Hostage (12 page)

The plastic bag that had felt squishy inside the backpack was beside my left hand, filled with gold sequins Jodie had been going to glue onto something at school. I felt it pop open when I squeezed it, and glittering bits sprayed out into the air. Pretty, but worthless.

My right hand closed around the little tube. Glue—that's what my fingers were touching—glue to stick glitter onto something, a costume, maybe.

I picked up the glue—sort of like arming myself with a feather to fight off a cougar—and instinctively slid backward, away from the three menacing figures already bounding up into the truck.

The chopper had retreated enough by now so I could finally hear the approaching siren of yet a third patrol car. The first two had driven right up to us, and uniformed officers were leaping out of them, weapons in hand, yelling at the menacing trio to stop where they were.

Actually I wasn't
consciously taking all this in at the time. My heart was pounding so hard, my chest hurt, and panic was making me deaf and blind all at once. But I remembered, later, the welcome sight of uniformed police officers with drawn guns, even as I feared they wouldn't be able to stop whatever Calvin and Bo and Buddy intended to do.

I didn't realize that they couldn't kill us in the next few seconds, because then we wouldn't be hostages any longer, and the police would have no reason to hold their fire. Fear had turned my brain to Silly Putty—or so I thought at the time.

As Bo jumped up into the compartment where they'd kept us prisoner, I felt the little tube in my hand. I don't remember twisting the cap off, but there must have been a small part of my mind that wasn't paralyzed by fear.

And as he lunged toward me, where I was sprawled in the middle of the junk from Jodie's backpack, I squinted and held out my pathetic little tube and squeezed it as hard as I could. Right into that snarling face.

It was only a tiny tube. There wasn't much
in it. At first I thought it hadn't had any effect at all, and then Bo swore and swiped at his face and went down on his knees and roared in anger. That gave me time to slide a bit farther away. Beyond him, Buddy was wrestling with Mrs. Banducci, who, for an old lady, was putting up a pretty good fight. Cal had already gone down under a swarm of blue uniforms.

I felt the knife fall against my leg and slide off onto the floor of the truck. Bo started to scream and he had both hands on his face. “What did you do to me, you—” Whatever he was going to call me was cut off when an officer hauled him backward out of the truck where the sound of the helicopter rotors drowned out his cursing.

Another officer helped me to my feet and I was lifted down onto the ground, where my legs were almost too shaky to hold me up.

Two other officers had gone to the assistance of Mrs. Banducci. Overhead, the Channel 4 chopper was tilting for a better angle of what they'd show on the six o'clock news, and it wasn't until it rose even higher and began to swing away that any of us could hear what anyone else said.

Bo was still screaming and writhing around. “My eye! She squirted something in my eye, and my hand's stuck to my face!”

The officer who was holding on to my arm bent his head so I could make out his words. “What was it, Kaci?”

I handed over the squashed tube and read the label the same time he said it out loud. “Super Glue! Oh, boy, that's going to require a trip to the hospital. That's wicked stuff. He may not be able to get his eye open if it really got it. Better call an aide car for that one, Jim. That Super Glue sets in thirty seconds. They can use it to close an incision these days.”

They led him away from me, still mouthing obscenities, and they rounded up the other two and put them into the back of one of the patrol cars. Then they installed Mrs. Banducci and me in another one.

“You want this?” one of the officers asked, handing in Jodie's backpack with all her junk packed back into it.

Everything but the phone. He kept that long enough to make contact with the 911 operator, who was apparently still on the line,
to give him a report. Then he handed it over to me. “You did some pretty quick thinking there, young lady.”

“It didn't seem like I was thinking at all,” I admitted. “We thought they were gone. I never dreamed they'd come back!”

“They panicked when they found they had a patrol car on their tail. We were looking for a car of that description, and I was about to pull them over and check them out when they swerved onto an off-ramp, turned around, and headed back here. They undoubtedly figured that having you and Mrs. Banducci as hostages was their only chance of getting away. You did a good job of holding that one off so he couldn't put that knife to your throat. You just sit back for the ride home. Your folks are waiting for you at headquarters.”

“I suppose it's too late for lunch with Sarah now,” Mrs. Banducci said. “She probably went home.”

  •  •  •  

By dinnertime my appetite had come back. Mom picked up Chinese takeout—she was too nervous and exhausted to cook, she said—and
neither she nor Dad went back to their jobs that day.

Jodie knew about the switched backpacks of course. For one thing she'd had to eat my ham sandwich instead of her own peanut butter and jelly, and she was pretty nervous about the stuff she had taken. She wasn't supposed to have the Super Glue, either; as Mom pointed out, it was much too potent to use to stick sequins onto a costume. Actually, none of us was supposed to use it without supervision.

