by Karen Karbo
On my way to the bus stop I found a pay phone and called Reggie. Even though I had a cell phone, Mark Clark had drilled into my head the importance of always carrying a couple quarters in your pocket, just in case something happened. I don’t think he ever imagined the “something” would be a lunatic throwing my phone into the shrubbery before locking me in a shed.
I dialed Reggie. I had no hope that he would be able to help me, but he answered on the second ring.
“Dude, you are so not going to believe this—”
“Hi, Minerva.” Again, his voice was low and flat. He sounded sick.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” He was so not all right. “What’s up?”
“I need an IP. Meet me at the transit center.”
“Sure. When?”
I was stunned. “You don’t have to hang around in case Amanda the Panda calls or anything?”
“Nah,” he said. He sounded as if he was going to cry. I don’t think I’d seen Reggie cry since preschool, when one of the kids at the indoor play gym bashed him in the head with a toy dump truck.
Why more kids my age don’t take advantage of our city’s great public transportation system, I don’t know. It beats riding your bike, travels just about anywhere you’d need to go. I hopped on the MAX. I was a little delirious that Reggie was going to meet me. I hadn’t seen him in what felt like forever.
I didn’t know what time it was. It was still glary bright outside, but it could have been dinnertime. Summer in the northwest is deceiving. It doesn’t get dark until nine o’clock. Five o’clock p.m. feels like noon. My white hoodie with the blue Hawaiian flowers marching up the sleeve was filthy. I tied it around my waist.
When I got off at the transit center, Reggie was already there. His mom must have dropped him off. He stood under a tree with his hands shoved deep in his back pockets, making his saggy pants sag even more. Why boys thought this was a worthwhile style of dress, I’ll never know. His thick bangs hung in his eyes, which were such a dark green they almost looked black. He smiled when he saw me, but it wasn’t his normal big goofy Reggie smile. He looked tired.
I was pretty much out of my mind with joy to see him, but couldn’t tell Reggie that.
On the number 10 bus, I filled him in on everything, chattering like Chelsea de Guzman after she’d had too many lattes. Usually, Reggie is not very good at listening. He interrupts when he gets a big idea. He can’t help it. The only thing he asked was where we were going.
“To the humane society. You gotta take a look at this pigeon coop thing. That’s where Frank is hiding the diamond. Or actually, he’s hiding it in the craw of that bird Oreo. That’s kind of a great idea, isn’t it? Who would ever look inside a bird?”
“Pretty excellent,” said Reggie.
“He was supposed to send Oreo out Friday to McCarthy, the guy who’s fencing the jewel, but since I found out about it he’s sending Oreo out earlier. How can we intercept him, do you think?”
“You mean, how do you intercept a homing pigeon on its route?” he asked.
“Yeah, something like that.”
I glanced over at Reggie, slumped in the seat beside me. Normally, this was just the sort of thing Reggie was into. Ask him the smallest question about how lions hunt, or mention that bats can see in the dark, and he becomes a walking, talking one-man science exhibit. I thought homing pigeons, with their ability to fly hundreds of miles and never get lost, would be something Reggie could geek out on for hours. He would know about strapping a tiny radio transmitter to the pigeon’s back and building a receiver, or implanting it with some radioactive I don’t know what that we could trace using something else I’d never heard of.
But Reggie just sat. “I don’t know,” he said.
This was too much.
I stared out the window. We passed a bakery thrift shop. I made a joke about who would want someone else’s old bagels and muffins. Reggie just stared at the back of the seat in front of him.
“What is wrong with you?” I asked.
He kept staring at the seatback. “Amanda broke up with me,” he mumbled, and then I think he started to cry.
This was not good. I was a princess with a blaster in the middle of solving a mystery. I needed him to help me intercept Oreo. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t dare look over. Reggie, on the bus, crying. It was impossible. I thought about what my brothers would do, but I wasn’t one of my brothers. “I’m sorry,” I managed. That’s what people said to me when my grandpa died, and Reggie seemed that wrecked. This wasn’t like when you’re crushing on someone for a week or two, then sort of forget about them when there’s a long weekend and you don’t see them for four days. This was genuine heartbreak.
