Meet the Gecko (4 page)

“Joel the Mole!” Dad and I cried together.

“We have to warn The Gecko!” I said.

“You mean Chase,” my dad corrected.

I started to knock on his door regular, then remembered—I knew the secret knock!

Knock-knock-knock!

Knock-knock!

Knock!

Henna answered the door and looked pretty surprised to see me.

“Joel the Mole! He's here!” I cried. “He was hiding behind that plant! He jumped out and took a picture of me, then ran down those stairs!”

“What?” Chase was at the door now, too. “He's
here
?”

“What did he look like?” Henna asked.

“Like a mole! Kinda fat. Kinda oily. Black hair. A twitchy, pointy nose. And long teeth. Long
buck
teeth!”

Chase frowned at Henna. “I
told
you he'd come!”

“Excuse us, won't you please?” Henna said. And while she closed the door in our faces, Chase called, “You're all right, Nolan! I owe ya!”

I couldn't help smiling from ear to ear. The Gecko didn't think I was a nerd. He thought I was all right!

“Well, champ,” my dad said. “It's been a pretty exciting day, wouldn't you say?”

He was steering me toward the elevator, but I didn't want to go that way.

I wanted to follow the Mole!

“Hey!” I said, breaking free. “I've got a great
idea! Why don't
you
go down the elevator while
I
go down the stairs. Let's see if we can find him!”

“Uh…”

“If you see him, follow him! I'll do the same. I'll meet you in the lobby.”

“Uh, I don't know…”

I had already dug out my camera and was heading for the stairwell door.

“Now hold your horses, Nolan.”

I shot him a look, and he read it loud and clear: Don't mess with a superhero in pursuit of truth and justice!

But just to make him feel better, I added, “I'm eleven now, Dad. Don't worry!” Then I ducked through the stairwell door.

All of a sudden, I felt like I was inside an old mine shaft going down, down, down.

My eyes were cranked.

My ears were perked.

I was feather-footed!

Fast!

Smooth.

Something about the pursuit of truth and justice makes me do things I normally can't do.

The Mole wasn't in the stairwell. And when I
got to the bottom floor and opened the last door, I could see an EXIT sign to my left and the lobby to my right.

Dad spotted me from over by the elevators and waved. I could tell that he hadn't seen the Mole, either, but I wasn't ready to give up yet! I signaled my dad to go outside through the front door while I went out the side exit. He frowned and shook his head.

Obviously he had a lot to learn about pursuing truth and justice.

I frowned right back and nodded, which made him roll his eyes and sigh, but he headed for the front door.

Yeah!

I snuck outside.

I hid behind bushes.

I darted from tree to tree.

But the Mole was nowhere to be found.

Nowhere!

I saw my dad heading my way, and I thought for sure he'd make me forget about finding the Mole. But then he slowed down.

His eyes sharpened on a big bush.

I looked where he was looking, but didn't see a thing.

Very slyly, he signaled me to stay put. Then he moved his index finger like he was taking a picture.

I ducked behind a tree.

I got my camera ready.

Then Dad cut across the grass and waved his arms through the air, yelling, “Hey! What are you doing back there? There's no loitering allowed here! Get out of here! Go! Go-go-go!”

A big bush shook.

The Mole came out from behind it!

He ran across the grass, getting away from Dad as fast as he could!

And in his hurry to get away from my dad, the
Mole didn't notice me, hiding behind a tree trunk.

Didn't hear my camera activate as he looked over his shoulder at Dad.

Didn't have any idea that he was now one digitally trapped Mole.

I didn't want to go back to school.

Didn't want to meet Mom for lunch.

Didn't want to open my birthday presents.

I had work to do!

“Please, Dad? Please-please-please?”

Dad frowned. He moved his mouth from one side to the other. He looked at me with one eye-brow up. Finally he flipped open his cell phone and called Mom.

He whispered a lot.

He said, “Uh-huh” a lot.

He shook his head a lot.

I didn't know what to think!

When he hung up, he said, “Well, champ…
your mother and I have decided that since it
is
your birthday and since you
are
a superhero…”

“Yes-yes-yes!” I cried. “You're the best!”

He started the car and said, “I'll just write my ‘Cool Kid Celebrity Visits Cedar Valley’ article at home.”

The second we were home, I tore down to my room, turned on the computer, and got to work.

USB cable connected—check!

Images of the Mole loaded—check!

Images transferred into Photoshop—check!

This was gonna be fun!

I connected to the Internet and did a search for “Ugly Alien Bodies.”

I got half a million hits!

I refined the search. I had to get fewer hits! I tried “Disgusting Alien Bodies.”

Only a few thousand hits.

Still too many to sift through, though. So I tried “Weird” + “Disgusting Alien Bodies.”

Only a few hundred hits.

Time to take a look!

