The Greatest Power (2 page)

I did say we’d get to the “who” part, and I did promise you “in a minute.”

I was, I’m afraid, being overly optimistic.

The fact is, I really should tell you about two other “whos” before I tell you about the bank-robber “who.”

The two other “whos” are the boy in the red sweatshirt and the lady with the ring. But there’s actually
another
other “who.” A “who” I’m quite hesitant to tell you about because you’ll likely not believe a word I say after I do (even though it’s all genuine, bona fide, documented truth).

So let’s start with the boy-in-the-sweatshirt “who,” shall we? His name is Dave Sanchez, and
the minute the squooshy-faced bank robber opened his mouth, Dave knew exactly who it was.

“That’s Damien Black!” he gasped. “He’s out of jail?”

And from inside his red ROADRUNNER EXPRESS sweatshirt came a sleepy little voice, “Huh?” followed by the sound of stretching, and then, “Ay-ay. I just had a baaaad dream,
señor
. In my dream, you said Damien Black was out of—”

“Shhh!” Dave whispered.

Suddenly the lady with the ring lurched toward Dave and pulled him to the floor. “Get
down,”
she whispered. “And stay quiet! This man is serious!”

Dave was dying to say “Serious? Ms. Kulee, he’s
demented!”
but it was at that very moment that the demented Damien Black shouted, “Don’t move a muscle!”

So Dave lay still, his brain racing, trying to come up with a way to stop him.

And why, you ask, would a thirteen-year-old boy think he was any match for a demented, diabolical, dart-wielding devil of a man?

The answer is not a simple one.

And it involves that third other “who.”

You see, at that moment, a little face peeked out from inside Dave’s sweatshirt.

A little gecko face.

One with sharp eyes.

Spotted skin.

And a spicy, snappy tongue.

“Holy guaca-tacarole!” the lizard gasped when he saw Damien Black. “It’s him!”

Now, just because
you’ve
never met a talking gecko lizard doesn’t mean a talking gecko lizard doesn’t exist. Sticky is, I concede, an anomaly. A one of a kind. A strange twist of nature.

Or, if you must, a freak.

But the fact is,
Sticky
is.

The other fact is that Sticky had forbidden
Dave from telling anyone else that he could talk. It was top-secret. Hush-hush. A keep-it-to-yourself-or-lose-everything sort of situation.

It was plenty bad enough that Damien Black knew.

Still. Sticky had a hard time keeping quiet.
“Ay caramba!”
he murmured from his sneak-a-peek spot inside Dave’s sweatshirt. “What are we going to do?”

“Shhhh!” Dave whispered into his shirt. Then, very softly, he said, “I’m thinking Invisibility.”

“It won’t protect you from the sleep darts,” Sticky warned. Having once been a prisoner of Damien Black, Sticky knew exactly what was loaded in the weapon that Damien was holding.

“It won’t?” Dave whispered.

“Ay-ay-ay,” Sticky grumbled, and although “Ay-ay-ay” can mean many different things when it’s coming from the lips of a talking gecko lizard, in this case it was short for Hopping
habañeros, hombre
. Aren’t you
ever
going to learn?

“Oh yeah,” Dave murmured. “People can’t
see
me, but I’m still there.”

“Correctomundo,” Sticky replied.

“But my only other choice is Wall-Walker! That won’t do any good. He’ll see me and shoot me!”

“Stop talking to yourself!” Ms. Kulee hissed. Then, in an effort to sound reassuring (when she was, in fact, totally stressed out), she whispered, “Everything’ll be all right. Just keep still.”

But Dave did not want to keep still. He wanted to
do
something. And the reason that he felt that he, at thirteen, could be any match at all for a diabolical man with a multi-muzzled dart gun was because hidden on his arm, under his shirt, under his sweatshirt, was an ancient Aztec wristband.

An ancient Aztec wristband (also known as a powerband) that was (as you may already suspect) magic. Because this powerband had originally been worn by an Aztec warrior, it was much too
big for Dave’s wrist, so Dave instead wore it on his upper arm.

With the powerband, either Dave could become invisible
or
he could walk on walls. All he had to do was click in a special power ingot (“power ingot” being a fancy way of saying strange-looking, very shiny notched coin). And although there were power ingots besides Wall-Walker and Invisibility, these were the two that Dave had in his possession.

Damien Black, I’m sorry to report, had the others.

So as you see, Damien Black had a history with Dave and Sticky. And with Damien’s robbery occurring at the same time Dave was picking up Roadrunner Express delivery envelopes from Ms. Kulee, that history was about to become longer (and, I’m afraid, more convoluted).

“I’ve got to do
something,”
Dave whispered to Sticky.

Sticky tapped his little gecko chin. “As much as I hate to say it,” he muttered, “Invisibility would be better than Gecko Power.” (Gecko Power being, in Stickynese, the same as Wall-Walker.)

That was all Dave needed. But as he moved to pull the Invisibility ingot from his pocket, Damien Black catapulted up on the teller counter and screeched, “I said DON’T MOVE!”