Crap.
He got himself together then, blotted his eyes with his hands, cleared his throat. “It’s like that,” he pointed at the front of my Green Day T-shirt.
I looked down, and read upside down: I GD.
The heart is a hand grenade.
The parking lot at the humane society was almost empty. A few cars sat parked at the far end. The shelter was closed. The pretty new building cast a long shadow on the vacant lot behind it. I knew Frank worked all his jobs part time, so I crossed my fingers he’d already left for his security guard job. I doubt he’d show up at the de Guzmans’ to walk the dogs. Just to make double sure he was gone, Reggie and I knelt behind an old car and watched the pigeon coop for ten or fifteen minutes. There was nothing. No one came in or out. The place was deserted.
“This is kind of cool out here,” said Reg. I could tell he was trying to get in the spirit of things, but I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to count on him much; still, it was good to have the company.
“What should we do?”
“Well, you blew the door off that closet. We could always blow up the pigeon coop.”
“Ha ha,” I said.
“I don’t know. I think the best idea is just to steal the bird.”
“Thank you, drive through please,” I said.
“Can you think of anything else?” he said.
“No, I can’t. That’s why you’re here, Mr. Brainiac.”
“Steal the bird, that’s my idea.”
“How do we know which one is Oreo?”
“Probably, he looks like an Oreo. Or the bird version of an Oreo.”
“Great,” I said.
Even though I was hands down the Most Awesome Escape Artist in my entire family and was full of magical adrenaline, I was still dead afraid of birds.
We crunched through the brush, past the Dumpsters in their tidy little storage pen, through the gap in the chain-link fence, to the pigeon coop. I could hear the evil birds cooing from inside. The human entrance for the coop was on one end of the water tank. It was one of those black wrought iron security doors some people have in place of a screen door. I didn’t want Reggie to think I was some stupid girly girl afraid of birds, so I didn’t stop and think.
To stop and think would be to stop and run away screaming. I pretended birds didn’t bother me in the least. No worries, I thought. Pretend they’re ferrets, ferrets with feathers and wings. The door wasn’t locked or anything. I walked right in, with Reg right behind me.
I want to say there were eight thousand pigeons, all of whom fixed me with their evil Jell-O bird eyes and prepared to peck my guts out, but only a few dozen birds were ambling here and there on their red feet, paying me no mind at all. The window at the opposite end of the tank was affixed with perches, and the floor was made of wooden slats, probably so Frank or someone could clean out the massive amount of bird poop.
The birds were mostly white, smaller than I expected. They had slim necks, some with iridescent feathers. A few had gray stripes on their wings.
“Check it out,” whispered Reggie. “There’s your bird.”
He pointed to a bird sitting on one of the window perches. He was all black with white wings and a white band around his middle, just like an Oreo.
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Perhaps it was the heat, or maybe these birds were used to humans, but as I reached out to grab Oreo, he didn’t screech or flutter his wings, or try to bite me. He wasn’t like Jupiter, he didn’t back away, fluff his wings, quake with fear. He looked bored and turned his back, which allowed me to drop my hoodie on top of him, scoop him up, dash out of the coop, and trot through the field toward the street. We jogged a block or two until I spied Patsy’s, the hamburger joint. There was a service station with a pay phone on the corner. I fished for a quarter in my back pocket and called home.
12
It was nearly nine o’clock when I walked through the door of Casa Clark with a pigeon wrapped in my sweatshirt, hours late for dinner. I spied the time on the big kitchen clock over the sink, where Mark Clark was washing the dinner dishes, in his business-casual khakis and pink polo shirt.
It must have been just him and Quills at the big dining room table that night. Morgan was still camping out somewhere in the desert of Eastern Oregon. It looked as if Mark Clark had made my favorite spaghetti dish, angel hair with Parmesan and black olives. I knew I was in deep trouble because he wasn’t listening to his eighties music on his boom box, something he normally does when he’s in the kitchen. He scrubbed the pots with too much energy and his mouth was a thin line inside the circle of his goatee. I was too exhausted to worry about the trouble I was in.
