Panda-monium

by Stuart Gibbs

  “That’s right.” Chloé was speaking nervously, as if still embarrassed about mistaking Flora’s servant for her husband. “There are over fourteen hundred different types of bamboo in the world, but wild pandas only eat about forty of those. And Li Ping only eats one.”

  “Only one?” Flora repeated, surprised. “What kind?”

  “It’s called Wolong bamboo. I don’t know why she likes that and not any other, but that’s the case. Maybe she got spoiled, growing up in captivity. But it’s not a common bamboo. If whoever took her doesn’t have it . . .”

  “Oh dear,” Flora gasped, fanning herself as though she might faint. “Oh dear, that wouldn’t be good at all.”

  Next to Panda Palace, the crowd was still growing around Crazy Panda Guy. “If FunJungle can’t get Li Ping back, then we deserve another panda!” he exclaimed. “And free annual passes!”

  The crowd cheered louder at this than anything he’d said so far.

  Several FunJungle security guards had gathered around the perimeter of the crowd. They looked to one another uneasily, apparently thinking this protest should be broken up, but in no hurry to upset the crowd.

  To the side of it all, the Chinese men and women appeared to have finished their ceremony. They were no longer dancing or playing instruments. Instead, they were all drinking sodas out of souvenir FunJungle cups.

  I realized Emily Sun was staring at me. She was looking straight through the crowd, her mouth a thin, angry line. She didn’t seem happy to see me there.

  I realized I had dallied way too long. If Mom was really going to check up on me, then I needed to get to Dolphin Adventure quickly.

  Chloé and Flora were really hitting it off, bonding over intriguing panda facts. “Did you know that pandas are pigeon-toed?” Chloé was saying. “They walk with their front paws angled inward.”

  “My goodness,” Flora said. “I had no idea.”

  “I have to go,” I told them. “It was nice to meet you, Miss Hancock.”

  “A pleasure,” Flora drawled.

  “If you hear anything about Li Ping, let me know,” Chloé said.

  “Will do.” I hurried toward Dolphin Adventure. As I ran along, I realized that now that I had my phone back, I could find out one more important thing about the panda investigation: the background of the man whose fingerprint had been on the ransom note. Using the voice system on my phone, I asked, “Who is Carlos Edward Gomez?”

  The phone didn’t answer right away. There were many spots at FunJungle where cell coverage wasn’t great—we were pretty far from civilization, after all—and I was in one of them. By the time I reached Dolphin Adventure, I still didn’t have a reply.

  The entrance was cordoned off with ropes and signs informing guests that the exhibit was closed due to “maintenance issues.” Kristi Sullivan, who worked in Public Relations, was standing nearby, stuck with the thankless job of handling the angry guests whose dolphin encounters had been cancelled. “We here at FunJungle sincerely regret any inconvenience this has caused,” she was telling a cluster of annoyed Italians. “The money you paid has already been refunded to your credit card, and we’d like you to accept this voucher for a free souvenir soda at any FunJungle vendor as our apology.”

  “We don’t want souvenir soda!” a tourist exclaimed. “We want dolphins!”

  Kristi caught sight of me and signaled that she was too busy to even say hi. So I slipped under the ropes and entered the dolphin area. It was eerily silent, compared to the chaos around the panda exhibit. Normally, the tanks would have been full of excited guests. Now there was no noise except for the occasional splash of a swimming dolphin.

  I was heading to the check-in area, looking for Olivia, when my phone finally announced, “Okay, I found this on the Web about Carlos Edward Gomez.”

  I glanced at the screen, and what I saw made me stop in my tracks.

  Carlos Edward Gomez was the president of the Nature Freedom Force.

  THE TANK

  The top hit for Carlos Edward Gomez was his Wikipedia page. According to it, Gomez was one of the founders of the NFF, although he’d been involved with several other animal rights groups before, including the Animal Liberation Front. The first photo of him was a police mug shot. He was young, with long hair and a mustache, and he was smiling despite having been arrested, as though he was pleased it had happened. The article claimed he’d actually been arrested several times—for something called monkey-wrenching. I had no idea what monkey-wrenching was, but before I could look it up, Olivia ran over.

