Big Game

by Stuart Gibbs

  Adam spun on her, angry. “Lydia wouldn’t do any such thing.”

  “She might,” June said firmly. “She’s a good shot, and she’s fallen on hard times. Her family needs money, and you know it.”

  “Who’s Lydia Trask?” Summer asked.

  “One of our clients,” June said quickly, before Adam could speak. “Or at least, she used to be. Her husband had a big construction company, but it went bankrupt. Now they’re deep in debt.”

  “That doesn’t mean she’d kill a rhino,” Adam snapped. “And besides, they’re in the hole to the tune of millions. The money a rhino horn would bring in would barely be a drop in the bucket.”

  “But it’d still be a drop,” Summer pointed out.

  Adam swung back to face her. “I wouldn’t put my money on Lydia Trask. But you know who I would look at? Abby Duntz.”

  I stiffened at the last name. “Is she related to Hank Duntz?”

  “His sister,” Adam replied.

  “Who’s Hank Duntz?” Violet asked.

  “Most people call him ‘Hank the Tank,’ ” Summer informed her. “He was a professional criminal who worked for a rival of my father’s. He tried to sabotage one of our exhibits last year, but Teddy caught him and he went to jail.”

  Violet turned to me, intrigued. “You caught another bad guy besides Vance Jessup?”

  “And he caught both the same day,” Summer said.

  “Wow,” Violet said, impressed. “How?”

  “I didn’t really catch him,” I told her, not feeling like telling the whole story. “Security did. I only figured out he was the one who’d caused all the trouble.”

  “Well, whatever the case, he’s in jail because of FunJungle,” Adam told us. “So it stands to reason that his sister might have a grudge against that place. Now, we don’t know her. She lives way out by Houston. But she’s a crack shot and she’s won some state rifle tournaments in the women’s division.”

  Summer asked, “So you think she might be shooting at the rhino just to get even with my dad?”

  Adam shrugged. “That rhino’s pretty valuable. And someone interested in revenge wouldn’t need to get the horn from the rhino. They’d simply want the rhino dead.”

  “But why would she only go after the rhino?” Violet asked. “If someone was really angry at J.J., why not go after any of the other animals?”

  “Maybe she still will.” Adam turned to Summer. “I’m not saying Abby’s behind this, but if she is, then all your animals could be in danger.”

  I leaned against the window and looked back at the room full of poorly mounted animals, feeling as nauseated as all of them appeared to be. Hank Duntz had been a nasty, dangerous man. If he had a sister with a grudge, that could be very bad news indeed.

  SUSPECTS

  “There’s another basketball game this Friday after school,” Violet told me. “Are you coming?”

  Summer’s SUV was idling in front of Violet’s house. We’d stopped at the Dairy Queen for takeout on the way back, and now the rear seat was littered with wrappers and used napkins.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hadn’t planned on it.”

  “Me neither,” Summer said.

  “You should come!” Violet told us. “It’ll be fun. Even though the team stinks. Dash and Ethan are coming. Everyone’s gonna go out for pizza afterward.”

  That did sound fun. “Maybe,” I said. “If I can get a ride.”

  “If you can’t, let me know,” Violet said. “Maybe we can figure something out.” She batted her eyes, slipped out the door, and hurried up the walk to her house.

  Tran started driving us toward FunJungle.

  “Oooh,” Summer teased. “She likes you.”

  I could feel my cheeks warming as I blushed. “She does not. She was asking both of us to come.”

  “She was asking you.” Summer did an amped-up imitation of Violet, batting her eyes at me. “You should come. It’ll be sooooo much fun. And afterward, maybe we can go smooch somewhere.”

  Now it felt like my whole face was red. Thankfully, the glass partition was closed between us and the front seat, so Hondo and Tran couldn’t hear anything. “I’m only in seventh grade. Why would she like me?”

  “Because you punched out the school bully. And solved the case of the stolen koala. And you’re more interesting than anyone else at school. Face it—she likes you. The head cheerleader likes you. You should be thrilled. That’s every guy’s dream come true, isn’t it?”

