by Stuart Gibbs
Xavier was a wreck. His brief encounter with Putterman had made him break out in a cold sweat. He looked down at his shirt morosely. “I can’t wear FunJungle T-shirts anymore? All I own are FunJungle T-shirts!”
To make things worse, the Barksdales now swept in. They had been following Putterman down the hall, mimicking his strut, but once he was out of sight, they descended on Xavier.
Until recently, the twins had been so similar in looks and intellect that no one could tell them apart, even their own parents. But over the past few weeks, Tim had developed a volcanic case of acne, allowing all of us to know which jerk was which for once.
“Gonzalez!” Tim said, doing a decent imitation of Putterman’s drawl. “I don’t like that T-shirt one bit! It has a kitty cat on it, and I’m scared of kitty cats!” He pretended to tremble in fear, getting some laughs from the other kids in the hall.
Now Jim tried to do an imitation of Putterman as well, though he wasn’t nearly as good at it. Somehow, his attempt to do Putterman’s voice sounded Jamaican. “I hate animals! So I hate that shirt! Now take it off!” Suddenly, he wasn’t joking around anymore. He had become his usual bullying self.
Xavier gaped at him, worried. “Take my shirt off?”
Tim loomed over him, having grown menacing himself. He clenched his fists. “Yeah, loser. Take it off.”
Around us, the other kids had stopped laughing. They now warily watched the entire exchange play out. I glanced down the hall the way Putterman had gone, wondering why the man never seemed to be around when students were truly misbehaving.
To my surprise, Xavier didn’t cave. Instead, he screwed up his courage and stood up to the Barksdales. He swallowed hard and said, “No.”
The twins looked to each other. They had obviously expected Xavier would simply give in and do what they wanted. Now that he hadn’t, they seemed a bit lost. Finally, after a tense few seconds, they dropped the whole idea of threatening Xavier in favor of taunting him.
Jim pointed to Xavier’s cheetah T-shirt. “That’s a stupid shirt, Gonzalez. Let me guess. You’re one of those tree huggers who thinks mountain lions shouldn’t be hunted.”
“Our entire government thinks they shouldn’t be hunted,” I reminded them. “They’re an endangered species.”
“Well, the government’s wrong,” Jim told me. “Lincoln Stone says they’re bloodthirsty and dangerous and we’d be better off without them.”
“That’s not true!” Xavier exclaimed, so upset that he overcame his usual fear around the Barksdales. “Mountain lions aren’t any threat to us at all!”
“Well, this one won’t be much longer,” Tim said with a snicker. “My family’s going to take it down.” He mimed blasting away with a rifle.
“That’s right!” Jim whooped. “And then we’re gonna get Lincoln Stone’s reward money and we’ll be rich!”
I frowned at the thought of this. I had never met Tim and Jim’s parents, but they were rumored to be excellent hunters with a questionable sense of legality, often trespassing on other people’s land in search of game. “It’s not legal to hunt that lion yet,” I reminded them.
“Says you,” Tim taunted. Then he flicked me on the ear with his finger for no good reason and sauntered on by.
“Yeah. Says you,” Jim repeated. Then he flicked my other ear and followed his brother down the hall.
Xavier and I watched them go. Our fellow students all took care to leave them a wide berth, knowing the Barksdales would happily give a wedgie or knock the books out of the hands of any unfortunate kid who got too close.
“I wonder how many other people like that Lincoln Stone’s bounty has encouraged,” Xavier said.
“Plenty,” I replied.
“J.J. probably didn’t even need to hire that hunter,” Xavier observed. “Thanks to Lincoln, someone else is going to kill that lion for him.”
“There’s no proof J.J. was behind this,” I said.
“Behind what?” Summer asked from beside me.
I turned to her, startled by her sudden appearance. “Trying to protect the mountain lion,” I said quickly. “The whole Barksdale family wants to hunt it down.”
