Sinister Substitute Read Online Free PDF

and annoying and ate him out of house and home, and yet the aroma in the kitchen made him forget all that.
    It was nose-wigglingly wonderful!
    In no time, the despicably wicked Damien Black was on olfactory overload, drooling like a basset hound.
    Damien, you see, did not cook.
    He barely took time to eat.
    He couldn’t be bothered with things like nutrition and hydration and hunger pains.
    He had work to do!
    Banks to heist!
    People to abduct!
    And yet the aroma in his kitchen made his knees turn to jelly.
    “She threw her breakfast at me!” Pablo complained.
    “And her lunch at me!” Angelo added (although through the food in his mouth it sounded more like “Ah wunhhh ah eeee!”).
    Tito simply delivered a bowl of soup to Damien and asked, “Toast?” as Damien jelly-kneed into a chair.

    Damien nodded, then held his long, pointy nose over the steaming bowl, his eyes drifting closed as he inhaled.
    “You okay, boss?” Pablo asked (recognizing that there was something rather odd about his idol’s behavior).
    Damien snapped to. “No, you fool, I’m not!” He grabbed his spoon and jabbed it in Pablo’s direction. “I had the wrong kid! How could I have followed the wrong kid? Four of those brats told me he owned a gecko, and I could tell he was hiding something when I asked him. But when I followed him, he
couldn’t
have had the—”
    It was at this point that Damien almost slipped. You see, the Bandito Brothers did not know exactly what it was that the boy and Sticky had that Damien wanted so badly. They only knew that Damien wanted whatever it was very,
very
badly.
    So immediately Pablo’s and Angelo’s ears perked.
    Their eyes sharpened.
    Their breath caught.
    They were finally going to find out what this was all about!
    (Tito, meanwhile, buttered the toast.)
    But Damien (much to Angelo and Pablo’s dismay) caught himself in the nick of time. “—he didn’t have my
stuff,”
he said, then dug into his bowl of chowder.
    Pablo and Angelo drooped, then watched Damien eat, wondering what his brilliant brain was plotting as he brooded in silence over his soup.
    Damien was, indeed, plotting, but his situation with the boy had him at a great disadvantage. Children, you see, all looked alike to him. (That is, unless one had radically red hair or a brilliantly blond buzz cut. But even then, it was tough.) To Damien Black, distinguishing one child from another was like reading Chinese characters. Thevertical and horizontal lines of their faces all ran together in his mind. He had to really concentrate to distinguish one character from the other. And then, when several of them were thrown together, he got confused. They all just looked too similar.
    Too annoyingly, confoundingly similar.
    However, as he reached the bottom of his chowder, Damien (feeling now fortified and surprisingly refreshed) had the spark of a new idea.
    And with it came the determination to try again.
    He had to!
    After all, he told himself, he now knew at least one thing more than he’d known the day before:
    The boy was definitely
not
named Dave Sanchez.

Chapter 8
SILLY-CIRCUITING
    Saving his sarcastic, fierce-faced teacher did not seem to Dave to be a good use of his superpowers.
    (Or, in this case, superpow
er
.)
    After all, superpowers should be used to fight evil, not save it, right? And according to Dave (and nearly every student at Geronimo Middle School), Ms. Veronica Krockle was most definitely evil.
    So after considering Sticky’s position on saving Ms. Krockle, Dave had only one thing to say to his sticky-toed friend:
    “No way.”
    “Ah,
hombre,”
Sticky said with a shake of his head. “Get your head out of mud pie.”
    “My head’s not in mud pie,” Dave snapped. “Ms. Krockle’s a beast!”
    “Don’t I know,” Sticky said with a snort.
    “So why would I want to save her?”
    Sticky studied the tips of his little gecko fingernails. “To save yourself,
señor.”
    “To save my—?” But then Dave understood.