by Stuart Gibbs
Mom had fallen silent herself, giving Dad’s theory some consideration. We were nearing the employee exit at the rear of FunJungle. Until recently, our home had been close by, but now the place where our trailer—and the rest of employee housing—had been was the future site of the Wilds. J.J. wasn’t even trying to hide the construction: He wanted guests to see that rides were being built, so they’d get all excited and return when the new area opened. A wooden wall ran across the path that would serve as the future entrance to the Wilds; it was gaily painted with representations of the rides-to-be, along with holes where you could peek through and watch the construction underway.
Mom glared at the construction site, the way she did every time we passed it.
I said, “If Marge is really involved, do you think Molly would actually arrest her?”
“Molly already did arrest her,” Mom pointed out. “Today after Marge forced you to sneak into the mobile unit for her.”
“That wasn’t a real arrest,” Dad told us. “I think Molly only cuffed Marge to show she meant business. Hoenekker worked out some deal to get Marge off. She has to keep clear of the investigation—and she’s barred from carrying a weapon anymore. Not even a Taser.”
“Hoenekker should have done that months ago,” Mom put in.
“However, if Marge truly turned out to be involved in a serious crime like this,” Dad went on, “I’m sure Molly would make sure she was prosecuted for it. There doesn’t seem to be much affection between those two. And Molly seems very committed to her job.”
“But like you said, Marge wouldn’t be the brains behind the operation,” I said.
“Marge isn’t the brains of anything,” Dad replied.
“So who is?” I asked. “Do you think the NFF is behind the panda-napping?”
Mom and Dad shared a look, as though they were trying to figure out how much to say to me. Then Dad said, “I share the same concerns about the NFF that you do. This doesn’t seem like their style. And they’re a small, cash-strapped operation. I don’t think they have the funds or the skill to hit a truck while it’s moving down the highway.”
“But James Van Amburg threatened Teddy today,” Mom said.
“Teddy didn’t actually see James,” Dad countered. “He only says the voices sounded the same. There are plenty of other people with deep voices like that.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It was awfully gravelly. . . .”
“Then maybe someone imitated James, wanting you to think he was attacking you,” Dad said. “Maybe this whole thing was just another part of a frame job for the NFF.”
Mom still seemed skeptical. “You think someone actually pretended to be James Van Amburg and threatened Teddy with a gun solely to point the finger at the NFF?”
“Why not?” Dad asked. “It seems to have worked. Notice that they threatened Teddy, not an FBI agent or any adult. He’s only a boy—and more susceptible to coercion like that.” He glanced at me. “No offense.”
“None taken,” I said.
Dad continued on. “By his own admission, Teddy wasn’t snooping around. So why come after him? Unless it was part of a setup.”
Mom grew thoughtful once more. So did I. My father’s argument made sense, and it made me angry. I had been scared to death by the panda with the gun. To think that it was all simply done to make me a pawn was infuriating.
We passed out of the park through the rear employee exit. Marcus and Jethro dutifully followed us. The employee parking lot sat to our left, heat shimmering off the asphalt, turning all the cars parked there into mirages. A path led through the woods—or at least, what woods remained now that the Wilds was being built—toward employee housing. As we headed into the trees, the noise of FunJungle was replaced by the clamor of the construction site: the rumbling of bulldozers, the clang of hammers, the beeping of trucks backing up.
“So, if it’s not the NFF, who did steal the panda?” I asked.
“I think you made a pretty good argument for Walter Ogilvy,” Dad replied. “And I wouldn’t rule out exotic animal traffickers, either. I can guarantee you there are plenty of people willing to pay big bucks for a giant panda.”
“And you think these traffickers might have faked the ransom, too?” Mom asked.
“Why not?” Dad replied. “It’s definitely thrown the FBI off the track.”
“There’s also the crazy idea that the FBI is actually right,” Mom suggested. “And that this all really is a kidnapping by the NFF.”
“But if it’s not,” I pressed, “then the FBI is getting distracted from the real criminals. And every minute they’re distracted, Li Ping is in more danger!”
