Nick and Tesla's Robot Army Rampage

by Bob Pflugfelder

  Tesla pulled out hers from under her shirt—she and Nick never went anywhere without them—and spoke into it.

  “Calling Agent McIntyre. Calling Agent McIntyre. Missing comic book alert! I repeat, missing comic book alert! Respond, please.”

  Tesla pressed the pendant to her ear, shook it, pressed it to her ear again, then stuffed it back under her shirt.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “All right. Geez,” DeMarco grumbled. “You don’t have to get all snarky about it. I just thought Agent McIntyre could help us.”

  “Who says we need her help?” said Tesla. She turned to Silas. “You say you heard what your dad told Sgt. Feiffer?”

  Silas nodded.

  “Everything he told Feiffer?” Tesla said.

  Silas nodded again.

  Tesla crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes.

  “Perfect,” she said. “Then tell us.”

  There were two sets of keys to the store, Silas said. One Mr. Kuskie kept with him at all times. The backup he hid in the Metalman statue. Stick your finger in Metalman’s right ear, and the keys would pop out of the left.

  “You’re kidding,” Tesla said.

  Silas shook his head gravely. “The keys used to be in his nose, but people kept picking it.”

  “All right,” Tesla said with a dismissive wave of the hand. “Go on.”

  “Well … I guess they just thought it was funny. And it was, actually. You could get your fingers waaaaaaaaaaay up there, and sometimes people would stick their gum in his—”

  “I meant go on about the robbery,” Tesla said.

  “Oh. Right.”

  The spare keys, Silas reported, were still in Metalman’s ear after the robbery. And the only people who knew about them were Mr. Kuskie, Mrs. Kuskie, and—because he was sometimes allowed to open the store if his father was running late—Silas.

  Not many people knew about Stupefying #6, either. Besides Silas, the only people who knew Mr. Kuskie had the comic book were the stranger he’d bought it from at the estate sale—a woman who’d barely glanced up from the romance novel she’d been reading long enough to give Mr. Kuskie his change—and Barry Dobek, the jerky antiques store guy. The lady obviously had no idea (or interest in) who Mr. Kuskie was, and Dobek couldn’t have known where he’d hidden the comic. Yet there was no sign the store had been searched. The thief had known exactly where to go.

  And finally, Mr. Kuskie had been so upset when he discovered that the comic was gone that he went to the little bathroom in the back of the store and started to barf. But all he’d had for breakfast was a chocolate doughnut hole and a cup of coffee, so—

  “That’s enough, Silas!” Tesla said.

  “You told me to tell you everything.”

  “Yeah, well—we’ve got what we need.”

  “What we need to do what?” Nick asked.

  He already knew the answer, though.

  It was obvious Silas and DeMarco weren’t the only ones who now thought that Tesla and Nick were kid detectives.

  “We’re going to get that comic book back and save the store, of course,” Tesla said. “And I know just where to start.”

  The place to start, apparently, was the It’s-Froze-Yo! self-serve yogurt shop up the street. Tesla led Nick, Silas, and DeMarco there, then stood looking inside as customers filled their bowls with nice, healthy, fruit-based frozen yogurts … which they promptly buried under gummy worms, crumbled candy bars, and chocolate sauce.

  “Sorry, Tesla,” Silas said, “but I’m not really in the mood for dessert right now.”

  “We’re not here for dessert,” Tesla said. “Take a peek across the street.” The boys all turned to look.

  Directly across from It’s-Froze-Yo! was a wine shop and an art gallery. And above them: the Treasure Trove, Barry Dobek’s antiques store. It was a bright, warm summer day, and the store’s windows were open. Beyond them, Nick could see lampshades and chandeliers and slow-spinning fans hanging from the ceiling.

  A lanky, gray-haired man with a pair of glasses pushed up onto the top of his head appeared near one of the open windows, gesturing at something Nick couldn’t see, while a pop-eyed woman beside him nodded excitedly.

  “Silas,” Tesla said, “describe Dobek.”

  She was still staring into the frozen yogurt store. In fact, some of the customers had begun to notice her and were staring back.

