Hunter Moran Saves the Universe (2 page)

Mrs. Wu would have a heart attack if she knew.

Zack and I turn down Vinny's alley, moving fast; we pass under Diglio the dentist's office window, cringing at the sound of the shopping cart. It would be a mistake if Vinny realized we're heading toward his back door and his huge garbage pile. It's almost a mountain, filled with orange peels, banana crates, stringy bits of lettuce, and much more.

Zack has second thoughts. “How will I explain to Mom?” he begins.

“Don't worry,” I say. “You never got an F before. No one will expect it. And you lose stuff all the time.”

We hollow out a square of ground under some eggshells and in goes the report card. “Goodbye,” I say in a hushed voice. “This is a sad loss for Sister Appolonia and St. Ursula's School.”

I pay no attention to my buzzing cell phone. I know it's Linny. She's convinced we've stolen her skateboard. Zack's lost that, too. But we have enough to think about without skateboards.

“May you rest in peace, old friend,” says Zack, leaning over the grave site.

We toss dirt over the whole thing, and that's when it happens. A torn piece of paper flies out of the shopping cart, almost as if it has wings. It loops around our heads before it nose-dives onto the grave and nestles there above the departed.

I bend over and pick it up with two fingers. Is it meant for us?

“What is it, Hunter?” Zack asks.

I read aloud:
Bom/Twin. REVENGE!

I sink down on a cardboard carton.

What kind of craziness is this?

A note about twins?

Zack and me?

I kick at an empty cheese box.

What kind of revenge?

I gulp.

Wait a minute. What's the other thing Sister Appolonia always says? “You have the sad habit, Hunter Moran, of jumping to dubious conclusions.”

Dubious.
Whatever that means.

But there's only one conclusion here. Think about that phone call in Mom's room. Didn't the caller say “Hunt”?

Of course.

Zack looks at me in horror. “Someone may be after you, Hunter. Or both of us.”

I straighten up, aiming for courage. We're thinking exactly the same thing. The call before? Wrong number. Right victim.

Zack turns the paper over. “There's a phone number here. Maybe it's the caller's. We'll call back, tell him we're innocent bystanders.”

Zack knows he's talking nonsense. What we have to do is gather evidence and get the guy before he gets us.

And something else. Dig. Wasn't that on the phone, too?

Dr. Diglio, the dentist, I bet. Diglio with the beady eyes, the four strands of hair pasted over his baldy bean. Diglio, who hates me.

“You don't know that for sure,” Zack says, reading my mind again.

But we both know I've crossed Diglio too many times. I wave the bottom of my T-shirt back and forth to get air. “It was an accident that I dinged his Acura with a rock.”

Zack nods sympathetically. “You can hardly see it, with all the rest of the dings. That car is one lemon.”

But there were other situations, too. My bicycle rutting up his desert front lawn, Diglio screaming as if it were the botanical garden.

My cell phone is vibrating like a plane going down. Linny never gives up. “What?”

“Don't get nasty,” she says. “Where's the stuff from the store? Where's the milk for Mary? Someone drank it all.”

“Want me to die of thirst?”

“No, just get back here before the summer is over.”

I cover the phone. “Do you remember what else we were supposed to get?”

Zach's still squinting at the revenge message. “What do you think
Bom
means?”

“Cauliflower!” Linny screams into my ear. “Broccoli, two heads; carrots; dishwasher soap.” She goes on and on. I close the phone, shutting off her voice with a satisfying snap, and squint over Zack's shoulder. “
Bomb
,” I say. “It stands for
bomb.
”

Zack hesitates. “Do you remember that movie? The one with the two kids and the bomb?”

How could I forget? I couldn't sleep for a week after I saw it. One kid was blasted away and half the neighborhood was gone. Actually, I look just like that kid, or what was left of him.

“Only pieces,” Zack says.

What is all this about anyway?

The original is missing from S-T-U?

Original what?

But bomb? There's no doubt about it. It's all linked together, heading toward one thing.

Kaboom!

Zack frowns. “There goes the summer. We'll have to work this out before Diglio blows up Newfield.”

