Panda-monium

by Stuart Gibbs

  The text said: I’m at the front gates!

  Summer and I both turned around. Sure enough, Xavier was at the gates, pressed up against the bars. Like almost everyone else, he was wearing black and white and Li Ping ears, though to my surprise, his outfit was a tuxedo. He waved to us excitedly and shouted something, though I couldn’t hear it over the crowd. Xavier’s mother stood next to him, obviously there against her will; the look on her face clearly said she would rather be back home in bed.

  “Xavier’s here,” I told my mother. “Can I go say hi?”

  “Of course.” Mom spotted Xavier and waved to him.

  “I’m gonna stay over here,” Summer told me.

  “You don’t want to talk to Xavier?” I asked.

  “Sure I do, but . . .”

  A few PandaManiacs near Xavier looked to see who he was waving to, spotted Summer, and shrieked. They seemed even more excited to see her than the panda. Word quickly rippled through the crowd that Summer was around, and soon everyone had whipped out their cell phones and started taking pictures—even though they were all so far away from Summer, she would probably only be a dot in their photos.

  “That’s why,” Summer finished.

  “Oh. Right,” I said.

  “Say hi to him for me.” Summer gave the crowd a friendly wave, which resulted in a roar of approval. Then she slipped behind some landscaping so they couldn’t see her anymore, which sparked a chorus of disappointed groans.

  I headed over to see Xavier, feeling bad for Summer. She knew she was lucky to be so rich, but there were many times when her fame caused her trouble. She rarely had the chance to do anything normal, like eat lunch in a restaurant or play catch in the park, without total strangers accosting her. Instead, she had to either disguise herself or keep herself cloistered.

  As I approached the gates, I felt the residual effects of her fame. People started shouting at me, simply because I’d been near her: “Who are you?” “Are you Summer’s boyfriend or something?” “Can you get her to come over here?” “Tell her I love her!”

  I did my best to ignore them and focus on Xavier.

  “I’ve been trying to get your attention for five minutes!” he chided as I approached.

  “Sorry,” I said. “We didn’t see you.”

  “I’ve been right here, waving!”

  I pointed toward his black-and-white outfit. “Well, you sort of blended in with the crowd.”

  Xavier grew offended. “These people are wearing T-shirts. This is a tuxedo! I rented it just for this occasion! Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a tuxedo in my size? I had to go all the way to San Antonio to get it!”

  “It’s still black and white.” I avoided mentioning that, despite all the trouble he’d gone through to find it, it still didn’t fit him very well. But then, they probably didn’t make a lot of tuxedos in Xavier’s size. Not only was he a kid, but he was short and overweight, with a big belly and stubby legs. While the waistband of the tuxedo pants strained over his stomach, the sleeves and legs were bunched loosely around his wrists and ankles.

  Before Xavier could say anything else about his formal wear, his mother spoke, sounding exasperated. “Teddy, do you know when this panda is actually going to get here?”

  Several other people in the crowd echoed this question.

  “Soon,” I said.

  “How soon?” Xavier’s mother pressed.

  The blast of an air horn echoed in the distance, and a semi rolled into the far end of the parking lot. The entire crowd turned toward it expectantly.

  “How about now?” I asked.

  A rumble of excitement began. The crowd surged toward the truck.

  As everyone moved away from the gates, I got a clearer version of Li Ping’s ride. It looked like almost every other tractor-trailer I’d ever seen. If it had passed me on the highway, I probably wouldn’t have looked twice at it.

  I looked back toward my parents and saw that they, along with Summer, J.J., and Hoenekker, were now on the move, crossing the entry plaza. Mom waved for me to join them quickly. I started after them.

  “Wait!” Xavier yelled to me. “Is there any way you can let me and my mom in to see the panda?”

  “I don’t even get to see the panda yet,” I informed him, although I was secretly hoping that might not be the case. “They’re limiting her contact with people so she doesn’t get sick.”