An eerie silence ensued, followed by a frightening THUNK. And then, from the corner of his eye, Dave could see that Damien was making a dastardly beeline for him.

Dave’s heart raced.

His ears filled with pumping blood.

Had Damien recognized him?

Had he heard Sticky’s voice?

Would he strip him of his wristband and power ingots?

But as Dave’s forehead fired off maddeningly useless sweat bullets, the stocking-faced robber
yanked the tiger-eye ring off Ms. Kulee’s finger and then, lickety-split, he was back up on the counter, shouting and running and shooting off his multi-muzzled dart gun.

Then, like shutters closing out the light, Dave’s eyelids drooped.

They dropped.

And before you could say “Holy tacarole!” Dave Sanchez was fast asleep.

There was one person who did not get hit by a sleep dart.

Correction.

One
lizard
.

“Ay caramba!”
Sticky said when all was quiet and he’d emerged from Dave’s sweatshirt to a sea of sleeping people.

Ay caramba
, indeed.

Despite some behaviors that might lead one to conclude the contrary, Sticky is a good gecko. So the first thing he did was run, lickety-split, to the window, where he saw the last wobblings of a manhole cover clang into place in the middle of a side street.

“Creeping creosote,” he muttered, for he knew that the police would not be able to trace Damien Black’s footsteps. (Or, even if they could, they certainly wouldn’t.)

He had escaped, you see, into the inky, stinky sewer system.

So Sticky zipped back to Dave (who was having a most wonderful dream about flying through the air after a terrified Damien Black, swooping down on the villain, and recovering the bank’s cash and Ms. Kulee’s ring).

In reality, however, Dave was sacked out on the floor of a bank sawing logs. In fact, he began snoring so loudly that it sounded like he was sawing logs with a full-throttled chain saw.

Then Ms. Kulee revved up
her
sleep saw.

As did the customers.

And the tellers.

And the manager.

The bank was suddenly a cacophonous cavern
of full-throttle snoring. “Ay-ay-ay!” Sticky cried (which, in this case, meant Somebody shut them up!).

Of course the only somebody around was Sticky, so one by one (starting with Dave), he began pulling out sleep darts. And by the time he’d made it back to where he’d started, Dave was waking up.

“Huh?” Dave said groggily. He rubbed an eye and looked inside his sweatshirt. “Sticky?”

“Right here,
hombre,”
Sticky whispered, then scampered up his arm and onto his shoulder. “That
loco
honcho got away.”

Just then, Ms. Kulee began to move.

Or, more precisely, she
jolted
.

“My ring!” she cried, grabbing the finger where the ring had been. “I can’t believe he stole my ring!”

Having something,
anything
, snatched from you is plenty upsetting enough. But when that
something is a family heirloom, passed from a greataunt to a beloved niece, over to a sister, down to a daughter, and on to
her
daughter; when the stone itself was unearthed by that great-(and, yes, often eccentric) aunt on a trek through the wilds of what is now Tanzania (which is, in case you’re not familiar, on the eastern side of Africa, below the equator); the stone, the
ring
, becomes more than a clouded tiger-eye in dire need of cleaning.

It becomes a family treasure.

A stony legend.

A compact repository of tall tales and family folklore.

“Why not that woman’s diamond bracelet?” Ms. Kulee asked through tears as she looked around the room. “Why not
that
woman’s ring? He’ll get nothing for mine, but it’s priceless to me!”

Now, it was unfortunate for Damien Black that he had pulled his bank heist at a time when Dave was picking up delivery packages from Ms. Kulee.

It was also unfortunate for Damien Black that he did not stick to a straight cash transaction. Money may be valuable (it is, after all, money), but there is nothing sentimental about it.

Jewelry, now that’s a different story.

And of all the sentimental diamonds and expensive dangling doodads in the bank that day, Damien Black snatched the most sentimental of all. And he took it from the person who’d given Dave his first job; the person who’d been kind and helpful and had told Dave “Go for it!” when he’d started Roadrunner Express; the person who’d helped Dave build his business to include customers besides City Bank and told him over and over “Keep this up, Mr. Sanchez, and you’ll be rich!”

Yes, stealing the money was one thing.

Stealing the ring was quite another.

It was, as Damien would soon discover, a mistake.

An ugly oops.

A big, diabolical boo-boo.

When the police arrived, Dave
tried
to direct them to Damien Black, but the questioning became too invasive.

Too hard to answer.

Too, how do you say,
nosy
.

“Why do you think it was him?”

“How do you know this man?”

“Are you saying you’ve been to his mansion?”

“How do you know he has a ‘thing’ for tiger-eyes?”

But the final (and nosiest) question of all was “What’s your name, son?”

It was then that Dave realized this was not the best way for him to help. He couldn’t risk giving away that he wore an ancient Aztec wristband with mysterious magical powers. He couldn’t risk giving away that he’d battled Damien Black in the past … and won. He couldn’t risk anyone finding out that
he
was the person people in the city had seen scale sheer walls of tall buildings. He couldn’t risk the policemen realizing that
he
was the person they called the Gecko.