes? he said. Pancakes, roared four voices. They cleaned up the flower in the morning, and the marbles and the Legos and the dinosaurs and the Christmas lights and the forty eight empty soda cans every single one. It took until lunch, and somewhere across the desert in the back of a police car, Dmitri Ralovich leaned over to Vladimir Pupin and whispered that next time, next time they would pick a house with no children in it. But Dimitri, said Vladimir Pupin sadly, picking a cactus needle out of his arm. I like the cactus. The end. For now. Coming next, Book 15. The Door Under the Stairs. Back home in Bay Village, there is a tall dark bookcase, and on it a slim green book with gold letters that nobody has ever quite gotten around to opening. There is a reason for that, and the boys are about to find it.