  It was definitely the dream of lots of guys at my school. Xavier Gonzalez, for one. He’d had a crush on Violet since kindergarten. But I wasn’t into Violet, and I really didn’t feel like telling Summer why. So instead I asked, “Do you think Violet’s uncle was telling the truth?”

  “Don’t try to change the subject.”

  “We’re supposed to be trying to figure out who killed Rhonda.”

  Summer sighed dramatically, letting me know I was being a bore. “The truth about what?”

  “Big-game hunters. When he said none of them would shoot a rhino in the zoo. That it wouldn’t be enough of a challenge.”

  Summer stared out the window thoughtfully as we cruised through Violet’s neighborhood. “I suppose he made sense,” she said. “And he knows more about how hunters think than we do. So yeah, I guess I believe him. Besides, he gave us a good lead with Abby Duntz.”

  Summer had texted her father about Abby the moment we’d gotten into the car. She’d also used her phone to find a photo of Abby online. It was from when she’d won a sharpshooting competition the year before. She looked almost exactly like her brother Hank—short and stout, with the kind of face that would give small children nightmares.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You don’t think Abby Duntz is a good lead?”

  “He brought her up really quickly once his wife mentioned Lydia Trask. Like he wanted to change the subject.”

  Summer considered that, then nodded. “You’re right. He did.” She pulled out her phone and ran a quick search. “Trask Construction went bankrupt last year, but their website’s still up. They list FunJungle as a client. Claim they built some of the exhibits.”

  “Which ones?”

  “They don’t say.”

  “That’d give Lydia some inside knowledge of the park,” I said.

  “I guess. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  Summer turned her phone around so I could see it. She’d found some photos of Lydia Trask on the web, mostly of her with her family. She had three kids, all of whom were older than us. “She’s a mom.”

  “Moms can commit crimes.”

  “Yeah, but think about this. Like Violet’s uncle said, the rhino horn still isn’t worth enough to get the Trasks out of debt. Plus, there are laws to help people who’ve gone bankrupt. So would a regular mom really commit a serious crime like poaching to only partly erase her debts? Especially when there’s still the issue of getting the horn off the dead rhino? The Abby Duntz story makes much more sense.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But a lead’s a lead. Hoenekker ought to investigate everything he can.”

  “I guess. Okay, I’ll share Lydia Trask with Daddy, too.”

  While Summer typed another text to her father, I stared out the window. We were now past what few suburbs there were in town, heading out the long, lonely road toward FunJungle.

  Summer asked, “Any other leads you’ve come up with, as long as I’m sending them to Daddy?”

  “Besides TimJim’s mom?”

  “I already sent that one earlier.”

  I shook my head sadly, feeling frustrated. “No. No other leads. Only a bunch of things that don’t add up.”

  “Like what?”

  “Why didn’t the hunter use a silencer the first time she went after Rhonda? She had to know it was going to make a lot of noise and alert everyone, right? And if she was trying to poach the horn, the last thing she’d want to do would be to draw attention.”<
br />
  Summer chewed her lip. “Maybe she wanted the attention. If it was Abby Duntz, trying to get revenge, maybe she was trying to send a message.”

  “If that’s the case, why didn’t she do the same thing the next time? Last night she brought a silencer and snuck all the way across SafariLand toward the rhino house. It was a completely different style of attack.”

  Summer’s eyes went wide. “Maybe there are two different people trying to kill the rhino!”

  I stiffened in my seat. “Two poachers? At the same time?”

  “Yes. Working together. Suppose it’s the Trasks. They both need money bad and decide to go after the horn. They helped build the park and know how to sneak in and out. Maybe they even know a way to get into the rhino house. So the husband tries first, but he royally screws up his attempt. He doesn’t bring a silencer; he starts an elephant stampede—and he misses the rhino. So now Lydia tries. And she knows her husband’s way was idiotic, so she changes the whole way of doing things, top to bottom.”

