by Adam Gidwitz
Uchenna dropped her gaze and saw dozens of couples dancing. There was a live band on a little makeshift stage playing bouncy, up-tempo music.
“What in the world?” Elliot exclaimed.
“It’s a pista de baile,” Lupita told him. “A dance floor. They’re playing cumbias. Really fun to dance to.”
“In this heat?”
“Oh, it’s always hot. We still dance,” Mateo said.
Uchenna caught sight of Choopi weaving between the legs of dancing couples. None of them seemed to notice him. As the other kids surrounded the pista de baile, Uchenna dashed onto it. Moving to the cumbia beat, she tried to follow the chupacabras. But he darted off the dance floor and into a crowd of people who were sorting through piles of used clothes.
Uchenna followed, scanning left to right, up and down. Nothing.
In seconds, everyone joined her.
“We lost him,” she said.
The others stared around them. Dancers. Shoppers. Vendors. Music and shouting and laughing. The smells of food and sweat and dust. But no chupacabras.
Elliot knelt down in the dirt. “What’re we gonna do?” He was breathing heavily from the pursuit. He put Jersey’s backpack on the ground. Jersey strained to get out.
Uchenna shook her head. “I dunno.”
Lupita was watching the cumbia dancers. But they didn’t make her feel happy, like they usually did. She was seeing them, but she was thinking of a chupacabras, separated from his family for some reason, lost in the pulga.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The kids wandered for what felt like a long time.
Lupita bought a bottle of water and they all shared it. Even Jersey seemed to have lost the scent, for when they let him poke his head out to pour some water on his tongue, he just looked around and took in the stalls, the sounds, and the smells, apparently delighted.
Suddenly, Mateo put out his hands. “Wait,” he said. “I have an idea.” He glanced at Jersey. “But, Elliot, you gotta make sure he stays hidden. The guy we’re going to see would be very interested in your amiguillo.”
Mateo led the others in a different direction. Soon, they were in an area where the corrugated roofs of the stalls cast long shadows. And yet, despite the shade, it wasn’t any cooler here. The air was still and stifling. And it smelled of stale wood chips and . . . something else. Elliot tried to place the stench, but could not.
“What is this place?” Uchenna asked.
“It’s kinda creepy,” Elliot added.
Lupita said, “We don’t come over here, usually. Mateo, where are you taking us?”
Mateo only said, “I told you. There’s this guy . . .”
Then they saw him. A short, thin man with a broad cowboy hat and a smile like a rattlesnake’s. And he was shaking hands with . . . a man who was dressed like a traditional English butler.
Uchenna grabbed Lupita, Elliot grabbed Mateo, and they held the siblings back.
“What are you doing?” Mateo said, but Uchenna shushed him.
They watched the butler pick up a large wooden crate and carry it away.
“Do you know that dude in the tuxedo?” Lupita asked in a whisper.
“That’s Phipps,” Uchenna replied quietly.
“Who’s Phipps?”
“The Schmoke brothers’ butler.”
“I’ve heard of them . . . but where?” Lupita muttered. “Who are they again?”
“Tell you later,” said Uchenna.
And Mateo said, “Yeah, come on. Let me introduce you to Charles.”
Charles was the skinny man with the big hat and the rattlesnake smile. He was a vendor, and his “wares” were in dozens of glass cases: all the creatures that you would never want to encounter in the desert. Scorpions, black and brown, huge and tiny. A diamondback rattlesnake. A black widow, motionless, perched on a glass wall of a case. Elliot shuddered.
And then he saw the source of the strange smell that saturated this part of the pulga. A pile of dead mice sat on a table, their odor wafting out into the flea market. A sign next to the mice read, DINNER! 50¢ EACH!
Elliot turned to the vendor. Charles’s boots looked like they were made from the skin of a snake, his belt buckle was large enough to serve a Thanksgiving turkey on, and from his wide-brimmed hat hung the hairless, wormlike tail of an opossum.
Mateo said to him, “Hi, Charles.”