Mom held up an open hand, signaling me to calm down. “I think we can trust the FBI to handle this, Teddy. They don’t need you getting involved.”
“But—” I began.
Mom cut me off. “We’ve talked enough about Li Ping today, don’t you think, Jack?” She gave Dad a meaningful look. I’d seen it before. It meant that if Dad didn’t want to end up in the doghouse, he had better not disagree with her.
“Your mother’s right,” Dad told me. It didn’t seem like he was only saying it to humor her. It seemed like he really believed it.
A cloud of mosquitoes suddenly swarmed us, which meant we were almost home.
Our new employee housing was called Lakeside Estates, but the “lake” was really only a muddy sinkhole. After the spring rains, it had filled with water to a depth of six feet and been fun to swim in for two days. Then the water had grown stagnant and started breeding mosquitoes by the ton.
Mosquitoes were a fact of life in much of Texas, though for some reason, they avoided FunJungle. My parents presumed that J.J. was covertly fumigating the place with powerful pesticides—tourists didn’t want to be mauled by mosquitoes at a theme park—but J.J. never copped to it. Sometimes it seemed as though every mosquito in the area was being diverted to Lakeside Estates. Each night, they hovered outside an invisible barrier near our home, waiting to attack us and siphon us dry.
We dashed through them, swatting left and right, racing for our trailer.
Except for the sinkhole, Lakeside Estates was prettier than the old employee housing area, but that was mostly because it was hard to imagine a place being uglier than the old employee housing area. Back there, a bunch of cheap mobile homes had been scattered randomly in the woods without any thought to appearance or community.
Now J.J. had sprung for nicer trailers for everyone (thanks to a little arm-twisting by my parents), and they had been arranged in two concentric circles around a central patch of dirt. J.J. had promised that, at some point, he would replace the dirt with a swimming pool, but for the time being, he’d sprung for a spindly volleyball net and a game of horseshoes. Mom, Dad, and I were pretty much the only people who ever used any of them—most of the other residents were workaholics with no kids—but we had managed to organize a volleyball tournament twice. (The mammalogists had beaten the herpetologists and ornithologists both times.) There was also a bit of landscaping that was coming into spring bloom. It might have all been a decent place to hang out if it weren’t for the mosquitoes.
We slipped through the door of our house, squashing any last bloodsuckers.
Marcus and Jethro posted themselves outside, in the shade of a cedar tree, where they could keep an eye on our house.
I felt kind of bad for them. With the heat and the mosquitoes, standing guard over us wasn’t going to be much fun. But I was still relieved they were there.
Of course, it wasn’t that nice inside our house either. My parents didn’t like wasting electricity, so they always turned the air-conditioning off when we left. The trailer was as hot and humid as a sauna.
Mom flipped on the a/c. “I’m making chicken for dinner tonight,” she informed us, then told me, “Hit the showers, kid.”
“Right now?” I asked.
Dad sniffed the air around me and teasingly wrinkled his nose. “Yes, now. Before that stink mak
es the paint peel off the walls.”
“You should talk,” Mom told him. “You’re next. Both you guys reek, and that’s coming from someone who works with gorillas.”
Dad held up his hands in mock surrender. “All right. We get the picture.” He grabbed a beer from the fridge and hustled me down the short hall toward my room.
While Mom went to work in the kitchen, I lowered my voice and said, “Dad, be honest. Did you ever do any monkey-wrenching?”
A brief flash of guilt flickered across his face before he thought to correct it. “Why do you ask?”
I realized he hadn’t said no. “I just got a feeling.”
Dad ushered me into my room and lowered his voice, not wanting Mom to hear him through our paper-thin walls. “On occasion, when I’ve been on assignment in other countries, I’ve found that the government wasn’t enforcing their wildlife laws as well as they should have. So I took matters into my own hands.”
I probably shouldn’t have found this impressive, but I did. “Like what?”
“A few years ago, I was in a national park in India where a corporation was building a hotel without a permit. It was right in the middle of critical tiger habitat. So . . . I might have set some of their construction equipment on fire.”