And me, too.

Chapter 3

We take a different route home so we don't bore ourselves to death. We pass the town round, the park in the middle of town. Right in the center is a huge iron pot on a stand. It's Lester Tinwitty's original kettle, dinged worse than Diglio's Acura.

Lester dropped in by balloon, forged the kettle, and stayed to found the town. One by one, pioneers staggered in, starving, and whispering, “Soup, soup.” All Lester had to do was stir up the pot.

I'm just glad I wasn't around then. I'd have eaten leaves or acorns instead of that soup, or even starved to death.

When we arrive home with the milk, beans, and two boxes of orange Jell-O, Linny is dancing up and down the front path. She grabs the bag out of the shopping cart and heads toward the house. “Mary is starving to death in there,” she mutters.

Inside, it sounds like the roller coaster at Rye Beach. Mom is pacing up and down in the kitchen with Mary over her shoulder. Mary's face is eggplant purple from screaming.

Mom smiles at us. “Good work,” she says as she pours milk into Mary's bottle with one hand.

“They forgot half the stuff,” Linny says.

“Milk was the main thing.” Mom looks like Sister Appolonia's picture of St. Dorothy.

Dorothy has a calm face, which is surprising because she's on her way to be devoured by lions in the Roman arena. It's also surprising that Sister Appolonia has that picture, since Dorothy went to her saintly death a couple of thousand years ago.

Zack and I go down the hall, sliding around William, who's working on his mural: a horrible view of outer space with worlds running amuck and crashing into each other. Mom thinks he's an artistic genius.

“Where are we going?” Zack asks me.

“Someplace private.”

We sneak upstairs and detour into our bedroom to search for the huge flashlight Nana gave us last Christmas. We'd told her we needed it to see the night sky, which is ridiculous when you think of it, but Nana goes along with whatever we want.

We find it under the dresser with a few dust balls. Then we head into Linny's bedroom, which William has painted for her. It's a nightmare: volcanoes spewing lava onto the ceiling and buzzards flying over her dresser.

We inch our way behind her bed and slide open the door to the crawl space—all this with the utmost secrecy.
We don't want to alert Steadman, who is hammering something to pieces in the next bedroom.

You can't stand up entirely in the crawl space; it's probably over a hundred degrees, musty and dim; no one in his right mind would want to hang out in there. A perfect spot.

“Problem,” Zack says.

I nod. Steadman is banging so close to the wall that it feels as if my head is going to come off.

“The telephone number,” Zack says. “Shouldn't it have ten numbers?”

I aim the flashlight onto the paper and count. “Right.”

Zack leans over my shoulder. “Only nine in this one. The end number is torn off.”

I whisper the number: 393-555-144—and there it leaves off. “At the most we'll have to call nine people.” I try not to shout over Steadman's noise. “We'll just keep adding numbers, zero to eight.”

“Zero to nine,” Zack says.

“No, that one's ours: five-five-five-one-four-four-nine.”

“Genius.” Zack gives me a high five. He looks down at the phone. “This thing is falling apart.”

“Like everything else in this house,” I say. “I think William stepped on it.”

“Conked the Caller ID right out,” Zack says. “Too bad.” He punches in the first number: 555-1440. No answer.

Very suspicious, right from the start.

I try the next: 1441. But things are getting complicated.
Linny has just come into her bedroom. We hear her closing the door to muffle Steadman's noise.

We have to be ultraquiet. Linny gets furious when someone invades her space. And the crawl space is part of her bedroom. At least, that's what she says.

Someone answers the phone. I whisper “Hello,” in a deep Pop-type voice.

“Is that you, Hunter?” someone asks.

It's Sarah Yulefski from my class. This is the worst possible thing. Last month Sarah told the whole fifth grade that I liked her. Liked her! She has braces over brown teeth and spits when she talks.

“No,” I say. “This is Vinny's Vegetables and Much More. Your order is ready.”

“Hunter?” she says. “Are you working there?”

I close the phone.

“Who's there?” Linny yells.

Zack and I don't move. We don't even breathe.