“Howdy, kid.” Charles smiled. “Here to look at some more snakes?”
“Have you bought snakes from him?” Lupita demanded.
Mateo shook his head. “I just come here to look sometimes.”
“But one day you’re gonna buy,” Charles said. “I can feel it. Gonna be one of my best customers one day.”
“Maybe,” Mateo said. “Right now, though, I have a question. We lost our, uh, our dog.”
Uchenna and Elliot were staring at Charles. He’d just done business with Phipps. What were the Schmokes up to?
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Charles replied.
“He’s, uh, kind of an ugly dog,” Mateo went on.
“We got a lot of ugly dogs down here,” Charles said. “Champion ugly dogs, in fact.”
“Yeah,” said Mateo. “But this one had spines. Yellow spines. And very sharp teeth.”
Suddenly, Charles’s eyes got very, very thin, and the corners of his mouth took a sharp turn downward. “You don’t say,” Charles murmured.
“Have you seen him?” Mateo asked.
Charles looked down at the boy. After a moment, keeping his face very still, he said, “I can’t say I have.”
Uchenna leaned in. “You can’t say that you have, or you haven’t?”
Charles just looked at her.
“And,” Uchenna added, “what did you sell to Phipps just now?”
“Who?”
“The butler.”
“Oh.” Charles held Uchenna in his gaze a long moment. A scorpion skittered across the glass of a case. “Now, look,” Charles began, “my clients expect a degree of discretion. You buy a black widow, maybe you drop it in your mother-in-law’s glove box—accidentally, of course—you don’t want me blabbing about it here in the pulga, do ya?”
Uchenna put a hand on her hip. “You help people murder their mothers?”
“Mothers-in-law. It’s a whole different thing. B’sides, who said anything about murder? It was an accident that he left that spider in that glove box.”
Elliot suddenly felt a little sick. But Uchenna pressed on. “Did you find our dog?”
Charles looked at her. He didn’t say a word.
“And did you sell it to Phipps?” Uchenna asked.
Charles kept looking.
Suddenly, Lupita was shouting at him. “You had no right to sell that . . . that dog! How dare you?! You just find someone’s . . . someone’s dog . . . and you sell it to the first person who asks?”
“This is a free country,” Charles said. He spit through his teeth onto the ground. “The land of free enterprise. I am allowed to sell what I want to sell, to whomever I want to sell it to.”
“Not if it’s not yours!” Lupita cried.
“And you’re saying that weird puppy was yours? He didn’t have any tags. No collar. And let’s cut the bull”—he stuck a short finger in Lupita’s face—“that was no dog. Now get lost.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The children stared at Charles. He had all ten of his fingers around his belt buckle and was staring right back.
And then Elliot stepped forward. He held up his hands. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”
Charles didn’t reply. He just watched Elliot and waited.
“I think we all got off on the wrong foot,” Elliot said. “You found a weird dog.” He paused.
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t,” Charles answered.
/> “And you sold him,” Elliot went on. “Sounds fine to me. It’s a free country.”
“That’s what I said,” Charles agreed.
“Right. A man can sell what he wants to whomever he wants.”
“Exactly!” Charles said. “You and me, we see eye to eye.”
Elliot nodded. “Now, there was a man wearing a crazy butler suit, who just left here with a big crate. His name is Phipps, and he works for the Schmoke brothers. You didn’t happen to sell that dog to him, did you?”
Charles sucked on his teeth. “I told you, my clients expect privacy.” But Charles seemed to be wrestling with something. Then he said, “You say he works for the Schmokes?”
It was Elliot’s turn to get coy. He gazed stoically up at the vendor. The other kids shifted from foot to foot. “Maybe I did.”
“Well,” said Charles, “I hate them boys. Building that dumb wall.”
Elliot and Uchenna looked at each other, eyes wide. “Ohhh . . .” said Uchenna. “That’s what they’re doing down there.”
