Dottie was free, but my situation had not improved. Rausch was furious. Holding me with one arm wrapped painfully around my waist, he grabbed the chair Dottie had been sitting in and dragged it over by the metal shelves, where it wasn’t visible from the street. He slammed me into the chair.
“Do. Not. Move,” he said. He backed away, keeping me in sight, and picked up the REMEMBER machine and the Rauschinator.
“Dottie will bring the police,” I said hopefully.
Rausch laughed. “I think not. My niece is a good girl. She wouldn’t want to get her parents in trouble.”
“She just stole your ATV and crashed it through a closed garage door,” I pointed out.
“True.” A shadow of worry crossed his face, but he shrugged it off. “In any case, very soon now you will have nothing to tell. Hold still.” He lowered the Rauschinator onto my head. I tried to kick him you-know-where, but he turned his hip and deflected my foot. Then he slapped me, hard, right across the face.
I don’t know if you have ever been slapped hard in the face by a grown man, but if you ever are, you will find that it’s not like the movies when people slap each other all the time and they’re just, like, ouch. A real slap is much worse. My head snapped back, my ears were ringing, and everything went dim for a second. But what happened next was kind of cool.
My eyes regained focus, and I saw that Rausch’s head had been replaced by a large fur ball. Furthermore, a large, puffed-up tail seemed to be jutting from the place where he usually kept his goatee, and the air was vibrating with a horrific high-pitched howling.
The howling wasn’t me. It was the normally sedate Mr. Peebles, who had attached himself to Rausch’s face. Rausch was howling too. I don’t know which of them was louder. I’m sure it would have been Rausch if he hadn’t been trying to scream through Mr. Peebles’s furry body.
Mr. Peebles was hard at work, attempting to detach Rausch’s ears with his unsheathed claws while biting the top of his head. I don’t know how long it went on. Maybe only a few seconds, but to me—and probably to Mr. Rausch—it felt much longer. Mr. Peebles finally decided his job was done. He sprang from Rausch’s face and landed next to me. Rausch was staggering around, disoriented and in obvious pain.
Mr. Peebles looked up at me and said, “Merp?”
“Merp,” I replied.
“Aargh!” cried Mr. Rausch.
“Let’s get out of here!” I said to Mr. Peebles.
We took off through the shattered garage door.