Cricket said, “And if she wasn’t trying to hide something, why not just go in the house?”
“I don’t think she’s married to Grayson, Cricket. He’s too old. And neither of them wears a ring. I think she’s his daughter.”
Cricket looked at me, horrified. “What kind of girl would do a scam with her dad?”
I grunted. “What kind of dad would use his daughter as bait?”
“One thing’s for sure,” Gary said. “If this is a scam, it’s the weirdest one I’ve ever heard of.” He checked the rearview mirror. “Let’s also make sure she doesn’t follow us.”
So for the three blocks back to the Kuos’ we checked all around for Janey but didn’t see any sign of her. And after we’d parked, Cricket grabbed her duffle and said, “Let’s go!”
So we hurried back to South Lucas Drive, but when we reached Casey, the SUV was already gone.
“He took off?” I asked.
“Two minutes ago. Janey showed up right after you left. She went in the front door and opened the garage. Pretty Vegas backed the SUV about halfway in, and before I could even get across the street, they were closing up shop.”
“So what did you see?” I ask.
“It was all in shadows, and they moved quick.” He grimaced. “Sorry.” But then he added, “I did memorize the license.”
That, at least, was something, even though all of us were feeling pretty deflated.
But then Cricket started jumping up and down. “Wait a minute, wait a minute! If he is the guy, then he’s got a receiver!”
We all blinked at her.
“And if he’s anything like every single camper I know, he unloaded all his camping stuff inside the garage!”
In a flash, I’d dug the garage door opener out of the duffle and had it aimed through a thin spot in the hedge. I pressed the button, and the garage door sprang to life, squeaking up, up, up.
When we were sure the coast was clear, we hurried across the street.
Even with the door wide open, the garage stank. It was worse than musty. It was like uric acid mixed with cooking mustard greens.
In other words, vile.
There was camping gear stacked to one side, including an old canvas tent and a roll-up sleeping bag.
“It was him!” Cricket gasped, scooping up a cowboy hat and sunglasses. She put them back down and cried, “And here’s the receiver!”
Then Gary called, “I found the net shooter!” and I pointed to some super-sized clippers and said, “And bolt cutters!”
Cricket stopped cold. “That monster! If he killed Marvin’s mom, I’m going to kill him!”
Not exactly model Girl Scout behavior, but who could blame her?
But Casey shook his head and said, “This place smells rank, but I’m not sure it smells like dead bird.”
“Where’s the smell coming from, anyway?” Gary asked.
There was a trash bin in the corner of the garage, and when I flipped open the lid and caught a whiff, I about hurled. “Holy putrid buzzard poop!”
Casey held his breath and looked inside at the newspapers slimed with poop and scraps of rancid meat. His eyes were stinging, just like mine. “Oh, man,” he said, closing the lid.
Cricket grabbed her duffle bag from where I’d dropped it. “I am taking back our stuff. This is our stuff!” She shoved in the receiver and power pack, the shooting net, and the record log that Gary had also found.
Then she zipped the bag closed and stood up. “We’re calling the police!”
Gary scowled at her. “And what are you planning to tell them, little Miss Break and Enter?”
Cricket’s eyes got wide as she understood what her brother was saying. “Oh, no! I compromised the evidence, huh? He can say that we put all this stuff in here, huh? He can say it’s a big conspiracy! He can . . . oh, no! What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Gary said. He peered outside. “But we really need to get out of here!”
So we slunk out of the garage with the duffle bag, pressed the remote to get the door rolling down, then hurried up the sidewalk. And when we were safely up the street, I glanced back at the house.
The garage door was down.
It was like we’d never been inside.
I looked at my watch. It was already after one. Maybe there was enough time to get the police involved, but with my history with the SMPD, I didn’t want to stand around wasting time trying. And with the Vargus connection, I still wasn’t sure who else might be involved or who we could trust.
No, the more I thought about it, the more I saw only one thing to do.
Follow them.
