We all piled into the junkyard van, (with many wills written out as we did), and headed for the model agency, and hopefully Frannie as well.
About ten minutes later, (give or take a few wrong turns), we arrived at a small colonial house at the bottom of a large hill in the middle of nowhere. The house had a tower on it and an attached garage, and that was it. There was nothing else remotely interesting or suspicious about it. Just another ordinary house.
"Is this it?" I said, dumbfounded.
"Maybe it's bigger on the inside," Gazzy suggested, "like in 'Doctor Who'."
"Gazzy, stuff like that doesn't happen in real life; it's call science 'fiction' for a reason," I said incredulously.
"Angel," he said slowly, "look around you. You're surrounded by mutants, that stuff happens."
"You know what I mean." I was starting to get frustrated. "Let's just look around the house, maybe there's a trapdoor that leads to an underground bunker or something."
We searched the entire house from top to bottom, twice. We even searched his office, but all we found there were the case files for the models. Iggy spent lots of time in there.
Eventually we made our way to the garage. It was longer than a normal garage, and we found the reason for that when we went inside.
"Whoa, nice limo!" the Gasman breathed. "Totally top of the line."
"You're right," Iggy agreed, "this is much better than what we worked on out west."
"You guys work on cars?" Nudge asked, curious about what they actually did since they moved to L.A.
"Something like that," the Gasman said, popping the hood.
Iggy meanwhile had slide himself into the drivers seat and was running his hands over the dashboard. "One of the Ghosts has work at an auto repair shop, he taught us how to fix cars, motorcycles, you name it."
"Who are the Ghosts?" asked Rex.
"Just some friends of ours in Los Angeles." Then he noticed the way Nudge and I were glaring at him. "Hey, asked Fang about it, it was his idea anyways."
"I'll be sure to. In the mean time; Leecy, Rex, Thud, you guys find anything?"
"Not a thing, this place is has even less in it than the house did," Felicia said from the back of the car. "There's nothing here but the car and some tools."
"Yeah, this bites," Rex said. "At this rate we'll all be old geezers by the time we find your cousin, Angel."
"Don't remind me," I said. But he did have a point, we were taking longer than I anticipated to find Commodore. Ok, I got excited when Nudge found the name near us, I admit that. I should have realized that we probably weren't got to find her at the first place we looked-
CLANG! KRrrreeeeeeeeee!
Remember when told you I jumped about six feet at an unexpected noise? Well, I think I just added a couple of inches to that record. Seriously, the noise just came out of nowhere.
"Gazzy!" I said, my eyes darting right to him once my brain calmed my heart down.
"Don't look at me," he threw his hands up, "I didn't touch anything on the engine, I swear!"
"Are you sure?"
"Sure I'm sure. Besides, the engine's all electric anyways, I don't know squat about electric engines. That's more of Iggy's thing." Iggy!
I opened the driver's door and Iggy looking around, trying to figure out what happened. "Iggy..."
"I don't know what happened, ok! I saw a button marked 'open doors', thought it was to open the doors on the limo and tried it out." Ok then.
"Did you get psykic powers and not tell me?" I asked, surprised that he answered the question before I asked it.
"No," he said, "but that would be the first thing I'd ask me if it happened."
Crash!
I looked over and saw Thud standing next to a broken window. He was pointing outside. I looked out the window and saw that a large door had opened up in the hillside. Score!
"Guys, I think we found it," I said triumphantly.
"How do you know it's this one?" Gazzy asked.
"Well, how many people do you know who have giant, secret doors that swing out of hillsides?" Hah! I had him.
"Batman." Crap, didn't think of that.
"Never mind," I said, "let's just get in there and rescue Frannie."
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