Greatest Power Read online

  Also by Wendelin Van Draanen

  The Gecko and Sticky: Villain’s Lair

  Shredderman: Secret Identity

  Shredderman: Attack of the Tagger

  Shredderman: Meet the Gecko

  Shredderman: Enemy Spy

  Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief

  Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man

  Sammy Keyes and the Sisters of Mercy

  Sammy Keyes and the Runaway Elf

  Sammy Keyes and the Curse of Moustache Mary

  Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy

  Sammy Keyes and the Search for Snake Eyes

  Sammy Keyes and the Art of Deception

  Sammy Keyes and the Psycho Kitty Queen

  Sammy Keyes and the Dead Giveaway

  Sammy Keyes and the Wild Things

  Sammy Keyes and the Cold Hard Cash

  For the superhero educators in Bakersfield and Lamont,

  and for the kids there who reach for the power inside.

  You are asombrrrrroso!

  1. A Wicked Stick-’em-Up

  2. Lights Out

  3. A Big, Diabolical Boo-Boo

  4. The Inky, Stinky Sewer System

  5. Sneaky, Creepy Footprints

  6. Screeches in the Light

  7. Monkey Business

  8. Whooshed Away

  9. Flying Monkeys

  10. The Fifth Dimension—Fear

  11. Rattling the Alarm

  12. Geronimo!

  13. Escape from Raven Ridge

  14. Topaz Attacks

  15. Footsteps in the Night

  16. Cuckoo

  17. The Eldorado

  18. Unsightly Disguise

  19. To the Bank!

  20. Damien’s Diabolical Trap

  21. Showdown

  22. The Greatest Power of All

  A Guide to Spanish and Stickynese Terms

  “On the floor, all of you!” the masked man snarled as he fanned a gun back and forth across the crowded bank lobby.

  At first, people just stared. From his stocking-squooshed face to his gloves to his pointy-booted feet, the bank robber was dressed in all black, with odd whatsits and doodads and peculiar thingamajigs dangling from a wide black tool belt.

  He was a tall man.

  A wiry man.

  And the gun he held was so strange—a multi-muzzled, peculiar puzzle of a gun.

  “NOW!” he screeched at the people in the bank lobby. “Get down or I shoot!”

  It may have been a multi-muzzled, peculiar puzzle of a gun, but it was also a try-to-run-and-you’ll-be-one-dead-donkey sort of weapon. So with squeals and cries and disbelieving gasps, everyone inside the bank dropped to the floor.

  THUMP!

  CRASH!

  (Jingle-jangle.)

  THWOP!

  And as they lay there trembling, they all peeked up at the man and wondered the same thing.

  Who was this villain, and what sort of wicked, diabolical device was that?

  The “who” part we will get to in a minute.

  The “what” part comes first.

  To begin with, the wicked, diabolical device was not a traditional gun that shot traditional bullets through a traditional muzzle.

  There was, in fact, very little traditional about it.

  The handle was a long canister of highly compressed air, and the gun had twelve barrels fanned out in a semi-circular pattern. One simple pull of the trigger would propel five sleep darts through each opening, immediately dispensing (as you may have already calculated) sixty oversized sleep-inducing needles.

  Not that any of the trembling, peeking people sprawled out on the bank-lobby floor cared how this deadly-looking gun worked—they only wished that the man with the tool belt of dangling doodads would not point it at them.

  (A foolish thing to wish, as the gun pointed every which way, all at once.)

  They also hoped that the villainous man wouldn’t come toward them, which, in fact, he did not. Instead, he shouted, “Don’t move a muscle!” and darted behind the teller counter, where three clerks had already hit their emergency buttons (to absolutely no avail, as the man with the diabolical dart gun had already deactivated the alarms with one of his mysterious tool-belt doodads).

  “Empty the drawers!” he snarled at the tellers, and produced a black sack of strangely stretchy fabric.

  The clerks quivered.

  And shivered.

  And in the end, they delivered.

  Stack after stack of cash was shoved into the strangely stretchy sack. And with each stack, the masked man became more and more agitated.

  Amped up.

  Wired.

  “Hurry up!” he commanded. “Quit stalling!”

  And then, just as the final drawer was being emptied, he saw something red move on the other side of the counter.

  “I said DON’T MOVE!” he screeched, catapulting himself onto the counter so that he could wield his gun to and fro, here and there, back and forth, across both sides of the counter. And he would almost certainly have fled the scene right then if a large ring hadn’t caught his eye.

  The ring was on the index finger of a woman lying on the floor beside a boy who had a backpack strapped on over a bright red sweatshirt.

  It was a tiger-eye ring.

  A large one.

  With elaborately scrolled gold holding the tiger-eye firmly to the band.

  Now, by tiger-eye, I do not mean the actual eye of a tiger.

  The actual eye of a tiger would be squishy and slippery and, in a word, gross.

  By tiger-eye, I mean a stone that looks (should you have a good imagination) like the eye of a tiger. This particular tiger-eye was honey-colored, with a long slice of black running vertically up the middle, and it looked very much like the eye of a tiger.

  Now, a tiger-eye is no diamond. It doesn’t glitter or shimmer or refract rays of light. Even when just polished, the stone is, at best, barely shiny. And this particular tiger-eye, although impressive in size, was old and clouded and in dire need of cleaning.

  But the squooshy-faced bandit happened to have a weak spot for tiger-eyes.

  Especially honey-hued ones with deep black stripes down the middle.

  He collected them.

  He treasured them.

  He had, in fact, gone on tiger-eye safaris in Africa, Australia, and (quite foolishly) Arizona but had never seen a specimen as large as the one on this woman’s finger.

  And so it was that although the squooshy-faced bandit had a sack full of cold, hard cash and should have been making a quick getaway, he instead leapt from the counter, wrestled the ring from the woman’s finger, and leapt back onto the counter.

  “Stay down, all of you!” he shouted as he added the ring to the sack. And then, although everyone in the bank followed his command, he fired off his multi-muzzled dart gun anyway.

  Fwoooosh! Darts shot through the bank lobby.

  Clack, he twisted the compression chamber, reloading the gun, and fwoooosh! Darts shot the tellers and bank manager (who had come out of his office) and loan officers (who’d been cowering by their desks).

  And as he reached the end of his dash along the counter, clack, fwoooosh! he shot a third batch of darts behind him for good measure.

  Before he’d even slipped through the door, everyone in the bank was deeply asleep.

  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 som
ething 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?”