by Dan Gutman
“Calm down, Coke!” Mrs. Higgins said, laughing. “I’ve retired from the paid assassin business.”
“Retired?” Pep asked. “Are you putting us on?”
“I got sick of it,” Mrs. Higgins said. “All of it. Chasing kids all over the country. Setting schools on fire. Luring unsuspecting victims into diabolical traps. It’s exhausting. And do you think Dr. Warsaw ever paid me a dime in overtime, or paid for my health insurance? Forget about it! I was glad you two got rid of him. It gave me the motivation I needed to start a new career. To try something different.”
“Do you mean it?” Pep asked, not quite sure if Mrs. Higgins could be trusted.
“Sure,” Mrs. Higgins said. “That’s why I applied for this job working in the public relations department. It gives me the chance to use my people skills.”
“People skills?” Coke said. “You tried to kill us!”
As Mrs. Higgins laughed heartily, the twins noticed the name tag on her shirt: AUDREY HIGGINS, PUBLIC RELATIONS DEPT., CHICAGO CUBS.
“You and I may have had our petty disagreements,” she said, “but it’s all water under the bridge. That’s my philosophy. I’m willing to let bygones be bygones. Any problems we had with each other in the past are history, as far as I’m concerned.”
“It was just yesterday!” Coke said.
“Come on,” Mrs. Higgins said, reaching into a drawer in front of her, “lighten up. We have these free Cubs T-shirts for the people who sing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’”
She handed Coke and Pep the shirts. They looked at each other for a moment, to see what the other one was going to do.
“Go ahead. Put ’em on,” said Mrs. Higgins. “It’s almost time to sing.”
As the twins put the T-shirts over their shirts, the Cardinals made the third out in the top of the seventh inning.
That’s when Mrs. Higgins suddenly pulled out a gun and pointed it at Coke and Pep.
The smile was gone from her face. She looked like a different person.
“Now it’s time for you to die!”
“What?!” Coke exclaimed, sticking his hands in the air.
“You little punks killed my fiancé!” she barked.
“You and Dr. Warsaw were going to be … married?” Pep sputtered. “We didn’t know—”
“He was the only man I ever loved!” Mrs. Higgins said, her eyes watery. “And you killed him!”
“It was self-defense!” Coke explained. “He was trying to kill us!”
“I’ve got news for you little twerps,” Mrs. Higgins said, leaning in close and sticking the gun in Coke’s face. “I put a bomb under the bench in the Cubs dugout. It’s programmed to go off when you sing the phrase ‘One, two, three strikes you’re out.’”
“What?! Are you crazy?”
“Please rise,” the public address announcer said. “Today, Coke and Pep McDonald of Point Reyes Station, California, will lead us in the traditional singing of ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’”
An organ played the familiar introduction to the song. Coke and Pep looked at each other. Mrs. Higgins pushed the microphone closer to them with one hand and the gun closer to them with the other.
“Sing!” she ordered.
“Take me out to the ball game,” the twins croaked out the first line.
The crowd began to boo. Pep had her eyes closed in terror. She could barely speak, much less sing another line.
“I said sing!” Mrs. Higgins ordered.
“Take me out to the crowd…”
“Keep singing or I’ll blow your heads off!” Mrs. Higgins sneered, brandishing the pistol.
“Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack…”
“Those kids stink!” somebody shouted.
“Sing!” Mrs. Higgins ordered. Tears were rolling down Pep’s cheeks.
“I don’t care if I never get back…”
“Those kids sing worse than Ozzy Osbourne!” somebody yelled.
“Sing!” Mrs. Higgins said, sticking the gun into Coke’s ribs.
“Root, root, root for the home team. If they don’t win it’s a shame…”
“Now finish it!” Mrs. Higgins ordered. “It’s the Cubs … or you!”
“For it’s one … two…”
At that point, Coke grabbed the microphone. “There’s a bomb in the Cubs dugout!” he shouted quickly. “Under the bench! Get out! Evacuate the dugout! Evacuate the stadium! This is not a joke! There’s a bomb!”
