The Crooked Crook

By Kemal Cater
 Bilo Mannings pried open the glass case with his thick
fingers. He grabbed the many shimmering gemstones sitting in
their little cubbies. The gems glittered in the dim light. The
museum was closed, but the windows were open, making a little
bit of light. Bilo dropped the jewels into a small canvas bag,
where they clinked together.
“Hand over the bucket, Bibley,” he hissed at a small, sallow
man standing beside him.
“Yessir,” squeaked the man. “Also, it’s Bribley, not Bibley.
Just saying.”
“Whatever.” Bilo dropped the bag into the KFC bucket, and
covered it with oily chicken nuggets.
They dashed towards the front door, jumping over the
guard they had drugged to get into the exhibit. As they ran, a
few chicken nuggets fell out of the bucket, but that did not
matter.
When they reached the front door, they heard sirens.
Staring at each other in shock, they ran out the back door and
dashed to get as far away from the empty museum as possible.
A few blocks away, they split. Bilo paid Bribley and then Bilo
ran to the nearest train station. Bilo took the C train to Penn
Station, where he snuck onto a Long Island Railroad train,
headed for Ronkonkoma, Long Island. From there he could sell
the gems and leave the country as a rich man.
Bribley, after being paid, ran to his cover job. It was at a
nearby KFC. His Monday lunch break had just ended.
A few hours later, Jim Persevelt peered around the
crumbling corner of an old building. In the middle of the street,
a Long Island Railroad train from New York City lay on its side,
smoking. It had slipped off the tracks, and destroyed an entire
huge street market stall. When his twin sister Tina and he had
heard the crash, they’d raced out of their dreary old home in
tedious, old Islip, where nothing exciting happened.
The engine was surrounded by the debris of the many
garden gnomes that had been on display in the stall. A
hysterical woman sat in the ruins, sifting through the plaster,
sobbing, “Don’t be dead Mr. Shmookins! Please don’t be dead!”
Mr. Shmookins was her favorite gnome, and the first of
many homemade gnomes, which she sold for a living. A few train
cars down, Jim watched a stocky man pull a red and white
striped KFC bucket out of a duffel bag. As Jim watched, the man
pulled a small canvas bag out of the bucket.
In the distance, Jim heard sirens. Uh-oh. Time to run. If he
were caught spying, he would be in serious trouble with the
police. But seemingly, the man thought so too. The man looked
around fearfully, and then he slunk off. Suspicious. Jim pulled
out his two-way radio. Tina had the other end, and the twins
knew a lot about the best way to converse in secret.
“Hey Tina, some dude is being very suspicious,” Jim called
on his radio.
“Yeah, I see him,” Tina replied. “I think we should follow him.”
“Totally!” came the excited reply. Since their older sisters
Samantha and Janette had gone off to join the CIA, the twins
had made it their dream to follow their heroes’ footsteps. To
prepare, they always followed suspicious people and recorded
what suspicious activity they found there in Islip. This was very
tricky, since nothing fun or exciting ever happened. As the
siblings snuck past the “Gnome Lady,” as they called her, they
shared what observations they had about the man.
As they trailed the man, they realised that he was heading
towards the junkyards, a more abandoned part of Islip. In one
of the further junkyards, he sat down behind a large pile of
trash. Above him, stood an old, rusted brown crane with an
electromagnet on the end of the chain.
The man dumped his loot on the ground. As the siblings
watched, hidden behind a large pile of trash, sapphires, rubies,
emeralds, amethysts, and even diamonds cascaded out of the
bag. It was a truly stunning sight.
“Heh-heh-heh,” he chuckled. “I’ll sell these to that nefarious
Parliament nominee guy, what's his name— Oh! Franklin
Bellamy!—and I, Bilo Mannings, get rich!”
 “He stole those!” whispered Tina. “I heard about it on the
news. We have to stop him!”
“Yeah,” whispered Jim. “Ok, here is the plan.” He carefully
outlined the plan to Tina.
As Bilo began to put the jewels away, Tina walked out from
behind the trash pile.
“Hello!” she called out in her perkiest voice. “I noticed that
you were new to Islip, so I wanted to give you a formal welcome!”
Bilo was obviously surprised, and also a little scared.
“Oh. Uh, h-h-how did you, well, h-how did you f-find me?”
Bilo stammered.
“How did I find you?” Tina questioned. “I just asked around
town, and I learned that you were heading over here. That's all.”
“Oh, oh. Okay. I thought you had followed me, which is a
little creepy, you know?” He stammered, obviously relieved.
While Tina distracted Bilo, Jim was scaling the crane as
fast as he could. He slid down the crane arm, his arms
pinwheeling to keep himself from plummeting down to the
ground. He shimmied down the thick chain, as Tina was asking
Bilo where he came from.
“Oh, I’m from Ronkonkoma, it's only a few miles from here,”
was his reply.
Jim hooked his arms on the edge of the electromagnet,
swaying slightly to land on Bilo.
“Oh cool! My dad took me there once,” Tina responded,
looking up and seeing Jim about to let go.
Jim let go. As Jim fell, Tina neatly did a backflip to make
sure that she did not get hit by Jim on his way down. Bilo on the
other hand, was not so lucky. Jim’s fall was perfectly timed, and
he landed squarely on Bilo’s shoulders, catching the bulky man
by surprise.
“Hey! You stole those gems, and now you're gonna sell it to
that jerk - that weirdo British Parliament nominee!” shouted Jim
when he landed. “That stuff was on the news! Your helper was
already caught, and you’re still going through with this. Hand
them over.”
“H-h-h-here,” Bilo thrust the bag at them.
They took the gems to the local police station, where the
gems were sent back to New York, and given much better
security. Then the news crews, the FBI, CIA, and even the NSA
came to interview the twins for their work. They even saw
Samantha and Janette, who came to congratulate the twins for
their work.
 Epilogue

Samantha Persevelt snuck around the corner of a building,

on high alert. She touched the radio in her ear and said, “I’m in
position. Janette, make the distraction.”
A few minutes later, Janette Persevelt walked around
another corner, a sheet of white blond hair singing behind her.
She stationed herself in just the right spot to hide the back of
the van from the cops guarding it.
While Jan flirted with the officers, Samantha picked the
lock on the back of the van, and crawled in. She grabbed a bag
holding some expensive gems, and tested them to make sure
that the gems were real. They were in fact. Samantha replaced
them with a bag of fake gems, and crawled back out, locking the
van behind her. Then she ran off. She hated lying to her little
siblings about the fact that she worked for the CIA, but there
was no way to tell them that she was actually an international
thief. They were too much of a pair of goody two shoes to keep
the secret. She ran back to the rendezvous point, and waited
for Janette.
When Janette got to the spot, they hopped into their car
and raced to their home in Brooklyn. Now that they had these
gems, they could begin to work on finding the amethyst ring, the
next part in the Jewels of Might.