The Crims #2 Read online

  “Oi!” said one of the little tuxedo-wearing Crims. “Don’t talk to Ava like that!” He pulled something from his cummerbund that looked suspiciously like a garrote.

  While Elsa was wrestling her garrote-wielding son, Imogen waved her arms to get the other Crims’ attention. “Follow me!” she hissed.

  She led them into the solid-gold hallway, and they slipped and slid all the way to the reinforced-steel door.

  But it was locked.

  And as soon as Imogen touched it, an alarm sounded.

  “INTRUDERS DETECTED. HOUSE ON LOCKDOWN” boomed an automated message.

  And then came the awful sound of footsteps running in their direction.

  The stiff-looking butler was sprinting toward them, followed by quite a flexible-looking butler, followed by several butlers of medium-looking flexibility. “Stop them!” shouted the first butler, which wasn’t really necessary since the Crims were cornered by the door and weren’t moving at all.

  “If only Sam had his rats,” Imogen whispered.

  “I found some new ones,” Sam said, pulling one out of his pocket. “The Kruks spent all their money on making the house look good and forgot to hire a cleaner.”

  Sam set the rats on the floor and whispered: “Get them!”

  The rats, which had been treated extremely badly by the butlers—who had been trained in butlering school to stamp on rodents when they saw them—launched themselves at the men’s legs with their nasty, gnawing teeth.

  “Now, run!” shouted Imogen, and the Crims skidded back down the solid-gold hallway, turning into the first corridor they saw, which was carpeted, much to everyone’s relief.

  “Quick! In here!” hissed Nick (or Nate—Nick had lost his hat, so it was once again impossible to tell the difference between them). He opened a door, and the Crims squeezed inside (it was an extremely small room), just as the butlers came running around the corner.

  “Which way did they go?” asked the stiff-looking butler.

  “Down here, I think,” said the flexible butler, and their footsteps padded off down the corridor.

  “Hey, guys,” said a familiar-sounding voice from underneath Aunt Bets. “Would you mind not sitting on my head? I’ve got a lot of solid-steel steak knives to polish and not a lot of time to polish them in.”

  “Don Vadrolga!” cried Imogen, not just because she liked saying the names of fading Hollywood actors during times of stress, but because Don Vadrolga was there, sitting on the floor, looking a little squashed, since Aunt Bets was sitting on his legs. “We can get you out of here!” said Imogen. “Hopefully. Either that or we’ll get you killed along with us. . . .”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” Don Vadrolga said wearily. “I’m used to the Kruks now. They feed me . . . and they only beat me up when they’re really bored . . . and the butlers lend me their coloring books when I’m feeling stressed, so I’m pretty zen about life these days. Plus, the paparazzi can’t get in here, and no one makes Friday Night Chills jokes, so I have it pretty good.”

  Imogen had a sudden, overwhelming desire to sing “Feelin’ Alive.” Luckily, she was good at resisting overwhelming desires.

  “Oi. Don Vadrolga,” said Aunt Bets, turning on him, her pointy-teeth bared. “Is there another way out of this house? You have five seconds to answer before I blow you up with my portable explosive device.” She pulled it out of her handbag to show him. “It doubles as a powder compact.”

  “Since you asked so nicely, yes,” said Don Vadrolga. “Turn right out of here, and go up the first spiral staircase—the one that isn’t made of Grammy Awards. At the top you’ll find Elsa’s bedroom. Don’t worry about the bats. At the very back of the room, you’ll see something that kinda looks like a laundry hamper, but it’s actually an escape chute. It’ll take you out right in the middle of Blandington Park.”

  “Thank you,” said Big Nana. “You are very kind for a man with such a big dimple on his chin.”

  The Crims ran out of the room and up the spiral staircase that wasn’t made of Grammy Awards (it was made of the bones of everyone who Elsa had ever overheard calling her “crazy,” but luckily, the Crims didn’t know that). Sam took out his skeleton key and jimmied open the door to Elsa’s room.

  And everyone gasped.

