The Crims #2 Page 14

  She checked her watch—it was just past midday. Not too late, then. She picked up the photo of Ava and pinned it to the middle of the plan. She stood back and looked at it.

  “Oh Imogen, my little overflowing recycling bin, it’s perfect!”

  “Aah!” yelped Imogen. She hadn’t heard Big Nana come in.

  “Now, now,” said Big Nana, wagging her finger. “Never be surprised by a relative, unless it’s your fiftieth birthday and they’re throwing you a party.” She turned back to the plan. “But I’ll let you off this time. You were paying attention to your crime homework! Let’s see: ‘Step one: Put on believable disguises, using real human-hair wigs, because the Kruks can spot a synthetic wig at a hundred paces.’ Couldn’t have put it better myself. ‘Step two: Play Wagner to pacify the guards.’ Inspired. ‘Step three: Take a dog with you, because the Kruks really like dogs.’ Yes, yes, and yes again.” Big Nana leaned over and gave her shoulders a squeeze. “I knew you could do it,” she said. “I knew you were the one who would follow in my footsteps. It’s hard sometimes, because my footsteps are very large and strange, and I often take quite roundabout routes—but you did it. Thank you.”

  Imogen felt the warm glow you only get from praise or sitting too long in a room full of radioactive waste. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for teaching me everything I know. Apart from the math stuff—I learned all that at Lilyworth.”

  “Numbers,” said Big Nana, pulling a face. “Yuck.”

  A few minutes later, Big Nana was dressed in her finest fake Chanel dress, adjusting her curly blond wig (made from the hair of ex–beauty-pageant contestants). Imogen was out front with Barney, putting the finishing touches to the NICELADY license plate she’d made—Big Nana’s welding homework had come in handy much sooner than she’d thought it would. She gave it one last polish and then screwed it over the real license plate on a black sedan she’d rented using one of Isabella’s stolen credit cards. She looked up and did a double take when she saw Big Nana, who looked remarkably like the well-groomed but bad-tempered Kruk she’d seen at school with Ava.

  “Have you got the sack?” Imogen asked.

  “Of course,” said Big Nana, pulling it out of her handbag like a criminal Mary Poppins. “I went for the extra-strong ones—the ones with the ad where they put the grizzly bear inside.”

  “That poor bear,” said Imogen. “I’d be grizzly too if I was shoved into a sack.”

  Barney barked, as if to say, Me too.

  They climbed into the car, and Barney bounded in after them. He couldn’t help bounding—he was that sort of dog.

  “Lie down in the back,” Imogen said to him. “Your job is to watch out and alert us to danger. Okay?”

  Barney barked happily.

  “What am I doing?” Imogen asked herself, shaking her head. Which was a good question—Barney wouldn’t have known danger if it came up and introduced itself really politely, wearing a “Hi. My Name is Danger” name tag. She threw a blanket over his head, and he lay down, thumping his tail on the back seat. “Right,” she said. “Let’s go, Big Nana. Next stop: Blandington Secondary School.”

  Big Nana checked her mirror and signaled before pulling out of the driveway. “Is this really how ordinary people drive?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Imogen.

  “But how do they get away from the police cars?”

  “You’re much less likely to get chased by police cars when you’re not breaking the speed limit,” Imogen pointed out. “It’s actually quite relaxing.” She leaned over to the dashboard and turned the radio dial to Naff Classics. A string quartet was playing Pachelbel’s Canon.

  “What is this noise?” demanded Big Nana.

  “It’s classical music, Big Nana,” said Imogen. “To help us focus.”

  “This is no fun,” said Big Nana, reaching over to turn the radio off. “We’re about to win our family back and stick it to the world’s most powerful crime family. You know what this calls for?”

  Imogen had a horrible feeling that she did. “Please, no . . . ,” she muttered.

  Big Nana held up her phone and shouted “Kitty Penguin!” into it. “Delia got me into her,” she explained to Imogen. “She’s very talented, considering she can’t sing in tune.”

  Kitty Penguin started blaring out from the tinny cell phone speakers, “singing” (screeching) one of her “tunes” (unbearable sequences of unpleasant noises).

