Chapter 26
The BearCat handled pretty well, I have to say.
Of course, it wasn’t a Peugeot, so Gran needed a little time to get used to it, and she complained that the thing was sluggish.
Still, at least she hadn’t hit anything.
Well, except for a traffic sign on Harrington Street, which was now lying flat on the ground.
But at least she hadn’t hit a person. When someone gets run over by an armored truck, they generally don’t live to tell the tale.
“I think I’m getting the hang of this thing,” said the old lady as she trucked along, the giant vehicle zooming along the road. “Before you know it, I’ll be an expert.”
“For a moment there, I thought you were armed police,” said Mercedes. “Or SWAT.”
“That’s what we’re aiming for,” said Scarlett. “If the bad guys see us coming, then they will skedaddle.”
“I would skedaddle,” said the Germinator. But then he seemed to remember he was supposed to be a superhero, and he amended his statement to, “If I were a regular person.”
“So what made you don the costume, Mr. Germinator?” asked Mercedes. “Was it your desire to do some good? To help your fellow man?”
“Well, the thing is that I’m from another planet, see,” said the Germinator, “so I don’t really consider humans my fellow men.
But yeah, I guess when I arrived here on planet Earth, I saw how riddled with problems you guys are, and since I have this power, I figured I might as well put it to good use. ”
“And what power is that?” asked Mercedes.
“I can subdue anyone with the power of my mind,” said the Germinator proudly. “Which makes it hard for the criminal element to fight back. The moment I’m locked in on them, they’re basically lost. Nothing they can do. They’re done for.”
“We saw that yesterday, didn’t we, Mercedes?” said Gran. “When Mr. Germinator here tied those two crooks to that lamppost.”
“That was a nice piece of neighborhood policing,” Mercedes admitted. “You know, I could have used you yesterday morning, when I was being mugged. Though I took care of that mugger myself, so no harm done.”
“You were mugged?” asked the Germinator. “That’s too bad.”
“Well, I handled it,” said Mercedes. “And then I went to the cops to report a crime being committed and met Vesta, so it’s all good.”
“I like Mercedes,” said Dooley. “She’s very gung-ho, isn’t she? A little bit like Gran herself.”
“Yeah, they fit together really well,” I agreed. “Gran and Scarlett and Mercedes are all cut from the same cloth.”
“And now with an actual superhero on our team,” said Dooley, “we’re a force to be reckoned with.”
“I still wonder who he is,” said Harriet. “Not Uncle Alec,” she added as she studied the bumblebee-clad superhero. “He’s too thin to be Uncle Alec. But he does look awfully familiar.”
“Probably when you see him without his costume, you wouldn’t pay any attention to him,” I said. “You know, like Clark Kent? Nobody pays him any attention either, until he turns into Superman.”
“Clark Kent doesn’t turn into Superman, Max,” said Brutus. “Clark Kent is Superman.”
“I wonder what planet he is from,” said Dooley. “Must be a planet where everyone is a bumblebee, right?”
“I think he’s from Planet Cuckoo Land,” said Clarice, who didn’t seem to share our enthusiasm for the masked crusader who had joined the Neighborhood Watch. “Delusional, like all of those so-called superheroes. Give me a regular person like Chase Kingsley any day over these trumped-up idiots.”
“Not a fan, are you, Clarice?” asked Brutus.
“Not at all,” Clarice acknowledged. “Too much ego and not enough actual skills. I’m telling you right now, the moment trouble hits, this so-called superhero will be crying like a little girl.”
“Or maybe he will unleash his inner bumblebee and destroy the thugs?” Brutus suggested.
“Fat chance,” Clarice scoffed.
We had arrived at our destination, which was the place where the police academy was located, and we all got out.
“Okay, so how are we going to do this?” asked Scarlett. “Because I know for a fact that Odelia will not be happy if we try to break up that romance of hers.”
“We need to handle this matter very delicately and with the utmost sense of diplomacy,” Gran agreed.
“Which is why we’re sending the cats in first, to spy on Odelia and identify which recruit she has fallen in love with.
And then, when we have his name and address, we start collecting dirt on the guy, as per Mercedes’s playbook. The more dirt, the better.”
“And then we expose him,” said Mercedes as she hit her fist in the palm of her other hand. “Nail him to the wall! Tear him limb from limb until he begs us to stop!”
“She seems to harbor a lot of pent-up aggression, doesn’t she, Max?” asked Dooley.
“She does,” I agreed.
“She’s simply upset about the death of her son,” said Harriet. “Poor woman is distraught and wracked with grief. And she’s channeling her pain into this mission.”