  Because Elsa’s bedroom was the creepiest bedroom any of them had ever seen, and they lived with Uncle Clyde. You’d never have guessed it belonged to a professional psychopath with too many butlers and a penchant for inflicting pain on innocent people. The room looked as though a child lived there. A six-year-old child. The walls were pastel pink and covered with childish drawings showing lynchings and bear smugglings and poisonings, each of them signed “By Elsa Kruk” in a crayon scrawl. Dotted around the room were the remains of what had once been teddy bears, but were now horrifying Frankenstein’s monster–type nightmares—a doll with the head of a penguin and the legs of an octopus; a teddy bear with no limbs, dressed as a prison warden; and a tiny doll that looked exactly like Big Nana, with pins sticking out of it . . .

  “So that’s why my sciatica has been so bad recently,” murmured Big Nana.

  And then there were the bats. They were black, and they were asleep, and they were everywhere—hanging from the wardrobe door, and the ceiling, and the clown-shaped ceiling light. And unfortunately, the laundry hamper/escape chute.

  Uncle Clyde pulled at his unnecessarily red hair, frowning. He was coming up with one of his plans, Imogen realized. “Nick and Nate, if you walk on your hands toward the laundry hamper; and Freddie, if you sing ‘Tingle, Tingle, Little Scar’ to calm the bats down; and Imogen, if you sort of cartwheel through the air without touching the ground—”

  “Shut it, Clyde,” said Big Nana, and she picked her way across the floor, which was covered in broken toys and bat droppings and actual bats, to the laundry hamper. She opened it carefully, trying not to wake the bats.

  Imogen held her breath. . . .

  But there wasn’t an escape chute in the laundry hamper. There were a lot of dirty T-shirts and a note, made of letters cut out of a magazine:

  FOOLED YOU AGAIN! IDIOTS!

  Uncle Clyde used one of Big Nana’s favorite swear words. And unfortunately, it seemed that bats don’t like swear words. Because suddenly they weren’t asleep at all.

  They flew at the Crims, squeaking and batting their leathery wings, and getting tangled up in one another.

  “There’s a bat in my hair!” shrieked Josephine.

  “Ther’b a bat id my mouth!” spluttered Sam.

  “Be quiet, everyone!” hissed Imogen, running back to the door. “Let’s get out of here, before—”

  What was Imogen going to say? “Before Elsa gets here,” probably. But it was too late for that. Because just as she was about to run out of the room, Elsa appeared in the doorway in front of her.

  “Looking for me, were you?” she said in her insane, singsong voice. “Quiet, my pretties,” she said to the bats, who instantly settled down and fell back to sleep.

  Imogen couldn’t help but be impressed, even though she tried quite hard not to be.

  “I have you cornered now,” said Elsa. “And it’s time for DINNER!”

  “I’M NOT HUNGRY, THANKS,” said Uncle Knuckles. “I GET A BIT GASSY WHEN I’M NERVOUS.”

  “You’re not going to eat,” said Elsa. “You’re going to be eaten! Why do you think Don Vadrolga was in such a hurry to polish those steak knives? I think I’ll start with fillet of Imogen, followed by rump of Josephine. . . .”

  And then the door burst open again, and a lot of Kruks tumbled into the room—too many to count, which is a really bad number of Kruks.

  And they were angry. And they were all holding explosive-looking weapons—machine guns, flamethrowers, mortars. Even the smallest, tuxedo-wearing Kruk had a nasty-looking grenade.

  Imogen felt sick. They had been so close to getting away. But now they were definitely, definitely going to die. At least it would be quick, from the look
s of the weapons.

  But then she looked at the Kruks themselves—and she realized that they weren’t actually pointing their weapons at the Crims.

  They were pointing them at Elsa.

  “Enough is enough, Elsa,” said Stefan Kruk in his extremely German voice. “We love crime. We love feeding people to wild animals. But only if they really deserve it. And the Crims—they do not deserve it. Ava is right. We have let you order us around for far too long. And your orders are terrible. Even when you order food from the Chinese restaurant, you get it wrong. We have had enough.”

  They raised their weapons. And Elsa, for once, did the sensible thing: She turned and ran out of the room as fast as she could. The Kruks chased her down the spiral staircase, and the Crims leaned over the hallway banister to see what would happen.

