Lion Down

by Stuart Gibbs

  I twisted around to see the face of the man who had saved me. He was a medium-size, muscular guy with a thick beard, dressed in camouflage gear. The hunter.

  I figured he was the person I’d seen running toward the gorge as I fell in, as well as the object that had plummeted into the water. He’d jumped in to save me.

  He didn’t seem the slightest bit worried about having been caught hunting on the FunJungle property, or upset by the ordeal we’d been through. Instead, he was thrilled, cruising on an adrenaline high. Even though I was safe now, and the flow through the lake was gentle, he kept his arms cinched around my body, holding me up.

  “You can let go of me now,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  “Hold on a scooch. There’s one more surprise in store.”

  It struck me that the hunter seemed to know an awful lot about this ride, but before I could give it any thought, Old Faithful went off right beside us. A huge column of water exploded out of the lake, shooting fifty feet into the sky. It vented upward for a few seconds, then shut off as abruptly as it had started. The water that had shot out continued raining down on us for a while afterward, though.

  Now we floated gently toward the exit dock.

  “All righty,” the hunter said cheerfully. “That ought to do it. You sure you’re all right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, then thought to add, “Thanks.”

  “No worries.” The hunter let go of me, but subtly kept his hand on my arm as we floated along. “It was probably my fault you ended up in the drink in the first place. I mean, you wouldn’t have been up there at all if it wasn’t for me, right?”

  “Right.” I was thrown by the hunter’s cavalier attitude. It was one thing to be unfazed—and even a little thrilled—by coursing down the rapids after me. But for a man who had just been breaking the law, he didn’t seem concerned at all.

  The exit dock was now only twenty feet ahead of us. The FunJungle security guards I had seen arriving earlier had parked their Land Rovers at the end of it and were racing to help us. I couldn’t recognize three of them in the darkness—it was possible I didn’t even know them—although I could make out the sturdy form of Chief Hoenekker.

  The hunter didn’t try to get away, or to even make excuses. I figured that maybe this was because there wasn’t really any point: His only option for escape was to swim, but security would have easily captured him anyhow. And yet, he still remained chipper and laid-back, even going so far as to wave hello to the guards.

  “Hey, guys!” he said cheerfully. Then, to me, he said, “By the way, I’m Jerry.”

  “Teddy,” I responded. “Did you see anyone else up there . . . ?”

  “Your friend, you mean? Oh yeah. She scared the bejeezus out of me, coming out of the dark all of a sudden, screaming like a banshee. I almost dropped my dang rifle off the mountain. There she is now.”

  Jerry pointed to the far side of the giant conveyor belt. I could see Summer bounding down the steps we had gone up only a few minutes before, racing to see if I was all right.

  I waved to her to indicate that I was fine, but from that distance, I doubted she could see me. She still had a good ways to go to circle around the loading area and get to the exit dock.

  Jerry and I were now at the exit dock ourselves. The current gently butted us up against it.

  Hoenekker and the security guards were now waiting for us on the dock. A few other people joined them. They were wearing shorts and collared shirts and had temporary FunJungle IDs on lanyards around their necks. Two had tablet computers and one held a clipboard. I guessed they were part of the design team for the Raging Raft Ride, the ones who had been conducting the tests to see how the water was moving. A middle-aged woman looked to be in charge. She seemed uncertain whether she ought to be relieved that I had survived or angry at me for falling into the ride. Finally, anger won out.

  “What the heck were you doing up there?” she demanded. “This is a restricted area!”

  “Hey!” Jerry snapped at her, the first time he’d seemed even the tiniest bit upset. “Go easy on the kid, will you? He’s been through a lot.”

  The woman immediately clammed up, looking embarrassed.

  The security guards knelt down on the exit dock, extending their hands to us. I grabbed onto one and he easily hauled me up onto the dock.

  Hoenekker helped Jerry out. Jerry hopped up onto the dock, dripping water all over the place, and actually smiled at him. “Thanks, Chief.”

  “Thanks for saving the boy, Jerry,” Hoenekker said in kind.