Down on the field, the Cub players came running out of their dugout. In the stands, people got out of their seats and rushed for the exits.
Quickly, it became bedlam at Wrigley Field. Hot dog vendors were getting knocked over. Little kids and old ladies were getting trampled.
In the booth, Mrs. Higgins threw back her head and laughed. Then she took a bite out of her gun.
“It was fake?” Coke yelled. “You mean to tell me there’s no bomb in the dugout?”
“Mmm, I am such a chocoholic,” said Mrs. Higgins as she took another bite out of the gun.
Down on the field, a bomb squad in full protective gear was tearing apart the Cubs dugout, throwing bats, gloves, and seat cushions every which way. The game had been officially called on account of a bomb scare. The Cardinals had won. The Cub fans, who were already angry, were now furious as they streamed out the exits.
“Why did you do that?” Pep asked.
Mrs. Higgins glared at her with a look that sent shivers down Pep’s spine.
“Herman Warsaw was the kindest, gentlest, most loving man I ever met,” she spat. “We were going to spend the rest of our lives together. So now I’m going to make the rest of your lives a living hell, until the day that you die. And you can count on that being very soon. Let’s see if you can make it out of this ballpark in one piece.”
She opened the door with a key, and the twins ran out of the booth. They located the first exit sign and headed down the ramp, along with hundreds of Chicago’s beloved bleacher bums.
“Hey!” somebody shouted. “It’s them! The kids who made the bomb scare!”
“We forfeited the game because of them!”
“Let’s get those kids!”
“Yeah!”
Pep turned around.
“What do we do now?” she asked her brother.
“We get out of here,” Coke replied.
The twins dashed down the ramp, passing throngs of disgruntled fans heading for the parking lot.
“Kill them!” somebody shouted. “Kill those kids!”
“These people are angry way out of proportion to what happened,” Pep said as Coke grabbed her hand and started running full speed. “It’s just a game.”
“Not to them!”
Hundreds of people were chasing them out Gate K, some of them waving foam fingers and miniature wooden baseball bats.
“Run!” Coke yelled, sprinting down West Waveland Avenue. “These people are crazy!”
“We have to find Dad!” Pep yelled back.
Coke’s cell phone rang. It was his father calling. He didn’t pick it up.
“Later!” Coke told his sister. “Let’s get out of this neighborhood first.”
The twins ran for their lives two blocks down Waveland, then made a right on North Clark Street and a left on West Grace Street. By that time, the angry mob that had been chasing them had fallen back. The twins ducked into an alley and stopped, panting and gasping for breath. It was only then that they noticed what it said on the back of the T-shirts Mrs. Higgins had given them.
THE CUBS SUCK!
Chapter 7
“DON’T STOP ’TIL YOU GET ENOUGH”
Coke frantically pulled the T-shirt over his head and angrily stuffed it into a garbage can.
“Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” he muttered. “How could we have been so stupid as to trust that lady? Mrs. Higgins is insane. She always has been. I should have known!”
“I really thought she had changed,” Pep said as she put her Cubs shirt into the sa
me trash can. “She seemed so sad when she was talking about Dr. Warsaw. And she sounded so sincere when she was telling us how unhappy she was working as a paid assassin.”
“Sincere?” Coke sputtered. “She played us for fools.”
“Do you think she was really in love with Dr. Warsaw? Do you think she was really going to marry him?” Pep asked. “Or was that a lie too?”
“Who knows?” Coke replied. “The two of them were made for each other. They’re both psychos.”
The twins debated whether or not Mrs. Higgins could be working together with Archie Clone, but they were interrupted when Coke’s cell phone rang. As expected, it was their dad.
“Are you kids okay?” Dr. McDonald asked urgently. “Why did you say there was a bomb in the Cubs dugout? Are you crazy?”
“Yes, we’re okay,” Coke replied. “I don’t know why we said there was a bomb in the Cubs dugout. Maybe we are crazy.”
