by Stuart Gibbs
TURN THE TV ON NOW!!! CHANNEL 3.
“Summer says something important’s happening on TV,” I said, grabbing the remote.
Our TV was about twenty years old, but then, we barely used it. I couldn’t remember the last time it had been on.
The local news was showing on channel 3, and the mountain lion was the lead story. Lincoln Stone was having what appeared to be a live press conference in front of his home. Several reporters were clustered in the driveway where I had been only a few hours before, pointing microphones at him, while his ugly fake log cabin loomed in the background. The news scroll at the bottom of the screen read: “Live: Local celebrity Lincoln Stone makes big announcement in cougar case.”
As we tuned in, Lincoln was in the middle of a rant, red-faced in anger, the same way he often was on his show. “The mountain lion that killed King is a threat to this community! Next time it might not be a dog that gets eaten, but a child. Or maybe even an adult. Now I know that all the tree huggers out there think this cat should have more rights than I do, but that’s just plain idiocy. I’m not going to sit here while a vicious, bloodthirsty predator menaces the lives of my fellow citizens! Therefore, I am putting a bounty on its head. I will pay fifty thousand dollars to whoever brings me the carcass of the cat that killed King.”
The announcement caught my parents and me by surprise. The reporters had the same reaction. There was a moment of stunned silence, and then everyone started shouting questions at once. Lincoln didn’t answer them. Instead, he said, “If anyone wants to know anything else, the full details are on my website, LincolnStoneForAmerica.com.” Then he turned his back on the cameras and headed toward his house.
The news returned to the studio, where the anchors seemed floored by Lincoln’s announcement as well.
I looked to my parents. Both were dumbstruck.
“That fool,” Mom said. “He has no idea what he’s done.”
“Oh, I think he knows perfectly well what he’s done,” Dad said. “He just turned this entire county into a war zone.”
6
OPERATION HAMMERHEAD
The hunters didn’t even wait until the next morning to start combing the area for Rocket.
Word of Lincoln Stone’s bounty spread like wildfire. Fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money. Hundreds of people who were about to go to bed suddenly pulled their clothes back on, grabbed their guns, and headed out to kill the cougar before anyone else could.
Almost all of them figured the cat would still be somewhere near Lincoln Stone’s home, and the biggest piece of wilderness around that was the FunJungle property. Most of it remained undeveloped, and very little was even fenced. Thus, right outside our door were several square miles of virgin forest.
It was possible that the hunters had no idea they were trespassing on J.J.’s land, but then, it was equally likely that they knew and didn’t care. After all, they were already willfully attempting to break one law: It still wouldn’t be legal to kill the lion until the Department of Fish and Wildlife officially declared it a nuisance and issued the permit, but everyone was hunting it anyhow.
Mom and Dad had rushed out immediately after the news ended to scuff out the lion tracks we’d found, hiding even that slight bit of evidence that the cat was around, but lots of hunters still came poking through Lakeside Estates. Most of them had used FunJungle’s entry road to get there, as it provided the easiest access to the wilderness. The road was gated off to cars at night, but the hunters were obviously parking on the edge of the property and then following the road on foot. Our home sat directly between where the road ended at the employee parking lot and the wilderness. So throughout the night, I heard hunters tromping past our place, as well as several heated arguments between rival groups declaring that they had gotten there first and thus deserved dibs on the cougar.
I also heard quite a lot of gunshots. None were inside Lakeside Estates itself, but they were close enough to rouse me from my sleep. Once awake, I had trouble going back to bed, fearing an errant bullet might pierce the cheap walls of our trailer. My parents had the same concern; we laid out sleeping bags in the living room, keeping ourselves close to the floor, but I remained nervous through the night.
Thankfully, Rocket survived. Possibly, no one even saw her—although there was ample evidence that, in their haste to earn the money, several hunters had shot at things that they mistakenly thought were the lion. Even if many of those things didn’t look anything like a mountain lion at all.
