Big Game

by Stuart Gibbs

I followed him and Mom dropped in behind us.

  Kyle waved good-bye from his desk. “Have fun.” He jammed a forkful of lasagna in his mouth, then gagged. “Ugh! This is half frozen!”

  While he was spitting it into the trash, we slipped out of the office.

  “What did Athmani want with you today?” Mom asked as we headed through the corridors of Monkey Mountain.

  I was still trying to chew up all the sandwich I had in my mouth. “What do you mean?”

  “You went off with him after you left me at the medical clinic.” Mom wasn’t having any trouble adapting to her crutches at all. In fact, she was flying along on them like she’d been using them her whole life.

  I hadn’t realized Mom had been watching me with Athmani. I pretended to be busy chewing to give myself time to work out an answer. “He just had some questions about what happened in SafariLand last night.”

  “Like what?” Mom sounded as though she didn’t quite believe me.

  “Whether I’d had a good look at the hunter. Did I think he was going after Rhonda again. Stuff like that.” I hated lying to my parents. Absolutely hated it. But I knew that if I told them the truth, that J.J. had railroaded me into helping, they’d go right to him to complain, and then J.J. would be upset with me for betraying his confidence and things would probably get worse from there.

  “Does security have any leads?” Dad asked.

  “Athmani said they had footage of the hunter going over the fence on one of the security cameras, but they couldn’t tell anything about him from it.” I purposefully omitted the part about the hunter being a woman, because Hoenekker had warned me not to share anything I’d learned after our meeting. Even with my parents.

  “They don’t have anything?” Mom sighed. “Guess that’s why they’re monopolizing all the security footage.”

  “I suppose,” I said, although talking about the cameras made me think of something. I tried to pick my words carefully, not wanting to let on how much I knew. “Dad, you followed the hunter over the fence last night, right?”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly follow him,” Dad corrected. “I lost him in the exhibit. But then I found where he’d gone over and used that route myself.”

  “Athmani said it was close to where one of the security cameras was posted.”

  Dad thought about that for a moment. “Was it? I didn’t notice. Or maybe I couldn’t see it. It was awfully dark out there.”

  We reached the door to the orangutan area. Inside the employee areas, the doors didn’t require coded keypad entries, but there was still security to protect the animals. Mom’s official FunJungle ID had an electronic sensor built into it. She waved this in front of a sensor built in the wall—which wasn’t so easy to do on crutches—and then the door unlocked automatically. “What are you thinking?” she asked me.

  “Well, there aren’t very many cameras out on that fence,” I said, holding the door open for Mom. “They’re pretty spaced out. So why did the hunter go over so close to one?”

  “He was in a hurry,” Dad said.

  “On the way out. Not on the way in. If you were going to sneak into the park to commit a crime, you’d probably take your time doing it, right? So wouldn’t you scope out the fence and pick the spot farthest from a camera?”

  Inside the orangutan care room, Mom and Dad both turned to me, impressed. Dad said, “I didn’t even think of that. I wonder if Hoenekker has.”

  I lowered my eyes, even more frustrated that I couldn’t reveal I was actually helping investigate.

  “Maybe the hunter didn’t see the camera,” Mom suggested. “Your father didn’t see it in the dark.”

  “But I wasn’t looking for it.” Dad set the camera case down and popped the latches on it. “If I were planning on sneaking into the zoo—or anyplace—I’d certainly be on the lookout for security cameras.”

  In a way, Dad was an authority on sneaking into places. On occasion, he had been assigned to take photos of animals in countries that were closed to tourists and journalists. At times like that, he had to find other ways over the border. (For example, he’d once had to infiltrate Somalia to get photos of herola, one of the most endangered antelope in the world.) It was dangerous—Mom had made him promise to stop taking those assignments—but he’d been very good at it. After all, he’d never been caught.

