Runaways (6 page)

Lefty, who seemed to be in a hurry, muttered under his breath and tried to get past, but Gus kept blocking his path and going on about the stuff he used to sell when he was a kid. It wasn’t until Lefty broke down and bought some lemonade that Gus let him get away. After that he did more or less the same thing to Maude Harris when she came by on her way to the post office. It wasn’t until he noticed a big, overheated Buick steaming into his service station that Gus bought another lemonade, added an extra ten cents as a tip and hurried back across the street. But a little while later he sent over a thirsty tourist family with four kids to drink lemonade while he worked on their broken-down car.

It was almost five o’clock when Dani counted what was in the cigar box and found out that they’d made enough to pay for the paper cups and the lemons already, and almost four dollars clear profit. But only a few minutes later disaster struck. A disaster named Ronnie Grabler.

Dani was just coming back from making up a new pitcher of lemonade when she noticed Stormy staring past her with a strange expression on his face. She whirled around and there, only a few yards away, was Ronnie Grabler. She turned away quickly, pretending she hadn’t seen him and hoping Ronnie had something else—some other victim—in mind. But no such luck.

Ronnie was wearing khaki shorts and a filthy T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up into dirty white doughnuts, and his usual cowboy boots. Ronnie’s big, expensive cowboy boots were kind of a joke at school because, as far as anyone knew, Ronnie had never been anywhere near a horse. It was the kind of joke, of course, that no one mentioned if Ronnie was around. But now the big dangerous boots were clumping up to the lemonade stand and their bowlegged wearer was saying, “Hey, hey. Look at the big businessmen. How’s about a sample?”

“Ten cents,” Stormy said in a grim tone of voice. Stormy’s chin was set in a way that told Dani he was about to do something rash. Rash, and in this case very dangerous. Dani quickly poured a cup of lemonade and held it out to Ronnie. “Here,” she said. “Take it. Take it and scram.”

But Stormy’s voice was louder and firmer.
“Ten cents,”
he kept on insisting.

Ronnie grabbed the cup out of Dani’s hand, took a swallow or two and threw the rest out into the street. “Not too bad,” he said, “but, hey, I’m a little short on cash right now.” Then his sweaty face lit up in an especially evil grin. “But I won’t be soon as I collect some rent money that I got coming. Some rent money that I got coming ’cause some little squatters set up their lemonade business on Grabler property. Right here on my dad’s sidewalk space.”

It probably wasn’t true. Dani was pretty sure that public sidewalks don’t belong to the buildings they happen to be in front of. But when she said so Ronnie only shrugged and said, “They do if I say they do. And besides, even if the sidewalk isn’t our property, that there awning sure enough is. So the shade is ours too. And you little bums been swipin’ our private shade all afternoon.” His eyes moved to the cigar box. “Way I figure it, shade gets pretty pricey on a day like this so—”

“How much?” Dani interrupted grimly. It wasn’t fair but there was no use trying to argue with a muscle-bound lump-head like Ronnie Grabler. Particularly when the lump-head’s father owned half the block. She was moving toward the cigar box when suddenly Stormy pushed her away, grabbed the money box and ran. And a second later Ronnie took off after him bellowing, “Come back here, dummy,” and some other insulting stuff. Stormy was yelling too, a high-pitched yelping sound like a scared puppy.

For a few seconds, while Stormy and then Ronnie crossed the highway and disappeared from view behind the gas station, Dani stayed right where she was. But then the noises, which were floating back across the highway, took on a shriller and more desperate sound. Changed into the high-pitched shrieking of someone who was scared to death, or maybe getting pounded to a pulp. A picture appeared before Dani’s eyes, a picture of Stormy sinking down to the ground under a rain of ferocious blows, and suddenly she was running too. She didn’t have the slightest idea what she was going to do when she caught up with them, but somebody had to do something—in a hurry.

She could tell now that the yelling was coming from Gus’s garage, but as she rounded the station, dodging old tires and car parts, the howls had a different pitch and tone. By the time she dashed into the garage she was beginning to wonder if the howler was still Stormy. And sure enough, it wasn’t.