  Xavier frowned, like I was being a bad friend somehow. It made me feel guilty, even though I’d never promised him anything. “Sorry,” I said, then ran after everyone else.

  The crowd was now so amped up, I could feel the energy rolling off it. The PandaManiacs began to chant, “Li Ping! Li Ping! Li Ping!” TV cameramen clambered on top of their news vans to film the semi’s arrival.

  I passed by the gate where Pete Thwacker was holding court in front of a throng of reporters. “As you can see,” he was telling them, mustering as much gravitas as he could, “Li Ping has finally reached the end of her epic journey, and with her arrival, a wonderful new era in FunJungle’s history begins.”

  The semi veered away from the main gates, heading onto the service road that led to the employee area of the park. It suddenly dawned on the PandaManiacs that, despite all the trouble they’d gone through to greet Li Ping, they probably weren’t going to see her at all. The chants of “Li Ping!” faded and were replaced by booing. The crowd angrily returned to the front gates and shook the bars. Someone threw a bottle into the entry plaza.

  Hoenekker got on his radio and spoke to his men outside the gates. “Looks like things are getting ugly out there. Do what you can to calm the crowds, but do not—I repeat, do not—use force against anyone. There are news cameras everywhere, and the last thing we need is footage of a FunJungle employee roughing up someone dressed as a panda.”

  As the FunJungle security forces moved in on the crowds, J.J., Summer, Hoenekker, Mom, Dad, and I passed into FunJungle’s employee area and headed for the animal hospital. Instead of going inside it, though, we looped around to the loading docks. The semi was already there, beeping a warning as it backed up to the building.

  Dad filmed some footage of this.

  Marge O’Malley was leaning out the passenger window of the truck’s cab, telling the driver how to back up, even though he’d certainly done it many times before without her help. “Take it slowly now,” Marge was saying. “Easy . . . easy . . .”

  “Mission status?” Hoenekker called to her.

  “A-okay!” Marge reported. “It all went exactly as planned, Chief.”

  The semi stopped with the rear doors right at the edge of the loading dock. There was a hiss from the air brakes, and then the truck shuddered as the engine cut off.

  “That’s perfect!” Marge told the driver, even though the truck had already stopped. “Park her right here!”

  J.J. hopped up onto the loading dock. Despite being a bit older than my parents, he was spry as an eight-year-old—not to mention as excited as one. He rapped on the double doors at the rear of the trailer and called out, “Good news, Doc! You made it! How’s our panda doing?”

  There was no answer from inside. I figured maybe I couldn’t hear Doc’s reply—or maybe he was asleep. He’d been on the road for nearly eighteen hours straight.

  J.J. seemed concerned, though. He banged on the rear of the truck again. Harder now. “Doc! Answer me! If you think this is funny, it’s not!”

  Now everyone started to grow worried. Summer nervously bit her lower lip. Mom gave me an anxious glance. Dad kept on filming.

  Hoenekker called out to Marge again. “You’re sure Doc’s back there?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” Marge said confidently, hopping out of the cab. “Where else could he be? He got in the trailer after our pit stop in Las Cruces and we’ve been driving ever since.”

  J.J. banged on the doors one last time, then reached for the handles. It was only now that he—and the rest of us—noticed something was wrong with the loc
k. There should have been a standard, key-operated dead bolt, but instead, there was only a hole with scorch marks around it. J.J. yanked on the handles and the doors swung open.

  The rest of us couldn’t see inside the truck yet, as we weren’t on the loading dock. J.J. could, though, and what he saw made him gasp in shock. The color drained from his face.

  “Daddy?” Summer asked, really worried now. “What’s wrong?”

  J.J. was so stunned, he didn’t even answer. It was one of the first times I’d ever seen him speechless. He simply stared into the back of the truck, as though he couldn’t believe his eyes.

  The rest of us scrambled up onto the loading dock as well.

  Li Ping’s cage and all of Doc’s furniture were in the back of the truck, exactly where they should have been.

  But both Doc and the panda were gone.

