Lion Down

by Stuart Gibbs

  Lily handed her phone to Summer. A video was cued up. Summer shifted the phone to her left side, and I leaned forward so we could both watch it.

  The video shifted back and forth between two cameras. One was mounted beside the driveway, so it could record the make of each car that arrived and the license plate number. The other was mounted on the call box by the gate, where the electronic keypad was, and recorded the face of every visitor. The footage was dark and grainy, having all been filmed at night, and Lily’s phone was several years out-of-date, so the video quality wasn’t very good.

  The first person to show up looked an awful lot like Lincoln Stone, except he was considerably heavier. It was like someone had added three rolls of fat to Lincoln’s face. He was driving a pickup truck jacked up on extremely large tires. Such trucks were common in the Hill Country. Lots of people liked to go four-wheel driving on dirt roads, especially after it rained, when they called it “mudding.”

  Summer paused the video. “That’s Lincoln’s brother.”

  “That’s right,” Lily agreed. “His name’s Walter. He has some kind of job in Lincoln’s media company, but he apparently doesn’t do much except screw around and leech off his brother’s success.”

  “Did someone at the company tell you that?” I asked.

  “Walter’s kind of famous,” Summer informed me, then explained to Lily, “Teddy doesn’t pay much attention to celebrities.” She looked back at me and said, “Walter’s the black sheep of the Stone family. He gets in trouble and his brother bails him out.”

  A pickup truck similar to Walter’s drove past us at that very moment, heading the other direction, chunks of dried mud caked on the undercarriage. It wasn’t Walter, though. Just proof that those trucks were hugely popular in the area.

  “What kind of trouble does he get in?” I asked.

  “Speeding tickets,” Summer replied. “Public drunkenness. Bar fights. Sometimes all three in the same night.”

  Lily added, “Last spring he got busted for shooting road signs.”

  “So he’s broken the law a lot,” I concluded.

  “Every few weeks, it seems.” Summer started the video again.

  The next person to arrive at Lincoln’s home was a woman with long blond hair, driving an expensive sports car. She was disturbingly skinny, with arms that looked as spindly as the legs of a newborn fawn.

  “That’s a woman!” I exclaimed.

  “Wow,” Summer said sarcastically. “Amazing sleuthing, Sherlock.”

  “Natasha Mason didn’t say anything about any women being there last Friday,” I reminded her.

  “She never said she saw who was there at all,” Summer reminded me right back. “She only heard them.” She looked to Lily. “That’s Petra Olson.”

  “Right,” Lily confirmed.

  “Who’s Petra Olson?” I asked.

  “See?” Summer asked Lily. “I told you he doesn’t pay any attention to this stuff.” She looked back at me again. “Petra is on Lincoln’s show a lot. She’s even farther out than he is.”

  “Especially on the environment,” Lily added. “Petra thinks the Endangered Species Act should be abolished. She has actually said that it would be no big deal if we wiped out every wild animal on the planet.”

  I looked back at the grainy image of the woman in the car. She didn’t look evil, but I felt a shiver go down my spine anyhow.

  The next person to arrive was at least two decades older than Walter, with gray hair and weathered skin. Despite his age, he was driving a sports car as well.

  “Is this guy famous too?” I asked.

  “Not to me,” Summer replied.

  Lily glanced at the image on the phone and said, “That’s Harlan Briscoe. He’s Lincoln’s producer. Really, the brains of the entire operation. Lincoln was a nobody when Harlan found him, doing AM radio and speaking to maybe thirty listeners. Harlan made him what he is today.”

  A semitruck rounded the bend ahead of us. It barely fit on the two-lane road, and we were forced to swerve onto the gravel shoulder to let it pass. There were tarps drawn down over the sides of the truck, hiding what it was carrying, but with our windows rolled down, we could hear muffled squawking. As the truck rumbled past, it left dozens of white feathers fluttering in its wake.

