by Dave Barry
“She’s really nice,” said Matt, moving up and sliding in next to me. The bus was moving now.
“I guess,” I said. But I was starting to think the main reason Suzana wanted us to pound the wall was to make sure she didn’t miss anything exciting. Such as us getting killed.
“Listen,” I said. “If those guys show up, I’m gonna tell Mr. Barto.”
“I thought we decided—”
“I changed my mind. This is getting too weird. I’m gonna tell him. I don’t care if we get sent home.”
Matt was quiet for a few seconds. “Okay,” he said.
The bus got back to the hotel and pulled into the driveway. We both looked out the window before we got out, but we didn’t see the weird guys, or anybody else: The street was quiet. Matt and I stopped just inside in the hotel doorway and took a careful look around the lobby. But the only people there were in a sad little line to check in—a tired-looking couple with a crying baby waiting behind a couple of businessmen, who were waiting behind a tall man in a hat and overcoat and a short dumpy blond lady in a red dress and purple shoes talking to the guy at the front desk. Other than that, the lobby was empty.
Mr. Barto and Miss Rector gathered us all together and gave us a lecture about how we were to stay in our rooms and they would be patrolling the hallways and anybody caught breaking curfew would be in Serious Trouble. Then we headed for the elevators. The Hot/Popular clot drifted past. Suzana worked her way over and whispered, “Seen anything?”
“No.”
“Okay,” she said. She held up three fingers. “Remember the signal.”
“Okay.”
Her clot drifted away. Matt and I and some other losers got on an elevator. As soon as the door closed Cameron Frank released a pretty spectacular fart, even by his standards, but I was too tense to laugh.
I felt a little safer once we got to our room. We got into our pajamas and figured out where to sleep. There were two beds, plus a sleeper sofa, plus a cot, which was where I ended up. We turned on the TV and sat around doing stuff on our phones, with Matt or me getting up every couple of minutes to look out the window and not see anything.
A little after ten thirty somebody pounded on the door, which made Matt and me both jump up, but it was just Mr. Barto telling us to turn off the TV and the lights and go to bed. He was still wearing his backpack; I think maybe he slept with that thing on.
We turned the lights off and the TV sound down and went back to our phones. I looked out the window a couple more times, but I was getting pretty tired, and I was beginning to feel like we were going to be okay, at least for the night. I closed my eyes and my mind started drifting around, the way it does when you’re falling asleep. I drifted back to Miami, and getting on the plane, then kind of went through the whole insane day, ending with getting back to the hotel and being scared that the weird guys would be waiting for us….
Suddenly I sat up. I was wide awake now.
I looked around the room. The TV was still on, with the sound down. Victor and Cameron were asleep in the two beds. Matt was asleep on the sofa bed. I got off the cot and walked quietly over to Matt. I poked him whispered “Wake up.”
His eyes opened. “What?”
“They’re here.”
“What?”
“Shh. Whisper.”
“Where are they?” he whispered.
“In the lobby. We walked right past them, but their backs were turned so I didn’t see their faces. I don’t think they saw us.”
“You saw them? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I just now figured out it was them.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. Remember when we came in tonight? The man and the lady at the front desk?”
He frowned. “Yeah, but that was a man and a lady.”
“Did you happen to notice what the man was wearing?”
He thought about it for a second. “A coat?”
“Right. A long coat.”
“So?”
“So it’s warm out. Way too warm for that coat. That’s like a heavy winter coat. He’s wearing it to cover himself, especially his tattoos. He had a hat on, too. He doesn’t want us to recognize him.”
“But he was with a lady.”
“He was with somebody in a dress.”
“With blond hair.”
“Or a blond wig.”
“But why do you think that was—”
“The shoes. Do you remember the shoes on the ‘lady’?”
“No.”
“They were purple. I didn’t really think about it at the time. But they were definitely purple.”
“So?”
“Purple shoes with a red dress?”
“Those don’t go together?”
I rolled my eyes. “No. And guess what the little weird guy was wearing on the plane.”
“What?”
“Purple Crocs.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. I thought it was weird, a grown-up wearing Crocs.”
We heard a rustling in one of the beds. Cameron was sitting up.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. He got up and shuffled into the bathroom.
Matt leaned toward me and whispered, “Okay, say that was them, in the lobby.”
“It is them. They’re here.”
“Okay, but they don’t know what room we’re in.”
“I think maybe they do. I think that’s why they were talking to the old guy at the front desk. They were finding out what room we’re in. Maybe even bribing the old guy to give them a key.”
“But they don’t know our names.”
“Yes they do.”
“How?”
“Remember the air marshal? On the plane? He asked us both what our names were. The weird guys were right there.”
“Oh man, that’s right.”
“Yeah.”
“So what do we do now?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I was thinking.
And while I was thinking, somebody knocked on our door.
For a few seconds Matt and I just stared at each other’s frozen faces in the flickering TV light.
