The Goonies by James Kahn Read Free Book Online

“Our court time starts in five minutes. I'll be waiting
     outside.” Then he walked out, real casual, sat down in his red Mustang convertible, and turned on the radio so loud, we could
     hear it all the way in the store.
    Brand looked at Andy kind of angry hurt and jealous, and she looked back at him with a look I'd like her to have looked at
     me, and then Brand kind of melted, and then Andy shrugged like this was a bad time, and then Brandslumped like he was trying to be nonchalant, and then Andy turned and left.
    I quickly unrolled the map. It was okay, only the edges were burned.
    But Brand was really broiled. He grabbed the map and slapped my head.
    “You know how I got loose?” he said. “
Mom
came home and unhooked me. She was totally pissed off, man, and so was I. And Rosalita was there with her brother, and
she
thought it was some kind of sexual torture device, thanks to Mouth. And then Mom told me that if I didn't find you and get
     you back in thirty minutes, we were
both
grounded. And
then
you know what happened?
Somebody
flattened my tires, so I had to
steal
Data's sister's bike to get over here—'cause I
knew
you bozos wouldn't get any farther than this on your great adventure.” Then he pinched my arm and shoved me ahead of him.
     “You just blew your whole life, pal.” He stuffed the map into his back pocket and looked at the other guys. “The rest of you
     guys too—you're all history. We don't need friends like you.”
    Mouth put his arm around Brand's shoulder and started singing, real sincere. “Here's to good friends, tonight is kinda special,
     the beer we pour, must be something more, somehow…”
    And all the time he was singing, he was pulling the map out of Brand's back pocket.
    Brand shoved him away. “You don't have to drink to make friends, wimp.”
    That was when Mouth showed us the map, with his back to Brand. We all made a run for it.
    We were on our bikes before Brand realized what happened and were out of the parking lot before he got to the neighbor kid's
     bike, which was about three sizes too small for him, and no way he could catch us.
    So we were outta there.
    * * *
    Mouth handed off the map to me at the next corner, but I didn't even have to look at it yet. I took us right to the coast
     highway and turned north. We were on our way.
    Springsteen was blasting from Data's tape deck, and somehow, with that cloudy wind and those darkish fir trees all up the
     coast, it was just perfect discovery weather. Something was definitely happening.
    One of the clouds on the horizon blew into a different shape so that it looked just like a pirate ship to me. I see pictures
     in clouds all the time. Mom says it's because I'm a dreamer, but they look so real, I don't see how other people don't see
     what I see. It's like jigsaw puzzles, I guess.
    Anyway, the fact that this cloud was a pirate ship seemed like a pure sign, no two ways about it, so I knew my instincts were
     right, and, if I just kept following my nose, I'd get a noseful of something soon enough.
    I checked the map after riding about twenty minutes and took the first turnoff beyond the old schoolhouse, leading up over
     Piedmont Ridge. In the distance we could see the edge of the Hillside Country Club. Mouth spat.
    We went down the ridge and past the coast road to where we overlooked the ocean again, and the first thing I saw was these
     three rocks sticking up out of the water in a
V
. And I knew them from somewhere.
    I stopped pedaling, and the guys stopped with me. “I know this place,” I whispered. “This is it.”
    It was the beginning of the place on the old map that didn't show up on the tourist map. It was marked by those three rocks,
     and by this tall, natural pillar of rock that stuck straight up at the bottom of the hill that we were at the top of.
    It was a steep hill with lots of jutting, jagged slabs pointing out all over and hardly a bike path down through it, nothing
     we would've taken if it hadn't been