  Lily slammed on her brakes so hard I was thrown against my seat belt. The car skidded to a stop on the shoulder, and Lily craned her head out the open window to watch the truck. “Son of a gun,” she muttered under her breath.

  “What’s wrong?” Summer asked.

  Lily didn’t answer. She was glaring after the truck hatefully. I got the sense she was trying to decide what to do next.

  “Lily?” Summer prodded. “Hello?”

  Lily snapped back to reality, though she still had a scowl on her face. “We need to take a little detour,” she said, then punched the gas.

  The tires kicked up a spray of gravel as we swerved back onto the narrow road. We kept going in the same direction we’d been heading, the way the truck had come from, though Lily was now driving a lot faster. We whipped around the bend so hard that I slammed into the door.

  I wondered if Lily was going so fast because she was in a hurry to get somewhere, or if she was simply angry and venting her frustration through speed.

  “Where are we going?” Summer asked. Though she was trying to sound calm, I could hear a hint of worry in her voice.

  Instead of answering, Lily grabbed her phone from Summer’s hands. “I need this back for a moment,” she said, then speed-dialed a number and put the phone to her ear.

  Summer looked at me questioningly, wanting to know if I had any idea what was going on. I could only shrug in return.

  Whoever Lily was calling didn’t answer. So she left a message on voicemail instead. “Hey. It’s Lily. The Connellys still seem to be up and running. I’m heading there right now to check it out. If you get this, mobilize the troops.” She hung up, tossed the phone back to Summer, and muttered under her breath again, “Lousy jerks.”

  “Lily?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

  Lily glanced back at me in a way that indicated she might have forgotten I was even there. “It’s nothing that concerns you. Just focus on the video. There’s one more suspect.”

  Summer gave me another worried look, but she brought up the video again anyhow.

  The fourth person to arrive at Lincoln Stone’s was another man, but that was about all we could tell from the video. He sat back in his car so that the camera didn’t catch very much of him, and his whole face was cast in shadow. All I could really see of him was his chin and the vague shape of his face. He was driving a pickup truck as well, but it wasn’t jacked up on big tires. It was a normal, everyday truck, of which there were probably thousands in the Hill Country. The only thing that stood out was a big dent in the rear fender to the right of the license plate.

  “Who’s this?” Summer asked.

  “We don’t know,” Lily replied. “I was kind of hoping you might.”

  “I can barely even see him in this video,” Summer said. “Didn’t you run the plates on this truck?”

  “Yeah, but they came back registered to someone named Cassie Martinez. That driver doesn’t look like a Cassie to me.”

  “And that’s all you have?” I asked.

  Lily threw the car into another tight turn, leaving skid marks on the road. “Tommy and I are a little shorthanded. He can run the plates, but after that, there’s not much we can do. This guy’s probably a friend of this Cassie Martinez, maybe even her husband or boyfriend, but short of going and interviewing the woman—which Tommy’s not supposed to be doing, or he’ll lose his job—we’re kind of at a dead end.”

  “So, were you thinking we were going to talk to this Cassie woman?” Summer asked.

  “That was the plan.” Lily whipped around another corner.

  “Maybe we should go do that now,” I suggested. I wasn’t really in a hurry to question any witnesses. For all I knew,
the guy in the car might have killed King and been willing to do anything to protect himself. But confronting him still seemed less dangerous than driving with Lily.

  “We’ll get to that,” Lily assured me. “There’s just something else I have to do first. In the meantime, we have three other new suspects in that video.”

  “They’re all friends and business partners of Lincoln’s,” Summer said. “And one’s his own brother. You really think one of those people killed his dog?”

  “Definitely,” Lily replied. “In fact, they might have all even done it together, Lincoln included. All those people have spoken out about dismantling the Endangered Species Act—and eradicating all natural predators, from lions to wolves to bears. Maybe they cooked up this scheme on Friday night to implicate the lion. You said yourselves the neighbor heard them shooting guns and being rowdy. Probably drinking, too. Way too often, when people get drunk, they come up with stupid ideas that seem like a good idea at the time.”