The first thing Dani saw when her eyes had adjusted to the dim light of the garage was Gus standing beside his famous grease pit holding something big and heavy down over the edge. Dani had heard all the stories about how strong Gus was, but if she hadn’t seen it herself she wouldn’t have believed that anybody could dangle a big kid over the edge of a grease pit by the back of his khaki shorts. But that was what Gus was doing. Standing there straddle legged, holding the struggling, howling Ronnie with just one hand, he was grinning his snaggletoothed grin while, on the other side of the pit, Stormy grinned back, still clutching the cigar box to his chest.

When Gus finally pulled Ronnie out of the pit and put him back on his feet he slunk off across the highway, stopping only once to glare back threateningly at Dani and Stormy. Dani knew the threat was a real one, so the second Ronnie disappeared into the hotel she grabbed Stormy and headed for home. Stopping only long enough to rescue Linda’s pitcher from under the hotel awning, they made it back to Dani’s house without any more Grabler trouble. Linda was cooking dinner in the stifling heat of the kitchen so they sat on the back steps, drank up what was left of the lemonade, counted their money and talked about what had happened. Talked and snickered every time they thought about Ronnie and the grease pit. After a while Dani stopped laughing.

“Okay,” she said. “It was pretty funny but it won’t last, you know. Old Ronnie might be scared off for the time being, but he’d be right back if we tried it again.”

Stormy gulped, swallowed another snicker and stared at her. “I know,” he said. “He’ll wait until Gus is busy, and then—”

“Well, anyway,” Dani said, “we were pretty lucky to get out of the lemonade business while we were still ahead. I mean, four dollars is better than nothing, even if it’s not going to make much of a difference in …” She looked back through the screen door to where Linda was doing something with hamburger that smelled pretty good. Lowering her voice to a whisper, she went on, “… in the running-away fund.”

Stormy sighed. “I know. But it
was
a good idea. Gus thought the lemonade stand was a real good moneymaking idea.”

“Yeah.” Dani chuckled sarcastically. “He sure did. Greasy Gus, the world-famous moneymaking expert.”

Stormy frowned uncertainly. “Gus is my—”

“I know,” Dani interrupted. “Gus is your friend.”

Stormy’s frown deepened and for a while no one said anything more. Stormy was still probably trying to decide whether to slug Dani for calling Gus greasy. And Dani? Dani was thinking that whatever you thought about Gus, he had been a pretty good friend to Stormy when Stormy really needed one.

Thinking about needing friends led to wondering about why Stormy had gotten himself into such a mess. How he’d had the nerve to snatch the money box from right under the nose of someone as big and mean as Ronnie Grabler.

Of course it might have been that Stormy was just too dumb to know what a risk he was taking. Or else it might simply have been stubbornness. Everybody knew that Stormy Arigotti was major-league stubborn, so that probably was a big part of it. But then again, maybe it had something to do with—guts? With the fact that, along with being stubborn and reckless, Stormy Arigotti was also a pretty gutsy kid.

For some reason it was kind of an intriguing idea. So intriguing, in fact, that for a moment Dani actually thought about telling Stormy what she’d been thinking. But the more she thought about it, the harder it got to come up with the right words. In the end she didn’t tell him anything, but she did surprise herself by going in to ask Linda if Stormy could stay for dinner.

Linda said, “Certainly,” which wasn’t much of a surprise since she was always worrying about Stormy’s Beer Nuts and pretzel diet. And Stormy said, “Wow, would I!” which was no surprise at all.

T
HE NIGHT AFTER THE
lemonade disaster Dani was awakened twice by horribly realistic nightmares. The first one was a lot like a dream she’d had before. A dream in which she was minding her own business when suddenly a hand grabbed her shoulder and whirled her around to face a man wearing an oily denim jacket and a Gila monster’s head. The second dream started out just about the same but this time the strange creature had the body of a Gila monster—fat, scaly body, clawed hands and feet—and the head of Ronnie Grabler. It was a pretty awful combination.

What with the lemonade fiasco and the nightmares, Dani had completely forgotten about the possibility of getting an allowance when some very peculiar things started happening. The first strange event was when she looked out her front window just in time to see the geologists’ weird car heading into town on Silver Avenue. And the next day, there it was again, this time going out toward the ranch. And then on Monday, Linda came home from the bookstore with amazing news. The Smithsons had definitely decided to lease the ranch for six months if they could wire the house and hook it up to a generator. And they really were willing to pay seventy-five dollars a month.