I grinned. “And that stopped them from building the hotel?”
“No,” Dad replied sadly. “The developer’s insurance bought him brand-new equipment. My actions didn’t make a difference for the tigers—and I came awfully close to getting thrown in a rural Indian jail, which would have really screwed up my life.”
“Was that the only time you ever did anything like that?” I asked.
“The point I’m trying to make is, monkey-wrenching probably causes more problems for the people who do it than the people they’re trying to stop. Especially in this country, we can usually trust the law to do the right thing. So don’t even think about it. And get cleaned up.” Dad ducked out of the room.
I realized that, once again, he hadn’t answered my question. And he’d said we could usually trust the law.
I peeled off my clothes and headed for the shower, wondering if we could trust the law this time.
Because if the FBI was wrong about the NFF, then Li Ping was in serious trouble.
TRAFFICKERS AND GOAT SUCKERS
“I know who took Li Ping!” Ethan Sokol announced.
He set his lunch tray on our table in the school cafeteria and slid into a seat across from me. Xavier and Summer were already there, along with our friends Violet Grace and Dashiell Alexander. Ethan, Dash, Summer, and Violet were all eighth graders, a year older than me. The boys were two of the best athletes at school, while Violet was the head cheerleader.
Violet excitedly responded to Ethan before I could. “Really? Who took her?”
“The chupacabra!” Ethan replied.
Everyone groaned.
“The Mexican goat sucker?” Xavier asked disdainfully, taking a bite of his sandwich. Now that we were in school, he’d traded his tuxedo for his standard outfit: jeans and a FunJungle T-shirt. “That’s an urban myth.”
“It is not,” Ethan argued, dead serious. He was a smart kid, but he had a weakness for science fiction. Two weeks earlier, he’d claimed he’d heard a werewolf baying near his house one night; it had turned out to be the neighbor’s cat in heat. “My grandfather saw one out on his ranch.”
“No kidding?” Summer asked. “When?” She said it like she was interested, but I knew she was only leading Ethan on.
“A couple years ago.” Ethan dug into his enchiladas, then spoke with his mouth full. “It was sucking all his goats dry. Draining all the blood right out of them. Every couple days, he’d come outside and find one of them all shriveled up, like a goat raisin.”
I snickered at this. I couldn’t help it. No one else at the table could keep a straight face either, except Summer.
“A goat raisin?” Dash echoed.
“Yeah,” Ethan went on. “You know, like all the blood was gone from it, so it was nothing but skin and bones. My grandfather started staying up, sitting on the porch with a shotgun. A couple nights later, he hears this horrible scream from the goat pen, and this insane shriek, so he aims his flashlight that way, and there’s a chupacabra, attacking his goats. It took off the moment it saw him, but he fired a few shots at it and scared it off. It never came back again.”
“What did it look like?” Summer asked.
“He said it was like part coyote, part lizard. Black as night, except for its eyes, which were blood red.”
I was trying so hard to keep from laughing, I couldn’t eat my lunch. “And you think one attacked the truck with Li Ping?”
“Absolutely.” Ethan jammed half an enchilada into his mouth. “The truck was attacked out in West Texas, right? That’s where chupacabras live. And you said the panda disappeared without a trace? Well, chupacabras don’t leave anything behind.”
“I thought they left goat raisins,” Dash teased.
“This isn’t funny!” Ethan snapped.
It was, though. Violet was giggling so much that her soda came out her nose.
And yet, Ethan’s suggestion wasn’t even the most ridiculous one I’d heard that day. Since the moment I’d arrived at middle school, my fellow students had been approaching me with ideas about who had stolen Li Ping. Erin Eanes had accused her uncle, who she said had serious post-traumatic stress disorder after leaving the army and had always wanted a panda. Dina Zywica claimed that space aliens had captured Li Ping for an extraterrestrial zoo. Lane Hagino suggested our PE teacher, Coach Redmond, most likely because Coach Redmond had made Lane run laps after school on Friday and Lane was still annoyed about it. And a dozen kids had accused the Barksdale twins, because the Barksdales were jerks and nobody liked them.