  The backstage area for the orangutans was a mess—but there was a good reason for that. Orangutans, like all primates, are very smart and need plenty of mental stimulation. So the keepers gave them lots of stuff to play with—the orangs were very fond of cardboard boxes and burlap bags—as well as mental challenges to work out. These usually involved food; the keepers would hide treats inside wads of newspaper or freeze them inside giant cubes of ice, and the apes would have to figure out how to get it. None of these things were allowed on exhibit because they made a mess and looked inauthentic in the rain forest (as if an Indonesian rain forest inside a fake mountain in Texas was in any way authentic in the first place), but the orangutans loved them, so their backstage area was often full of garbage.

  Pancake was the champion cardboard box shredder of the orangs. He could turn a good-size box into scraps within minutes. But today he had ignored the three that had been given to him. In fact, he hadn’t moved from his nest of burlap sacks.

  However, he perked up as we entered, excited to have company—and intrigued by Dad’s big camera case. When Dad opened it, he hauled himself up and approached the bars of his enclosure, grunting eagerly, wondering what could possibly be hidden inside the mysterious black object.

  “Hiya, Pancake,” Dad said. “You look like you’re feeling a little better.”

  “He does,” Mom agreed. “He was pretty miserable when I first saw him this morning.”

  Pancake knew my whole family and seemed to especially like Dad. Now he grinned at him, revealing a set of teeth that, except for their size, looked surprisingly human.

  Although I normally would have been thrilled to be so close to one of the orangutans—it wasn’t something I got to do often and it was always a treat—I was distracted by several things at once. I was still thinking about the hunter and how she’d climbed over the fence. It was hard to believe she hadn’t seen the security cameras, even at night. If anything, the cameras were designed to be seen. That way they’d act as a deterrent; someone was much less likely to climb the fence if they thought they’d be recorded doing it.

  Meanwhile, the blurry images of the hunter still stuck in my mind. Although I’d been surprised that the hunter was a woman at first, it sadly didn’t narrow the field of suspects down that much. Women might not have hunted as much as men did, but there were still plenty who did it. And lots of them probably had dark hair long enough to make a ponytail out of.

  Then there was the gun to consider. The fact that the hunter had been using a silencer at night—but not the previous morning—still nagged at me. Something seemed important about that fact, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

  And if all that wasn’t enough to distract me, I was finally in the orangutan habitat, site of the potential jailbreak. As adorable as Pancake was, I found myself drawn to his habitat itself, looking for evidence that there’d been an escape. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see any. I realized, to my own annoyance, that I’d been hoping for something obvious, like a poorly hidden tub of melted ice cream or misshapen metal bars that had been twisted open and shut again. Instead, the habitat looked exactly like it always did.

  Pancake was sticking his arm through the bars now, palm open, gesturing for Dad to give him what was inside the case. Orangutan arms are startlingly long when fully extended, almost twice the length of the ape’s legs.

  Dad laughed. “Sorry, buddy. This is way too expensive to let you have it.”

  Pancake now made an overblown sad face, like a little kid who hadn’t gotten what he wanted and was trying to make his parents feel bad about it. And it kind of worked. I immediately started to feel sad for him, even though
I knew he was probably only acting.

  “Pancake,” Mom said, “you know you can’t have that. But how about this instead?” She took one of the carrot sticks she’d brought for lunch out of her pocket.

  Pancake’s frown immediately melted away. His open palm shifted in Mom’s direction.

  Mom set the carrot in Pancake’s hand, and within a second, it was inside Pancake’s mouth. The orangutan happily munched away.

  “Doesn’t look like your stomach’s bothering you anymore,” Mom said.

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t eat the ice cream though, right?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Mom replied. “Stomach aches don’t last forever.”

  I asked, “Did anyone ever check his poop for signs of candy?”

  Dad wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Eww. Gross.”

  “I told the orangutan’s keepers to keep an eye out,” Mom said. “But I didn’t hear anything from them.”

  “Do you think they even did it?” Dad inquired. “I wouldn’t sift through orangutan poop if I didn’t have to.”