And in spite of the fact that the phone had proved invaluable to me, she got bawled out for taking it and the glue. She almost always got away with whatever she did, and ordinarily it would have been sort of satisfying to see her on the spot for once. Not that I expected it to change her in the long run. But I was surprised to realize that I felt almost sorry for her as she explained while Mom and Dad were both watching her with those incredulous expressions on their faces.

“Why the telephone, Jodie?” Dad demanded.

My sister licked her lips and glanced at me as if for help. I was even more astonished to
hear myself saying, “Well, it was a good thing it was in the backpack when I needed it.”

“Yes,” Dad agreed. “We're grateful for that part of it. But we still want to know what she expected to do with it.”

Mom had a sudden flash of understanding. “You were taking it somewhere so that you could call me after school, weren't you? You weren't going home, you were going where there wouldn't be a telephone.”

Jodie squirmed on one of the kitchen chairs, the only ones left in the house at the moment. She looked at me again, but I didn't see any way to help her. In fact, I couldn't believe that I even
wanted
to help her. I felt like I ought to say
something,
just to show that for once we were both on the same side, but nothing came to me.

“Bethany and I were going out to the lake where they're making the movie,” she said in a small voice. “We thought maybe they'd let us be extras in the mob scenes. The paper said they'd need a couple of hundred kids, and they'd pay them twenty-five dollars apiece.” She swallowed hard. “Mrs. Wightman wouldn't take us out there, either, and said Bethany couldn't go.
We . . . we didn't think anybody'd ever know the difference, if we were home before suppertime.”

Mom's voice was quiet. “And how were you going to get out there if nobody took you?”

Jodie licked her lips again. “On the bus. There was one, right after school got out.”

“You knew it was wrong, didn't you?” Dad asked. “Both to take the phone and to deliberately disobey your mother?”

Jodie chewed on her lower lip. “Yes,” she admitted.

Dad's a school principal and is good at handling kids who get sent to the office for misbehavior. He didn't bawl her out anymore. He just sighed and said, “Think about this the next time you decide to do something you know we don't want you to do, Jodie.”

He and Mom stood up, then, and went to take care of something or other, leaving me and my sister sitting at the kitchen table. I was even sitting on the chair where I'd been tied up and scared to death.

Jodie was close to tears as she looked at me across the table.

I cleared my throat. “I'm going to watch a new video tonight. I mean, it's an old movie, a Hitchcock one. It's supposed to be pretty scary, but you can watch with me if you want to.”

She brightened a little, swiping at a stray tear that had escaped onto her cheek. “Okay,” she said, even though I knew that getting scared wasn't her usual idea of fun.

Afterward, she said she was nervous and wondered if I'd let her sleep with me that night instead of in her own room. And she actually said that blue and white were restful colors for a bedroom.

We eventually got our furniture and silver and pictures and all the other things back. The broken glass was replaced in the kitchen window. The number I'd written on the wall washed off. There was a tiny scratch on Jeff's baby grand, but Dad got it touched up so it hardly showed. The bedspread they had wrapped around the piano got torn, so Mom and Dad had to get a new one. As long as they were doing that, Mom ordered new draperies for their bedroom, as well.

We heard that the doctors got the glue off Bo's
face and hands, though I guess it was an uncomfortable process. We learned later that he was related to another new family in Lofty Cedars, the Burgers. He'd visited them with his folks and then mentioned to his friend Cal that there were a lot of TVs and computers and sound equipment going into those new houses. And Cal had suggested that he and Bo and Buddy might manage to steal some of it while the families were all out working. They had done a number of jobs together before they came to Lofty Cedars Estates and hadn't been caught. No one suspected them until they came to our house.

There was a story in the paper, of course. Everybody in town read all the details. That didn't stop the kids at school from asking me to repeat them. By the second day, I was totally tired of the entire subject; I just wanted to forget what had happened. I prayed I'd never have that kind of adventure again as long as I lived.

Luckily, it didn't spoil my love for adventures in books. I just got a new one from the library today. It's by an author I haven't read
before, Edward Bloor, and it's called
Tangerine.
That doesn't sound like a mystery, but the blurb on the cover sounds intriguing.

But I won't read it when I'm alone in the house. There are limits to everything. I'll have a big bowl of popcorn, all to myself, and I'll choose a time when Mom and Dad are downstairs, right close by.

I might even ask Jodie if she wants to come to my room and listen while I read the new book aloud to her. I might make a mystery fan of her yet, who knows?

DON'T MISS THESE OTHER WILLO DAVIS ROBERTS MYSTERIES:

Surviving Summer Vacation

The View from the Cherry Tree

Scared Stiff

Megan's Island

Baby-Sitting Is a Dangerous Job

The Kidnappers

The Old House

The Pet-Sitting Peril

What Could Go Wrong?

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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