I’d spent the short ride from the service station to Casa Clark trying to explain my day to Quills, who kept looking over at me from beneath raised eyebrows. I sat between Quills and Reggie, who looked out the window a lot and sighed. Nabbing Oreo had distracted him for a while, but now he was back to moping. Poor Reggie.
Oreo sat on my lap, swaddled in my hoodie. He was very still. I worried that maybe I’d suffocated him—you would think I wouldn’t mind, given my hatred of birds—but I was grateful to him for having allowed me to pick him up without trying to peck my eyes out. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him, at least while he was being kidnapped by me.
“So let me get this straight,” said Quills. I could hear the smile in his voice. “First, you busted out of an abandoned shed at the humane society …”
“Behind the humane society in a vacant lot. And I didn’t bust out. Frank let us out, because Tonio, Sylvia’s brother, brought Frank the diamond. Then the cops were supposed to arrive and catch Frank red-handed, with hostages and the stolen diamond, but they didn’t show up …”
“You called the cops and they didn’t show up?” asked Quills.
“It’s a long story …” I said. “But I thought Sylvia was on my side. When we were being held captive, she acted like she hated Frank. Then Tonio showed up and Frank let her out and suddenly they were all lovey-dovey.”
“And that’s when Frank chloroformed you …”
“He put a towel against my face with something that smelled like medicine and that made me sleepy.”
“Sounds like chloroform to me. Straight out of some bad seventies detective show.”
“I don’t know.” I peeked inside the small bundle on my lap, even reached in and touched Oreo’s black feathers with my finger.
“Here’s a question for ya,” continued Quills. “Why would Louis de Guzman hide an expensive gem in his thirteen-year-old’s ring instead of shipping it? The guy’s loaded. He needed to save the hundred bucks or something?”
“Big-time jewelers do it all the time, Quills! Don’t they, Reggie? Don’t say it like it’s this unbelievably ridiculous thing! And if I’m lying, then what were Reg and I doing out on Columbia Boulevard? I didn’t have anything better to do than steal a pigeon out of a pigeon coop? ’Cause you know how much I love birds.”
“Well, it’s not just any pigeon! It’s got de Guzman’s red diamond hidden in its craw. Mwa-ha-ha!” He laughed his phony evil bad guy laugh.
The air-conditioning was on high in the Electric Matador—Quills’s old Ford Ranchero with the bullhorns strapped to the front—but it didn’t work, just blew warm air into my neck. I really wished Quills would get off my back. He could be a real pain sometimes. We drove for a few blocks, passed El Taco Loco, where they have the best three-dollar burritos on earth.
“You hungry?” asked Quills. His voice had softened. He was trying to make amends, but that just irritated me more. It was that boy way of saying you’re sorry, where you just act nice all of a sudden.
“I feel as if I’m about to hurl, actually,” I said.
We rode in silence. I didn’t even reach over to turn on the radio.
“You gotta admit, Min, this all sounds pretty farfetched.” Quills tried again.
“Look, before last week I hadn’t even heard of red diamonds. I didn’t even know they existed. I was just looking for something to do—you and Mark Clark are on me all the time about finding something to do, so I found something to do! You don’t understand. I had that stupid accident and it made me so different from every girl I know. Before I thought I was ugly and awful, but at least that’s something girls my age understand. I don’t want to go to the mall and try on lip gloss. I don’t want to obsess about my clothes. It would be a whole lot easier if I did, believe me!”
Quills didn’t say another word.
Then Reggie did a strange thing: He reached over and patted my hand, then held it there. It felt all right, having Reggie hold my hand, although I did something that was probably not very nice: I closed my eyes and pretended he was Kevin. Then Quills dropped Reggie off at his house, and my brother and I drove home in silence.