  “So now you think it could be Lydia Trask?”

  “And her husband, yeah.”

  I mulled that over. Summer’s theory certainly answered some of my questions, though not all of them. “Why’d they go after Rhonda, then? There were other rhinos that were easier to get to.”

  “Maybe they knew how to get into Rhonda’s house but not the others.”

  “The other rhinos were right out in the open yesterday morning.”

  “They might not have noticed that. And besides, Rhonda’s got a pretty big horn. Those things sell by the pound. If you need money, you might as well go for the biggest one you can get your hands on.”

  “Good point,” I admitted.

  “And who says she was only going after Rhonda?” Summer added. “Maybe the plan was to go after all the rhinos, but she didn’t get the chance.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. It hadn’t been that late when my parents and I came along and spotted the hunter. If she’d had all night, she easily could have wiped out all five rhinos in the Asian Plains.

  Summer’s phone buzzed with an incoming text. She read it, then reported, “Daddy says thanks. He’s gonna pass these leads on to Hoenekker right away.”

  “Make sure he doesn’t tell Hoenekker they’re from us.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Hoenekker’s not happy your dad asked us to help out. He might not be very keen to follow up on any of our leads.”

  “If Daddy tells him to investigate something, he’ll investigate it. It’s his job,” Summer said, then paused to think about this. “Unless he’s a lousy detective. Do you know if he’s any good?”

  I shrugged. “Your dad seems to think so. He gave him the job.”

  “He also gave Large Marge the job. And look how well that worked out.”

  “True, but Hoenekker does have his men working hard on this, though. They’re combing through all the footage from all the cameras to see if they can find another shot of the hunter.”

  “That’s it? He ought to be doing more than that, don’t you think? Why are we the ones finding out about TimJim’s mom and the Trasks and Abby Duntz? Why isn’t Hoenekker doing that?”

  “Maybe he did and he simply didn’t tell us. Maybe he’s got plenty of leads we don’t know about.”

  “And maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he doesn’t have any leads at all.” Summer sat forward, excited. “Maybe he’s tanking the entire investigation because he’s in cahoots with the bad guy!”

  “Cahoots?” I repeated.

  “Yeah, cahoots! Like, maybe he knows the Trasks and they promised him a cut.”

  “But Hoenekker’s the one who found the footage of a woman going over the fence.”

  “Big whoop. We’ve got ten million cameras around the zoo and he found one grainy shot? Maybe there were plenty of other shots—good ones—and he trashed them all to show you the worst one. To make it look like he was doing his job. I mean, do we really know if he’s got his guys combing through all this footage? Have we seen them doing it?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Then maybe they’re not. If they were, they should have found something else by now, right? But we haven’t heard a thing.”

  I started to argue that, even if Hoenekker had found anything important, he probably wouldn’t have shared it with us, when something occurred to me. “He said there wasn’t any footage of the hunter from the roof of the monorail station.”

  Summer looked to me, confused. “What do you mean?”

  “Hoenekker originally figured that the hunter must have fired at Rhonda yesterday morning from the roof of the monorail station, but when they looked at the footage from there, there wasn’t anybody in it.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. See? Maybe he’s lying to protect the bad guy!”

  “Or maybe the hunter didn’t fire from above the monorail.”

  “Oh,” Summer said. “Yeah, I guess that’s possible too.”

  “That was Hoenekker’s idea,” I told her. “He said he was going to try to figure out where else the hunter could have fired from—”

  “That’s easy,” Summer interrupted. “World of Reptiles.” There wasn’t a trace of doubt in her voice.

  “Really?” I asked. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I know FunJungle better than anyone. Except you, maybe. The place was my idea, remember? I’ve spent half my life looking at blueprints for it. World of Reptiles is close to SafariLand, and it’s the tallest building around. If the shooter didn’t fire from the monorail station, the dome of World of Reptiles would be the next best place.”

  I realized Summer was right. World of Reptiles had a direct shot at the rhino house too. The previous night, when I’d been at the rhino house, I’d seen the monorail station silhouetted against the dome of that building. “It’d be an awfully long shot, though.”

