Spy to the Rescue Read Free Page A

“This midget just made you pee your big-boy pants.” Everybody laughed. Happy memories.)
    â€œBrendan Chew is like Tinker Bell,” I tell Joanna.“He needs the love and applause of a gullible audience. Setting me up for cheerleader-choreography theft is way too anonymous and complicated for someone like him.”
    â€œThat’s exactly why it might be him,” she says. “You wouldn’t expect it.” Then she yells, “I know, I’m coming! I said I’m coming! I’ll call you later, Bridget.” And the phone goes dead.
    Even though I still talk to Joanna Conquest on my way to and from school, as I have every day for what feels like the past fifty years, she doesn’t live in Reindeer Crescent anymore. Four months ago, her grandmother, the woman she affectionately—as affectionately as Joanna is capable of—refers to as Big Log took a tumble on her way downstairs. She tripped, it turns out, on a discarded yogurt carton. A carton emblazoned with the words Mine. Don’t touch! in Joanna’s scrawl. Old bones take a while to heal and Big Log’s recuperation at Reindeer Crescent Memorial Hospital turned out to be such a lengthy process that a question mark started to form over Joanna’s future. She was too young to be left alone in a home filled with discarded yogurt cartons. She had no relatives in the state of California and no one to look after her.
    I overheard my mom and dad having a late-night conversation about the possibility of taking her in. It was a lot like the time Dad drove over a hedgehog. They werestill talking halfheartedly about bringing the wounded critter to the nearest vet when they were twenty miles away from the squished prickly mess.
    The endlessly repeated joke around school was that Big Log had thrown herself downstairs rather than spend any more time around Joanna. Which was harsh but, like the meanest jokes, had the ring of truth. Joanna could be tough to take. She thought the worst of everybody, she was endlessly judgmental, and she was incapable of being happy about another person’s good fortune. But when the cousins in Brooklyn she’d never mentioned saved her from getting sucked into the child services system and possibly dumped onto an unsuspecting foster family, I was surprised, pleased for her, and worried for me. I hadn’t exactly told her everything about Carter Strike, Section 23, and my double life. But she’d been around for some of it. I could talk to Joanna the way I couldn’t talk to anyone other than Carter Strike, and since he’d adopted the be-normal-stay-normal lifestyle, I could barely talk to him the way I talked to her.
    So, yes, I was feeling a little abandoned when she packed up and moved three thousand miles away to New York. Joanna called me every day to keep me informed about her new home: “There’s a burned-out shell of a car outfront and a dead dog living inside it. That’s the part they like to show visitors.” She was equally enthusiastic about her new family: “Barely civilized. Like Planet of the Apes if the monkeys had stayed stupid.” Those calls almost made up for not having her around. But then, a good spy is at her best when she’s on her own with no excess baggage and no one else’s feelings to consider or worry about.
    By the time I get home, I have zero energy to construct credible theories as to the culprit behind my cheernapping. I throw my backpack across the hallway and charge into the kitchen. I need a grilled cheese sandwich to refuel my throbbing, pulsing brain-thoughts. I wrench open the fridge door. And I feel an impact. There’s something on the other side of the door. Something solid. I hear a faint mewl, like a cat. A cat! Has Boots followed me home? I slowly, fearfully close the fridge. I see a slight, waifish girl with a hand pressed to her forehead. Where I hit her with the door.
    â€œOh my God!” I gasp.