I scrolled through the first page of Web addresses, and when I saw “Real pictures, Real aliens!” my heart started racing. And when I vis-ited the site and found an image of a huge, slimy green slug dripping with disgusting green pus, I knew I'd found the Mole's new body.

Oh, yeah!

I worked and worked and worked until I got the Mole's face superimposed onto the slug's body. It looked great! Really real!

Next, I added some ugly green arms and put the Mole's camera in between slimy green suction-cup hands.

It was disgusting!

It was vile!

Oh, yeah!

Then I made up a page like you see in those stu-pid magazines by grocery store checkout stands. I
played around with different fonts and finally picked an old-fashioned typewriter-style one for the headline:

JOEL BOWL EXPOSED!

And under that came the story:

Then I put the Slug-Mole picture on the page, added a background of Old Town that I lifted from the Cedar Valley Chamber of Commerce Web site, and presto! I had the Mole just where I wanted him.

Dad popped his head through my door. “How's it going, champ?”

“Great! Come in! You've got to see this!” He hadn't knocked, but who cared?

Dad stood behind me, looking at my computer monitor. He started shaking his head. “How in the world did you
do
that?”

“Piece of cake, Dad.”

“Oh, right.” He sat down on the edge of my bed, still looking at the monitor. “So now what?”

I gave the page one last save and said, “Now we go do a search.”

“For?”

I reopened my Internet connection. “For ‘Joel Bowl’ plus ‘the Mole. ’”

“Because?”

“Because that way the search engine will check the entire World Wide Web for any sites that have both
Joel Bowl
and
the Mole
in their text.”

“I know, but why are you searching for that?”

“Because …” Just then the computer displayed
Web site found
and then
Found: 87 matches for “Joel Bowl” + “the Mole.”
“Wa-hoo! Eighty-seven matches!”

“But why?”

I opened up the first site and said, “Because most Web sites have e-mail addresses. I'm going
to collect them and send everyone who knows the Mole or hates the Mole a picture of him. I'm going to do to him what he does to other people!”

Dad was starting to nod. “Planning to fight fire with fire?”

I grinned at him and said, “More like give him a taste of his own medicine.”

Dad stood up and laughed. “By the time you're done with him, there's no doubt he's going to hate the flavor.”

Oh, yeah!

One of the eighty-seven sites I looked at was for a newspaper in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Someone there really hated the Mole! There was an article in the archives that cut him down low!

Said he was a liar.

An embarrassment to journalism.

Said his work stank like a sewage line.

They didn't have a picture of him, though.

And they called him Mr. Bowl.

Did they really think that would stop him?

Obviously they didn't have much experience with sneaks and bullies!

I added their e-mail address to the others I'd
collected. They were going to love my slimy Slug-Mole!

There was also a television station in Los Angeles that had “journalist Joel Bowl, known to celebrities as the Mole…,” but it was an old link and didn't take me anywhere. I copied and pasted the station's e-mail address, anyway.

You never know.

By the time I'd gone through all the Web sites, I had learned lots about the Mole.

He ruined lives!

People hated him!

He was even worse than The Gecko had told me. He was wicked!

Evil!

A true villain!

Well! Maybe he'd gotten away with it so far, but he'd never gone nose to nose with Shredderman before!

I clicked on Compose.

I put
MOLE ALERT! (Truth and Justice can prevail!)
in the subject line of a new e-mail.

Then I wrote a short note and attached the Slug-Mole page. The note said:

Yours in truth and justice,
Shredderman

I added all the e-mail addresses I found to the To box.

There were a lot!

I spell-checked everything and was in the
middle of giving my mass mailing a final inspection when…

Knock-knock-knock!

I banged my knee.

I spun around.

Mom peeked into my room. “Where's my birthday boy?”

“Mo-om!”

She came in. “Don't you Mo-om me!” She gave me a squeaky smooch on my cheek and said, “I heard you had an outstanding adventure today. Tell me all about it!”

“I have to finish this first.”

She squatted next to my chair and looked at the monitor. “Your dad said you were busy shredding on some sleazy reporter. Can I see?”

“Uh…”

“Don't worry! I may not be your sidekick, but I
am
in your corner. Let's see.”

So I showed her. And she loved the Slug-
Mole! But when she saw my message and all the people I was sending it to, she started fidgeting.

Her smile turned twitchy.

Her eyes went into hyper-blink.

She said a lot of Uhs and Buts and Do-you-thinks, and finally she just came out and said, “I don't think this is such a good idea, Nolan. I know you've spent all day on it, but I don't want him to
sue
us.”

I scowled at her. Fear holds no power over the pursuit of truth and justice!

“Mo-om!”

“I'm serious, Nolan. Let me talk this over with your dad, okay?”

“No!”

Her eyebrows flew to the ceiling.