Charles jerked his finger at his glass cases. “More like trying to cut a man’s business in half. I go collecting on both sides. And my clients live on both sides of the Río Grande, too. Takes me an hour to get through the checkpoint, and they always want to search my stuff. Walls ain’t good for free enterprise.” He paused. “Besides, I mighta found a lady friend in Nuevo Laredo. She’s into poisonous frogs. You don’t meet a woman like that every day. But she can’t come over here so easy anymore. And that makes a feller lonely . . .”
“So you did sell it to Phipps, then?” Elliot asked.
Charles was jerked out of his reverie. “Huh? Oh.” He spit again. “I suppose I did.” And then he said, “Sorry.”
A few minutes later, the kids were walking away from Charles’s stall. Uchenna had just called Professor Fauna. As she put the phone back in her pocket, she said, “Okay. We’re gonna meet them at the south entrance of the pulga.”
“And then what?” asked Mateo.
Uchenna said, “We’re going to the campus of Laredo College.”
“Why?” asked Elliot.
“We have a date with the Schmoke brothers.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It was getting late in the afternoon. The Cervantes family and the Unicorn Rescue Society team were in the minivan, nearing the edge of the college campus. To their left, they could see a shady, wooded area, separating the road from the wide and lazy Río Grande. All along the side of the road, a wrought-iron fence glittered in the sunlight.
Elliot tapped on the glass, pointing. “So this is the older fence. When did they build it?”
Dr. Cervantes sighed. “About a decade ago. The college decided it didn’t want people crossing the river onto its property. They put up the fence to discourage them. Waste of tax dollars. Completely useless in addressing the root issues. And if you don’t solve the root issues, you’re not going to solve the problem—folks will come in another way. Smuggled in trucks, across the Gulf of Mexico, or they’ll get here the way most undocumented immigrants do—fly legally into the US and then simply overstay their visas. But they wanted this fence because they’re scared of people coming over from the other side—Ooh! Our neighbors who happen to live on the other side of the border! How scary!” Dr. Cervantes scoffed. “Several of us professors tried to talk sense into the college leadership, but they called us out-of-touch, snobby elitists. They build a useless fence out of fancy wrought iron, and we’re the out-of-touch ones? Outrageous!”
“Well, to be fair,” Mr. Cervantes pointed out, “you did call the president and the trustees a ‘gaggle of gaseous geese.’”
“True. Kind of undercut my argument, didn’t it?” she said, winking.
Mateo pointed. “And there’s the wall.”
Uchenna and Elliot pressed their faces against the window of the minivan.
The wrought-iron fence continued into a construction area, where it ended, and a tall, solid concrete wall stood in its place. The concrete wall extended a hundred yards or so, and then the wrought-iron fence started again, passing out of the construction area.
“That’s weird,” said Elliot. “Are they doing it in small batches or something?”
Israel Cervantes shook his head. “No. A judge stopped construction a few weeks back, but the Schmokes appealed. We’ll hear the new decision today.” Backhoes and diggers and bulldozers were idling near the wall inside the construction site, puffing black smoke into the bright blue air. “These construction folks seem mighty sure of winning that appeal.”
His wife gripped the steering wheel more tightly. “Believe me, the Schmoke brothers have many influential government friends in their ample pockets.”
Professor Fauna growled deep in his throat. Jersey, sitting at Uchenna’s feet, imitated the sound.
“Look!” Elliot gasped. “It’s Phipps!”
There was a gate at the entrance to the construction site. A security guard punched a button, and the gate slid back to let a stiffly formal man in a butler’s uniform walk through.
In his white-gloved hands was a wooden crate.
“Choopi!” Mateo exclaimed. “Mamá, ¡estaciónate! Doesn’t matter where. Just pull over!”
Dr. Cervantes slowed the minivan but kept driving. “Espérate, m’ijo,” she said. “We need to think this through. We can’t just rush into that place. The guard would stop us.”
Uchenna, leaning over Mateo for a better look, said, “Phipps is going into that office trailer!”