  Mom shrugged. “It’d probably be a wild-goose chase anyhow. The candy’s probably already out—and the chocolate ice cream would have already looked kind of like poop on the way in.”

  “Please.” Dad grimaced. “I just ate.”

  “Get over it,” Mom teased. “You want to work at a zoo, there’s going be poop talk.”

  Pancake finished eating the carrot, then extended his hand for another treat.

  Mom turned her pockets inside out to show that they were empty. “Sorry, Pancake. That’s all I had.”

  Pancake pasted his comic frown back on and immediately aimed his open palm at Dad again.

  “Forget it,” he told him. “You’re not getting this.” He took the video camera out of the case.

  “Why’s that so big?” I asked.

  “Because unlike the camera on your phone, this one can record all night. There’s sixteen hours of storage in it.” Dad looked up at the corners of the room that faced the exhibit. “Guess this should go right up there next to the official security camera.”

  Sure enough, there was a security camera already mounted in the corner, aimed right at the orangutan exhibit. This was the one Mom had been accessing the feed from in her office. The one security hadn’t reviewed the footage from yet.

  I looked back to the cage. There was only one gate built into it, a gate that worked like a sliding door rather than hinging open, like a normal door. Instead of a key-based lock, however, it had an electronic one.

  “How’s that lock work?” I asked.

  “The same way the lock on the door to get in here does,” Mom said. “With this.” She pulled out her ID with the electronic sensor, then pointed to a sensor pad on the wall six feet away from the orangutan cage. “If you wave it by that pad, the cage unlocks.”

  At the sight of the ID card, Pancake forgot all about trying to get the camera from Dad and turned his attention to Mom again.

  “Sorry, boy.” Mom tucked the card away again. “I was only displaying it. You’re not getting out right now.”

  The frown creased Pancake’s face a third time.

  “He knows the card opens the gate?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Mom said. “Pancake doesn’t miss a trick.”

  Dad looked at the gate again, intrigued. “Wasn’t there a lock that needed a key here before?”

  “Yes,” Mom replied. “Back before the park opened. But you might recall that didn’t work so well. Bung swiped a key off one of the keepers within the first few days, hid it away, and kept letting himself out at night. So we switched to this new system. Even if the orangutans steal an ID card, they won’t be able to work the sensor. It’s too far for them to reach—even with those enormous arms.”

  I looked from Pancake, whose arm was still outstretched, to the sensor on the wall on my side of the bars. Mom was right. The orang was three feet short of being able to trigger the gate to unlock. “But suppose Pancake did figure out how to escape the cage? There’s nothing that would keep him locked in this room, right?”

  “True,” Mom agreed.

  “So he could go right through the halls and get out into the park?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Mom said. “It wouldn’t be that hard. But getting back in would be impossible. At night, Monkey Mountain is locked down tight. You can’t enter the building without knowing the entry code—and there’s no way an orangutan would know that.”

  “He could guess it,” I suggested.

  “Two nights in a row?” Mom asked skeptically. “It changes daily. The odds against guessing the right code once must be astronomical, let alone twice. Assuming Pancake even knew how the key-code entry worked in the first place. And then, once he got past that, he’d have to get the code right again to access the behind-the-scenes areas—and then he’d still need the electronic ID card to get back into this room. Orangutans are smart, but I can’t imagine one of them could figure out how to do all that.”

  “What if he propped all the doors open after he went through them?” I asked. “Then he wouldn’t need the codes to get back in.”

  “Good point,” Mom said. “Only, at night, the alarms will trigger if any door is left open for more than five minutes. So that wouldn’t work. And if there’s any other way in or out of here, I don’t have the slightest idea what it could be.”

  Dad held up the camera he’d brought. “Well, that’s what this is for.” He looked up to where the other security camera was mounted, high above the floor. “I’ll need a ladder to get this up there.”