  “I don’t need to describe Dobek,” Silas said. “Just turn around and you’ll see him.”

  He started to lift an arm toward the man with the glasses.

  Tesla grabbed the arm and pushed it down.

  “Don’t point,” she growled. “And turn around, would you? I said take a peek, not stare until Dobek notices you.”

  The boys turned toward It’s-Froze-Yo!—and found themselves facing a family of four that was trying to enjoy some yogurt while being watched like a bunch of monkeys at the zoo.

  Nick looked over their heads and pretended he was giving serious consideration to the list of the day’s flavors posted on the wall.

  “Silas, does Dobek know who you are?” Tesla said.

  “Yeah. I go with my dad to the estate sales sometimes, so I’ve met him.”

  “Which means there’s a good chance he knows DeMarco’s a friend of yours, since you two are like a couple of conjoined twins.”

  “I guess so,” Silas said.

  “Hey!” DeMarco protested.

  “Can we go stare at something else, please?” said Nick. A bitter-looking teenage girl behind the cash register had started shooting him nasty looks.

  “Dobek doesn’t know me and Nick, though,” Tesla mused, ignoring her brother. “That gives us an opportunity.”

  “What opportunity?” Nick said, his voice quavering.

  The register girl was stomping toward them.

  “Ooo,” Silas said when he noticed her. “What crawled up her nose?”

  “Us,” Nick said.

  The girl jerked open the store’s front door, leaned out, and snarled, “Do you want some of this frozen glop, or are you just going to stand there freaking out the people who do?”

  Tesla gave her a smile. “No glop for us, thanks.”

  She took Nick by the arm and began dragging him away, headed for the nearest street corner.

  “My brother and I are going antiquing,” she said.

  “I think you need to slow down, Tez,” Nick said as he and his sister crossed the street.

  “Slow down?” Tesla jerked her head at an SUV that was inching toward them, the driver obviously begrudging them the four seconds it would take to get from one side of Main Street to the other. “Does this look like a good time to slow down?”

  “I’m not talking about how fast you’re walking. I’m talking about how you’re running off to play detective.”

  Tesla stopped and whirled to face her brother. Fortunately, they were out of the street by then.

  “I’m not ‘running off to play detective.’ I’m just trying to help a friend. If someone doesn’t get that comic book back, Silas’s family is going to lose their store. No store, no money. No money, no food. The Kuskies might have to become migrant field hands or move to Alaska to work on fishing boats or sell their kidneys to sick billionaires or something.”

  “Sell their kidneys to sick billionaires? Don’t you think that’s laying it on a bit thick?”

  “Maybe. But tell me this: if we don’t find that comic book, who will?”

  “How about the people whose job it is? The police.”

  “Half Moon Bay’s finest? Remind me, Nick, what was Sgt. Feiffer doing the last time we saw him?”

  Nick rubbed his chin. “Let me see. He waaaaaaas … oh. Now I remember.”

  They’d last crossed paths with Sgt. Feiffer three days before. He was chasing an unlicensed dog that was chasing the Newtmobile.

  Not only could Half Moon Bay not afford a police force anymore, it couldn’t afford an animal control officer, either.

>   “And the time before that?” Tesla said.

  Nick thought it over.

  Five days before, they’d seen Sgt. Feiffer giving a ticket to a very unhappy-looking ice-cream truck driver who’d been selling his popsicles and orange Push Ups too close to a fire hydrant.

  Half Moon Bay couldn’t pay for meter officers anymore either.

  “All right,” he said. “You win.”

  Even if Sgt. Feiffer had been a brilliant detective—and Nick had no way of knowing if he was—he’d probably be too busy cornering rabid chipmunks and ticketing double-parked cars to track down a comic-book thief.

  “So we go into Dobek’s antiques store,” Nick said, “and then what?”

  “I have no idea,” Tesla said, starting toward the Treasure Trove again.

  After a few quick steps, she turned and flashed her brother a grin.

  “Maybe I am going too fast,” she said.

  Yet she didn’t slow down.

