Brad Nero, Boy Hero

"Well, golly, Skip, sure is lucky the pirates didn't notice us."
   Skip just wagged his tail, on account of his voice machine was broken.
   It was just as well, the volume on Skip's voice box had been stuck on 'YELL' for months, Brad just hadn't had the time to fix it. And just now, swinging onto the pirate ship on a jungle vine from the headhunters' island, Skip's voice box had crashed into a yardarm and now was nothing more than a mass of wires and dented metal around a furry brown neck. It was all for the best, Brad realized, he couldn't chance being discovered by the pirates, and Skip tended to talk too much anyway.
   The clomping tread of heavy boots rattled the deck, and Brad tried to make himself as small as possible as he hid behind barrels. Two pirates clomped by, men twice as big as Brad and four times as strong. Brad didn't dare peek out to look at their faces but they probably had scars too, big ones. Pirates always had dramatic scars on their faces.
   "Yo ho, mateys," came a call from read of the ship, from the wheel.
   Brad stifled a gasp and grabbed Skip's muzzle to keep him from barking. They knew that voice!
   "Aaargh, Cap'n," one of the pirates who had just passed snarled. "We're glad to be off that cannibal island."
   Cap'n? Brad's blood ran cold. So that explained it all...
   "If you don't pull your scurvy weight around here, I'll send you back," the cap'n snarled, "so the cannibals can put ye in their stew pot."
   "And if you do," one of the pirates replied, "who'll be unloadin' yer cargo of Cleveland Cavaliers bobble-heads?"
   "Or the crates of Sham-wows?" the other pirate asked. "You need us, Cap'n Thompson."
   Thompson. Or Old Man Thompson as Brad and his neighborhood gang The Enigma Patrol called him. He always yelled at kids to keep off his lawn and never gave back any balls or Frisbees that ended up in his back yard. Rumor had it that he took the loot to the flea market on weekends to pay for his cat tranquilizer habit.
   "To Blazes with your sass talk," Cap'n Thompson cursed. "But without yer help I'll never get this crap posted on Craigslist and eBay."
   Brad scribbled furiously in his L'il Detectives note pad. So that was Old Man Thompson's game... post all the pirated goods onto terrible, larcenous web sites so unsuspecting dupes would pay top dollar for discount crap. Fiendishly clever. An old man could buy a lot of cat tranquilizer with eBay money.
   "Before ye go below decks for inventory, though," Cap'n Thompson said, "could ye two look behind them barrels. I do believe we got us a stowaway."
   Brad's blood froze as the pirates' shadows fell across him and Skip.

-- to be continued --