  SCENE OF THE CRIME

  Within fifteen minutes, the semi was a full-scale crime scene. Although FunJungle Security was mostly staffed by nitwits, Chief Hoenekker himself was extremely competent. At his behest, three officers had brought him a criminal investigation kit and then been posted around the loading dock to keep unauthorized personnel away. J.J. wanted to keep the panda’s disappearance a secret, even from his employees, so the guards told any potential onlookers that they were to steer clear of the loading dock in order to protect Li Ping’s safety. Meanwhile, Hoenekker went to work searching the interior of the trailer for clues.

  Only two other people were allowed in the trailer with him. One was my father. Instead of documenting the arrival of the panda, he was now recording the scene for the investigation.

  The other person was me. Hoenekker hadn’t been pleased about this, but J.J. had insisted. And when J.J. had his mind set on something, there was no talking him out of it. Especially when he could fire you. “Teddy’s had a hand in solving every major crime that’s taken place here,” he’d declared. “I’m not keeping him on the sidelines when my top vet and my panda are missing.”

  The way he said it, I didn’t have much choice in the matter either. I definitely wanted to help find Doc and Li Ping, but even though I’d had some success solving crimes at FunJungle before, I was still only a kid. Being asked—or really told—to aid Hoenekker in his investigation was daunting. And yet, it didn’t seem like a good idea to say no.

  So Hoenekker let me into the crime scene—although he warned me to give him space and not touch anything. Then he slipped on a pair of linen gloves and went to work.

  Meanwhile, Marge desperately wanted to be a part of the investigation. Only, she was in the doghouse for letting Li Ping and Doc disappear in the first place. She stood off to the side of the loading dock while Pete Thwacker went ballistic on her. Pete didn’t lose his cool very often—staying calm under pressure was part of his job—but now it appeared that every bit of frustration he’d bottled up over the past few weeks was spewing out of him. There were probably other things he should have been doing, but at the moment, he was flipping out. “How could you lose the panda?” he screamed.

  “This wasn’t my fault,” Marge said defensively.

  “Then whose fault was it?” Pete demanded. “You were the only security officer on duty. This wasn’t a sightseeing trip! You had a job to do: make sure the panda got here. And guess what? There’s no panda!”

  “I’m aware of that,” Marge said.

  “Are you aware of how much time, energy, and money it has taken to arrange for a panda to come to FunJungle?” Pete yelled. His normally perfect complexion was now mottled red from rage. He looked like a tomato with teeth. “Are you aware how angry the Chinese are going to be? They don’t hand out pandas like they’re fortune cookies! It took us five years to negotiate getting this animal! Five years! J.J. had to call in a thousand favors. He put his reputation on the line. We spent millions building a special panda facility! And more millions on advertising and promotion. All of which doesn’t mean squat if we don’t have a freaking panda!”

  Marge glanced toward J.J. McCracken, as though hoping he might come to her aid. But J.J. wouldn’t even make eye contact with her, which indicated he was as angry with Marge as Pete was. He was simply letting Pete do the dirty work. I could understand why. Pete wasn’t exaggerating what J.J. had gone through to get Li Ping. Summer had told me about the whole process. J.J. had a lot of business interests in China, and he’d had to use every one of them as leverage with the Chinese government. He’d made plenty of backroom deals and promises, and now that the panda was missing, each of those could come back to haunt him.

  Even so, Marge looked so beaten down by Pete’s anger that I almost felt bad for her. Almost, but not quite. Because Marge had berated me plenty of times—and I had never really deserved it. Meanwhile, she had really messed up big now, letting the panda—and Doc—vanish on her watch. I was pretty upset with her about that myself.

  Everyone else seemed equally annoyed. My mother and Summer lingered outside the truck, glaring at Marge. Dad was mostly hidden behind his camera, but I could tell he was upset too. And Hoenekker wasn’t even trying to hide his anger as he poked around the crime scene.

  “How on earth did she miss all this?” he muttered.

  “Miss what?” Dad asked.

