by Stuart Gibbs
“If it was,” I said, “then it would have been by the dig site, with all the other supplies. But it was downriver, which indicates that someone tried to get rid of this, too.”
“What use would a three-foot-long log be?” Ethan asked. “Or a plank with holes in it?”
“I don’t know,” Sage said. “But I suppose that—”
“Shhhh!” Dash hissed.
The rest of us instantly fell silent. I stared out into the darkness, listening intently for whatever had caught Dash’s attention. For a while, all I could hear was the crackle of the fire and the rushing of the river.
And then I heard something else.
Voices in the distance.
We weren’t the only people out at the crime scene.
14 THE SUSPECTS
We all tensed in fear, wondering who else might be out there.
“Oh my god,” Ethan moaned quietly. “Do you think it’s the chupacabra?”
Even though Dash had just warned us to be quiet, he groaned. “You and your stupid chupacabra,” he muttered.
The chupacabra was a mythical creature that was rumored to suck the blood out of goats—and possibly humans. As ridiculous as it sounded, Ethan wasn’t the only person who believed it existed. Some people thought it was a reptilelike creature that hopped like a kangaroo, while others thought it was more doglike in appearance.
“The chupacabra isn’t stupid,” Ethan whispered back. “It’s extremely wily and as smart as a chimpanzee.”
“That makes one of you,” Dash said. “That’s not a chupacabra you hear. It’s obviously humans talking.”
I was trying to focus on the voices. Between the fire and the river and my friends arguing, there was too much noise to hear what was being said. It was hard enough to even pinpoint where the voices were coming from, but they seemed to be downstream somewhere.
“The chupacabra can make itself sound human,” Ethan argued. “To trick unsuspecting campers into dropping their defenses.”
Well down the river, a flashlight beam suddenly cut through the night, as though whoever was carrying it had just emerged from a stand of trees.
“Do chupacabras carry flashlights?” Dash asked pointedly.
“They do after they kill humans who were carrying them,” Ethan said ominously.
Several other flashlight beams joined the first. All were aimed in our direction.
They weren’t very strong beams, probably the type of small flashlight that you could strap to your forehead. The newcomers were merely using them to light the path directly ahead of them. We were too far away for them to see us clearly…
But they could easily make out our campfire.
There was nothing we could do to hide it. In the pitch-black night it might as well have been a spotlight.
The flashlight beams froze suddenly as the intruders stopped. Then the beams spun around and disappeared back into the trees.
“They’re getting away!” Dash exclaimed, and took off after them.
Before I even knew what I was doing, I was running after him as well. Sage was right next to me, although Ethan hung back by the fire. “You idiots!” he yelled. “What if it’s a chupacabra?”
“Don’t be such a chicken!” Dash yelled back.
Ethan sighed and joined the chase. There was nothing worse for a teenage boy than being labeled a chicken. Even getting attacked by a chupacabra.
Dash and Ethan were both extremely good athletes and very fast, but they didn’t know the terrain nearly as well as Sage did, so they had to wait for him to lead the way. Sage found the safest place to descend the small bluff to the riverbank in the darkness, and then brought us along the edge of the water.
Ahead of us, the flashlight beams were gone. Either they had vanished into the woods, or the people we had seen had turned them off so that we couldn’t follow them.
We also couldn’t hear the people anymore. The river was too loud beside us to pick up any voices.
We kept on running anyhow. “This had better not be a chupacabra,” Ethan grumbled under his breath.
I briefly wondered if the intruders might be planning an ambush, but decided that didn’t make much sense. They had obviously been surprised to see us there, and they had immediately run, which meant they weren’t looking for a fight. Instead, they were probably trying to get away fast before we could see who they were. Ambushing us would require coordinating a counterattack on the spur of the moment, and it would be hard to do without revealing their identities.
But still, all that was guesswork. I kept my guard up as I ran.