“Chupacabras don’t exist,” Xavier said. “Trust me. I’m an expert on cryptozoology.”
“What’s that?” Violet asked.
“The study of mythological animals,” Xavier said proudly. “Like dragons and yetis and sasquatches. The chupacabra is a modern-day invention. The entire myth can be traced back to a comedy routine by this guy in Puerto Rico back in the 1990s. . . .”
“That’s not true,” Ethan protested.
“Then why is there no mention of chupacabras anywhere—in any newspaper or magazine or news report—until after 1995?” Xavier crammed a handful of Doritos into his mouth. “How had no one ever seen a half coyote, half lizard running around Texas before that?”
“Because they didn’t exist before that,” Ethan declared. “They were created in a government lab. But something went wrong and they escaped and the government has been trying to cover it up ever since.”
Everyone laughed at this, too. Xavier threw up his arms in exasperation. “I can’t reason with this guy.”
“Fine,” Ethan sneered. “Laugh now. But you won’t be laughing when chupacabras breed enough and we run out of goats. Then we’ll be next. Everyone’s so worried about zombies—”
“Actually, I don’t think anyone’s worried about zombies,” Dash interrupted.
“Well, wait till the chupacabras come for us,” Ethan finished. “I’ll be ready, but you won’t. And it’ll be your funeral.”
“Sadly, Ethan, I can prove that a chupacabra didn’t take Li Ping,” Summer said, polishing off the last of her lunch. Her family’s personal chef had made her yellowtail sashimi with sides of snap bean salad and Mediterranean couscous.
I, on the other hand, had a turkey sandwich and celery sticks. “Summer,” I warned. “We’re not supposed to reveal anything about the case.”
Summer completely ignored me and blurted out, “There was a ransom note left behind.”
Violet and Dashiell were thrilled to be let in on this. “No way!” Violet gasped. “The panda was kidnapped?”
“Panda-napped,” Summer corrected.
Xavier wheeled on me, annoyed. “I texted you last night to ask if there was a ransom note and you said no
.”
It was one of about two hundred texts he’d sent me, all asking questions about the case that I wasn’t allowed to answer. I’d had to feign ignorance in response to each one.
“Because that’s not supposed to be public knowledge,” I said, fixing Summer with a hard stare.
Summer waved this off, unimpressed. “The FBI only told us that because they’re being all territorial.”
“The FBI is investigating?” Violet asked, even more intrigued.
“Aha!” Ethan cried. “That proves the chupacabra was involved!”
“Calm down, psycho,” Dash teased. “How did some kind of goat-sucking coyote lizard leave a ransom note?”
“It’s all part of the government cover-up to hide the fact that chupacabras exist,” Ethan said flatly. “First, they plant the note to make it seem like humans stole the panda. Then they send the FBI in to take over the whole investigation so that no one learns the truth.”
Xavier collapsed on the lunch table, pretending to be exhausted from this discussion. “Talking to you,” he said, “is like trying to reason with a brick.”
“Ha ha,” Ethan sniffed. “If you’re such a genius, then you explain how the panda disappeared.”
“Maybe the Loch Ness Monster ate it!” Dash suggested.
Everyone laughed except Ethan, who slugged Dash in the shoulder. Then he looked to Xavier again. “C’mon, Einstein. I’m waiting.”
“How should I know?” Xavier said. “Ask Teddy. He’s the one who’s working with the FBI.”
“No I’m not,” I told them. “The feds don’t want me involved. I’m completely in the dark on this one.”
“I’ll bet,” Xavier said sarcastically. “Summer’s dad wouldn’t let them do that to you.”
“He can’t tell the FBI what to do,” I pointed out.
Xavier turned to Summer, knowing that she was more likely to tell him the truth about the investigation.
“It’s true,” she said. “Sorry, but Teddy’s off the case. He and I tried to poke around yesterday and got run off. All he’s investigating now is why the dolphins have started pantsing people.”