  “Like killing your dog and framing a mountain lion for it?” I asked.

  “Exactly.” Lily swerved onto a narrow road that didn’t even have a sign marking it. She hadn’t checked her directions once, indicating that she was familiar with the route to wherever we were going.

  “I still find it hard to believe someone would kill their own dog for something like this,” I said.

  “So maybe Lincoln wasn’t involved,” Lily said. “Maybe one of these sleazy friends of his did it without him knowing. Because they knew it’d set him off. They killed the dog, framed Rocket, and then encouraged Lincoln to go on a tirade.”

  Summer said, “Given what Natasha Mason told us last night, it seems possible that Lincoln could have killed his own dog.”

  “What’s that?” Lily asked, intrigued.

  “She said she didn’t think Lincoln was a very caring owner,” Summer explained. “Seeing as he left a little dog outside when he knew there was a predator around.”

  “That is awfully negligent,” Lily agreed. “I wonder if Lincoln might have been an abusive owner. You’d be surprised how many people are. I’m gonna call his vet.” She suddenly pulled off the side of the road and turned off the car.

  It was a very abrupt stop, given how fast we had been driving to get somewhere. The area where we now were didn’t seem any different from the landscape we’d just been racing through, except that the road was a bit narrower. There was still oak and cedar forest on both sides of us, with barbed-wire fence running along each side of the road.

  Beyond the popping of Lily’s engine as it cooled, the only sound was the distant chirring of insects.

  Lily grabbed her phone back from Summer and climbed out of the car. She opened her address book and scanned through it while circling around to her trunk.

  Summer and I climbed out of the car too. It was hot on the side of the road. “How do you know Lincoln’s vet?” I asked.

  “Tommy got the name off King’s license,” Lily explained. “And given who my dad is, I pretty much know every vet in the area. Melinda Goodwin is a friend. She’s one of our people.”

  “An activist?” I asked.

  “No,” Lily replied. “But she’s on the right side of the fight. Most vets are. If that dog’s been abused, she’ll know about it.” She speed-dialed and, once more, got voicemail. While she left a message for Dr. Goodwin, I noticed something dangling from the barbed-wire fence on the same side of the road where we were parked.

  It was an old metal sign, weathered and rusted. At some point, it might have been painted white, but the color had dulled over the years until it was gray. I took a few steps closer so that I could read it.

  “Connelly Farm. Private Property. Trespassers Will Be Shot.”

  Behind me, I heard a metallic squeal. I turned around to see that Lily now had her trunk open. She bent over into it and rummaged around while wrapping up her message to the vet. “. . . so if you have any information about King, I’d greatly appreciate if you could share it.”

  I ran back over to her. “Is this the farm that truck came from?”

  “That’s right.” Lily hung up, pocketed her phone, and then lifted a pair of industrial bolt cutters out of her trunk. The handles were two feet long and the blades looked sharp enough to cut through almost anything. There were scrapes on them, indicating they had been used many times before.

  “Uh, Lily . . . ,” Summer said hesitantly. “Exactly what are you planning on doing here?”

  “I’m doing what’s right.” Lily slammed the trunk of her car, then strode toward the barbed-wire fence. “You kids stay here. I won’t be too long.”

  The fence only had five strands of barbed wire. Lily easily slipped through them and stepped onto the Connelly farm. Then she set off through the woods with the bolt cutters slung over her shoulder.

  I looked at Summer. She looked at me. Neither of us knew what Lily was up to, but we both suspected it was bad.

  “We have to stop her,” Summer said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not doing anything dangerous.”

  “I’m not saying we should. I’m saying we need to stop her from doing anything dangerous.” Summer gave me a challenging look, daring me to say no to her again, then slipped through the barbed-wire fence herself.