Dani couldn’t believe it. She had been so sure that the whole thing had been just another one of Linda’s “happily ever after” pipe dreams. But now it looked as if it was really going to happen. By the middle of the next week Linda had signed a lease contract and picked up her first seventy-five-dollar check. It was great to get all that extra money but, as it turned out, Dani didn’t get any of it. There were, it seemed, too many overdue bills to be taken care of first. But her mother did say, “I really do think someone your age should have an allowance, if it’s at all possible. So we’ll see what we can do next month.”

Not till next month. Dani had stomped away angrily and later she told Stormy, “Next month will be too late. I’ve—We’ve got to get started a long time before that. Even if she’d let me have a huge allowance, like a couple of dollars a week, I won’t—I mean we won’t—have enough money for the bus tickets until way past the middle of summer.” At least not enough for two tickets, she added silently. Out loud she only said, “I wanted to get started right away, like before school gets out. I said I was going to leave right away, and I meant it.”

She had meant it, and she still did. That day in the graveyard when she’d yelled at the sky, she’d definitely meant to start off immediately. Like in a day or two. And at that moment she hadn’t felt frightened at all—only fiercely determined. But somehow putting it off had made the whole thing seem less like a real possibility, and also a lot more dangerous. As if, now that the desert had been warned, it would have time to think up ways to stop her. And the longer she had to wait the more time she spent thinking of things that might go wrong.

On the other hand, she had to admit that it might be slightly interesting to hang around Rattler Springs just a little longer. Long enough, at least, to see what the geologists were actually going to do way out there in Linda’s run-down, dusty old ranch house.

The first thing they did was to truck in a lot of heavy equipment. Only a few days after the Smithsons paid their first month’s rent, a lot of trucks began to head up Silver Avenue in the direction of the ranch. Big trucks that seemed to be carrying all kinds of lumber and strange-looking machinery. Linda said she thought the machinery was just the generator and maybe some scientific equipment, but other people had other ideas about what it might be.

One of the trucks looked like a big, long moving van. Dani was heading up Silver Avenue and just passing the Grand Hotel when the van went by. It was so long that it had to back and turn to get around the corner and for a while it got kind of hung up. Dani stopped to watch and before long some other people did too.

One of the first ones to show up was Stormy, of course, and a little later most of the people who’d been in the bar straggled out. Even Stormy’s mother, Gorgeous Gloria, came out and joined the crowd, wearing a stretchy red dress with a silver thread woven into it, and still carrying a dish towel and the glass she’d been drying. After a while Dani got bored with the truck and started watching Gloria instead. It was interesting because you didn’t see Stormy’s mother out-of-doors very often, at least during the daytime.

Dani had always thought that Gloria Arigotti was very young looking to be the mother of a great big nine-year-old kid like Stormy. She had a movie-star-type figure and lots of superblond hair, and she always wore very glamorous-looking clothing, like tight sweaters and short skirts. But seeing her now in the bright sunshine Dani could see how she might be pretty old after all. Like maybe even thirty, which was nearly as old as Dani’s mother.

Gloria was chatting and joking with some of the other people who’d come out of the bar to watch. People, men mostly, seemed to enjoy talking to Gloria even though the rumor was that she could be pretty dangerous at times. Like getting mad at somebody and trying to hit them with a whiskey bottle. Or like the time she’d showed up at the O’Donnells’ in the middle of the night, yelling and screaming because she thought Stormy was staying over without permission. He hadn’t been there, so she’d gone off without him, but the next day he showed up with a black eye. Linda, who always worried about Stormy having a lousy mother, had been sure that Gloria had done it. Dani believed Stormy when he said he’d bumped into a door, and she’d told Linda so. She’d reminded Linda that the little klutz was always bumping into something or other, and she’d also hinted about how there were a lot of different ways to be a lousy parent. Right now, for instance, watching Gloria, it seemed to Dani that it might be kind of exciting to have such a glamorous mother.