Lion Down

by Stuart Gibbs

  And yet, even though he didn’t want us investigating the crime, I realized I was going to help do it. I believed Tommy Lopez was right that someone had framed Rocket. My parents wouldn’t be happy about my getting involved, but I knew they wouldn’t want an innocent lion to be killed either. I would simply have to be careful and hope things didn’t work out as dangerously as they had for me in the past.

  Unfortunately, that wouldn’t turn out to be the case.

  And bizarrely, this was only the first investigation I would get asked to be a part of that day.

  4

  THE ASSIGNMENT

  “We’re having a problem with the giraffes,” J.J. McCracken said.

  We were eating dinner at his house, along with Summer and her mother, Kandace. As we had been driving down Lincoln Stone’s driveway in Lily Deakin’s car, Summer had received a text from her father inviting me to dinner that night. I had immediately called my parents and asked them if I could go. I always enjoyed dinners at the McCrackens’. They gave me more time with Summer—and they were usually much better than dinners I had at home. My parents weren’t bad cooks, but they rarely had the time or energy to put much effort into it. Meanwhile, the McCrackens had a gourmet chef on staff.

  We were eating grass-fed filet mignon fresh from the McCrackens’ ranch along with béarnaise sauce, farro, and a ragout of roasted spring vegetables. I hadn’t even known what farro or a ragout was until a few minutes before, but they were both delicious.

  “Oh, for crying out loud, J.J.,” Kandace said with a sigh. “Please tell me you didn’t invite Teddy here to talk about work.”

  I didn’t know Summer’s mother as well as her father, because I saw J.J. a lot more. He had an office at FunJungle, and he was there all the time. Kandace was at least twenty years younger than J.J., and almost everyone on earth believed she had simply married him for his money. J.J. wasn’t a very attractive man, but he was rich, while Kandace had been a relatively famous professional model at the time. She was also six inches taller than him. From my experience, though, they seemed to really love each other, despite being very different people with very different interests. For a rich person, J.J. didn’t seem to care much for luxuries, while Kandace made no secret of how much she enjoyed them. They often took separate vacations, with J.J. going camping or fly-fishing, and Kandace going to fancy hotels and fashion shows.

  However, the biggest difference between them might have been how they felt about FunJungle. It was J.J.’s passion project, and while he had originally started the park to make money, he had become more and more invested in his animals and now spent much of his profits protecting endangered species in the wild. Meanwhile, Kandace didn’t really seem to like the place. She liked certain animals, such as horses, quite a lot. But she had zero interest in most others.

  Since Summer loved FunJungle—after all, it had been her idea in the first place—she spent much more time with her father than with her mother. This was a sore point for Kandace, who was constantly looking for ways to better their relationship and give them more “girl time” together—as long as those activities didn’t involve wild animals.

  “I didn’t invite Teddy here for shoptalk at all,” J.J. said. “But it so happens, this giraffe thing just came up, and I figured I’d get the kids’ thoughts on it.” He deliberately looked at Summer and said, “Both of your thoughts. You two have been very helpful solving mysteries at the park.”

  I froze, a forkful of filet halfway to my mouth. “Mr. McCracken . . .”

  “For the hundredth time, Teddy, you can call me ‘J.J.’ When you say ‘Mr. McCracken,’ I think you’re talking to my father.”

  “Okay. J.J., you know my parents don’t want me investigating any more crimes, seeing as I keep ending up in danger.”

  J.J. raised a hand, palm forward. “Hold on there. I never said this was a crime. It’s a mystery. Which is different.”

  “How so?” Summer asked, excitement in her eyes.

  “Something’s happening to the giraffes,” J.J. explained, “but I don’t necessarily think someone’s doing it to them on purpose. Or that anyone’s even doing it at all.”

  “What do you mean?” Now that I’d been told this wasn’t a crime, I felt comfortable enough to return to eating my dinner. Summer might have been thrilled by the prospect of two crimes popping up in one day, but I wasn’t. Investigating one was plenty for me.