  But then someone whispered “Hey! Imogen!” from farther down the hallway: Ava! She beckoned the Crims toward her. “Look what I’ve got!” she hissed, holding out a sack of dynamite. “I’ve brought a match this time! Want me to bust you out of here?”

  “Yes, please,” said Imogen.

  Ava laid the dynamite symmetrically around the reinforced-steel door.

  She lit the fuses.

  The Crims stood back and put their fingers in their ears.

  And then . . .

  KABOOM!

  The steel door blew apart into a thousand twisted pieces.

  The Crims were free!

  “Thank you!” Imogen called to Ava, as she ran through the door.

  “You’re welcome!” Ava called back.

  They ran out into the passageway and took the elevator to the escalator to the stairs, to the other flight of stairs. They were pretty out of breath by the time they stepped, coughing and spluttering, into the boring Blandington street.

  “GROUP HUG!” insisted Uncle Knuckles. He reached around all the Crims with his extremely long arms and pulled them into a suffocating embrace. He let them go moments before accidentally committing mass murder through the medium of extreme affection.

  Imogen found herself next to her father, who was blinking and polishing his glasses, looking a little lost, as though he didn’t really know what was going on.

  Imogen gave him an extra, nondangerous hug. “I missed you,” she said. “Once I’d realized you’d been usurped by a Kruk, I mean. Sorry about that.”

  “‘Usurped’ is a very good word,” said Al, smiling at Imogen proudly.

  “I know! I never thought I’d have a reason to say it out loud!”

  “Every cloud has a silver lining made out of dictionaries,” said Al Crim. And he hugged her again. “I knew you’d find me.”

  “Hey,” said a voice behind them. It was Ava, looking a little bit gunpowder-y and disheveled. “Just wanted to check you all got out okay.”

  “We did,” Imogen said, smiling at Ava—and feeling strangely shy. It occurred to her that she actually liked Ava, and she was pretty sure she was never going to see her again. “I can’t thank you enough,” said Imogen. “We’d be dead if it weren’t for you.”

  “No worries,” said Ava, waving her hand like it was nothing. “I would say buy me an ice cream sometime—or one of those frozen yogurts your friends are so into—but I don’t suppose we’ll see each other anytime soon. Which is actually . . . a shame.”

  “It is a shame,” said Imogen. “Would it be okay if I . . . hugged you?”

  Ava looked around. “Quickly, before any of my family see.”

  And for the first and probably the last time in history, a Crim hugged a Kruk, and not just in an I’m-about-to-get-you-into-a-headlock-and-kill-you sort of way.

  “Now get out of here!” said Ava, and she disappeared back inside the house, where a serious Kruk family argument was clearly still taking place. (Imogen could hear gunshots and smashing glass and someone shouting “Not the sharks!”)

  Imogen clapped her hands because the Crims had started to fight among themselves too—Sam had stolen some piranhas and was trying to shove them down the twins’ pants. “Right, everyone,” she said. “Let’s run for it!”

  And together, screaming and yelping and throwing deadly fish at one another, the Crims ran off into the sunset. Not that you could see the sunset, because the air pollution got in the way.

  That’s what you get when you live in Blandington.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A MONTH LATER, the Crims were thriving again—if by “thriving” you mean “hurting one another with hammers on a regular basis and occasionally stealing one anothers’ underpants.” Now that the Kruks weren’t sabotaging every crime they tried to commit, and the Masked Banana Bandit had mysteriously stopped stealing bananas, they were back on top of the most wanted list. Isabella had committed her first armed robbery (she used her arms to steal milk cartons from the other kids at the nursery); Henry had burned down the skate park; and Sam had set fire to Henry’s matches and lighters and amateur tattooing equipment in revenge for him burning down the skate park. Al Crim had made Josephine the happiest woman in the world by buying her an extremely expensive diamond brooch and pretending he’d stolen it. Which, when you think about it, is sort of like fraud. Everything, in other words, was back to normal.