  “Teddy! Thanks for coming!” She was back in her usual bathing suit, although her hair was dry and frizzy again, indicating it had been a while since she’d been in the water. “I really appreciate this. We’re in kind of a pickle here.”

  I slipped my phone back into my pocket, figuring the panda case could wait. After all, I was supposed to be keeping my distance from it. “I’m happy to help, but . . . have you called park security about this?”

  “Of course. But they’re really busy with this whole stolen-panda thing.”

  “I thought the FBI was handling that.”

  “They still need help from security gathering information, I guess.”

  “Oh,” I said. I figured they were still looking for the car that had dumped Doc in the parking lot.

  “So it looks like it’s just you and me. C’mon, I’ll show you where we found the second bathing suit.” Olivia led me past the check-in area for the dolphin swims. This was a small building with a registration counter and, this being FunJungle, a tiny gift shop where people could buy dolphin-themed merchandise. It was empty except for the wife of the guy who’d been bitten on the bottom, and an unlucky Dolphin Adventure employee named Nick who was stuck dealing with her.

  “No one here ever informed us that there was a danger of being bitten by one of your stupid dolphins!” the woman was screaming.

  “Actually,” Nick said, “you signed a waiver that did inform you of potential risks . . .”

  “Potential risks? My husband is now missing a piece of his rear end! The doctor says it probably won’t grow back! He’ll have to go through the rest of his life with a divot in his buttocks! Because your dolphin attacked him!”

  “In self-defense. Your husband punched her.”

  “It was trying to steal his bathing suit! That dolphin was a pervert! I didn’t see anything about perverted dolphins on my waiver! I ought to sue this park for a million dollars.”

  Olivia hurried me past before the woman spotted us. “She’s been in there for half an hour,” she explained, “instead of with her ‘poor’ husband. Who isn’t in that bad shape at all. I saw the aftermath. He’s not missing a chunk of his butt. It’s only a little scrape. Twix barely nipped him.”

  “Then why’s she flipping out?” I asked.

  “She’s probably trying to shake us down. To see if J.J. McCracken will cough up some cash rather than go to court. The sad thing is, it’ll probably work.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. It won’t be a million dollars, but it could definitely be a couple thousand. J.J. doesn’t want the public to hear that one of his dolphins bit someone’s butt. It’ll hurt business. So it’s cheaper to pay off someone like this. And that woman knows it. She’s probably thrilled that her husband got bitten. Gives her a chance to get her whole vacation here paid for—and then some.”

  We reached the edge of the tank and began to circle around it, heading toward the employees-only area at the far end.

  Several dolphins immediately raced over to us. Olivia’s presence usually meant playtime and fresh fish.

  “Sorry, guys,” Olivia told them. “No fish right now. We’re just passing through.”

  The dolphins continued to vie for our attention anyhow, clicking and whistling at us. A five-year-old named Pop Rocks even leaped into the air and did a flip.

  I paused, considering the layout of Dolphin Adventure. Most exhibits at FunJungle had big fences or large moa
ts to prevent people from going in with the animals, or they were located inside buildings where the doors could be locked. Dolphin Adventure wasn’t like that. The only barriers to the exhibit were a short fence around the beach, and a four-foot wall that surrounded the rest of the tank. A small child could have easily climbed over either one of them.

  “If someone was in the park after hours,” I observed, “they could easily get into this tank.”

  “Yes,” Olivia admitted, “but FunJungle is locked up at night. No one’s supposed to be in here unless they work here.”

  “So whoever got in with the dolphins must work at FunJungle,” I said, then thought to add, “Or they snuck in somehow.”

  “People have snuck into the park before,” Olivia reminded me.

