Free Amos Gets Famous by Gary Paulsen Page B

up. He looked at both sides and shook his head. “Weird.”
    “What?”
    “It has a date, an address, the word
clock
, and—” He stopped.
    “And what?” said Amos.
    “What did you say the name on the note the police found was?”
    “Mr. Zipzoo.”
    “That’s on here too,” Dunc said.
    Amos stared at him. “Do you think—”
    “I don’t know. Could be. Think we should check it out?”
    Amos leaned back in his chair and shook his head. He looked across the table as if Dunc had some kind of skin disease. “Whenever we check something out, something bad happens.”
    “That’s not true.”
    “Sure it is. Either parrots swear at me, or ghosts scare me so bad I pee my pants, or dogs blow snot all over me. We have bad luck.”
    “You have bad luck.”
    “Same difference.” He turned the page in the book so he wouldn’t have to look at the roundworm.
    “You’ll do fine this time,” Dunc said.
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because you’ve had bad luck all your life. How long do you think a streak like that can last?” Dunc looked back down at the note. “I wonder what those numbers in the paper meant.”
    “What were they, again?” Amos asked.
    “Fifteen, four, twenty, and there’s a P at the end.”
    “I don’t know.” A thoughtful look crawledlike a bug across Amos’s face. “Maybe Mr. Zipzoo is an alien, and he’s collecting knick-knacks from Earth for a museum on his home planet. Maybe the numbers are spatial coordinates, like they use on TV. Spatial coordinates always sound like that.”
    Dunc ignored him. “I bet this is a message from Mr. Zipzoo to one of the burglars that works for him. There’s one thing I don’t understand—why would he leave messages in library books? Anybody could find them.”
    “No way. How many people are strange enough to look in a book about parasitic nematodes?”
    “I did.”
    Amos nodded. “My point exactly. I bet that book has been sitting on the shelf for years without ever being opened. When was the last time someone checked it out?”
    Dunc flipped to the back cover. “Nineteen fifty-three.”
    “See what I mean? What safer place could there be to hide a note?”
    “Except now we found it. We know the place, the date, and what they’re going to steal,” said Dunc.
    “Maybe we should go to the police.”
    Dunc shook his head. “Don’t you remember the appliance smugglers?”
    “Oh, yeah. I guess we can’t go to the police.” Dunc and Amos had once found an underground tunnel that some appliance thieves were using for storage. It was filled with gunpowder barrels from the Civil War. One of the thieves had lit a match and taken out most of that side of town. The police were still a little touchy about it.
    “This address looks familiar,” Dunc said. “Do you know it?” He handed the paper to Amos.
    Amos read it. His head popped up.
    “What?” Dunc asked.
    “That,” Amos almost shouted, “is Melissa’s address!”

.3
    “Think about it, Dunc. We can be heroes!”
    Dunc shook his head. “I don’t want to be a hero.”
    “Not just a hero,” Amos said. “I’ll be
a hero
. I’ll rush into Melissa’s house and save her from some big dastardly brute. She’ll love me forever.”
    “Speaking of big dastardly brutes, I saw in the paper that her brother Rocko is home from college. What happens if he catches us in his house?”
    “Big deal.”
    “Maybe you forgot. He plays the offensive line for one of those Big Ten football teams.”
    “What position?”
    “I didn’t say he plays a position. I said he plays the line. The whole line.”
    “So? If we catch this burglar and save Melissa and her family, Rocko will be my friend for life. A guy like that is good to have for a friend.”
    Dunc slid the paper back into the book and put it on the shelf. He turned and studied his friend and thought,
Right there is the problem. He is my friend. My best friend for life. And here is a chance for him to realize his dream
. He sighed.