“I’m sure Chase will catch the person who did this to Harley,” I said, for Pippy’s benefit.
The little doggie hadn’t said a word throughout the last stages of our trip and seemed very ill at ease.
“Do you want me to come, too?” she asked.
“No, you’d better stay here,” I said. “People don’t look twice when they see a cat, but a dog tends to attract attention—especially in places where dogs aren’t allowed.”
“Dogs aren’t allowed here?” asked Pippy.
I pointed to a sign attached to the chain-link fence. It showed a dog with a big red line through it.
“They’re probably afraid the recruits are so hungry after a grueling day of crawling through the mud and the trenches that they will catch the dog and eat him whole,” said Clarice. “I know I would do it,” she added when Pippy gave her a look of abject horror.
“I don’t want to be eaten,” she confessed nervously. “So I’ll stay here.”
“Excellent decision,” said Brutus. “You stay here with the three ladies and the superhero, and we’ll go and scout the place.”
“Your mission,” said Gran, “is to find Odelia and identify her beau. And then, once you have nailed down his identity, you report back to me. Is that understood?”
She had said all of this in her own language, so as not to rattle her fellow Watch members—or at least the new ones, who didn’t know that Gran also had a superpower: she could talk to cats.
“Understood, Gran,” I said.
And so we snuck through a hole in the fence that Gran had found and were off on our mission.
“I don’t like this, you guys,” said Clarice. “Can’t we simply talk to Odelia? Get her to spill the beans? Then we wouldn’t have to waste our time traipsing all over this terrain. I mean, there might be mines buried here, or bombs. There might be tripwires.”
“Odelia would never tell us if she has fallen in love with someone,” said Harriet. “Because she knows we would be horrified, and we would tell Gran and Marge, and then all hell would break loose.”
“There would be an intervention,” I said. “And nobody likes to be intervened upon, if that’s the correct expression.”
“I think it’s intervened with,” said Brutus.
“I doubt it,” I returned.
We had snuck along some derelict terrain that reminded me a lot of Blake’s Field, and arrived at what looked like a series of low-slung buildings. Presumably, those were the buildings where the courses were being given, and so we set paw in that direction.
As we glanced in through the window of the first building, we heard the sound of a gunshot, and immediately all five of us hit the deck.
“They’re shooting at us, Max!” Dooley cried.
“Not us,” I said. “Just doing some shooting practice, probably.”
“Do you think Odelia is learning how to shoot?” asked Harriet.
“Probably,” I said. “It’s all part of the training.”
“Yeah, a police officer needs to be able to shoot,” said Brutus.
“I really don’t see Odelia shooting stuff,” said Harriet. “She simply doesn’t have it in her.”
“The pen is mightier than the sword,” said Dooley. “So maybe Odelia should stick to her pen.”
We all gave him a look of surprise. Sometimes Dooley really says some good stuff.
“Let’s go,” said Clarice.
“Go where?” I asked as I nervously looked around.
“To go see what they’re shooting at, of course!”
And when we didn’t immediately respond with the kind of excitement she must have been expecting, she took off on her own.
“I don’t want to be shot,” said Harriet. “So I think I will stay here, thank you very much.”
“Me too,” said Brutus. “Those bullets fly in every direction, and since these are all recruits, they probably have terrible aim.”
“If we stay low,” I said, “maybe we won’t get hurt?”
“If Odelia is shooting, she will probably do a good job,” said Dooley. “Since Odelia never does anything without the proper training. Does she?”
“Odelia would never shoot at us,” I agreed.
And so Dooley and I took off, leaving Harriet and Brutus behind. They would check out the buildings to see if they couldn’t locate Odelia there, and we would check out the shooting range—if that’s where the sounds of shots being fired were coming from.
“Is it a good idea to split up, Max?” asked Dooley. “In horror movies, that’s when the monsters pounce.”
“We’re at the police academy, Dooley,” I pointed out. “Not the lair of a monster.”
“I guess,” he said. “And also, we’ve got the Germinator waiting for us just outside the fence. So when something really bad happens, he will rush in and save us, won’t he?”
“Of course he will,” I said, even though I shared some of Clarice’s doubts about the man’s capacities and powers. I just couldn’t imagine a man living on a planet filled with human-sized bumblebees. It seemed a little far-fetched.
We were getting closer to the sound of the gunshots, and as we neared, I saw that we had reached what was presumably the gun range. On one side, recruits stood with headphones on, taking aim, and on the other, a series of targets had been set up.
“So this is what Odelia does when she’s here,” said Dooley.
We both hid in the tall grass off to the side of the range and made sure that we didn’t go behind those targets.
“Where is Clarice?” I asked.