Linny doesn't move, either; she's afraid of kidnappers. After a minute, she rushes out of her room and slams the door behind her.

Steadman stops hammering; he clatters into Linny's room. “Just what we need,” Zack says.

I crawl into Linny's bedroom, wiping cobwebs off the top of my head. “Hi, Steadman,” I say.

“What are you doing in there?”

“Cleaning up the spiders. They could be poisonous.”

“Great,” he says. “I'll help.”

“Cheech,” Zack moans from the crawl space.

“I have a better idea,” I say. “You could have ocean warfare with your men.”

His eyes light up. Then he shakes his head. “We don't have any oceans around here.”

“Follow me,” I say.

I gather up a ton of his army men, his miniature tanks and ships, and take them into the bathroom. “We'll just fill the sink a bit,” I tell him, “and you can slosh all these guys around.” I dump everything into the sink, stick in the plug, and turn on the faucet.

“I'll be back soon,” I say.

I race to the crawl space.

“Genius,” Zack says, and hands me the phone so I can dial the next number. A quavery voice answers. It's Old Lady Campbell, Zack's cello teacher.

I press the End button quickly.

Then it's Zack's turn; he hits pay dirt. “It's Diglio,” he whispers as a voice growls into the phone loud enough for the citizens of Uzbekistan to hear: “Dr. Diglio here.”

He sounds so sinister, it almost scares me. You'd never believe he and Mom went to school together, that they even lived next door to each other growing up.

“Hello,” Zack says in a voice that sounds like Whistling Ghost, Saturday Night Special.

“Olyushka!” Diglio says into the phone.

“Is that what you call the bomb, the one in the note?”

“Olyushka?” Diglio shouts. “What do you know about …”

Then all is static.

Zack and I stare at each other. And then Diglio's voice comes through again.

“Listen,” he says. “I know you feel bad about their dying. But never mind, we'll be out of here soon. We'll forget about them. What do they do, anyway? Just hang around waiting to be fed.”

Zack and I look at each other. Could he possibly be talking about us? All we do all summer is hang around. But how does he know about what we eat?

“Spying on us, that's how,” Zack whispers.

Probably right in our kitchen window with binoculars. Horrible.

It makes me think of something. That's what we'll ask Nana to give us next Christmas, high-powered binoculars. If we're still alive, that is.

“Olyushka,” Diglio begins.

“But why a bomb?” Zack cuts in. “Who are you working for? Is it Russia? North Korea? Antarctica?”

“A Moran kid!” Diglio snarls like Old Lady Campbell's dog, Fred. “You think I don't recognize your voice?”

“No.” Zack chooses a name from our class at random. “It's Joseph Simiglia. I think I have the wrong number.”

Diglio isn't fooled. “I see the number. I bet it's your cell phone.”

We've made a fatal error. Of course he'd have Caller ID. Who'd dare step on his phone?

“Listen, you two.” Diglio sounds as if he's coming through the phone at us. “Watch out that I don't see your father.” He slams down the phone.

We sit there thinking; then we head for our bedroom.

“Can't even take a simple wrong number,” Zack says innocently. “Something is wrong with Dr. Diglio.”

We give each other another high five. That's exactly what we'll say if Diglio runs into Pop and tries to get us off the case.

But what is this all about? It's getting scary, really scary, if you ask me. The original missing from S-T-U, a bomb called Olyushka, my name—Hunt—and all of Newfield in jeopardy.

Chapter 4

Mom is the greatest. She can hit a ball as far as a major-league player. Well, almost. And she makes the best spaghetti in the world. It's her one great recipe. But she's a nervous wreck. She worries about break-ins, bacteria, and dirty fingernails.

“That's why we have to protect her,” I tell Zack.

“Don't I know it, Hunter,” he says, as inch by inch, we slide up our bedroom window. Even though two television programs are competing with each other downstairs and William is practicing his train whistle as he paints, Mom can still hear what's going on.

I poke my head out the window to test the air. At last the sun has come out. In a moment I'm going to jump.

From the window, the rope on Pop's flagpole whips around; the flag is long gone. “Breezy,” I say, the wind tearing the words out of my mouth.