  “Yeah, but a good hunter with a good rifle could still do it.”

  I frowned. “It seems like Hoenekker should have figured that out.”

  “Yeah, it does,” Summer said suspiciously, then grinned with excitement. “I guess that means we need to check it out.”

  “We?” I repeated. “How?”

  Summer glanced toward Hondo. He was chatting in the front seat with Tran, unaware of anything we were saying, thanks to the glass partition between us. “We go up on the roof of World of Reptiles and see if we can find any evidence up there.”

  “You mean like bullet casings?”

  “What are those?”

  “When someone fires a gun, the casing gets ejected,” I explained. “And each gun leaves different marks on the casing, like a fingerprint. So if the shooter left a casing behind, we might be able to use it to figure out who they are.”

  “Really?” Summer asked, growing even more excited. “Yeah, we should definitely look for those. And who knows? Maybe we’ll find something else important up there. It doesn’t sound like security’s checked it out yet.”

  “It won’t be easy to get up there.”

  “Sure it is. I’ve been up there plenty of times.”

  “When?”

  “When they were building it. And even a few times since. It’s really cool up there. And don’t worry. It’s totally safe.”

  “Maybe we should tell Hoenekker.”

  “I don’t trust Hoenekker. C’mon. You aren’t chicken, are you?”

  The truth was, I was a little scared. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Summer about the roof being safe. It was that I had a bad track record with ending up in danger at FunJungle. Lots of times, things that should have been safe turned out to be not so safe when I was there. I’d even had a bad experience in World of Reptiles once before, with an escaped black mamba. A mamba that had never been found again.

  But I didn’t want to admit I was scared. Not in front of the girl who I liked a hundred times more than I liked Violet Grace.

  So I tried to figure some other way out. “There’s no way
Hondo will let us go up on World of Reptiles.”

  “I know that,” Summer said, smiling mischievously. “That’s why we’re going to ditch him.”

  THE DOME

  Once Summer got an idea in her head, there was no talking her out of it. She didn’t even bother trying to convince me. She simply acted like I’d already agreed. As the SUV pulled up in front of FunJungle, she told me, “Meet you at the World in fifteen minutes.” Then she banged on the glass partition by the front seat and said, “Hondo, I have to make a bathroom stop.”

  Hondo groaned and slid the partition open. “You can’t wait to get back home?”

  “No!” Summer exclaimed. “I drank a ton of iced tea at Dairy Queen and I’m gonna burst. I’m lucky I made it this far! I’ll be right back!” She hopped out of the car with me.

  “Wait!” Hondo yelled, then cursed under his breath when she didn’t. He ordered Tran to park in a red zone and then ran after her.

  The park was closed for the night, so we all headed for the employee entrance.

  Summer didn’t try to outrun Hondo. If she had, he would have alerted park security before she could get very far. Her plan was almost as simple, though. Once we were inside the park, she went into one of the public bathrooms and then climbed out the window while Hondo waited. Summer had pulled this stunt on her bodyguards before, but she saved it for occasions when she really needed to use it and hadn’t sprung it on Hondo yet.

  Therefore, she caught Hondo with his pants down. Literally. It turned out, he’d also drunk plenty of iced tea and had a full bladder. So when Summer went into the women’s room, Hondo ducked into the men’s room and missed her escape. By the time Hondo realized Summer had given him the slip, she was well on her way to World of Reptiles.

  I took my time heading there, trying to appear inconspicuous, while Summer ran flat out, trying to leave Hondo way behind—so by the time I arrived, she was already there, panting from exhaustion. She tried to hide it, though, straightening up and declaring, “You’re late.”

  “I’m actually early,” I pointed out. “You said fifteen minutes. It’s only been twelve.”

  Summer waved this aside, as though it didn’t make sense. “Whatever. Let’s go.” She quickly typed her father’s entry code into the security keypad, and the door to World of Reptiles clicked open.