Finally Matt said, “Ohmigod, what do we do?”
I put my finger in front of my mouth. Shh.
I looked at the room phone. Should I call somebody? Who?
More knocks on the door. Harder this time.
I realized something: If they had to knock, that meant they didn’t have a room key.
“What do we do?” Matt said again.
“Nothing,” I said. “We stay quiet. They can’t get in.”
Then the toilet flushed. Cameron. I forgot about Cameron.
He came out of the bathroom. I waved my arms to get his attention, but he wasn’t looking my way.
A voice outside the door said, “Hotel security! Open up!”
Cameron turned toward the door.
“No!” I said, jumping up.
Too late. Cameron was turning the doorknob.
The door banged open and Cameron staggered backward as the big guy, wearing the hat and overcoat, shoved him into the room. Right behind him was the little guy, wearing the red dress and the blond wig, looking like the world’s ugliest lady. He closed the door behind him and turned on the room lights as the big guy kept shoving Cameron backward.
“Hey!” said Cameron.
“Shut up,” said the big guy, pushing Cameron down onto his bed. Victor, in the other bed, was waking up. He blinked, looked at the two weird guys, started to say something, then decided not to.
The little guy walked past the big guy and stood in front of me and Matt. He looked really ridiculous in the wig, but this did not seem like a good time to say so.
“Where is it?” he said.
“Where is what?” said Matt. Have I mentioned that he’s an idiot?
The little guy sighed. He pointed to the big guy and said, in a r
easonable-sounding voice, “Would you like him to beat your head on wall?”
“Not really,” said Matt.
“Good. So tell me, where is it?”
Matt looked at me, which caused the two weird guys to look at me, which was unpleasant.
“We don’t have it,” I said.
The big guy stepped toward me. This was even more unpleasant. I took a step backward. My back was now pressed against the wall.
“What do you mean, you don’t have it?” said the little guy.
“We gave it to somebody.”
“Who?” said the big guy.
I didn’t answer.
The big guy raised his fist. It was a big fist. It looked like a catcher’s mitt. I raised my hands in front of my face.
“Who did you gave it to?” the big guy said. “TELL ME NOW.” He emphasized those last three words by pounding the wall right next to my head, BANG, BANG, BANG.
“Next time,” he said, “I don’t hit wall.”
I was thinking as hard as I could for a person who was very close to peeing his pj’s. On the one hand, I didn’t want to sic these two lunatics on Suzana. On the other hand, I didn’t want the big guy to turn my brain into guacamole.
“One more time,” said the big guy, raising his fist again. “Who’d you give it to?”
“I…I…I…”
“You what?”
I honestly didn’t know what I was going to say after “I,” and I never will know, because that was when the window opened. We all looked that way and saw Suzana, in her pajamas, standing on the hotel driveway roof and leaning through the window. She was holding up her iPhone.
“I called 911,” she said. “The police are on the way.”
The big guy and the little guy looked at each other.
Suzana said, “You guys are in major trouble.”
The big guy gave a What now? look to the little guy. The little guy grabbed Matt’s arm and said “You. You took it, and you will tell me where it is right now.”
“It’s not in this room,” said Matt.
“WHERE IS IT?”
Right then we heard a siren, bwoop bwoop, nearby. Everybody looked toward the window.
“Told you,” said Suzana.
The big guy went over to the little guy and said, “We must go.”
The little guy looked really unhappy.
Bwoop bwoop. The siren was closer.
“Okay,” said the little guy. “We are going. But we are taking you.” He yanked Matt toward the door.
“Hey!” said Matt.
“Let him go!” yelled Suzana. She was climbing through the window. Matt was still struggling and yelling. The big guy walked over and reached his hand back, like he was about to hit him. Matt stopped struggling.
“No more noise,” the big guy said. “Or you get hurt.” He grabbed Matt’s shoulders and shoved him toward the door.
Bwoop bwoop.
Suzana was in the room now.
“YOU LET HIM GO!” she shouted. It occurred to me that she wasn’t just taller than me; she was also way, way braver.
The little guy turned around and looked at her, then me, Cameron, and Victor. “We will let him go when you give it back.” He looked down and saw an iPhone on the sofa bed. He picked it up. “Is this yours?” he said to Matt.
Matt nodded. He was crying, trying not to make noise, tears dripping off the end of his nose.
The little guy turned back to the rest of us.
“If you tell the police anything about us, anything, you will never see your friend again, you understand?” He looked around at us. “You understand?”
We all nodded. Cameron also farted, but I think it was just nervousness.
The little guy held up Matt’s phone, looked right at me, and said, “We will message you. You will do what we say.”
Then they were pushing Matt out the door. I caught a glimpse of his teary red face looking back at me, scared to death.
And then they were gone.