Summer glared after Tim and Jim angrily. “Of course they do. Thanks to this bounty, every jerk in the state is going to be after Rocket.”
Xavier gave me a knowing glance behind Summer’s back, amused that Summer didn’t know her own father might be one of those jerks.
Summer pulled her gaze from the Barksdales and turned back to me. “Unfortunately, we’ve got another problem.”
“What?” I asked.
“I just heard from Daddy. The giraffes are sick again.”
I winced. “So . . . it was the formal couple?”
“No, it wasn’t. That’s what Daddy wanted to tell me last night, before we saw the hunter and Rocket. They were innocent.”
“But if it wasn’t them, who else could it be? We watched the giraffes all day yesterday and didn’t see anything else suspicious.”
“I know. But we obviously missed something. Because somehow, they’ve all been poisoned again.”
11
WAITING FOR LILY
The bell rang before I could ask Summer anything more about the giraffes or why the formal couple was innocent, and I had math club during lunch, so it wasn’t until the end of the school day that I could get more information from her. I found her sitting in the shade of an oak tree on the front lawn of the school, waiting for Lily Deakin to come pick us up. She had her shoes off and was wiggling her bare toes in the grass while she read an article on her phone.
Before I could bring up the giraffes, she asked me, “Did you know that there’s a national park in India that people have illegally built entire villages in?”
“Yeah,” I said. “My father went there to take photos of leopards for National Geographic.”
“It’s horrible,” Summer said. “I mean, here’s this preserve that’s supposed to protect animals, and people just moved right into it—and the government didn’t even stop them. The leopards and all the other animals barely have any space in India as it is. But now they have even less.”
“Unfortunately, those people don’t have any place else to go,” I told her. “They’re dirt-poor and there’s no other available land around there. They have to live somewhere.”
“So they should take land from the leopards?”
“No, but . . . these issues are complicated. I read all about it in the article my father took the photos for.” I sat down on the grass and pulled my own shoes off. “Why are you reading about this?”
“I’m just looking up stuff on human/wildlife conflict. It’s not just happening here, with us and Rocket. It’s happening everywhere on earth.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw plenty of it in Africa. Usually, the animals end up on the losing side.”
“It’s not fair,” Summer groused. “The animals were here first. We took their land. And then we get upset at them for trying to survive any way they can.”
A ladybug started crawling over my toes. I picked it up and let it wander across my hand. “How did your father know that the formal couple didn’t poison the giraffes?” I asked. While I was pleased that Summer was researching human/wildlife conflict, I was desperate for the news on Operation Hammerhead.
“Hoenekker tracked them down and questioned them. It turned out they hadn’t been feeding anything to the giraffes. They were doing a wedding announcement.”
“A wedding announcement?” I set the ladybug back down on the ground and let it continue on its way.
“Yeah. Like a save-the-date thing for their wedding. They dressed up and then took a selfie in front of the giraffe. They’re going to make it into a card and send it out to all their friends.”
“Why a giraffe?”
“Because they really like giraffes. And because giraffes are one of the only animals you can get that close to. They said they were going to write some corny giraffe jokes on it like, ‘It
’s not too long until our wedding. Hope to spot you there.’ It’s kind of cute, really.”
“I guess,” I said. Thinking about wedding invitations, I recalled my parents two nights before, teasing me about J.J. McCracken being my future father-in-law, which made me feel slightly embarrassed.
Other students were sitting on the lawn, under the tree, waiting for people to pick them up as well. But as usual, they all were treating Summer differently from everyone else. Everyone was trying to act like they weren’t paying any attention to Summer, but they were paying attention to her. After all, Summer was famous, and no matter how much she tried to act like a normal teenager, she wasn’t. So everyone gave her some distance for privacy, but then kept glancing her way, or interrupting their conversations to eavesdrop on ours.
I asked, “If they were only taking a photo with the giraffe, why were they acting so suspicious?”