  “Yes, but since then, J.J. has really beefed up security around the perimeter. Plus, the only place anyone ever got in was the fence around SafariLand. That’s an awful long way from here, and you’d have to come through a huge exhibit full of wild animals. It seems like a huge amount of work to get into the dolphin tank. Plus, it’s dangerous.” I knew this from experience. I’d faced down wild animals at night in the Asia Plains. There were some very big and scary animals out there, like Cape buffalo, and even the medium-size antelope could still trample you or gore you with their horns.

  “So?” Olivia countered. “I’m sure there are people out there who really want to swim with dolphins. Or maybe someone found a place besides SafariLand to sneak into the park.”

  “It’d still be much easier to already be inside FunJungle,” I insisted. “And a lot of people work here at night: janitorial staff and nighttime keepers and security guards and stuff.”

  “You think a security guard actually broke the rules and went swimming with the dolphins?”

  “Maybe.” I looked into the tank. I was broiling in the heat. It was extremely tempting to leap over the wall into the cool water. And there were dolphins as a bonus. However, the dolphin swim cost hundreds of dollars. Lots of people couldn’t afford it—or it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. “What if one of the other employees got jealous of you guys over here? They’re out there in the sun, doing their jobs all day, and you’re here in a giant pool playing with dolphins.”

  “That’s not exactly all we do.” Olivia sounded a bit insulted. “Taking care of all these dolphins is a lot of work.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted, “but it probably still looks like paradise compared to a lot of other jobs at FunJungle. Some employees have to unclog toilets all day. Or shovel elephant poop. Or walk around in a big, hot animal costume when it’s a hundred and ten degrees.”

  Olivia considered that, then nodded acceptance. “I suppose that’s possible.” She started walking around the tank again. The dolphins followed her.

  I followed her too, realizing I had to bring up one other idea. I’d been hesitant to mention it, though. “Maybe one of the other trainers taught the dolphins to steal people’s suits.”

  “No way.” Olivia seemed offended by the idea, which was exactly why I hadn’t brought it up before.

  “Why not?” I pressed. “I know you said the dolphins could pick up behaviors from people by accident, but yanking off someone’s bathing suit kind of seems like something that would be taught. And only a trainer would know how to do that.”

  Olivia frowned. I got the sense that this had occurred to her already, but she hadn’t wanted to mention it either. Finally, she said, “All the trainers here are very committed to these animals. We all know we have plum jobs here, and we’ve worked really hard to get them. I can’t imagine anyone would jeopardize that by teaching the dolphins an aggressive behavior for no good reason.”

  “Well, maybe they had a reason.”

  “Like what?”

  Now that I thought about it, I really couldn’t come up with a good answer. The best I could manage was, “Maybe they thought it’d be funny?”

  “Funny enough to get the whole exhibit shut down and lose a bunch of business? It doesn’t make sense. And I can’t come up with any other reason that does.”

  We reached the farthest end of the tank from the beach. This was where most of the maintenance equipment was. It took a great deal of machinery to keep a fake ocean going without letting the water get stagnant and start breeding fungus. Most of it was hidden behind a blue wall with a huge photo mural of a Caribbean beach on it, though there was also some equipment at the bottom of the tank.

  Olivia pointed down to a pipe that ran just above the floor of the tank. “That’s where we found the bathing suit, tucked under there.”

  The pipe was painted blue to make it blend in with the floor, and it was so far down, I couldn’t see it very well.

  “Olivia!” A voice carried across the water. It was Nick, the poor guy we’d left with the angry wife of the dolphin-bite victim. “Can you come here? This woman really wants to talk to someone higher up than I am!”

  Olivia sighed, obviously not thrilled by the prospect. “Guess she wants to yell at someone else for a while. Will you be all right out here by yourself?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Can I walk around the tank?”

  “Yeah. Just stay clear of the machinery, okay? I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Olivia ran around the tank toward the offices. The dolphins all followed her, abandoning me. After all, she was the one who usually brought them the fish.