  “The giraffes keep getting sick,” J.J. told us. “Not badly sick, but sick enough. Something’s getting into their digestive systems and giving them diarrhea.”

  Kandace gasped, upset this had even been mentioned at the table. “J.J.! That’s disgusting!”

  “You’re telling me,” J.J. agreed, missing the whole reason for his wife’s reaction. “When most animals get the squirts, you can’t even tell, ’cause they do their business two inches above the ground. But when it happens to a giraffe, all that stuff’s shooting out from six feet up in the air. Looks like a poo waterfall.”

  Kandace turned greenish. “Do we really have to talk about low-class things like this at the dinner table?”

  “It’s not low-class, Mom. It’s science!” Summer said, though it was obvious she found her mother’s nauseated reaction amusing. “Dad, does the giraffes’ diarrhea look kind of like this?” She took a mouthful of chocolate milk and spit it back into her glass.

  “Summer!” Kandace groaned in disgust, clutching her stomach.

  “It sort of does,” J.J. said, oblivious to Kandace’s discomfort. “And then it splatters all over the giraffe’s legs and the ground. Half the tourists who see it look like they’re gonna lose their lunch.”

  “And now I’m going to lose my dinner,” Kandace said, shoving her plate away.

  “Do the giraffes ever vomit?” Summer asked her father. “Because that’d be really gross. Can you imagine something eighteen feet tall puking? It’d look like this!” She stood up, made a retching noise, and hocked a mouthful of ragout into her napkin.

  “Summer!” Kandace cried.

  J.J. chuckled at Summer, then said, “I was worried about that myself. But it turns out giraffes can’t vomit. No animal that chews its cud can. So when they get sick, everything just comes out the poop chute.”

  “Enough!” Kandace declared, exasperated. “I don’t want any more talk about poop at the dinner table! We have a guest!”

  “Teddy doesn’t care,” Summer said. “We talk about poop all the time.”

  “What do you think is making the giraffes sick?” I asked J.J. quickly, hoping to change the subject before Kandace ended dinner and sent me home.

  J.J. answered, “The keepers think they’re probably getting poisoned by something. Not badly enough to kill them, but getting the trots like this on a regular basis isn’t good for them either. We were thinking it might be either the water supply or their food, but unfortunately, the evidence indicates there’s probably human involvement.”

  “You mean, someone’s trying to poison the giraffes?” Summer asked, horrified.

  “That’s where we’re in kind of a gray area,” J.J. said. “We don’t know if someone’s trying to do it—or if they’re doing it by accident somehow.”

  I popped another piece of steak into my mouth. “Why do you think it’s definitely a human?”

  “A couple reasons,” J.J. said. “First of all, the giraffes are only getting sick on Mondays.”

  This was strange enough to even provoke a response from Kandace, despite her distaste for the subject. “Only Mondays? Really?”

  “Really,” J.J. confirmed. “Which the vets say means the poisoning is probably taking place on Sundays. If it was happening on Saturdays, they’d be getting the runs on Sunday.”

  “How long has this been happening?” Summer asked.

  “Every Monday for the past four weeks,” J.J. replied.

  “Definitely sounds like a pattern,” Summer said.

  “But that doesn’t mean a human is necessarily behind it,�
� I said. “It could still be something in the water supply or their food.”

  “True. So we’ve taken steps to eliminate those possibilities.” J.J. ticked them off on his fingers. “First, we brought in water from other sources and they still got sick on Monday. Second, we changed the food supply. Once again, sick on Monday. That leaves some kind of random environmental factor or human involvement, and my money is on humans. Someone’s probably feeding them something that’s bad for them. It happens all the time at the park, just not usually on a regular basis.”

  I knew this was a sad fact of the zoo business. No matter what steps any zoo took to discourage people from feeding the animals, on any given day dozens of people did. There were signs posted on every exhibit at FunJungle warning guests that feeding the animals could make them sick, and yet, almost every day, I saw some idiot standing right in front of the signs and feeding the animals anyhow.