  “This, for starters.” Hoenekker pointed to where the lock had been on the rear doors of the semi. While the hole had been rather small on the outside of the doors, on the inside it was much larger, the size of a baseball. The metal was peeled back and scorched as though a meteor had blasted through it. “The thieves used an explosive to blow the lock off. Probably C-4, but I won’t know until we get it analyzed by a lab. I have no idea how they did it on a moving truck, but I can guarantee you, it wouldn’t have been quiet. And yet, Marge didn’t have a clue that it happened.”

  Dad snapped a few photos of the hole.

  On the loading dock, Mom tried calling Doc’s cell phone, which she’d been doing every two minutes since learning he’d disappeared. I could tell from the look on her face that this call, like all the others, had gone straight to Doc’s voicemail. “Still no answer on Doc’s phone,” she reported.

  “You’re wasting your time,” Hoenekker told her. “Whoever snatched him weren’t amateurs. We’re not gonna hear squat from Doc until they want us to.”

  He moved on to the panda’s cage, which was set along the driver’s-side wall at the rear of the truck, where it would have been easiest to get Li Ping in and out. The cage was twelve feet long and six feet wide, which would have given Li Ping plenty of room, although this only left us a two-foot gap to squeeze past it along the opposite wall.

  Transporting a panda—or any zoo animal—was a complicated task. You couldn’t explain to an animal that it was going to be in an unfamiliar confined space, like a truck or an airplane, for hours, if not days. So if you simply tried to move the animal without any preparation, it would stress out. (Sometimes they could even die from the anxiety.) To prevent this, the keepers had to prepare the animals for travel. In Li Ping’s case, this had taken six months of training.

  The first step had been to get Li Ping used to being in a cage. The keepers in San Diego had trained her to go inside one for increasingly long periods of time by rewarding her with treats like apples and yams. Then they practiced lifting her in the cage with a forklift and moving it to a simulation of the truck, where she would be transferred to the somewhat larger cage inside. The actual truck was sent to San Diego a month ahead of the move, and Li Ping spent that time getting used to it.

  However, once Li Ping was comfortable in the truck, there was still plenty left to coordinate. The timing of her delivery had been planned down to the minute. It was no mistake that the drive had been done overnight; the idea was to be on the roads when the fewest other drivers were—and thus, the least chance of an accident. Plus, it would also be significantly cooler in the truck at night than during the day. (Giraffes were particularly tricky to deliver, since they were so tall; they needed special trucks with holes in t
he roof to stick their necks through, and the routes they took had to be carefully planned to avoid any low bridges.)

  By all accounts, though, Li Ping had handled her truck training perfectly. Short of the traffic delay at the end, the trip had gone exactly as planned.

  Except for the part where the panda and Doc had vanished.

  The panda cage was empty, save for a scattering of bamboo bits and a large plastic ball, which Li Ping had probably been given to keep herself stimulated.

  The gate of the cage was aimed toward the rear doors of the trailer. It had been locked with another dead bolt and then wrapped with a padlocked chain for good measure. The chain now dangled loosely, two of the thick links snapped open, while the dead bolt had been ripped apart. “Looks like the thieves used bolt cutters and a crowbar,” Hoenekker observed. He didn’t seem to be sharing information with me so much as talking things through to himself, trying to make sense of how the crime had played out. “Quieter than blowing the bolt off, but it would have taken quite a bit longer. Maybe a few minutes.”

  “So why didn’t they just blow it open, the same as the back door?” I asked.

  Hoenekker gave me a disappointed look. “You can’t figure that one out yourself, Sherlock?”

  I thought about it, then came up with an idea. “Because blowing stuff up is dangerous?”

  “That’s one reason. The back of this truck is an enclosed space. Not a great place for an explosion, no matter how controlled it is. Our kidnappers didn’t want to hurt themselves.”

  “Or the panda,” I suggested.

  Hoenekker considered that, then shrugged noncommittally and turned to my father. “Jack, can you get some photos of this?”

  “Sure thing,” Dad agreed. “Just the gate?”