Bulldozers, for example. Hunters shot two different ones that had been parked close to the fence of the Wilds. In addition, overzealous hunters also shot several trees, many prickly pear cactuses, four PRIVATE PROPERTY: NO HUNTING signs, three large boulders, and one windmill. One man, who turned out to have been drinking, quickly got turned around in the woods and shot his own car. There were at least ten accounts of different hunting parties opening fire on one another, but miraculously, no one was hurt, save for one idiot who rested a loaded gun on his foot and accidentally blew off three of his own toes.
J.J. McCracken was terrified that, sooner or later, some fanatical hunter would mistake one of the park animals for the lion and shoot it. But even with all his political clout, he couldn’t get the police to start rousting hunters from his property until dawn. (The local sheriff had argued—probably correctly—that anyone wandering out in those woods at night stood a decent chance of being mistaken for a mountain lion themselves and shot by accident.) At first light, though, law enforcement arrived en masse, arresting people by the dozens for trespassing.
Lincoln Stone then issued an angry press statement against J.J. McCracken, claiming that he was “harboring a fugitive varmint” on his property.
The local division of the Department of Fish and Wildlife didn’t issue any statements at all.
With all the commotion, I didn’t get much sleep. So when I showed up at J.J.’s office in the morning to get my orders for the stakeout, I was frazzled and groggy. J.J. wasn’t in much better shape, having spent much of the night on the phone with everyone from the local police to the FBI, trying to deal with the onslaught of hunters. Chief Hoenekker, the head of FunJungle Security, was also in a testy mood, although his wasn’t due to lack of sleep; he seemed annoyed that J.J. was forcing him to use Summer and me to investigate the giraffe mystery.
No one except J.J. knew where Hoenekker had worked before coming to FunJungle, but given the secrecy and the fact that Hoenekker always dressed and acted like he was in the military, a lot of people figured he’d come from some highly classified special ops division. Unfortunately, no matter how competent and qualified Hoenekker was, his security force was equally incompetent and unqualified. This was a major source of frustration to Hoenekker, who was constantly pestering J.J. for more money so that he could hire people with IQs above those of the animals.
Our assignment was rather easy: Summer and I would hang around the giraffe paddock for the day, acting like tourists, but keeping an eye out for anything suspicious. We would be aided in this by FunJungle Security personnel Marge O’Malley and Kevin Wilks. The way Marge and Kevin had been selected for the job was very simple: No one else in FunJungle Security had wanted to do it.
Neither Marge nor Kevin was very bright, but Marge was at least exceptionally committed to her job. Until recently, she had been a nemesis of mine, convinced that I was up to no good, and determined to prove it. However, in the course of recovering FunJungle’s stolen panda, I had finally earned Marge’s respect. She had been downright kind and friendly to me ever since.
Technically, Marge wasn’t even FunJungle Security anymore. She had been kicked out after a disastrous incident in which she had ruined the FunJungle Friends Dance ’n’ Sing Parade while in pursuit of a criminal, destroying two floats and the instruments of an entire high school marching band in the process. For the past month, she had been working as a director of crowd control operations, which was basically making sure people didn’t cut in lin
es; she was essentially a glorified hall monitor. Marge had been good at this—she liked yelling at people who were breaking the rules—but she had started to find the job tedious and was bucking to get back into security. The giraffe stakeout seemed like a decent way to give her a test run.
As for Kevin Wilks, he was a decent person and he had always been nice to me, but he had the deductive skills of a dead muskrat.
Then again, Marge and Kevin weren’t being asked to do much deduction. They were merely supposed to stay in the vicinity of the giraffe exhibit, in radio contact with Summer and me, in case they were needed. They were going to be undercover themselves, in standard tourist garb, which at FunJungle meant shorts, baseball caps, and souvenir T-shirts. Even so, J.J. didn’t want them lurking too close to the giraffes, recognizing that neither was really a master of blending in, and he didn’t want the presence of law enforcement to spook any screwball who was trying to poison the giraffes on purpose.