  Mr. Kuskie had been right when he’d said the Treasure Trove didn’t sell the kinds of things you’d find at Hero Worship, Incorporated. To catch Barry Dobek’s eye, it seemed, something had to be not just old but musty and dusty and dark and dull.

  The Treasure Trove was filled with furniture mostly, though there were also some “vintage” (a.k.a. moth-eaten) clothes and display cases stocked with costume jewelry and cuff links and spectacles and shaving kits and other stuff that generally made Tesla feel like she needed a nap. The one kid-friendly thing in the place was a barrel of candy. Except the candy was salt-water taffy the color of slugs, and Tesla wouldn’t have paid a penny for the whole barrel, let alone the quarter per piece that Dobek was charging.

  Dobek seemed as drab and lifeless as his store. He was a tall, thin, gray man with a long, bony face and white hair he swept straight back into a pompadour. He was dressed casually, in jeans and a denim shirt, yet the clothes looked so spotless and stiff—so unlived in—he may as well have been in a freshly pressed business suit. His glasses were still pushed up on top of his head, as if they weren’t glasses at all but a strange kind of hat worn purely for decoration.

  At first, he ignored Tesla and Nick as they moved slowly up and down the aisles. He obviously preferred to focus on the adults in the store, which made a certain sense. How many kids are going to shell out $1,000 for an eighteenth-century buffet deux corps? (Tesla had no idea what an “eighteenth-century buffet deux corps” was until she saw the words written on the price tag. To her, it just looked like a dinged-up old cabinet.)

  Eventually, a couple to whom Dobek had been trying to sell a “petite English oak barley-twist drop-leaf wine table” (whatever that was) beat a hasty retreat, and Nick and Tesla were the only customers left in the store.

  “He’s looking at us,” Nick whispered as he and Tesla pretended to examine a collection of antique chamber pots.

  Tesla tried to steal a casual look at Dobek.

  He was near the front of the store, looking back at her in a way that didn’t seem casual at all. It seemed pretty serious, in fact.

  Dobek was frowning and furrowing his bushy white eyebrows.

  Tesla turned her back to him again.

  “Just act natural,” she said under her breath.

  “How should I know what ‘natural’ is in a place like this?”

  “Do what the grown-ups did. Stare at boring old junk, nod like you know what you’re looking at, and if Dobek asks if you need any help, say, ‘Just looking.’ ”

  Nick tried staring at boring old junk and nodding like he knew what he was looking at.

  “He’s still watching us,” he muttered after all of five seconds. “What are we doing in here, anyway?”

  “Watching and waiting,” Tesla said.

  “Watching and waiting for what?”

  “I have no idea, remember?”

  Nick threw his sister a glare.

  “You know, Tez,” he said, “sometimes your plans leave something to be desired. Like a plan.”

  Tesla just smiled and shrugged, though she was starting to worry that they were indeed wasting their time. If hanging out around the Treasure Trove didn’t result in any leads, she wasn’t sure what to do next. Yet she was determined to continue the hunt for the missing comic. And not just for the sake of Silas and his dad and Hero Worship, Incorporated.

  Nick needed a distraction. It had been fun messing around in Uncle Newt’s basement lab—Nick and Tesla had always loved gadgets and gizmos and science. But day by day, Tesla had watched her brother’s excitement fade and his worry grow.

  Why hadn’t their parents called? And what were they really doing in Uzbekistan—if that was truly where they were?

  Tesla was as much in the dark as her brother. So she would give him different questions to wrestle with instead.

  Who’d taken Stupefying Comics #6?

  How had they known where it was hidden?

  Why were there no signs of a break-in?

  And why was Barry Dobek suddenly looming over them with a scowl on his face?

  Tesla jumped.

  That last question had caught her by surprise. Her brother, too.

  “Justlookingjustlooking!” Nick blurted out.

  Dobek leaned in toward him.

  “Oh, I know you are,” he sneered. “I know what you’re looking for, too … and you’re not going to get it!”

  Dobek spread his feet apart and put his hands on his hips. It made him look a bit like the Metalman statue outside Hero Worship, Incorporated—and he seemed just as immovable.