Dr. McDonald instructed the twins to meet him at a parking lot on North Sheffield Avenue, and hung up abruptly.
It took the twins awhile to retrace their steps and find the location. When they did, their father was leaning against the side of the RV, hands on hips. Never a good sign.
“If it was so important for you to leave the game early, you could have just said so,” Dr. McDonald said sternly. “You didn’t have to have them evacuate the whole ballpark.”
“That wasn’t it, Dad!” Pep replied. “Really! We would never do something like that.”
“Then why did you do it?”
Pep looked at her brother, who was always better in situations like this.
“Dad,” he began, “would you believe me if I said our health teacher Mrs. Higgins works for the Cubs now, and she told us that singing the last line of ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ would trigger a bomb in the Cubs dugout? Dad, she put a gun to our heads and forced us to sing it.”
“No,” said Dr. McDonald. “I wouldn’t believe that.”
“What if we told you it was a chocolate gun?” added Pep.
“That was a very dangerous stunt!” their father scolded them. “People could have been killed running for the exits like that!”
“But if there really was a bomb in the Cubs dugout,” Coke explained, “people really would have been killed!”
“But there was no bomb in the dugout!” Dr. McDonald shouted. “You did it for no reason at all!”
He shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers, which is what parents do for some reason when their kids do incomprehensibly dumb things.
They climbed into the RV and headed downtown on Michigan Avenue, where Mrs. McDonald had arranged to meet them. She was waiting when they pulled over to the curb across the street from Millennium Park.
“So how was the game?” Mrs. McDonald said cheerfully as she climbed into the front seat with a shopping bag.
None of them, not even Dr. McDonald, particularly wanted to go over what had happened at Wrigley Field.
“It was very exciting, Mom,” Coke finally said.
“That must have been cool, seeing your names up on the video screen,” Mrs. McDonald said. “Was it fun singing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’? That was my idea.”
“It was a unique experience, Mom,” Pep said diplomatically.
Dr. McDonald shook his head slightly and snorted to himself as he put the RV into gear. The streets were busy, but he managed to merge onto Lake Shore Drive and the Chicago Skyway—Route 90.
It was late afternoon by this time. Mrs. McDonald punched their location into the GPS. She did some rough calculations in her head as they left Chicago. It was June 26. They were about seven hundred miles from Washington, and they hoped to get there at least one day early to explore the capital before Aunt Judy’s wedding on July Fourth. So they had about seven days to travel seven hundred miles. About a hundred miles a day. That was reasonable.
Go to Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/).
Click Get Directions.
In the A box, type Chicago IL.
In the B box, type Gary IN.
Click Get Directions.
They were making good time, and Dr. McDonald relaxed a little behind the wheel, brainstorming about his next book.
Maybe I should write a biography, he said to himself. I’ve never done a biography. I could write about a historical figure. Maybe a president. People like to read biographies of presidents…
Dr. and Mrs. McDonald were both thankful that up until this point, they hadn’t encountered any of the typical road trip calamities—lost wallets, mechanical failures, kids getting poison ivy, and so on.
(Little did they know that so far their children had been forced to jump off a cliff, locked in a burning school, pushed into a sand pit, thrown into a vat of SPAM, zapped with electric shocks, lowered into boiling oil, and chased through the streets of Chicago by enraged Cub fans.)
Dr. McDonald knocked wood—well, the dashboard, anyway—and reached into the glove compartment to put on a CD—Michael Jackson’s Number Ones. There was little the whole family could agree on, especially when it came to music. But after Michael Jackson died, they had all gone to see his concert film This Is It. By the time the movie was over the McDonalds had become Jackson fans. Four heads were bobbing together when the first notes to “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” pumped out of the RV speakers.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Mrs. McDonald said suddenly. “I got you kids souvenirs.”
She opened her shopping bag and pulled out a Cubs shirt for each of the twins. They immediately flipped them over to see if there was any writing on the back.
“Thanks, Mom!” Coke and Pep said together.