The butler climbed three steps into a shiny mobile office. Just as he opened the door, a horrible whine split the air. It wasn’t the high whistle that the chupacabras had used to put Jersey to sleep, but a high-pitched whistle that made your skin crawl. Jersey snarled.
“What is that sound?” Dr. Cervantes asked.
“Oh!” said Elliot, getting excited. “It sounds like another type of chupacabras whistle! This will be the third I’ve documented—well, will document. The first was the low, hypnotic whistle. The second was a higher, shrill whine—like Choopi was complaining or upset. This whistle sounds almost like a scream! Speaking of documentation—Professor, when were you going to tell me about the Proceedings of the Unicorn Rescue Society?”
“What, Elliot? I don’t know! Not now!” replied Professor Fauna. “Oh, that whistle is unbearable!”
Indeed, inside the minivan, everyone was covering their ears, and Phipps was grimacing as he tried to get the shrieking crate into the office trailer.
“He’s so upset!” Lupita cried. “We’ve got to help him!”
“But how are we going to get in there?” Professor Fauna said.
“You know what?” Dr. Cervantes replied. “I was wrong.” She steered the minivan right up to the guard station. Everyone else in the van suddenly went pale. What was Dr. Cervantes doing? She leaned her head out the window.
A young man with a construction hat walked up to the side of the van. “Dr. Cervantes!” he said. “¿Qué anda haciendo por acá?”
Dr. Cervantes frowned. “Is that any way to talk to your favorite professor? No ‘buenas tardes’? No ‘How can I help you today, Dr. Cervantes?’”
The young man blushed. “Sorry, Dr. Cervantes. How can I help you?”
“I’m here on university business,” she said. “Gotta park in there and talk to some of the big hombres. How’s your mother?”
The young man smiled. “Está muy bien. Gracias. I’m not really supposed to let you in without an appointment or something, but . . .”
Dr. Cervantes flashed him her widest smile.
“But you are my favorite professor, so . . .” The young man stepped back and waved her through.
Dr. Cervantes waved at him and drove into the construction site.
“Wow,” said her husband. “You must have given him a really good grade.”
Dr. Cervantes chuckled. “Are you kidding? He got a C-minus.”
“Seriously?” Mateo exclaimed. “And he still likes you?”
“Yes, he likes me, m’ijo. And he respects me. Which is even more important.”
Dr. Cervantes steered the minivan past the guard station and over the dirt and gravel ground of the construction site.
They were inside.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Dr. Cervantes drove the van around to the back of the construction site, out of view of the Schmokes’ office trailer, and parked next to the wrought-iron border fence.
Everyone piled out of the minivan. The children all found themselves peering through the bars, across the chaparral, to the Río Grande, and into Mexico beyond. The terrain there was exactly the same as the terrain here in Texas. In fact, the buildings looked the same, too. There was a big sign, in the distance, in Spanish. But there were signs in Spanish on the US side as well. Except for the river and the fence, you would have no idea where Mexico ended and the United States began.
Lupita suddenly said, “Did you hear that?” She was looking through the fence, past the wooded riverbank, down to the slow-moving waters of the Río Grande.
“Choopi?” Uchenna asked. “I think I can still hear him whistling . . .”
“No, not him.” Lupita’s eyes went wide, and she took a step back as she lifted her arm and pointed. “Them!”
From the other side of the border fence came a cacophony of whistling. Dr. Cervantes, Mr. Cervantes, Professor Fauna, Elliot, Uchenna, Lupita, and Mateo all looked around wildly. Elliot peeked inside the backpack, to see if Jersey had gone rigid again. He had not. Instead, he was shivering. The whistling grew louder. This was not the hypnotic whistle, or the shriek. It was more like the whining noise, but it was longer and sadder. Like a dog howling at the moon.
“Look!” Professor Fauna cried. “There they are!”
Elliot turned to look—which was when Jersey burst out of the backpack that Elliot had neglected to close and began to dive toward a gap in the border fence.