  I stayed where I was, telling myself I was doing the smart thing, and that I didn’t care what Summer thought of me, and if she wanted to get in trouble, that was her business.

  It took five seconds for me to crack. Then I scrambled through the fence and ran after the girls.

  13

  THE FARM

  Lily was slinking through the woods cautiously, but she was still moving fast. By the time Summer and I caught up to her, she was fifty yards onto the property, working her way up a small hill.

  “I thought I told you two to stay by the car,” she said, though she didn’t stop walking.

  “What’s going on here?” Summer asked.

  “This farm is operating illegally,” Lily replied. “The government ordered it closed for using inhumane practices, but it appears they’ve ignored that and continued operating.”

  “How can they do that?” I asked.

  Lily shrugged. “Corporations ignore the law all the time.”

  As we neared the crest of the hill, I realized I could hear something in addition to all the insects buzzing around. It sounded bizarrely like there was a large party in the distance, with thousands of people chattering away.

  “We’ll be happy to go back to the car,” Summer told Lily, “but you need to come back with us. We can call the police. Or the FBI. Or whoever is supposed to handle this.”

  Lily said, “If the police or the feds really wanted to handle this, this place wouldn’t still be operating. And I can’t just sit by while these animals suffer.”

  We reached the top of the hill. On the other side, much of the forest had been cleared away. Below us, where there had once been a valley full of trees, there were now five long white buildings. Each was about half the length of a football field, thirty feet wide and two stories tall, with low-pitched roofs. They appeared to be made out of aluminum and were painted white, so they were almost blinding in the bright sun. There were windows along the sides, but they were smeared and dingy, as though they hadn’t been washed in years. Cooling units sat every few yards along the peaks of the roofs, but even from this distance, I could tell that several were in disrepair and probably weren’t working at all.

  The party chatter was coming from the buildings, although I now realized that it wasn’t human at all: It was the babble of several thousand birds gobbling all at once.

  The trunk of a toppled oak tree lay on the ground nearby. Lily knelt behind it, hiding from the view of anyone at the farm. We joined her there, and she began explaining the farm’s layout to us. “Each one of those buildings holds up to thirty thousand turkeys, although they were only built to house twenty thousand, tops. The poor birds are all kept in mass pens with barely enough room to move—and
it’s probably hotter than a sauna in there.”

  I took a closer look at the buildings and saw the shimmer of heat coming off the roofs. Given how hot it was outdoors right them, I imagined it would be a hundred times worse inside metal warehouses with almost no air-conditioning.

  “The farmers are supposed to filter the turkeys’ waste,” Lily went on, “but they don’t. They just dump it right there.” She pointed to a pond at the south end of the buildings. Unlike most ponds, no plants were growing around it. There was only barren dirt. However, the surface of the water was covered with a slick of brown algae. “That’s basically the poop from a couple hundred thousand turkeys. Lucky for us, the wind isn’t blowing this way. Otherwise, we’d be puking our guts up.”

  As it was, even without the wind blowing our way, I could still get a hint of the stench from the pond. It was bad enough to make my stomach churn.

  “This place started out as a family farm,” Lily explained. “Raising cattle free-range for generations. But that’s a hard business and the family wanted out, so they sold it to the Redwood Corporation.”

  “Redwood?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Lily said. “Sounds nice and natural, doesn’t it? But they’re one of the worst companies imaginable when it comes to how they treat their animals. One out of every ten of their turkeys in those buildings dies of starvation or disease or heat stroke. And they’re not only raising turkeys. They’ve got facilities like this for cattle, pigs, chickens, and who knows what else all around the country. The company’s so big that when the government actually does cite them for poor practices, they can fight it in court for years or even just ignore it. I’m not sure which of those has happened here, but I’m tired of it.” Lily peered over the fallen tree and scanned the area around the buildings below.

  Despite the size of the operation, there were no humans in sight. I figured that anyone working there was probably someplace air-conditioned and far from the pond full of turkey poop.