The radios were pretty cool, with little buds that fit in our ears and microphones that clipped to our shirts. The wires that went to the earbuds were extremely thin and nearly impossible to see, so you had to look really closely to tell that we were wearing them. The one big drawback was that, if you weren’t careful, you could forget you were wearing the radio and broadcast something private to everyone else. So Summer and I opted to not wear them most of the time, putting them in only when we needed to be in contact.
In theory, Summer should have been the biggest hindrance to our undercover work, as she was famous, but Summer was extremely adept at blending in when she wanted to. The trick was that, when she went out to public events where she was supposed to be noticed, she always wore pink. It was her trademark, although the truth was that Summer didn’t like it much. Her fans associated the color with her, and, therefore, when she wasn’t wearing pink (which was most of the time), she was almost invisible. For our stakeout, she was wearing her standard incognito outfit: a baggy T-shirt, sunglasses, and a baseball cap tucked down low over her eyes.
Marge, who had always fancied herself the closest thing FunJungle had to a commando, felt that we needed an official military name for the stakeout.
“What’s wrong with ‘the stakeout’?” Summer asked as we were all heading out to our posts in the morning.
“It’s lame,” Marge argued. “And it’s not specific enough. If we don’t name the operation, it might get confused with other operations over the radio.”
“That’s right,” I said. “There’s also a platoon of marines staking out the platypus exhibit today.”
“Really?” Kevin asked, surprised. “Why? Is someone trying to steal the platypuses?”
Marge bopped him on the back of the head with an open hand. “He’s joking, you idiot.” Then she thought for a moment and said, “What about Operation Deathstalker? That sounds cool.”
“It sounds psychotic,” Summer said.
“How about Operation Giraffe?” Kevin asked eagerly. “You know, because we’re watching the giraffes?”
“We can’t call it that!” Marge told him, aghast. “It’s too obvious. Then anyone who’s eavesdropping on our communications will know exactly what we’re talking about!”
“Why would anyone be eavesdropping on our communications?” I asked.
“We don’t know what kind of fiends we’re up against here,” Marge warned me. “This giraffe poisoning situation might just turn out to be the tip of the iceberg. Maybe there’s a whole criminal organization at work up to some nefarious purpose here and we’re merely scratching the surface.”
Summer gave me a look that said agreeing to the stakeout with Marge might have been a big mistake.
“Operation Kangaroo!” Kevin suggested triumphantly. “This way, it’s a misdirection, right? If the criminals are eavesdropping on us, and they hear Operation Kangaroo, they’ll think we’re staking out the kangaroos and not the giraffes.”
“I really don’t think there’s a criminal organization at work here,” I said.
“We’re not calling it Operation Kangaroo,” Marge said dismissively. “That’s too cute. If we’re going to use an animal, it needs to be an awesome one. Something that’s deadly, maybe.”
“Ooh!” Kevin said excitedly. “Like a blowfish?”
“Those aren’t deadly,” Marge said. “All they do is inflate themselves when they get scared.”
“They’re deadly if you eat them,” Kevin told her. “They’re poisonous.”
“That’s not exactly intimidating,” Marge said. “I mean something that can kill you without needing to be dead first. Like a tiger. Or a wolverine. Or a hammerhead shark.”
“Operation Hammerhead!” Kevin exclaimed.
Marge broke into a smile. “I like it,” she said. “It sounds cool and deadly. Like us.” She mimed whipping out a gun and blowing away her enemies.
Summer rolled her eyes. “We’re not getting paid enough to put up with this,” she told me.
We arrived at the giraffe paddock just as the park was opening. The paddock was located directly next to the African Plains in SafariLand; the giraffes could be released into the plains if the keepers wanted. The giraffe feeding area was a round platform that extended out into the paddock. It was raised ten feet above the ground, as was much of the viewing area for the giraffes, as this allowed guests to look the beautiful creatures in the eye, or to hand food directly to them without forcing the giraffes to bend down to get it. It was accessed by a small wooden bridge, at the front of which was a turnstile. To pass through the turnstile, you had to show the receipt proving that you had paid for the experience. Despite the five-dollar cost, the line to feed the giraffes was often more than fifty people long.