Now that we were away from the campfire, my eyes were adjusting to the light. The night was no longer a field of black, but was instead shades of darkness. The stars had come out in force above. The Milky Way was a great white slash across the sky, and it was reflected in the river to our right as well.
I could make out a path along the river, the reeds trampled by a dozen feet going over them every day. It must have been the route that the paleontology crew took back and forth to their camp—and the road.
The great shadow of the woods loomed just ahead, which was the point where our surprise guests had turned and fled.
From deep in the forest, I heard a thud, followed by a yelp of pain.
It sounded as though someone had run straight into a tree, although I couldn’t tell from the yelp whether it was a man or a woman.
But it was definitely an indication that the others were running away from us, rather than lying in wait, and that one of them was now injured.
“C’mon!” Dash urged us, then yelled out, “You’d better run, you losers! Because we’re coming for you!”
We reached the woods.
It was darker in the trees, without the stars above. A trail had been cut through, but it was hard to pick out. We had to slow down for fear of suffering the same fate our targets had and hurting ourselves. And yet, even then, I kept smacking into branches and getting facefuls of cedar needles.
Ahead of me, Ethan suddenly shrieked in terror.
“What happened?” I asked worriedly. “Are you okay?”
“I just ran into the biggest freaking spiderweb of all time!” Ethan howled. “Ugh! I think I got dead bugs in my mouth!”
“Sucks to be you!” Dash laughed, and then cried out as he tripped over a tree root and crashed to the ground.
Up ahead of us came the sound of a great splash.
Dash snapped back to his feet, wiping mud and dead leaves out of his hair. “What was that? Think one of them fell in the river?”
“It was too loud to be a person,” Sage said, then forged ahead through the woods.
We finally emerged from the trees into a large expanse of grassland.
Five large canvas tents were pitched there, each big enough for at least four people, set a good distance from the river to be safe from flooding. They were arranged in a ring around a central area where the grass had been trampled flat and a large fire pit was filled with the damp remains of campfires.
“This is the paleontologists’ camp?” I asked Sage.
“Yes,” he replied, then pointed across the river. “The way to the road is over there… Oh crud.”
“What’s wrong?” Ethan whimpered. He looked around skittishly, as if expecting the chupacabra to pounce on him any second.
“This is where the log we used as a bridge to cross the river was,” Sage said. “But it’s gone.”
The river narrowed ahead of us, which meant it was running deeper and faster, and the water funneled through the gap. There were some big rocks in the middle of it that created a short series of rapids. The white foam from their churning gleamed in the dark night.
“That’s what the big splash must have been,” Dash observed. “They shoved the log into the river.”
Sure enough, we found a deep gouge in the riverbank not far ahead, indicating that the end of a log had nested there for quite some time. A rope stretched across the river, four feet above the wa
ter, tied to a tree on each bank.
“We used that as a handrail,” Sage explained. “To steady ourselves while crossing.”
I gauged the river. At the rate it was flowing, trying to wade across it in the middle of the night would be suicidal. “Is there any other place to cross close by?”
“Not when the water’s like this,” Sage replied sadly. “We’d have to go another mile downstream until there’s a safe enough ford.”
I looked to the opposite bank. Far in the distance, well across a field, the intruders had turned their flashlights on again. They were no longer running full tilt, but were moving at a more leisurely, careful pace. Obviously, they knew we were no longer a threat to them.
Without the bridge, there was no way we could catch them. They had gotten away clean.
15 SNAKES ALIVE
The billboards for Snakes Alive began to appear along the interstate twenty miles before we got there. SEE THE WORLD’S MOST DEADLY SNAKE! SEE THE WORLD’S MOST VICIOUS CROCODILE! SEE A REAL LIVE MAN-EATER! Each had a lurid painting of an animal next to it: a king cobra, a saltwater crocodile, and a Bengal tiger. Each mile or so, we passed another sign. At the bottom of each was the inevitable phrase: MORE FUN THAN FUNJUNGLE—AND A WHOLE LOT CHEAPER!