“They needed a selfie stick to get the photo right.”
“Oh,” I said, now understanding. As ridiculous as it was, FunJungle had been forced to ban selfie sticks. It was staggering how many different ways tourists had managed to cause trouble with them. They fell over railings while trying to take photos of themselves. They tried to get close-ups of animals, extending the sticks too far into exhibits, at which point the animals would grab their phones (if they were apes or monkeys) or try to eat them (if they were almost anything else). They would accidentally whack other tourists with them; the FunJungle hospital averaged three selfie stick–related injuries a day. And now that the park was planning to open thrill rides, J.J. knew selfie sticks would only cause more trouble. The Disney empire had already banned them, because tourists kept trying to take pictures of themselves on rides and getting the sticks caught in the machinery. So J.J. had preemptively declared them illegal before any damage could be done.
“So they were only hiding a selfie stick?” I asked.
“Yes. The woman had it in her purse. When Marge came charging in, the couple thought she was trying to arrest them for using it. So they ran off and dumped the stick in the garbage.”
That made me laugh. “If anyone would tackle a tourist for having a selfie stick, it’s Marge.”
“No kidding. When Daddy first set up the ban, she was frisking guests for them at the front gates. Hoenekker made her stop it.”
“Have you heard how she’s doing?”
“Not too bad. They put a cast on her broken leg. She’ll only be out of commission another day or two.”
I thought back to the chaos Marge had caused at the giraffe feeding area. “After Marge fell into the exhibit, I wasn’t paying very close attention to the tourists, were you?”
“No, not really.”
“So someone could have poisoned the giraffes then, and we might have missed it.”
“There were still a lot of people around then. Someone would have seen something, don’t you think?”
I shrugged. “This has been going on for five weeks and no one’s seen anything yet.”
“Plus, Daddy says all five of the giraffes are sick today. Not just one or two. But at the feeding areas, you only have access to one giraffe at a time. So how did someone manage to poison all of them?”
“Maybe they came back multiple times. Did you notice if anyone visited more than once yesterday? Or maybe asked to feed more than one giraffe?”
“No.” Summer absently plucked some blades of grass from the lawn. “But, to be honest, there were lots of times when I wasn’t paying close attention yesterday. I mean, I was trying my best, but . . . being on a stakeout wasn’t exactly riveting.”
“I know.” I picked up an acorn and chucked it at the tree in frustration. “But we were there, right? I mean, if someone had been doing something blatantly dangerous, we would have noticed, wouldn’t we?”
“Like what?”
“Feeding the giraffes something that was obviously bad for them. Like candy or garbage.”
“Maybe not,” Summer admitted. “There were a couple times, when I was there by myself, when I might have been distracted for a while.”
“Doing what?”
“Texting friends and stuff.”
I couldn’t control my annoyance. “So someone could have poisoned the giraffes during your shift and you wouldn’t have noticed?”
“It’s possible. I mean, I thought I was keeping a good eye on things. But maybe I wasn’t. Because someone still poisoned the giraffes.”
“Great,” I said sarcastically, before I could stop myself.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“It didn’t sound like nothing. It sounds like you’re angry at me.”
“You got angry at me yesterday,” I said testily. “After I didn’t run after the selfie-stick people with you. You acted like I’d made a huge mistake and let the bad guys escape. But then you didn’t even do the job we were supposed to do in the first place!”
“I tried,” Summer protested. “But it was boring. You’re telling me you never looked at your phone the whole time you were on duty?”
“No.”
Summer took off her sunglasses. “Honestly? Look into my eyes and swear you never got distracted.”
I met her gaze and said, “I never got distracted.”
Only, that wasn’t the truth. I had been distracted by my phone at times. I had checked my emails and answered some texts and played a few games. But I had never taken my eyes off the giraffes for more than thirty seconds. At least, I was pretty sure that was the case.