There were six different feeding stations on the round platform, each run by a separate person who would advise the tourists about the proper way to feed the giraffes and then give them a few leaves of lettuce. Running a feeding station was hot and repetitive, but the people who worked there all seemed to enjoy it; they had proudly named themselves the Giraffe Staff.
Summer and I posted ourselves on a bench in a shaded area close enough to the giraffes to keep a close eye on the entire paddock. It was only a few minutes before the first park guests arrived, eager to feed the giraffes before the lines got too long. Marge and Kevin milled about, doing their best to look like tourists. To Kevin’s dismay, Marge felt they ought to act like a couple on their third date, even though Marge was at least ten years older than Kevin. She insisted that they hold hands and stare at each other lovingly, which Kevin was having a hard time with. Marge wasn’t unattractive, but she was a slob, and she never used deodorant; somehow, she’d gotten the idea that it caused cancer. Thus, on a hot day like this one, she sweated a lot and smelled bad.
I soon discovered that a stakeout wasn’t as easy as I had expected. As much as I loved seeing giraffes in the wild, watching people feeding them for hours on end wasn’t nearly as fascinating. No one was doing anything remotely sinister. The tourists appeared excited, fascinated, and occasionally grossed out by the long, slobbery tongues—but no one seemed to be up to no good, which was boring. Plus, the heat was brutal, even in the shade. Combined with my lack of sleep from the night before, I was having an extremely hard time staying awake. Even after Summer got us jumbo 72-ounce souvenir cups of highly caffeinated soda, I kept nodding off.
At one point, somewhere around noon, I snapped back awake to find Summer in the midst of reading something off her phone to me. “. . . which would mean that any mountain lion could be killed. That’s horrible!”
“What?” I asked, trying to shake the cobwebs from my head.
Summer looked up from her phone at me. “You fell asleep again, didn’t you?”
“I’m sorry. Last night was awful.” I realized I had nodded off with the radio in my ear. Marge was rambling on about a new initiative she wanted to start at FunJungle to fight pickpocketing. I noticed that Summer had removed her own earpiece, so I plucked mine out too.
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“I was reading the laws about depredation permits for mountain lions,” Summer said. “If I’m understanding this right, they’re insanely stupid. Apparently, if Lincoln Stone gets this permit to allow a nuisance animal to be killed, it doesn’t actually specify that you have to kill the exact same mountain lion that you consider a nuisance. It allows you to kill any mountain lion.”
I rubbed my eyes, wondering if I had misunderstood Summer due to my exhaustion. “So you could kill a lion that didn’t eat the dog, and the law would be totally fine with it?”
“Yes!”
“That’s crazy.”
“Tell me about it. How could a law like that even exist?”
I stared out at the giraffes, wondering if I had missed anything while I was napping. But nothing criminal appeared to be happening. The tourists kept changing, but the scene remained almost exactly the same. “Lincoln Stone has people all over the county trying to kill a lion now. There’s a really good chance one of them will get the wrong one.”
“Any lion will be the wrong one! Because no lion killed that dog in the first place.”
“Have you heard anything from Tommy yet? About the video from the security cameras?”
Summer checked her email for what was probably the thousandth time that day. Not that I could blame her; we didn’t have much else to do. “Nope.”
I fished my phone out of my pocket to do the same thing.
“Do you think Marge asked Kevin to pretend to be her boyfriend because she thinks he’s cute?” Summer asked.
I looked up to find that Summer was watching them. They were strolling along the exhibit, trying to act normal. Marge was holding Kevin’s hand and smiling happily. Kevin looked like he’d rather be holding a dead sea slug.