“It should say ‘a whole lot sleazier,’ ” Summer grumbled.
It was late in the morning after my campout at the Bonotto Ranch. The rest of the previous night had been uneventful after our mystery guests had escaped. Our presence there had scared them off for good. I had fallen asleep shortly after returning to the campsite with Sage, Dash, and Ethan; it had been a very long day.
I had woken early and searched for any clues I might have missed in the fading light the night before. Downriver, I found the footprints of our mystery guests, but they were from the kind of hiking boot that pretty much everyone wore. I didn’t find anything new around the dig, not that I really expected to come across anything else as blatant as the Weems Aerospace pen. But it was still incredible to be in the middle of a real dinosaur dig, surrounded by honest-to-goodness tyrannosaur bones.
We had to strike camp early. Sage needed to help out around the ranch, Dash and Ethan had to get to their summer jobs, and Summer had lined up more investigating for us to do. Once again, I hadn’t agreed to this so much as been thrust into it. I had turned off my phone when I went to sleep, and when I turned it back on, I found a long text chain from Summer saying that she was heading to Snakes Alive in the morning to question Rick, and she was doing it with or without me.
I also found a series of e-mails that I had been included on between Summer and Tommy Lopez.
Summer had written to Tommy with an update about what had happened at the Barksdales’ and our lead to Rick at Snakes Alive. Tommy had responded that this was great work, but then said he was still going to be out of town on business at least another day, at which point Summer had suggested approaching Rick with me, posing as normal kids who wanted to buy a snake. To my surprise, Tommy had been supportive. He even thought there might be an advantage to having Summer and me to talk to Rick before he did; no one would expect two teenagers to be running a sting operation. If Rick took the bait and offered to sell us something illegally, then Tommy could use that as evidence to argue for investigating Snakes Alive to his boss.
We weren’t being asked to do anything dangerous, Summer pointed out. We were merely going shopping. Except, instead of looking for books or clothes, we were looking for snakes.
Put that way, it didn’t sound too bad.
Even Mom, who was always looking out for my safety, had been in favor of the plan. She had picked me up at Sage’s ranch and spent most of the ride home ranting about how upsetting the illegal animal trade was. This was a particular concern to her, as reptiles weren’t the only victims; there was also a booming illegal trade in birds, tropical fish, and Mom’s area of specialty: primates. Mom reminded me that she had even thwarted a trafficker herself on one occasion, when she had boarded a plane in the Congo and found a man trying to smuggle a baby De Brazza’s monkey.
“He wasn’t even trying to hide it!” Mom exclaimed, still just as angry about the event ten years after it had happened. “He had the poor thing in the pocket of his jacket and was showing it off to the other passengers!” Mom had promptly alerted the airline staff, who hadn’t been too concerned until Mom claimed that the monkey could be carrying a deadly disease that would make all the passengers’ brains dissolve. That was an exaggeration, but it got the attention of everyone on board, who were upset to learn their lives were in danger. The pilots had radioed ahead to the authorities, who were waiting to arrest the smuggler when the plane landed.
Mom was less pleased about my involvement with the stolen T. rex, though. When I told her about what had happened the night before, her face creased into a frown. “Why on earth did you chase those people? You should have called the police.”
“By the time the police showed up, the bad guys would have been long gone. And besides, Sheriff Esquivel doesn’t even care about this case.”
“That’s no excuse for putting yourself in danger. You ought to call the police right now, let them know what happened—and then be done with this.”
“All right.” I looked up the number for the sheriff’s department, then called and asked for Officer Brewster. She wasn’t in, which was fine with me, as I didn’t really feel like talking to her again. The dispatcher put me through to her voicemail and I left a message detailing what had happened.
When I hung up, Mom said, “Maybe you ought to let that paleontologist—Dr. Chen?—know what happened as well. I’m sure she’d want to know about it too.”