  Neither of them said anything for a minute. Where’s Delia now? Imogen wondered. She would have loved to be part of this. And the rest of my family? Imogen hated to think of what they were going through—but she shook herself. They’re all fine. They’re just hanging out in a cozy dungeon somewhere, waiting for us to come and get them, which we are doing, right now.

  Big Nana closed her eyes—which was a bit worrying, driving-wise—and started singing along to “Get Fierce,” Kitty Penguin’s latest number one.

  “‘I don’t get fierce. I stay fierce,’” sang Big Nana. “‘I’ve got sharp nails, and I could pierce/ Balloons with them if I wanted to, but I don’t.’”

  “Such beautiful lyrics,” said Imogen.

  “They really are,” said Big Nana, who didn’t get irony. “Come on! Join in!”

  Reluctantly, Imogen cleared her throat, and started howling along with the music.

  “We’ll kill you if we like.

  Or we might just steal your bike.

  Or change our names to Mike.

  We do what we want, cuz we’re fierce!”

  Big Nana turned and smiled at her, the wind blowing her fake hair away from her face. “See? Don’t you feel better?”

  And Imogen realized that she did. She had come up with a brilliant plan, and she was setting out with Big Nana to pull it off.

  They were finally fighting back.

  There was a huge line of traffic outside the school. Big Nana honked her horn.

  “What are all these people doing here?” she asked.

  “Picking their kids up.”

  “People really do that?” Big Nana shook her head, baffled.

  It was getting hot in the car, and neither of them had had breakfast—they’d eaten the last of the chicken nuggets the night before. Big Nana was getting increasingly irritated, particularly with the slower kids. “Why are they looking both ways before they cross the road?” she asked.

  “So that they don’t get hit by a car.”

  Big Nana tutted. “Getting hit by a car builds character.”

  They pulled up next to an ice cream truck—a familiar one. Imogen’s cousins had hijacked it the day she’d come home from Lilyworth and given her a very uncomfortable ride back to Crim House. She felt a pang of nostalgia as she remembered Delia swerving into oncoming traffic, and Henry trying to graffiti his initials on her knuckles, and Isabella beating her up with her tiny fists. . . .

  Big Nana’s stomach growled. It was the least polite of all of her internal organs. She dug some coins out from the side of the car’s seat and handed them to Imogen. “Jump out and get us an ice cream.”

  “Really?” said Imogen. “Now?”

  “A little ice cream never hurt a kidnapping,” she said. “A lot of ice cream, on the other hand, can play havoc with your interrogation technique.”

  Imogen shrugged. She was done doubting Big Nana: She was, it turned out, always right. She opened the car door, climbed out, and strolled up to the truck’s window.

  “Yep?” said the bored-looking man in the ice cream truck.

  “Two ice creams, please. With flakes,” said Imogen.

  The ice cream man looked in his freezer. “I’m out,” he said. “Let me go and check in the back.”

  Imogen glanced back at the traffic. There were still several cars ahead of Big Nana. She still had time.

  But that’s when the ice cream truck’s door opened and a hand reached out, grabbed Imogen, pulled her inside, and shoved her into a sack.

  The first thing Imogen thought was: Ooh, nice
burlap. This is like a professional sack.

  The second thing she thought was: Help!

  Imogen was shaken out onto a dusty floor, covered with curled wood shavings and a dark stain that might have been blood or might have been hot chocolate.

  The room she was in felt familiar for some reason. The whole place smelled of freshly sawn wood. The lights were dim, but she could make out benches and saws and drills and huge planers, and there were planks of wood stacked up against each of the walls. I’m in the school woodshop, she realized. She’d only been in here once, to try to bribe the Design Technology teacher into donating to the charity drive by letting him know that she knew his first name: Hilary.

  She heard a familiar laugh. Maniacal yet tinkling; irritating yet likable . . .

  Could it be?

  Yes, unfortunately, it could.