  I suddenly felt weak in the knees, and for reasons that had nothing to do with my most recent near-death experience. I understood now why Jerry wasn’t worried about FunJungle Security, why he knew Hoenekker, and why he had seemed so calm about trespassing on the property.

  He wasn’t trespassing. The man who’d been shooting at Rocket worked for FunJungle.

  10

  ACCUSATIONS

  “J.J. obviously wants the lion dead,” Xavier Gonzalez said. “There’s no other explanation.”

  We were walking through the halls at school the next morning, heading from science to algebra. Before school had started, I had filled Xavier in on everything that had happened with Rocket, as Xavier was my best friend and a FunJungle fanatic. (Xavier wore almost nothing but FunJungle T-shirts; today’s featured a cartoon cheetah and the corny slogan “FunJungle is really Fast-cinating!”) Our conversation had been cut short by the start of our class, but Xavier didn’t waste a second after the ending bell to start it up again, racing to my side as I walked out of the room.

  “There are other explanations,” I argued.

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe J.J. only wants to scare the lion off.”

  That was what Jerry had told me he was doing, but I hadn’t been able to ask him any questions about it. Chief Hoenekker didn’t want Summer to know the hunter was working for FunJungle at all. “It’d be wise if you didn’t share this with her,” he’d warned me the night before, while Summer was still running down the mountain to meet us.

  “I’m not going to lie to her,” I had protested.

  “I’m not asking you to lie,” he’d said. “Just don’t tell her the whole truth. It would be in everyone’s best interests.” Before I could press the issue any further, he had hustled Jerry into his Land Rover and driven him away. By the time Summer had made it down to the exit dock, they had already been long gone, leaving her with the mistaken impression that Jerry had been arrested.

  I had let her believe that, even though I didn’t want to. While Hoenekker hadn’t said as much, I figured that the orders for secrecy were coming from J.J. McCracken himself.

  However, Hoenekker hadn’t said I couldn’t tell anyone else about Jerry’s association with FunJungle, so I had told Xavier. Now, as we wound our way through the crowded halls, my friend said, “They’re not trying to scare off the lion. The guy had a gun!”

  “Gunshots would scare a lion away.”

  “So would lots of other things. There’s plenty of ways to make a loud noise without a gun. If someone has a gun, they’re trying to kill something, pure and simple.”

  “Maybe the hunter was shooting at Rocket with something else, like rubber bullets.”

  Xavier stopped at his locker and fixed me with a hard stare. “Why are you defending J.J. McCracken?”

  “I’m not defending him. I’m trying to understand what’s going on here.”

  “Face it, you’re defending him.” Xavier opened his locker. The interior was plastered with photos of wild animals that Xavier had clipped from National Geographic magazines. “If all J.J. was doing was trying to scare the lion off, he wouldn’t care if Summer knew he’d hired a hunter, right?”

  “I don’t know.” I leaned against the lockers, scanning the halls, making sure that Summer wasn’t anywhere within eavesdropping range. “Maybe J.J. thought she’d get upset about seeing anyone with a gun in the park at all.” I stood up straight as a thought
occured to me. “Besides, we don’t even know if the order for secrecy came from J.J. Maybe Hoenekker was the one who hired Jerry, and he doesn’t want J.J. to find out. That’s why he asked me to keep it secret from Summer.”

  Xavier considered that while swapping his science book for his math one. “Why would Hoenekker hire a hunter without telling J.J. about it?”

  “Hoenekker doesn’t have to tell J.J. everything he does. And he’s in charge of security. What could be a bigger threat to the animals at the park than a predator trying to eat them?”

  “Good point.” Xavier shut his locker and turned to me. “But I still think J.J.’s behind it. Because of the giraffes.”

  “The giraffes?” I repeated, starting down the hall with Xavier again. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ll bet you a million dollars J.J. only hired you to investigate them to distract you from the mountain lion business.”

  “Are you feeling okay?” I asked. “Because you sound completely insane.”

  “Think about it. The giraffes have been getting sick for weeks. If J.J. was really worried about them, why didn’t he come to you before now?”