Somehow, Suzana got rid of the police. She went back to her room before they got to the hotel, and I don’t know what she said to her roommates, but they backed up her story, which was that they called 911 because they saw a guy on the driveway roof outside their window. A cop went out on the roof and looked around, but he didn’t find anything. The cops came to our room and asked us if we’d been out on the roof, and we said no, and the girls in Suzana’s room said it wasn’t us, it was definitely a man, but they didn’t get a real good look at him.
In the end the police told us to keep the windows locked, and we said absolutely we would. Mr. Barto and Miss Rector stuck around a while looking unhappy, but they couldn’t really yell at us about anything, so finally they left. In all the excitement and confusion they didn’t notice that Matt was missing, and of course we didn’t point that out to them. As soon as they were gone Victor and Cameron started asking me a million questions about who the weird guys were, and what they were looking for, and generally what the heck was going on. I told them about the weird guys, and how they had acted on the plane, and how Matt took the thing from the little guy’s backpack, and how the weird guys were after us to get it back. When I was finishing up we heard tapping on the window. I opened it and Suzana climbed into our room. She was wearing a Miami Heat parachute sack.
“Have you heard from them?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“We need a plan,” she said.
“Maybe we should tell the police,” I said.
“You mean, like, the police who were just here, and we finally got rid of them?”
“I know, but maybe that was a mistake. Those guys have Matt.”
“And they said if we told the police, they’d kill him.”
“They didn’t say they’d kill him.”
She rolled her eyes. “They said we’d never see him again, Wyatt. What do you think they meant? That they’re taking him to Disney World?”
I was getting a really bad feeling in my stomach. “So what do you think we should do?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Suzana. “I’m thinking.”
Victor, who’d been quiet, said, “Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” I said.
“The thing they want.”
Suzana took off the parachute sack. “In here.”
“Can I see it?” he said.
She pulled out the box and handed it to Victor. He looked at it, turning it around in his hands.
I said, “Matt thought it was a detonator.”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“So what is it?”
“I’m not sure. But I think this”—he pointed to the little Plexiglas dome—“is a laser.”
“Cool,” said Cameron.
I said, “Why would those guys have a laser?”
“I dunno,” said Victor. “But I think this might be a military thing.”
“Those aren’t military guys,” said Suzana.
Victor took a picture of the box with his phone. “My dad’s an intelligence analyst with the Southern Command,” he said. “He might know what this is.”
“Okay,” said Suzana, “but don’t tell him where you got it, until we get Matt back.”
“Which we have no idea how we’re gonna do,” I said.
Suzana was about to say something, but before she could, my phone made the sound of Homer Simpson belching, which is the sound I use for texts.
“Did your phone just burp?” said Suzana.
I looked at the screen, and my stomach flipped over. “It’s a text from Matt.”
“What’s he say?” said Suzana. She, Cameron, and Victor crowded next to me to see the screen. It said:
police?
“What does that mean?” said Cameron.
“I guess they want to know if the police are around,” I said.
“Answer no,” said Suzana.
I typed no and sent it. Then we waited. It felt like a long time, but it was probably only a minute
or two. Then my phone burped again.
tomorow 10am boy scout statue bring it
“What are they talking about?” I said. “What Boy Scout statue?”
Suzana and Victor were both thumbing their phones.
“There’s a Boy Scout Memorial,” said Victor.
“On something called the Ellipse,” said Suzana.
“That is a weird statue,” said Cameron, looking at Suzana’s phone.
“Tell them we’ll meet them,” said Suzana. “Text okay.”
“But how’re we gonna meet them?” I said. “Don’t we have some museum thing tomorrow?”
“Smithsonian Natural History Museum,” said Victor, still thumbing his phone. “It’s about a mile from the Boy Scout statue.”
“But how will we get away?”
“We’ll figure that out,” said Suzana. “Tell them okay.”
I texted ok. We waited again. Finally the phone burped.
com alon or you do not see frend agan NO POLIC
“They’re not very good at spelling,” said Cameron, taking over for Matt in the role of idiot.
“How do we know Matt’s okay?” I said.
“Ask them,” Suzana said.
I thumbed my phone:
is matt ok? can we talk to him?
We all stared at my screen, waiting. We stood there looking at it for five minutes, hardly breathing.
The phone did not burp.
Finally Suzana said, “We need a plan.”
We finally got to bed around two a.m., but I don’t think anybody got much sleep. I definitely didn’t. I kept thinking about Matt. When he was around, he was unbelievably annoying, but now that he wasn’t around, I was really wishing that he was.
I also wished that I’d been braver when the weird guys were in our room. At least Suzana tried to stand up to them. I didn’t do anything. I just stood there and watched them shove him out the door.
I kept seeing his face, looking back at me.
The other thing I was thinking about was our plan for getting him back. It was really mostly Suzana’s plan. Her idea was that we should get Matt back—that was the most important thing—but also try to get video of the weird guys, so we could give it to the police. We all agreed that we would definitely tell the police everything after we got Matt back, even if it meant getting in trouble and getting sent home. Whatever those guys were planning to do, we knew it couldn’t be good.