Follow them and rescue that big ol’ mama bird ourselves.
TWENTY-SIX
I told Cricket and the others what I thought we should do and ended with, “If that big mama is still alive, we don’t have much time!” Then Gary said, “So let’s go rescue Big Mama!”
The funny thing about the bird suddenly having a name was that it all became personal. I mean, up to now figuring out what had happened to Marvin’s mom had been more a nagging challenge to me than a passion. But now? I was ready to fight! Big Mama needed us!
Cricket didn’t need Big Mama to have a name to feel the way I did. She’d had the beating pulse of it all along. But with what she’d seen and found in the garage and now with the idea of a rescue, she was pumped, man. Pumped and ready to do battle with one slimy newscaster and his decoy daughter.
So we hurried back to the Kuos’, where Cricket flew around the house shoving things inside her duffle bag, getting ready for our rescue mission. Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh! she zoomed, going this way and that. At one point she came to a dead stop, looked at us, and said, “Be prepared!” like it was the secret key to the universe, then whooshed off again.
Gary had disappeared when we’d first arrived at the Kuos’, and I hadn’t given what he was doing any thought because Casey and I had been trying to figure out how to work the receiver. But then from across the house he called, “Hey, rescue squad! Come here!”
We all channeled down the hall and into the dungeon, where we found him scrolling intently through the pictures on a Web site. “Remember how I sent out a query to my butterfly contacts? Well, Pryze sent me this link to a site put up by some guy who calls himself the Birdman. He’s got a one-hundred-acre aviary full of rare, exotic birds!” He pointed to bright red text against a deep blue background. “Check this out!”
So we all hung over his shoulders and read:
My aviary is the BIGGEST and BEST in the world. I have over 450 RARE and EXOTIC screamers and ducks! Kingfishers, hornbills, and allies! Eagles, hawks, and vultures! Passerines! Cranes, rails, trumpeters! Examples of a few of my greatest acquisitions include the crested shelduck and the white-winged duck! Marquesan kingfishers! Hawaiian crows! Gouldian finches! Whooping cranes! Ivory-billed woodpeckers! I also have Azores bullfinches, bald eagles, Kruper’s nuthatches, orange-fronted parakeets . . . and coming soon! The legendary thunderbird!
“Who is this guy?” I gasped.
Gary shrugged. “The Birdman.”
“Is there a picture of him?”
Gary scrolled through the site quickly. There were pictures of birds and the aviary, but not one of a human.
Casey sort of frowned and said, “I’m not a world traveler or anything, but that doesn’t look like anyplace around here.”
The steep hills in some of the pictures’ background were a lush green, and in every image the sky looked misty or cloudy.
“Japan?” Cricket asked. “Fiji? The Bahamas? South America?”
Gary shook his head. “Could be any of those places.”
“But it’s definitely not around here,” I said. “And if this is the right guy, the Poacher and the Decoy are probably headed for—”
“The airport!” everyone cried.
“And once Big Mama’s gone, she’s gone. This Birdman guy’s got to be traceable, but if he’s in a different country, we’ll never get he
r back!”
Gary rattled through a lockdown sequence and cried, “To the Thunder Truck!”
The Thunder Truck? Casey and I sorta eyed each other and laughed, ’cause over the past couple of days Gary seemed to be morphing from computer geek to cartoony action hero.
But Cricket balked. “So when do we call the police? We can’t take down the Birdman and the Poacher and the Decoy!”
I laughed out loud, because I’d never heard anyone sound more like me. It wasn’t what she was saying; it was the way she was saying it. “How about we find them first, okay? Then we’ll call the police.”
So we grabbed the duffle bag and the tracking equipment and followed Gary out the door. And since Casey’s and my skateboards were right there on the porch, we grabbed those, which made Cricket do a U-turn back into the house and appear a minute later with two pairs of Rollerblades.
I looked at her like, Huh?
“We don’t have skateboards,” she said, “but we’re fast on blades.”
