Thumb and the Bad Guys Read Free Page A

always borrowing
Annie Pritchard’s boat because his own broke down so often. He only weighed about
130 pounds, most of it skin that seemed to hang from his arms and legs and belly and
even his ears.
    â€œWhy?” asked Susan.
    â€œHe spits,” I said.
    Susan’s eyes narrowed. She knew I was right. Kirk McKenna was always
spitting. During Thursday night movies he didn’t even sit in the stands. He stood
beside the gym door and kept turning his head so he could spit outside.
    No plants grew close to that door.
    When Kirk McKenna walked along the cedar sidewalk that ran in front of
all the houses in our village, he didn’t turn his head and spit onto the sand.
Instead, he spat three feet in front of him.
    It rains a lot in New Auckland, and the cedar sidewalk was usually wet
from the rain or fog or just the damp ocean air. But even though the sidewalk was
almost always wet, you could still see a stain every place Kirk McKenna’s spit had
landed. Each drop looked like a tiny oil slick. Dad figured that every inch of that
sidewalk would eventually be soaked with Kirk McKenna’s spit.
    â€œSo we’re waiting to see if Mr. McKenna is a bad guy because he
spits?”
    â€œA lot. He spits a lot. And if Kirk McKenna cared about people then
he’d at least turn his head and spit on the sand.”
    â€œGood point.”
    People started turning off their lights. We saw Dad and Mayor Semanov
and Susan’s dad step out of her house. They all shook hands and said goodnight.
    I was a little nervous, wondering if Dad might check on me before he
went to bed. He didn’t, though. A few minutes after he got home, the lights in our
house went out, too.
    I was used to seeing lots of stars but was surprised to see that the
number of stars seemed to double when the village was dark. The mountains around us
were visible mostly because they weren’t visible at all. They were black shapes
where no stars could be seen.
    â€œNext time let’s bring a blanket,” I said.
    â€œYou think there’s going to be a next time?”
    â€œAren’t you having fun?”
    â€œWell, I can only say that sitting here in the dark when I could be
sleeping is making me wonder why staking out the village seemed like such a good way
to fight boredom, especially when – ”
    â€œShh,” I said.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI see a shadow moving between the houses. It’s coming this way.”
    Susan and I both ducked lower so we couldn’t be seen. I heard the
gentle lap of waves slapping the beach and the sound of boat hulls nudging against
the dock. I also heard the sound of a person trudging through the sand, heading
right toward us.
    Susan heard it, too. She grabbed my hand and held it tightly. The
person stopped right beside the fire truck.
    And then I heard a sound I recognized because I had heard it so many
times before.
    Somebody, leaning against the fire truck and looking back at the
village, spat.

    3
A SECRET HIDING PLACE
    SUSAN AND I HUDDLED
TOGETHER and listened. She wasn’t bored any more. She was scared.
    Kirk McKenna hummed a tuneless song while he tapped his fingers on the
fire truck. When the song was finished, he spat one last time before walking behind
the school.
    We knew where he was heading. Only one trail left the village. It
sneaked through boulders behind the school and then slowly climbed Linda Evers
Mountain. Five minutes up the trail there was a large pond on a small plateau.
    The pond was created by a clear mountain stream that flowed into it and
then back out, before cascading into the ocean not far from our village. The pond
was about the size of a little league baseball diamond, and it was very deep and
very clean. It was one of the main reasons we had a village. We piped fresh water
from it down to our houses.
    We sent water samples out with Max the pilot about once a month. We’d
never had any problems with