  “Hello, Imogen,” said Ava. She was holding a knife—a really expensive-looking, diamond-studded, pink one. Dangerous, yet the sort of thing a teenage girl might ask for for Christmas. She turned to the large, unfriendly looking men who had shaken Imogen out onto the floor and said, “You can leave us now. We have a lot of catching up to do. Don’t we?”

  Why is Ava so much better at everything than I am?? Imogen fumed as the massive men left the room. I planned to kidnap her, and she kidnapped me!! This is unacceptable! I will not let her win!

  Imogen stumbled to her feet. “You’re a Kruk,” she spat at Ava.

  “Yes, I am,” said Ava, twirling her knife.

  Imogen straightened her back. Never let them know you’re scared. “You’ve been after me this whole time.”

  “Right again,” said Ava.

  “You came to Blandington Secondary School so you could kill me.”

  “Aww,” Ava said patronizingly. “You have been doing your homework! Except it’s not really me who wants you dead. This is all my mom’s idea.” She shook her head. “Parents—am I right?”

  Her mom must be the blond woman who was driving the NICELADY car, thought Imogen. She hadn’t recognized her from the pictures of the Kruks she’d found, either—but then the blond hair was probably a disguise. Was Ava’s mother Ida, the musical Kruk who specialized in throttling her victims with ukulele strings? Or Mona, the amateur dentist with a taste for hand drills? Or the craziest, deadliest Kruk of all—Elsa?

  Ava pointed the knife at Imogen’s throat and said, “Do me a favor, would you? Climb up on that workbench over there.”

  Imogen looked at the workbench. It was attached to a huge circular saw, and there was a plank of wood lying on top of it. A plank as long as Imogen’s body. “I’d rather not, if you don’t mind,” she said in her sweetest voice.

  “Oh, but I do mind,” said Ava. “I have to kill you before dinner, or I’ll be grounded. And I can’t be grounded because it’s the charity auction next week, and you dropped out of it, so it’s on me to organize the whole thing, so really, this is all your fault.” She stepped toward Imogen. The knife looked nastily sharp.

  Come on Imogen. Think. But the only thing in Imogen’s head was “Get Fierce,” the lyrics spinning round and round in a terrible, screechy loop. I don’t get fierce. I stay fierce. . . . Great, she thought as she clambered up onto the workbench. The soundtrack to my death is going to be the world’s worst pop star rhyming “fierce” with “ears.”

  “There,” said Ava, tying Imogen’s arms and legs to the workbench. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” She leaned over to press the saw’s on button—but then she paused.

  “Ready?”

  Imogen didn’t say anything. Of course she wasn’t ready. She had to come up with a plan. But apart from Kitty Penguin, her mind was horribly empty, like the kitchen fridge had been that morning.

  And then she remembered something—something that would hopefully make her imminent death slightly less imminent. . . . Please let it work, she thought to herself.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  Ava raised her eyebrows. “Okay. You asked for it!” she said, and flicked the switch.

  The saw started to spin, blade flashing, and cut through the plank, slowly moving toward Imogen. The wood seemed to scream, and who could blame it? It was being cut in half by a teenage maniac.

  The saw was slowly approaching Imogen’s feet, spitting sawdust into her face. But Imogen wasn’t worried. Okay, she was a bit worried—anyone would be, with a screaming saw approaching their feet. But she knew it would never reach them because the saw had a safety cutoff. When she’d surprised Mr. Hilary Jenkins in the woodshop all those weeks ago, he’d been in the middle of chopping the worst student projects up into little pieces so he could throw them on a fire and forget that they had ever existed. He’d jumped when Imogen walked into the room, and his hand had slipped . . . But instead of cutting his fingers off, the saw had juddered to a sudden halt. “If the saw gets too close to your hand, it stops automatically,” he’d explained. “Which you’d know if you took woodshop. Why don’t you, by the way? Hammering is very cathartic.”

  And then she’d blackmailed him into handing over a month’s wages, and he’d seemed quite happy about her not taking woodshop after that.

  But Imogen’s feeling of relief only lasted for approximately twenty seconds. Because that’s how long it took for Ava to open a box of dynamite.