  “I think there’s one in the maintenance closet,” Mom said. “I’ll show you where it is.”

  Dad asked, “Mind if Teddy sticks around and helps me set things up? I could use an extra hand.”

  I looked to Mom expectantly. “Can I?”

  “I suppose,” she replied. “Though you two better keep a good eye on your tools. Don’t leave them anywhere near Pancake here. If you drop your guard for a moment, he’ll swipe something—and the next thing you know, this whole cage will be in pieces. Then we’ll be up to our armpits in escaped orangutans.”

  “We’ll be careful,” I told her. “I swear.”

  Dad moved his tools to the wall right beside the door, several feet out of Pancake’s reach. Then we headed out to get the ladder.

  As we did, Pancake starting hooting sadly. We all turned back to him.

  He was frowning again, smushing his face between the bars, making himself look as pitiful as possible.

  “He doesn’t want us to leave,” I said.

  “He doesn’t really care if we leave or not,” Mom said. “He’s only trying to manipulate us. Pancake’s as smart as they come. If any orang could figure out how to get out of here and back in again, I’d bet on him.”

  We left the room. Pancake hooted even more sadly, but after the door closed, I glanced back through the window at him. The frown instantly left his face, and he quickly turned his attention to shredding one of the cardboard boxes.

  “I’ll be darned,” Dad said. “That ape could win an Oscar.”

  My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out to see that Summer was calling. “Mind if I take this?” I asked. “It’s important.”

  “Who is it?” Mom inquired.

  “Summer,” I said.

  Dad and Mom instantly shared a knowing smile, then turned away hoping I wouldn’t see it.

  I sighed, stepped away from them, and answered. “Aren’t you supposed to be in class right now?”

  “You should talk,” Summer shot back. “You aren’t even in school. We still on for four o’clock today?”

  “Sure. Where are we going?”

  “To Violet Grace’s aunt and uncle’s ranch.”

  My parents were trying to act like they weren’t eavesdropping on my conversation, but they were. Dad whispered something to Mom that made her giggle, and then she punched him in the arm lightly. I figured it all had to do with me an
d Summer.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Remember those exotic game ranches we were talking about yesterday? The ones where people pay to kill animals from all over the world? Well, they own the biggest one in this whole area.”

  I lowered my voice so my parents wouldn’t hear me as I asked, “And you think they might have something to do with Rhonda?”

  “Probably not,” Summer said. “But they know pretty much every big-game hunter for a couple hundred miles in any direction. Which means they might have a very good idea who our poacher is.”

  THE GAME

  Summer’s driver, Tran, picked me up at FunJungle and brought me to school. Only, we couldn’t simply grab Summer and Violet and head out to the ranch, because there was a basketball game, and as head cheerleader, Violet had to be there.

  The game was just starting the third quarter when I arrived. We were already down by twenty-six points to Eisenhower Middle School—though, sadly, that was actually pretty good for us. Our basketball team was pathetic. Two weeks before, we’d lost to a team that had only four players. There was almost no one in the stands except for the team’s families. Despite this, Violet and the other cheerleaders were still prancing on the sidelines, doing their best to keep the small crowd revved up.

  “We’re awesome!” they chanted, even though this obviously wasn’t the case. “Oh yeah, we’re awesome. A-W-E-S-O-M-E. That’s right, we’re awesome!”

  Behind them, one of our forwards took a shot and missed the hoop by ten feet.

  It wasn’t hard to spot Summer in the sparsely filled stands. She was wearing her usual pink, and Hondo was looming close by. She waved to me, then pointed to the seat she’d saved for me, as if there weren’t a few hundred free seats available around her.

  I circled around the court to join them, trying my best to be inconspicuous. After all, I’d skipped school that day and now there I was at the game. It was hard to be inconspicuous around Summer, though. The few kids who were actually in the stands ignored the game to stare at me.

  Eisenhower’s team blew through our defense like it was made out of tissue paper and scored an easy layup.