  To Tesla it seemed as if he was planting himself between her and Nick and the exit, making himself an obstacle they couldn’t get around.

  Trapping them.

  “If you’d moved a little quicker, you might have gotten away with it,” Dobek said. “But you dawdled, and now you’ve lost your chance.”

  Nick opened his mouth.

  “Uhh,” he said.

  He swallowed hard, then tried again.

  All that come out was another “uhh.”

  “Lost our chance for what?” Tesla said.

  Dobek smirked down at her. “Please. I’m not a fool. I don’t have toys or games. There’s only one thing in this whole place that would interest anyone under the age of eighteen. And whenever I see children in here who weren’t dragged in by their parents, I know that’s what they’re after.”

  He threw a meaningful glance at the nearby barrel of salt-water taffy.

  “And if they don’t pay for some and leave within a minute,” Dobek went on, “I know they’re not planning on paying at all.”

  Tesla was so annoyed to be lumped in with “children”—she and Nick were nearly twelve!—it took her a moment to realize what Dobek was saying.

  When she did, she started laughing.

  “You thought we were going to steal taffy? Really? I hate that stuff!”

  Nick let out a laugh, too—a shrill cackle of nervous relief.

  “Yeah, salt-water taffy’s the worst!” he said. “Not only would I not steal it, you couldn’t pay me to eat it. It’s like chewing on someone’s old gym shoes!”

  Nick laughed again.

  Dobek narrowed his eyes and flared his nostrils.

  Nick stopped laughing.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  “So,” Dobek said, “why are you here, then? And don’t tell me you’re looking for a rococo chaise longue because it would be just the thing to tie the living room together.”

  “Well …” said Tesla.

  She had no idea what was going to come out of her mouth next.

  “We’re waiting for our parents,” said Nick.

  Dobek arched an eyebrow at him.

  Tesla almost did, too.

  “Ohhh?” Dobek said.

  Nick nodded sadly. “They ran off to do some stupid grown-up thing, and we’re just supposed to hang around in limbo until they come back … whenever that’ll be.”

  For a moment, Dobek almost—almost—looked sympatheti
c. But the moment passed quickly.

  “That doesn’t answer my question,” he said. “Why are you in here?”

  “Well …” said Nick, “you see …”

  His eyes met Tesla’s and flashed a quick S.O.S.

  “Our parents are in the gallery downstairs,” Tesla said. “Picking out art for our new beach house.”

  “Ohhh?” Dobek said again. But it was different than his earlier “Ohhh?” It was about an octave higher and it was said with widened eyes and the beginnings of a smile.

  Tesla nodded. “Mom can’t stand bare walls, even for a few days. So she’s making Dad buy half the stuff in the gallery. When they’re done, they’re coming up here to look for furniture.”

  Dobek switched from “Ohhh?” to “Ahhh.” A very happy “Ahhh.”

  “Well, they’re coming to the right place,” he said. “The Treasure Trove has the best selection of antique furniture between Monterey and San Francisco.”

  “We can see that,” Tesla said. “Right, Herbert?”

  It took Nick a moment to realize he was Herbert.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said to Dobek. “Gertrude’s right. Mom and Dad are gonna love this place.”

  Gertrude—a.k.a. Tesla—had to fight the urge to kick her brother in the shin. She hadn’t meant anything by calling him “Herbert.” The name had just popped into her head, maybe because it felt as old-timey as everything in the Treasure Trove. But “Gertrude” was really pushing it.

  Dobek didn’t seem to notice, though.

  “Excellent. Excellent,” he said with a simpering smile. “I hope you’ll forgive me for coming on a bit strong a moment ago. Half Moon Bay is a lovely community—you’re going to just love it here!—but we do have a few little hooligans running around.”

  “We understand,” said Tesla.

  “I think we’ve seen some already,” Nick added. “There were these weird kids staring at us when we stopped for frozen yogurt …”

  Now Tesla really wanted to kick her brother in the shin. Or at least slap a hand over his mouth.