Now, I hadn’t thought about the fact that Gary’s truck was loud and that it might be useful to have a skateboard to get us closer to where we needed to go—wherever that was. It was more like, There’s my skateboard, I’ll grab it just in case we don’t come back.
But now I saw that Cricket was thinking strategy and that there was no way she was gonna get left behind because she was on foot and we were on boards.
So I kinda grinned at her and said, “Be prepared?”
She gave me a great big smile. “Exactly.”
Anyway, we threw our wheels in the bed of the truck, and after we were all seated, Cricket rolled down her window and stuck the receiver antenna outside while Gary fired up the truck.
“Casey and I couldn’t get a signal,” I called up to Cricket. “Maybe we were doing something wrong?”
But Cricket seemed to be having trouble, too. “I hadn’t thought about this before, but what if there’s too much interference in town? Buildings, plus radio and TV station transmissions?”
Gary frowned. “That would not be good.” He cruised down the street a little ways, then asked, “Anything?”
Cricket shook her head.
“So?” Gary asked, looking over his shoulder at me. “To the airport?”
“To the airport,” I called back. “And step on it!”
I’ve never actually been on an airplane, so I didn’t know much about airports. I’d heard they had tight security. And elaborate monitoring devices. And FBI agents dressed as everyday travelers. But we’re talking Santa Martina here—not LAX or JFK or XYZ or whatever big airport terminal most people fly in and out of. So I wasn’t too worried about elaborate monitoring devices, and I really didn’t think the FBI would be a problem. I mean, come on. The planes that fly in and out of here are just oversized crop dusters. Oh, they pretend to be sleek, sophisticated aeroplanes, but everyone knows—they’re crop dusters in disguise.
Anyway, when we got to the airport, we cruised through the parking lots searching for the steel blue SUV. It only took a few minutes to go up and down all the aisles of both parts of the lot.
No SUV.
Cricket still had the receiver pointed out of the window, and finally she said, “Gary, can you just park? Your truck’s so loud I can’t tell if there’s a signal or not!”
So Gary pulled over and cut the motor, and Cricket played with the receiver, moving the antenna from left to right across the window opening.
No beep.
“What if we’ve got the wrong airport? What if they went up to Santa Luisa?” She opened the door and jumped out. “If they’re meeting the Birdman at three, we’ll never catch them!” She turned slowly, holding the antenna straight out in front of her. We could see the air traffic control tower and heard the buzz of a plane as it came in for a landing.
My heart sank as Cricket kept turning. And all I could think was, Why’d we wait so long to get going? Why didn’t we just grab the receiver, hop in the truck, and go? Why’d we have to be so “prepared”?
But then all of a sudden Cricket stops. She stops, and very slowly she swings back in the opposite direction. She plays with the controls some, then shouts, “I’ve got a signal! It’s faint, but I’ve got a signal!”
The rest of us scramble out of the truck. “Where? Which direction?”
“That’s what’s so weird.” She points away from the airport. “Over there.”
So we all pile back in the truck and follow a narrow road that leads away from the control tower. There are some office buildings on our left, so we can’t see the airfield at all anymore, and it really seems like we’re getting farther and farther away from where any plane might land. Still, Cricket is hanging out the window with the receiver and she calls, “It’s getting stronger!”
So we continue along the road until it Ts to the left and the right. Going right looks like it’ll take us up to some more office buildings near the highway, and to the left is a huge area that’s fenced off by chain link topped with razor wire. Plus there’s a security gate about fifty yards down the road.
Gary pulls off into the weeds, cuts the motor, and says, “What have you got?”
Cricket scans the area with the antenna, and we can all hear the beep get louder as she aims it over at the fenced off area.
“That must be an airfield back there,” Casey says. He points toward the rows of arched buildings on the other side of the security gate. “Those are probably private hangars.”