  “He already had his security people working on it. But they failed.”

  “Even so, he didn’t reach out to you until after Lily Deakin asked you to help with the mountain lion.”

  “That’s not true. When he invited me to dinner on Saturday night, he had no idea Summer and I had been talking to Lily.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he did. J.J. always knows what Summer is up to.”

  “How? She hasn’t had a bodyguard in months.”

  “He doesn’t need a bodyguard to keep tabs on her. Did she have her phone with her?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then he could track her on it.”

  “J.J. has better things to do than tracking his daughter twenty-four hours a day.”

  “He doesn’t have to be doing it actively. There are all sorts of alerts he could set up. Like if she goes out of a certain range, or heads someplace she’s never been before, he could get alerted to her movements.”

  I thought about that. It did sound like something J.J. might do. “I suppose.”

  Xavier asked, “Did Summer take any photos while you were out at Lincoln Stone’s place?”

  “Yes. She took a bunch of his house. It’s hideous.”

  “Well, there you go. If she posted those to social media while you were there, and J.J. follows her—which I’m sure he does—then he’d know where you were. And the only reason you’d be out at Lincoln Stone’s place would be investigating that crime, right?”

  “I guess. Though I don’t know for sure that she posted anything. . . .”

  “Technically, she wouldn’t even have to. Any photo Summer takes goes into her cloud account. I guarantee you J.J. has access to it. If a whole lot of crime scene photos started popping up, he’d realize what was going on.”

  I mulled all that over as we passed the library. The more I thought about Xavier’s arguments, the less crazy they seemed. Summer had definitely taken pictures of the tape outline at the crime scene, as well as Lincoln Stone’s horrible house. Less than thirty minutes later, J.J. had invited me to dinner.

  “Okay,” I conceded, “let’s say that J.J. did ask us to investigate the giraffes in order to keep us from investigating the lion. If J.J. is really the one hunting Rocket, how does that connect to Lincoln Stone and King?”

  “Like this: J.J. knows he has a lion loose on his property and he wants to get rid of it. Well, he can’t just hire a hunter and kill an endangered animal. He owns FunJungle, for Pete’s sake! The PR would be awful if the public found out. But now imagine that the lion is suddenly a nuisance. It killed the beloved dog of a famous person. And that person is the one who fights for the warrant to hunt it. Now J.J. has the right to have it killed, and the public won’t be as upset.”

  “You think that J.J. McCracken killed King?”

  “No!” Xavier exclaimed. “Well, not personally. I’m sure J.J. has lots of shady people on his payroll who would kill a dog for him.”

  “Um . . . I’m not sure that’s true.”

  “Look, I’m not saying that J.J. knew Lincoln would go on this whole crazy tirade and put a bounty on the lion’s head. But if you really think that someone killed King and framed the cat for it, who would benefit more than J.J.? The lion’s a bigger threat to him than it is to anyone else. It’s creeping around his zoo at night. Maybe it’s been doing this for weeks and we’re only finding out now. How long before it kills some exotic animal? Or a tourist? From what you’ve told me, J.J. couldn’t get a permit to kill it until something died. Or got threatened, at least. But if Rocket killed someone else’s animal, and the permit is issued, then it’s open season. Anyone can take out the cat.”

  “Maybe. Though it’s still not guaranteed that the government will issue the permit at all.”

  “I bet they will. You said Tommy Lopez’s boss didn’t even want him investigating this. That his boss was more concerned about politics than her job. Well, who’s the most influential person in this area? Not Lincoln Stone. It’s J.J. McCracken. If that guy wants the government to do something, the government does it.”

  “Then why wouldn’t he just press the government to let him kill Rocket in the first place?”

  “Because then he’d look like a jerk. This way, he doesn’t—”

  “Gonzalez!”

  Xavier cringed in response. We both knew who the voice belonged to.

  Our vice principal, Mr. Putterman, was storming down the hall toward us. Putterman was stocky and mean, with a neck so thick it looked like his head went straight into his body. As usual, he was wearing boots and a cowboy hat. Putterman was in charge of discipline at Lyndon Baines Johnson Middle School, and he pursued the task with a disturbing relish. His basic philosophy was that every student was guilty of something until proven innocent.