  Delia committed Imogen’s favorite crime of all: She stole the bouncy castle from Isabella’s third birthday party and used it to replace the Boeing 747 on top of the house. “MUCH MORE FESTIVE,” said Uncle Knuckles, who loved bouncing around in his new bedroom. He had to confiscate Aunt Bets’s needles, though—and her sharpened colostomy bag, her pointy false teeth, and her sword collection—because she kept puncturing the walls, and he was getting sick of patching and reinflating the castle every morning.

  “Ha!” Uncle Clyde had said in delight, when he went to the supermarket and found it fully stocked with bananas. “Now that we’re back in top form, no one can compete with us! We’ve scared that stupid bandit out of Blandington. I wonder who he was. . . .”

  Typical Uncle Clyde, Imogen thought, assuming that a successful criminal must be a man, when all the best Crims and Kruks are women. But she never gave away the Masked Banana Bandit’s true identity.

  Imogen was back at Blandington Secondary School, where, without Ava to compete with, she had easily retaken her position as queen bee. Her friends seemed to be extremely relieved that Ava had left.

  “She was horrible,” admitted Penelope.

  “And quite scary,” said Willa.

  “And not nearly as fun as you,” said Hannah.

  “I haven’t been much fun either since I came back,” Imogen said. “I’m sorry I was so awful. I had some . . . problems at home.”

  Her friends forgave her—of course they did. After all, now that Crim House had a bouncy castle, it was the most fun to have sleepovers in. And Imogen resolved to be kinder to them in the future. Kindness, she was beginning to realize, was a very effective means of control.

  The only trouble was, school was a little bit boring with no one to challenge her . . . so she persuaded Delia to join her as co-chair of the charity drive.

  “I don’t want anyone to actually think I, like, care about anything, though,” Delia said. They were holding their first co-chair meeting late one evening in the living room of Crim House.

  “What’s wrong with caring?” Imogen said. “Kitty Penguin is always campaigning to save seabirds. . . .”

  “Hmm,” said Delia, which Imogen took to mean, “Very good point, Imogen. I am convinced by your excellent argument.”

  Imogen opened up her charity drive notebook. “We need to think of an autumn fund-raiser.”

  “You need to think of an autumn fund-raiser,” Delia said, looking out the window to the front yard, where Henry was teaching Isabella to eat fire.

  “We could always have a bake sale,” Imogen said.

  “Ugh, no,” said Delia. “Pathetic. If kids are going to pay to do something, it has to be something they want to do but aren’t allowed to—like get tattoos.”

  Imogen tapp
ed her pen on her chin thoughtfully. “That actually isn’t a terrible idea,” she said. “We could get some temporary tattoos—”

  “Temporary tattoos?” Delia asked, staring at Imogen as though she’d lost her mind, which she hadn’t, although she’d come pretty close to it in the past few weeks. “What’s the point of that? I’ve already got a real one.”

  She pulled up her shirt to reveal a curly black C on her lower back.

  “Wow,” said Imogen. “I’m impressed with your family loyalty.”

  Delia frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “The C. It’s for ‘Crim,’ right?”

  “No!” said Delia, tucking her shirt back into her skirt. “It’s for ‘cucumbers.’ I hate them. And reminding yourself of the things you hate keeps you sharp. Am I right?”

  Imogen did not think she was right.

  “Anyway,” continued Delia, “I’ll go and talk to the guy who runs the tattoo parlor in town. He was saying the other day that everyone in Blandington gets the same tattoo—‘Mum’ on their upper arms. I bet he’d love a bit more variety.”

  Imogen decided it was time to change the subject. “I’m really glad you’re working on this with me,” she said. “You’re so full of . . . ideas.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Delia, looking at the floor. “I had quite a lot of time to think while I was in that dungeon.”

  “It was weird without you,” Imogen said. “And I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you sooner. About the whole Kruks thing.”

  “Seriously,” Delia said, grinning at her. “I know you’re not as smart as me, but that was really stupid.”

  Imogen couldn’t let that slide. “I’m the one who figured out how to get you all free,” she pointed out.

  “Only after the rest of us basically wrote ‘IT’S THE KRUKS’ on the living room wall.”

  “Henry actually did write that. Above the mantelpiece, in indelible marker. Except he spelled ‘it’s’ with a Z. But most of his graffiti makes no sense at all, so can you blame me for ignoring it?”