“I thought these would help you remember your day at Wrigley Field,” Mrs. McDonald said.
“Oh, we’ll remember our day at Wrigley Field,” Pep said. “I’m sure of that.”
They continued along Route 90 for a few miles when, at the same time, all four spotted a sign at the side of the road.
“Wooooooooo-hooooooooooo!” Coke yelled. “Hey, do you know that five vice presidents were born in Indiana?”
“How can you possibly know that?” asked Pep.
“I read it on the place mat in a restaurant when we were in Wyoming,” Coke said. “In fact, Indiana is nicknamed ‘Mother of Vice Presidents.’”
“You’re laboring under the misconception that anybody cares,” Pep said.
The McDonalds couldn’t see it, but they were only a mile from Lake Michigan at this time. “Billie Jean” pumped out of the RV speakers as Dr. McDonald pulled off Route 90 at exit 14B. The sign said GARY. He drove a couple of miles through this busy working-class city before the kids noticed they were no longer on the highway.
“What are we doing here?” Coke asked.
“Do either of you know what Gary, Indiana, is famous for?” asked Mrs. McDonald.
“I do!” Pep said excitedly. She began to sing that old song from The Music Man that consists mainly of the words “Gary, Indiana” repeated over and over again.
If you don’t believe me, YouTube it.
“Nope, that’s not it,” Dr. McDonald said as he turned onto a street filled with very small houses. “Guess again.”
“I give up,” Coke said.
The RV stopped in front of a simple little house with white siding and a dark shingled roof.
“Look at the street sign on the corner,” Mrs. McDonald said.
The sign said 2300 JACKSON STREET in one direction and JACKSON FAMILY BLVD in the other.
“Beat It” was pumping out of the RV speakers.
“This was Michael Jackson’s house!” Pep yelled.
“That’s right,” Mrs. McDonald said. “It’s his boyhood home.”
Only then did the kids notice a few stuffed animals and flowers that fans had left near the front door.
Mrs. McDonald rolled down the window and snapped a few photos.
“Weren’t there something like ten brothers and sisters in
the Jackson family?” Coke asked. “And they all lived in this tiny little house?”
“Nine,” Mrs. McDonald said. “The family moved to California when Michael was eleven.”
“Is this a museum or something?” Pep asked. “Can we go inside?”
“No, somebody lives here,” Dr. McDonald said.
“But this is like going to Graceland if you’re an Elvis fan,” Mrs. McDonald explained. “Like going to Liverpool if you’re a Beatles fan. Like going to Hoboken if you’re a Sinatra fan.”
“Hoboken?” Coke asked. “What’s that?”
“What’s a Sinatra?” asked Pep.
“Forget it.”
They listened to “Thriller” as they headed back onto the highway. Just ten miles east of Gary, they pulled into Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park Camp-Resort in Portage, Indiana. Mrs. McDonald had called ahead on her cell phone and made a reservation.
Dr. McDonald hooked the RV up to the camp’s electrical system while the others pitched in to prepare dinner—frozen chicken and vegetables. Afterward, there was a campfire going on, and the kids went over to toast some marshmallows.
While they were sitting there, sticks in the fire, Coke was thinking about what had happened that day, and he suddenly remembered something. Back at Wrigley Field, right after their birthday message flashed up on the video screen, it had been replaced by another message. He had almost forgotten all about it, but his brain somehow had memorized the message itself.
Pep ran back to the RV to get her notebook so they could write it down and figure it out.
“It looks like it might be some ancient picture language,” Coke guessed. “Like something the Aztecs used, or the Egyptians.”
“Or each of those symbols might represent a letter of the alphabet,” Pep said.
Using the flickering light from the campfire, Pep puzzled over the strange symbols for a long time while Coke toasted more marshmallows. He had no patience for ciphers or puzzles, or any of that spy stuff his sister loved so much.
There were fourteen symbols, and numbers one and ten were the same. None of the others were repeated. Pep turned it upside down and sideways, trying to get a different perspective on it. The dots had to be important, or they wouldn’t be there.