I immediately felt terrible about lying to Summer. I had never lied to her before. But I was annoyed at her for slacking off after getting angry at me, and I didn’t want to give her any ammunition to argue that I might have slacked off as well. If she had really stopped watching the giraffes for minutes at a time, then all our vigilance on the stakeout had been for nothing.
Summer stared into my eyes for a long time. She seemed to suspect I was lying, but she didn’t call me on it. Instead, she finally put her sunglasses back on and said coldly, “I guess you’re just a better detective than me.”
A car horn grabbed our attention. It was broken, so it sounded like someone was killing a goose. I figured that I only knew one person who drove a car so broken down that even the horn could barely function.
Lily Deakin had arrived. She pulled up into the red zone in front of the lawn and honked at us again.
Summer got to her feet and grabbed her books. “Come on, genius,” she said brusquely. “Time to investigate our other case. I’ll try not to screw this one up too.”
With that, she headed for Lily’s car.
I grabbed my bag and followed her, feeling terrible all around. I was frustrated by our failure to catch the giraffe poisoner in the act and worried about J.J. McCracken’s possible intent to kill the mountain lion and upset that Summer and I weren’t getting along. Nothing about either one of our investigations was going the way I’d hoped.
And things were only going to get worse.
12
SUSPECTS
“Tommy and I have some exciting new leads in the Rocket case,” Lily said. “But we don’t have much time to pursue them.”
We were driving along a two-lane road through the Texas Hill Country, a little north of school. On both sides of us, barbed-wire fences ran along the shoulder with huge tracts of oak and cedar forest behind them. We were in ranching country, where the properties were enormous and the homes were few and far between. We had seen far more cattle than cars.
Summer was in the front seat. I was in the back, along with a box of 20,000 pamphlets protesting the inhumane treatment of animals in testing drugs for humans. All the windows were rolled down, so hot wind was whistling through the car. The pamphlets fluttered noisily in the box.
“Could we roll the windows up?” I asked. “I can barely hear anything!”
“I’d prefer not to,” Lily replied. “My air conditioner conked out yesterday. At least this w
ay, there’s a breeze.”
Summer sighed with resignation, then asked, “Why don’t we have much time?”
Lily said, “Tommy says Fish and Wildlife is under a lot of pressure to make a decision about the permit to kill Rocket. Probably because of Lincoln revving up all his followers. Tommy’s been doing his best to slow the process down, and he’s not the only one, but—”
“There are other people there who think Rocket might have been framed?” I asked.
“Well, there are other people who think that they should at least take their time to examine all the evidence before saying it’s okay to kill a cougar.” Lily swerved wildly into the opposite lane to avoid an armadillo that was foraging on the side of the road. “Lots of people, really. But they’re not assigned to the case. So the process can only be stalled so long. Which is why we need to find some ironclad evidence to exonerate Rocket.”
“Then let’s get to it,” Summer said. “What are your leads?”
Lily answered, “Tommy got ahold of the video from Lincoln Stone’s security system for last Friday night, like you suggested. He knows a guy at the security company. They had to do it on the down-low, because Tommy’s boss wouldn’t approve even this much investigating. We only have the video from the front gates, but it’s enough. Turns out, Lincoln had a couple friends over the night that King died.”
“Yeah, we heard,” Summer said.
Lily looked at her over the top of her sunglasses, surprised. “How?”
“From Natasha Mason, the mother of the boys we saw near the crime scene,” Summer replied. “She said the guests were all drunk and using the firing range.”
“She said they might have been drunk,” I corrected.
Lily said, “Tommy called Lincoln’s office to ask about them. He couldn’t get Lincoln, but an assistant said Lincoln hosts a poker night every couple Fridays. As far as I know, the assistant didn’t even admit that everyone had been out on the firing range. He didn’t tell Tommy much of anything, really. He wouldn’t even give out the names of the guys who were there. We had to get them by examining the video and running their license plates.”