  Humming in tune with the screaming saw, which was still working its way toward Imogen, Ava moved around the workbench, arranging dynamite around Imogen’s body symmetrically; the same way she’d arranged the brownies on plate in the charity committee meeting. But then Imogen spotted something in Ava’s pocket. A book of matches! If she could just somehow reach them . . . If only her hands weren’t tied to the bench . . .

  And then Ava brushed right past the bench—and as she did so, Imogen managed to reach out with her fingers and snatch the book of matches just in time. She pushed them up her sleeve before Ava could notice, and her heart thumped with relief. I’ve saved myself, she thought. I’m not going to die. Just yet.

  Ava adjusted the angle of one of the sticks of dynamite and stood back to admire her work. And then she cleared her throat.

  Oh no, Imogen thought. She’s not going to do an evil monologue, is she?

  In fact, that’s exactly what Ava was going to do.

  “Who would have thought it would end like this?” started Ava.

  It was all Imogen could do not to roll her eyes. “Talk about a cliché introduction . . .”

  Ava glared at Imogen and then carried on monologuing. “It’s a shame, really. I’m killing you without an audience. Without anyone knowing what I can do with a little bit of determination, some dynamite, and a large collection of high-quality woodworking tools. But what does that matter? What matters is that you’ll end up dead. Because the Kruks are far superior to your pathetic little family, and always will be! Mwahahahahahahaha!”

  Imogen had to admit Ava’s maniacal laugh was, as the kids at school said, all extra. But whatever—she was not going to sit here silently and let Ava have the last word. She cleared her throat and launched into her own evil monologue.

  “I always knew you were a Kruk,” Imogen muttered. “I followed you home and saw you there—with your overdressed little cousins and your uncle Stefan.”

  Ava gasped.

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Imogen. “You say you’re so superior—and yet you forgot to close the blinds when you were bringing prisoners into the house. Rookie mistake, Ava. Rookie mistake.”

  Ava gave a nasty little laugh. “I heard a lot about you before I got to Blandington,” she said. “I heard you were smarter than the other Crims, and popular, and good at physics. But you’re pathetic. It took me about five minutes to take your spot as queen bee. Plus, I got an A on that string theory test and you only got a B+.”

  “That’s because the questions were worded confusingly! And I’d been up all night knitting a bulletproof vest!”

  “Yeah? Well, you should have made a sawproof vest.”

  “Sh
ould I, Ava? Should I?”

  The saw was at Imogen’s leg—and then, all of a sudden, it cut off, shuddering to halt.

  Imogen cackled. Nice dramatic timing. She felt pretty smug for a person who was maybe about to be blown to death by eighty evenly spaced sticks of dynamite.

  Ava let out a cry of frustration. “NOOOOO!” she wailed. “STUPID SAW! HOW AM I GOING TO KILL YOU NOW?”

  “Well . . . you do have the dynamite.”

  “Oh yeah. Good point,” said Ava, reaching into her pocket to get the matches. “NOOOO!” she groaned again when she found it empty. “I FORGOT THE MATCHES! Why is this SO HARD?” She flopped down onto the floor.

  “You also have that knife,” Imogen observed.

  “But I don’t really want to hack you to death,” whined Ava. “It’ll get really messy, and this T-shirt is new.”

  “It’s a good color on you,” said Imogen.

  “Thanks!” Ava said brightly. “I got it on sale.” And then she pouted again. “My mom told me I had to brutally murder you. But I think it’s stupid.”

  “She used the word ‘brutally’?” Imogen said.

  Ava nodded. “She used some other words, too— ‘sadistically,’ ‘inventively,’ ‘slowly’—but I thought ‘brutally’ kind of covered it. Why can’t our family just TALK to your family? Why do they have to go all scorched-earth? They’re so embarrassing!”

  “Tell me about it,” said Imogen. “Imagine your family, with all the malevolence and fondness for sharp objects, but with none of the talent. That’s the Crims.”

  Ava hopped up onto the workbench next to Imogen. “Don’t be so hard on yourselves,” she said. “You do have talent. I didn’t really mean what I said just now.”