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school.” He looked directly at Dave. “You have to rescue her.”

Chapter 7
SIMMERING SOUP
    Damien Black did not live alone in his maniacal mansion on Raven Ridge.
    Oh, he would have
liked
to, but three men (who were known in their hometown as the Bandito Brothers) had, at one point, bumbled their way into his house, and try as he might to get rid of them, they always seemed to come back.
    The Bandito Brothers—Tito, Angelo, and Pablo—were not actual brothers (although they fought like they were). They were a mariachi band.
    A
bad
one.
    They screeched out songs.
    Played out of tune.
    And (as it was their real purpose in forming the band) they stole stuff.
    Yes, the Bandito Brothers played at being a band, but they were actually a band of thieves. And in all their crooked years, these out-of-tune crooners had never met another thief, another swindler, another
anyone
as clever as Damien Black.
    They were, it’s fair to say, awestruck by the treasure hunter. And, despite the fact that Damien called them bumbling bozos and had, on several occasions, come close to killing them, the Brothers were sure that deep in his dark, dastardly heart, Damien Black liked them.
    And so, time after time, the Bandito Brothers returned to the monstrous mansion from which they’d been banned, in hopes that someday they, too, would be clever and crafty and rich like Damien Black.
    Now, the simple truth is, Sticky was right:
    Damien had, indeed, abducted Ms. Veronica Krockle.
    And Damien had (to his sinister surprise) discovered that he couldn’t handle her alone.
    Oh, he’d had no problem clonking her over the head (with the smooth, appropriately twisted, and remarkably dense humerus of a pygmy hippo—a bone he’d acquired while on a hippo safari in the forests of Tiwai Island).
    He’d had no problem blindfolding her and transporting her up to Raven Ridge (in his devilishly dandy 1959 Cadillac Eldorado).
    And he’d had no problem hoisting her like a rag doll up ninety-nine steps to a remote, windowless tower in his maze of a mansion and locking her up.
    But after she came to?
    Oh my.
    Damien discovered (to his horror) that he’d abducted a mad cat.
    An angry alligator!
    A wild and wicked wasp of a woman!
    And what a stinger that voice of hers was!
    And so, once again, he’d turned to the Bandito Brothers for help.
    “Tie her up and
shut
her up!” he’d commanded.
    “Who
is
she?” they’d asked.
    “Just do it!” he’d snapped, and shoved them inside the tower room with a fat roll of duct tape.
    Damien was not, I should point out, a coward. He simply did not want Veronica Krockle to see him, or to know where she had been taken (hence the windowlessness of the room). His plan was neither to keep her nor to kill her. Oh no. She was not nearly important enough for
that
. He just needed her out of the way until he’d tracked down the boy and snatched back the powerband.
    His plan was to then return Ms. Veronica Krockle to Geronimo Middle School (late at night and blindfolded, of course) and be donewith the whole maddening mess without
making
a mess (by, say, killing her).
    But, Damien now thought as he zoomed home and changed out of his disguise, this was all taking longer than he’d expected.
    Way
longer.
    And since (as we all know) desperate, diabolical times call for desperate, diabolical measures, he began plotting ways to adjust his plan.
    He had to figure out what to do next!
    And when, exactly, to rid himself of that nasty cat-scratch teacher.
    Apparently he wasn’t the only one thinking this, as he was accosted the moment he entered the kitchen.
    “Boss!” Pablo cried, his little ratlike face screwed into a pained squint. “That lady’s a beast!”
    “A monster!” Angelo agreed, through a mouthful of food.
    “Want some soup?” Tito asked from over by the stove, where he was stirring a steaming cauldron of rosemary potato chowder.
    And really, this summed up Damien’s dilemma. The Bandito Brothers were idiots