CHAPTER 4

“Bick? Beck?”

Mom’s voice was urgent in our ears.

“Rebecca? Bickford?”

Yep. She was also mad. That’s just about the only time she ever calls us by our full names.

“Where are you two?”

I looked at Beck. She looked at me. The truck hit a pothole or maybe bounced off a curb.

“You tell her,” whispered Beck. “You’re the wordsmith.”

“We’re, uh, um… in a truck. An olive-oil truck. With the mummy.”

“What?”

“The bad guys drove through the back wall of the garage and—”

“Bickford Kidd, you—”

After some whispered yelling that you don’t really need to hear about, Mom told me what I should do. I raised the side flap and peeked out at the street.

“We’re on the Via Palazzuolo,” I said, reading a sign.

“The polizia and carabinieri have arrived,” said Mom. “They’ve already apprehended the two gentlemen who dropped off the sarcophagus.”

“What about Tommy and Dad?” I asked.

“They’re fine,” said Mom. “You should be seeing them shortly.”

“Huh?”

“Do you have your phone?” asked Storm over my headset.

“Yeah.”

“Make sure the GPS is on.”

“It is.”

“We’ll track you,” said Mom. “So will Dad and Tommy. Hang on, Stephanie!”

That’s Storm’s real name. And Mom’s the only one who can call her that without her eyes turning into dark, threatening thunderclouds, which is the reason we call her Storm.

The truck took a sharp left turn. The mummy slid sideways toward Beck and me. We stopped it with the soles of our tennis shoes so it wouldn’t get knocked around and even more damaged.

Bouncing along, I smelled water. “We’re near the river,” I reported. “I think.”

“Roger that,” said Mom. “We have you on the Lungarno Amerigo Vespucci.”

Then, of course, Storm jumped in with one of her travelogue monologues. “The long boulevard along the Arno River is named after the Italian explorer from Florence who first realized that the West Indies were not, as Christopher Columbus had proclaimed, the edge of Asia but a whole new world. That is why the Americas, North and South, are named after the Latin version of Amerigo’s first name: Americus.”

Yep. Storm could be boring even in the middle of a chase scene.

Suddenly, Dad was in our earpieces too. “Hang on, Bick and Beck. Tommy and I borrowed a pair of Vespas.”

“How’d you get out of the chains?” I just had to know.

“Simple trick I learned by studying the escape artistry of one Harry Houdini,” said Dad matter-of-factly. “I’ll teach you some day. After we recover this Egyptian treasure!”

In case you haven’t figured it out, both our parents are supersmart and have wicked mad skills.

“Here comes Mom!” said Beck. She had lifted up the back flap on the bad guys’ getaway truck.

This was about to get interesting. Fast.

Hey, with us Kidds, things usually do!