  To my horror—and that of my parents as well—corporal punishment was actually legal at our school. Generally, this consisted of “paddling,” wherein Putterman would have the offending student bend over his desk (which was known as “assuming the position”) and then swat their butt with a wooden paddle. Apparently, paddling had been practiced throughout much of Texas only a few decades before, but enlightenment had come to most of the state. Somehow, it had escaped my school, though. The philosophy among many parents who had also gone to LBJ Middle seemed to be that they’d had to deal with it, so their kids should too.

  Putterman didn’t paddle kids too often; the fear of it was enough to keep almost everyone in line. But it did happen, and Putterman was rumored to enjoy it. His paddle was emblazoned with the words BOARD OF DISCIPLINE, and while it usually hung prominently on a hook in Putterman’s office, the vice principal also liked to carry it around the halls, brandishing it menacingly while he looked for troublemakers. Unfortunately, in Putterman’s book, everyone was a potential troublemaker; he was often so busy terrorizing decent kids that he overlooked the real problem students.

  Which was happening right then. Putterman was bearing down on Xavier, aiming his paddle at the poor kid like a massive pointer, completely unaware that Tim and Jim Barksdale were lurking in the hall directly behind him. The Barksdale twins were idiots and bullies who had caused plenty of trouble for Xavier and me—as well as almost everyone else at the school. At the moment, both of them were mocking Putterman, imitating how he walked while they made dopey faces, and yet, Putterman was so focused on Xavier he didn’t even notice them.

  Putterman stopped in front of Xavier and jabbed him in the chest with the paddle. “Gonzalez, that shirt does not meet the standards of the dress code for this school.”

  Xavier was so nervous, he couldn’t find the words to defend himself. So I stepped in instead. “It’s only a T-shirt, Mr. Putterman,” I said, trying to sound as respectful as possible. “T-shirts are allowed at school.” I pointed around the hall to all the other kids who also happened to be
wearing T-shirts. Many of them glared at me angrily, like I had stabbed them in the back.

  Putterman wheeled on me. “Was I speaking to you?”

  I shrank back in fear. “No, but . . .”

  Putterman jabbed Xavier with the paddle again. Even though he was ostensibly pointing at the shirt, he was poking Xavier hard enough to knock him backward. “That is a FunJungle T-shirt. There is a difference between a regular T-shirt and one that merely serves as an advertisement for a company that has no affiliation with this school. Particularly a company that is merely a carnival sideshow for the display of animals.” He said this last word the way other people might have said “disease” or “excrement.”

  Putterman had a bizarre hatred for animals. He often remarked that “the only good animal is the one on your plate.” Therefore, he hated FunJungle with a passion, and he couldn’t understand what anyone would like about it at all. It was rumored that Putterman hated animals so much because he was really afraid of them. The one place all students knew they were safe from him was the science lab; Putterman never entered it, possibly because our science teacher kept three tarantulas, two turtles, and a bearded dragon in there.

  Xavier did his best to answer Putterman, stuttering in fear. “S-s-sorry. I d-d-didn’t know that rule.”

  “Well, you should,” Putterman snapped. He then held up the student handbook, which he always kept folded in his back pocket, and announced to the entire hall, “All students are required to know all the rules and bylaws of this school! Failure to conform to said rules will be dealt with harshly!”

  Behind his back, Tim and Jim Barksdale continued mocking him, aping his every move. As Putterman held up the handbook, each of them held up a comic book and shook it wildly. Even I thought this was funny. Around the Barksdales, students struggled to hold in their laughter.

  Putterman remained oblivious and returned his attention to Xavier. “I’ll let you off with a warning this time, because these rules were only recently amended. But I do not want to see you wearing a T-shirt from that place again.” He jabbed Xavier with his paddle once more, this time so hard that it knocked my poor friend into a bank of lockers. Then Putterman put the paddle over his shoulder and strutted around the corner.