  My guess was, very few of the guests meant any harm, but the act was still dangerous. Many people assumed that an herbivore such as a giraffe could eat any plant at all, but that wasn’t the case. Most animals had extremely specialized diets and any variation from those could be unhealthy for them. Meanwhile, there were plenty of morons who tried to feed animals things that weren’t remotely good for them. Usually, this was food they had purchased at FunJungle, and a staggering amount of the food FunJungle sold wasn’t even that good for humans. I had seen people offering animals almost any type of junk food imaginable: lollipops, candy corn, chili fries, potato chips, churros, soft-serve ice cream. I had even seen people offering sips of their sodas to animals ranging from monkeys to elephants to okapis. It was startling that the same people who complained about the exorbitant cost of the food at the park would then turn around and give it to an animal, even after being warned that it would make the animal sick.

  And then, there were some people who really did seem to be acting maliciously. They would offer animals things that weren’t food at all, like napkins or plastic toys. Back when Henry the Hippo had been alive, the FunJungle mascot had usually kept his mouth open, eagerly waiting for guests to throw food to him, and people had often thrown garbage instead, thinking it was funny. Plastic drinking straws were particularly dangerous to animals, as they got stuck in their digestive systems and caused all kinds of medical emergencies; for this reason, most zoos in America didn’t even hand out straws with drinks.

  “FunJungle lets the public feed the giraffes on Sundays,” Summer observed.

  “Right,” J.J. said. “Well, we let them feed the giraffes most days, but there’s a good chance our culprit could be doing it at the Sunday event.”

  FunJungle had a giraffe feeding program, where guests could pay five dollars to give the giraffes a few leaves of lettuce. A great many zoos did this. Giraffes were docile, friendly, and extremely popular. Furthermore, with giraffes, if you ran the feeding properly, there was little chance of a tourist getting bitten by accident. To feed most animals, you had to hold the food dangerously close to the animals’ mouths—and thus, their teeth—but giraffes have eighteen-inch-long prehensile tongues, with which they can grab food from up to a foot away.

  “But aren’t the keepers monitoring the feedings?” I asked. “Just so something like this doesn’t happen?”

  “They are,” J.J. said. “So, to be honest, if someone is slipping the giraffes something, it’s probably happening at some other point during the day. The best way to tell, though, would be to have a team set up to watch the giraffes all day. Which is where you two come in.” He aimed his pointer fingers at Summer and me like they were the barrels of six-shooters.

  Summer sat up in her chair, excited. “You mean, you want Teddy and me to do a stakeout?”

  “In a way,” J.J. said.

  “No!” Kandace exclaimed. “J.J., I don’t want you dragging our daughter into something that could be dangerous.”

  “It’s not going to be dangerous . . . ,” J.J. argued.

  Kandace said, “The last time Summer got wrapped up in an investigation, she nearly fell into the crocodile pit! And poor Teddy almost got eaten by a polar bear!”

  “This is different,” J.J. said. “All I’m asking them to do is help keep an eye on the giraffes for a day. They won’t be going up against poachers or animal smugglers or anyone dangerous. And they’ll have my security force there to back them up.”

  “Then why not just have your security force do this in the first place?” Kandace demanded. “Don’t you pay them to handle things like this?”

  “Yes,” J.J. said. “But to be honest, I think these kids could do a better job.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “There’s no need for modesty here, Teddy,” J.J. told me. “If it hadn’t been for you and Summer, I’d never have known who bumped off my hippo or kidnapped my koala or stole my panda. The truth is, I’ve had my security force out at the giraffe paddock the past two Sundays, trying to catch this culprit, and they’ve come up dry.”

  “That’s no surprise,” Summer said. “No offense, Dad, but most of the people you have working FunJungle Security couldn’t find a hole if they were standing in it.”

  J.J. frowned at this, but he didn’t argue the point. Summer might have been exaggerating, but FunJungle Security was mostly made up of people who couldn’t get law enforcement jobs anywhere else. Chief Hoenekker, who ran the operations, was a smart guy, but he couldn’t do much on his own.