Mark Clark sat at the dining room table with his arms crossed and listened to the whole mad story. Oreo sat on the floor of Jupiter’s wire cage in the middle of the dining room table. We couldn’t think of anything else to do with him. He stood in the middle of the cage and looked around.
The more I told the story, the more impossible it seemed, even to me. At home I no longer felt like a princess with a blaster. My shoulders hurt. My back hurt. The inside of my ears hurt. How is that even possible? From the explosion maybe?
Mark Clark chuckled when I got to the part about using the capacitor to blow off the lock on the electrical closet door. He couldn’t resist saying that he knew I’d like basic electronics.
“Quills thinks I’m lying,” I blurted out. I couldn’t help saying that. It was the sight of that stupid bird in Jupiter’s cage. Where was Jupiter? Was he gone forever? I slumped into a chair at the table, put my head on my arms, and cried like an idiot. “They took Jupiter, too.” I cried even harder.
My brothers just sat there. They are boys, and this is what boys do when you cry. They sit there and wait for it to be over.
“Well, I don’t think you’re lying,” said Mark Clark. “But I do think you’re engaging in what they now call high-risk activity, but used to be called being just plain stupid.”
“How was I being stupid? I went to the humane society to talk to somebody. It was in public. I didn’t get in his car or anything. It wasn’t my fault that the guy I thought was Shark turned out to be Frank, the de Guzmans’ dog sitter. It’s not my fault Chelsea turned up and told him everything, is it?”
Mark Clark rubbed his forehead. I could sense he thought I had a point.
“Anyway,” I went on, “you can blame Morgan. I was about to just quit looking for the diamond, but he said that sometimes you just have to pursue something because it’s there and because it interests you.”
Mark Clark said nothing. We watched Oreo peck around the bottom of the cage. Finally, Mark Clark said, “So there’s a red diamond sitting in the craw of this bird.”
“Well, I think so. I knew they were sending a bird named Oreo out with the diamond, and this was the only bird in the coop that looked like an Oreo.”
“I can see that,” said Mark Clark.
“It’s actually kind of a cool plan,” I said. “Use the bird to hide the gem and transport it at the same time.”
“And who were they sending it to, again?”
“Some guy nam
ed McCarthy, who lives pretty far away, in Washington or Idaho or somewhere. He was the one who was going to sell the diamond and split the money.”
“He must be the fence,” says Quills. “You’re getting into some pretty sophisticated crime stopping if you’re dealing with a fence.” He sat on the edge of the table, poking a chopstick between the bars of the cage.
“Stop mocking me!” I shouted. I couldn’t take it another minute.
“I think we should just call the police,” said Mark Clark.
“I think we should make ol’ Oreo here toss his cookies, see what we got,” said Quills.
“Good idea,” I said quickly.
“Throw up?” said Mark Clark.
“Regurgitate. Whatever.”
They both considered Oreo with new interest.
“I don’t know that it’s so easy,” said Mark Clark. “I read something once about a macaw that ate one of its owner’s diamond earrings. They couldn’t get the bird to regurgitate the earring no matter what they did. By the time surgery was done to recover the earring, the facets on the diamond had all been blunted. That’s how long the earring was in there.”
“Let’s give him a little dish of mustard and water and see what happens.”
Quills disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a jar lid half full of a runny yellow substance. He slid it inside Jupiter’s cage. The bird wouldn’t go near it. We decided perhaps we needed to try the Internet, and trooped into the computer room to peer over Mark Clark’s shoulder as he Googled “how to make a bird throw up.”
All the first aid for birds Web sites said that you should never try to make a bird throw up, in capital letters. They didn’t say why.
“But the diamond is in his craw, not his stomach, right?” said Mark Clark.
“Aren’t they the same thing?” I asked.
“I think the craw is the pre-stomach,” said Quills. “The storage area for the stomach.”
It was dark now. The only light in the room shone from the computer monitor. Outside, crickets chirped. We all got along much better this way, trying to solve a problem that didn’t have much to do with any of us. I wonder what my life would have been like if we’d had a sister. Then I thought, Morgan was like the sister, but he was out communing with nature.