It took me a little bit longer to track down Dr. Chen’s number, but after some searching, I found her listing in the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Texas at Austin. It was located at—of all things—the J. J. Pickle Research Campus.
I giggled at this. “J. J. Pickle? Really?”
“Believe it or not, J. J. Pickle was a respected congressman from Texas,” Mom informed me. “I believe Summer’s father is named for him.”
“Good thing they went with the ‘J. J.’ and not the ‘Pickle,’ ” I observed, then called the number. I got a receptionist who informed me that Dr. Chen was out in the field. I asked if I could have her number and he told me that wasn’t allowed, but offered to take a message. So, for the third time that morning, I gave the details of what had happened at the dig site the night before. The receptionist sounded very concerned, said he would let Dr. Chen know immediately, and thanked me for my help.
By that time, we were almost home. Mom and Dad both had to work that day, so Mom took off right after getting me back to our trailer. I quickly showered and changed, then met Summer and Tran in the employee parking lot and headed out again.
The billboards became more common as we got closer to Snakes Alive. They began to announce how far it was:
ONLY HALF A MILE TO THE WORLD’S MOST INCREDIBLE COLLECTION OF REPTILES!
ONLY 1,000 FEET TO THE GREATEST ZOO ON EARTH!
EXIT HERE FOR THE MOST EXCITING TOURIST ATTRACTION IN TEXAS!
We pulled off onto the access road. Snakes Alive was located just beyond the exit.
The billboard in the parking lot was the biggest one yet, a full two stories promoting wild animals, refreshments, and souvenirs.
Even FunJungle might not have been able to live up to so much hype, but at first glance, Snakes Alive was extremely unimpressive. It appeared that they had spent far more on billboards than buildings. The main structure was a long, drab cement bunker with a gravel parking lot. Someone had attempted to sculpt the head of a giant venomous snake atop the building, with the mouth open and fangs bared, but they hadn’t done a great job.
“Looks like a vampire beaver,” Summer observed. She was in her standard outfit she wore when she didn’t want to be recognized: baseball cap, sunglasses, and a nondescript shirt.
Despite its dreary appearan
ce, however, Snakes Alive was attracting customers; the parking lot was full. Tran parked by the giant billboard and stayed in the car with the air conditioner running.
After a day of rain, the summer heat had returned with a vengeance. Summer and I wilted as we crossed the parking lot.
Snakes Alive was so close to the highway that we could hear the constant roar of semitrucks rushing by. Directly to the right side of the tourist attraction was a recreational vehicle dealership, a two-acre parking lot filled with RVs. On the left side was an enormous convenience store called Jerk-ee’s.
There were several Jerk-ee’s in Texas; all were located on the highways halfway between major cities, where travelers would need to make pit stops. Each was the size of a Walmart. They lured customers by claiming to have the biggest and cleanest bathrooms on earth; the men’s rooms had up to eighty urinals. Not surprisingly, they specialized in beef jerky, which they sold over a hundred types of, but you could also buy thousands of other snacks and drinks, as well as a surprising array of other things, like clothing, toys, kitchenware, and, since this was Texas, hunting supplies. Jerk-ee’s didn’t sell guns, but they had almost anything else you needed for a hunting trip, and thus, it was a very popular spot for hunters.
This created an odd juxtaposition of businesses. Snakes Alive, while it might have been tacky, was trying to attract customers who wanted to see living animals, while Jerk-ee’s was trying to attract people who wanted to kill them. The cars in the parking lot of Snakes Alive were mostly rental cars and minivans, the kinds of things tourists and families would drive, while the parking lot of Jerk-ee’s (which was much better paved and significantly larger) was full of pickups with gun racks in their rear windows.
Summer and I entered Snakes Alive. A bored girl not much older than us sat at a ticket counter beside a turnstile. Over her head, a large banner proclaimed that Snakes Alive was a great place to have your child’s birthday party; it featured a crudely drawn cobra looking excitedly at a cake.