  “I’d pay you for your time,” J.J. said. “Ten dollars an hour.”

  That got my attention. J.J. had never offered to pay me to help him before. And the park was open sixteen hours on Sundays. A full day’s stakeout would bring in $160, which was more money than I’d ever had.

  Summer wasn’t as impressed. “Ten dollars?” she scoffed. “I could get twice that working at the mall.”

  “The most you could make at the mall is minimum wage and you know it,” J.J. said.

  “It doesn’t matter what the offer is,” Kandace said. “I still think this is a bad idea.”

  Summer ignored her and kept negotiating. “You want us to find out who’s poisoning the giraffes? It’ll cost you twenty dollars an hour.”

  “Twelve,” J.J. countered.

  “Eighteen,” Summer said.

  “Stop negotiating right now,” Kandace ordered.

  “Fourteen,” J.J. said. “And I’m not going any higher.”

  “Then I guess the park guests on Monday are going to be seeing a lot of giraffes with the runs,” Summer replied.

  J.J. sighed. “All right. Sixteen.”

  “Plus food and beverages,” Summer said.

  “Deal,” J.J. agreed. He seemed to be impressed by Summer’s negotiating.

  “Why is no one listening to me?!” Kandace shouted.

  J.J. and Summer both turned to her, looking surprised she was there.

  “As far as I’m concerned, you spend way too much time at that park as it is,” Kandace told her daughter. “If you want to make money, there are easier ways to do it. You’re famous. There are plenty of companies that would pay you thousands of dollars just to tweet about their products.”

  “That’s not work,” Summer said dismissively. “That’s just trading in on our family name.”

  “Darn straight,” J.J. concurred. “I got my first job when I was Summer’s age, putting up fences for local ranches, working four hours a day after school in a hundred degrees. This won’t be nearly as tough. But it’d still be good for these kids to do a little real work and learn the value of money.”

  I was quite pleased with the idea of earning money for investigating a mystery, which I had always done for free up until that point. But one thing still bothered me. “I really appreciate this, J.J., but before I agree to anything, I need to check with my parents.”

  “It’s already done,” J.J. told me. “I took care of it.”

  I set my fork down, surprised. “Really?”

  “I know I’ve been a little bit”—J.J. paused
to come up with the right word—“weaselly about how I’ve gone about seeking your help before. That hasn’t exactly put me in good stead with your parents. So I figured I ought to be completely aboveboard on this one. I called them up before I invited you over here. Told them everything that was involved, and they signed off on it. Of course, I told them it was only going to be ten dollars an hour, not expecting that my own daughter would bleed me dry. . . .”

  “Like you wouldn’t have negotiated in that situation,” Summer taunted.

  J.J. chuckled at this. “So, what do you say, Teddy? Are you in?”

  I asked, “All you need us to do is watch the giraffe exhibit tomorrow?”

  “That’s right. Though I’d like you as clandestine as possible. Act like you’re two kids hanging out at the park for the day, not junior detectives on the lookout for criminals. It’s possible that, if someone really has been poisoning those animals on purpose, they’ve been keeping an eye out for security. But they won’t expect a couple kids to be on the job.”

  “And what happens if we catch someone doing something wrong?” I asked.

  “Not if, ” Summer corrected. “When we catch them. Because we’re going to find them.”

  “You won’t have to get involved,” J.J. explained, glancing at Kandace as he said this. “I don’t want you two taking any risks at all. You’ll be in constant contact with security. The moment you see anyone up to no good, you call my people and they will take care of the situation. Is that understood?”

  “Fine,” Summer said, sounding disappointed. It was clear she’d been hoping for a little more action.

  For my part, I was happy with those orders. I had ended up in enough danger over the past year. “Sounds good to me.”

  J.J. now turned his full attention to his wife. “How about you, darling? You okay with this?”

  Kandace sighed heavily. “I suppose so. As long as you can guarantee the kids won’t get in any trouble.”