  It suddenly occurred to me why someone would have tuna fish in the pockets of their bathing suit. Olivia and the other dolphin staff used fish to train the dolphins. If the dolphins did something good, they were rewarded with food. But the fish was delivered early every morning. By the end of the day, it was probably gone. Or if anything was left, it was most likely locked up.

  So if someone was looking to train the dolphins themselves, they would probably have to bring their own fish. I had no idea if dolphins would eat canned tuna or not, but it would probably be easier to smuggle a tuna sandwich into the park than an entire dead mackerel.

  The dolphins finally realized Olivia wasn’t going to feed them, so they abandoned her and started racing around the bottom of the tank. I tried to watch them, but it was hard to see. The sun was reflecting off the water so brightly it was blinding. However, there was an underwater viewing area for guests on the far side of the tank from the check-in area. I figured I could get a better view of the dolphins—and the tank itself—from there, so I circled around that way.

  The underwater viewing area was really well designed. The ground around the tank had been excavated so that the walkway sloped below the surface of the water, leading to a twenty-foot-long, eight-foot-high wall of thick glass. Since the water went right to the top of the glass, signs warned guests that they were in an official “Splash Zone” and could possibly get wet. As I’d suspected, my view of the park’s eight dolphins was much better from here. Four had formed a small pod and were racing each other, while three others were doing lazy laps. The last one was down near the pipe Olivia had pointed out before, lying motionless on the floor.

  I figured it was sleeping. Since dolphins breathe air, they can’t sleep the same way humans do, because then they’d sink and drown. (Also, being asleep out in the ocean would leave them vulnerable to shark attacks.) So they actually shut down half of their brains at a time, letting one side sleep while the other monitors their surroundings and controls their breathing. In the wild, dolphins would sleep motionless at the surface of the water or swim very slowly, but in captivity, they were known to occasionally snooze at the bottom of their tanks as well. (Possibly because they knew there were no predators in captivity.) At times like this, the dolphins would use their oxygen very slowly, surfacing every once in a while for a breath before drifting back down again.

  The tank was so big, I could barely see the far side of it. The dolphins over there looked as small as minnows.

  But I had a great view of Twix, who came right up to the glass to greet me. I recognized her from a small scar on her nose, as well as her che
erful attitude. I wondered if she might recognize me, since I’d spent so much time in the tanks with her lately.

  Normally, the viewing areas were exceptionally crowded, but today I had Twix all to myself. Olivia, Nick, and the angry woman were all the way on the far side of the tank, in the check-in area.

  I made a circle in the air with my finger, giving Twix a signal I’d seen Olivia do a hundred times.

  Twix twirled in the water like a ballerina doing a pirouette.

  “Awesome!” I exclaimed. “Now try this.” I flapped my hand.

  Twix flapped her pectoral fins in response.

  I’d never had a dolphin respond to my commands before. It was almost as amazing as getting to be in the water with them.

  I gave Twix another command. And another. And another. She performed them all, apparently having just as much fun as I was. I forgot about everything else for a while. The stolen panda. The intruder who’d left their bathing suit behind. Marge, Molly, and the entire FBI.

  I was so focused on the dolphin, I didn’t notice I was no longer alone until it was too late.

  A reflection in the glass suddenly caught my eye. Something big and black and white was directly behind me.

  A panda bear.

  I whirled around, fearing that maybe Li Ping hadn’t been stolen at all but had simply escaped and was now loose in the zoo. Lots of people think of pandas as being docile, like they’re giant teddy bears. But they can actually be dangerous, seeing as they’re big and strong and have sharp teeth and claws.

  Now that I was looking directly at the panda, rather than a reflection, I realized it wasn’t Li Ping at all. It was only someone wearing the zoo’s Li Ping mascot costume.

  I heaved a huge sigh of relief. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that,” I gasped. “You scared the daylights out of me.”

  “You ought to be scared, you little brat,” the person in the costume growled. The voice was deep and ominous.