I grabbed the duffle bag and fished out the binoculars. Then I leaned forward between Cricket and Gary and focused on the gate. There was a sign wired to the fence that had SECURE AREA and a bunch of penal code information on it, plus a post with a security box mounted on top where you could enter a secret code to open the gate and drive through.
The bad news was, there was no way we could guess our way inside the gate or climb over the razor wire. And the whole area around the gate was exposed—no trash cans or bushes or trees . . . nothing to use as cover.
The good news was, I didn’t see any guards.
And there were some great bushes about twenty yards from the gate.
“Park over there,” I told Gary, pointing to a shady area under some eucalyptus trees. “I’ve got an idea.”
Casey smirked. “Uh-oh.”
So I explained what I wanted to do, and even though nobody was wild about the idea, nobody could come up with anything better.
Except maybe Cricket, who wanted to call the police.
“I agree—we should do that! But let’s get in position first.”
I did still have a problem with the whole Vargus connection, though. I mean, how had Vargus’s name wound up on the Trail Riders form if someone who knew Vargus wasn’t involved? What if Quinn or Professor Prag or Robin was involved? What if they were sacrificing one condor to help many? What if they could get so much money from the sale of one bird that they could keep the condor program going for a decade!
Should we just let them do it?
Anyway, we wind up crouched behind the bushes with our skateboards and Rollerblades and the duffle bag, and after Cricket’s done complaining about how ridiculous it is to be hiding in the bushes wearing Rollerblades, she gets Casey’s phone, looks at me, and says, “You want to do it?”
I shake my head. “I’m terrible at explaining stuff like this.”
So she punches in 9-1-1, and she’s totally amped, because when someone answers, she starts talking a hundred miles an hour. “We need help. There’s a guy—Grayson Mann, actually—the KSMY reporter? He’s stolen a condor. Out of the woods? And he’s getting ready to sell it for big bucks to some guy from out of the country called the Birdman, and—”
She stops talking suddenly, and then her jaw drops. And after a few seconds of silence she looks at the phone, then snaps it shut, and says to us, “She told me she’d have me arrested if I didn’t quit fooling around! Can you believe that? She hung up on me!”
I give a little shrug. Like, yeah
, I can totally believe that.
She flips open the phone. “Well, I’m going to call Robin!”
But before she can dial, a bunch of things start happening, all at once.
First, a car turns down the road toward the security gate. Then from the sky above comes the sound of a plane, and when we look up, all our jaws drop.
It’s no crop duster, that’s for sure. It’s a sleek black jet—not big, but not small, either. And it’s strange enough that it’s black, but it’s painted like an angry raven . . .feathers on the wings, eyes and a beak around the cockpit. . . . We all know it’s just a jet, but something about it is still unnerving.
“The Birdman!” Cricket gasps. “That must be him!”
And we’re just absorbing the urgency of what’s in the sky above us when that car drives past us toward the gate. The driver is wearing a uniform, and he’s talking on a walkie-talkie type of radio. Not one of those little hand jobbies—a big one.
Like the kind Quinn used up at the Lookout.
“That’s how he knew!” I gasp, but there’s no time to explain. The car’s already at the security keypad.
The driver’s punching in the code.
The gate’s swinging open.
It’s time to charge!
TWENTY-SEVEN
If the security gate had been right next to the bushes, we could’ve piggybacked in, no problem. But when the car went through, we were twenty yards away, and no matter how quick any of us might have been at sprinting, we could never have reached the gate before it closed.
But we had wheels, and the instant the car moved forward through the gate, we hit the ground rolling.
Casey and I got a good start and pushed as hard as we could, but even so, the gate was swinging closed fast and we were not going to make it.
Then Gary zoomed past us on his Rollerblades. He was leaning way over, his arms pumping high. He was flying. And when he got to the gate, he zipped through, then strained to keep the gate open long enough for the rest of us to squeeze by.
When we were safely in the shadows of a plane hangar, I panted, “Grayson Mann got Vargus’s name from radio transmissions!”
Sammy Keyes and the Wild Things Page 20