Big Game (13 page)

“I don't know,” Mom replied. “Last I saw, he was chasing the hunter toward the back fence.”

“That was him calling,” I told them. “I'm trying him back now.” I flipped the phone to speaker so they could hear it ringing.

Hoenekker glanced at Mom's ankle. “You need to go to the hospital?”

“I'll be fine,” Mom told him.

Dad finally answered the phone. “Where are you?” he asked. “Is everything all right?”

“I'm with Mom in a rover,” I replied. “Chief Hoenekker's driving. Where are
you
?”

“Outside the park.”

“What?” Mom asked. “How'd you get past the fence?”

“Same way the hunter did. He laid a towel across the barbed wire and climbed right over.”

The rover reached the dirt road in the exhibit and swerved onto it. It was a smoother ride than going over the grass had been, but not much. With every jounce over the ruts and bumps, Mom winced in pain.

Hoenekker snatched the phone from me. “Any idea where that shooter is now?”

“No,” Dad replied. “By the time I found his access point, he was long gone.”

“So you lost him.” Hoenekker sighed, annoyed.

“Yes,” Dad admitted. “I lost him.”

“Meaning you just risked your dang fool lives for diddly-squat,” Hoenekker growled.

“We saved Rhonda's life!” I snapped.

Hoenekker looked at me in the rearview mirror and narrowed his eyes. “Maybe,” he muttered. “But only for a little while.”

My parents let me skip
school the next day. After all the excitement in the Asian Plains, we'd had to spend hours relating what had happened to Hoenekker and a bunch of other security guys, so by the time we finally found the new location of our mobile home and got to bed, it was after midnight and I was exhausted. My parents were too. Dad thought maybe Mom should go to a hospital about her ankle, but she kept insisting she was fine; she took some painkillers and went right to bed. Dad said I deserved some rest after all I'd been through, so he told me to sleep in.

I did. I might have slept all morning had I not been awakened by someone pounding on our front door. Our trailer was so poorly built that the entire thing trembled with each knock.

I pried my eyes open and tried to find my alarm clock. Since we hadn't been notified about the move of our trailer, we hadn't packed our things beforehand. I didn't have much stuff, but what I did own was scattered all over my room. It looked like my closet had blown up.

“Answer the door, Teddy!” Marge hollered. “I know you're in there!”

I groaned and dragged myself out of bed. Our trailer's heater was so awful, it was freezing inside. The moment my feet touched the cold, bare floor, I snapped awake. It was like sticking my toes in ice water.

Marge started pounding on the door again. It felt like someone was jackhammering the house. “Teddy!” she roared. “Show yourself!”

“I'm coming!” I yelled back. I dug some socks out of a pile of clothes in the middle of the room and found my alarm clock buried beneath it all. It was almost nine o'clock. I couldn't believe I'd slept so late. At school, I'd have already been in second period.

I glanced out the window. I couldn't see Marge, but I could see her golf cart. There was only one bush anywhere near our front door, but Marge had managed to run into it.

This was the first time I'd seen the new location of my home in daylight. Lakeside Estates didn't look anywhere near as nice as Pete Thwacker had made it out to be. None of the landscaping or pathways he'd promised had been laid down yet. Our home sat in a large clearing, surrounded by bare slabs for the other trailers: a dozen cement rectangles looking bizarrely out of place in the woods.

The so-called lake barely had any water in it, and what little there was had frozen, so it was really only a patch of ice-encrusted mud.

Marge kept banging on the door, apparently convinced this was the way to get me to move faster. Instead, I decided to take my time, knowing it would aggravate her. Maybe I'd get lucky and her head would explode from frustration.

I slowly pulled on my jeans, shoes, and a sweatshirt. Through it all, Marge kept pounding away.

It occurred to me that my parents must not be home. I'd expected that they might sleep in too, but if either one had been there, they surely would have told Marge to can it by now. Sure enough, there was a note from Mom on the breakfast table. “Went to work. Don't try to shower. Water isn't hooked up yet. Call when you wake up.”

My cell phone was still in my pocket, set to silent mode. I pulled it out and found twenty-five texts from Summer about the previous night's excitement. She'd texted me questions right up until midnight and apparently had thought of plenty more since then:

How's Rhonda?

Is UR mom OK?

Where R U 2day?

I thought about taking the time to answer them all, but the trailer was trembling so much from Marge's incessant thumping, I worried it might collapse. “I can hear you in there!” she yelled. “Open the door!”

“Who is it?” I asked sweetly, simply to get under her skin.

“You know darn well who it is!” Marge snapped, then added, “It's Marge!”

“What can I do for you?”

“Open. The. Door!”

“Why?”

“So I can search your house.”

“No.”

“Your house is technically the property of FunJungle,” Marge growled. “I'm being nice, asking you to open it. If I wanted to, I could just kick the door down.”

I didn't challenge her on this. The door was so flimsy, a grasshopper could have kicked it down. It already appeared dented from Marge's knocking.

So I opened the door. Marge stormed right in, barreling past me, her face flushed as red as a uakari monkey's. “You've really done it this time,” she told me, going right to our freezer and yanking it open. She seemed surprised to find it empty, save for a few bags of frozen vegetables, then wheeled on me. “Where is it?”

“Where's what?” I asked. “The candy? I already told you I didn't steal that.”

“This isn't only about candy anymore and you know it.”

“Actually, I don't.”

Marge fixed her piggy little eyes on me. “Eleanor Elephant's Ice Cream Eatery was broken into last night. Sixteen gallons of assorted flavors were stolen, including Cheetah Chocolate, Monkey Mint Chip, and Rhino Raspberry Swirl.”

“And you think I stole that, too? What would I do with sixteen gallons of ice cream?”

“Eat it.”

“I can't eat sixteen gallons of ice cream!”

“If I thought you could eat that much ice cream at once, I wouldn't be here looking for it, would I? I know you stashed it somewhere. But I assure you, I will find it. And when I do, you're getting shipped off to juvenile hall.” Marge stomped down the short hallway and went into my bedroom.

I followed and found her tossing my clothes aside. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for the stolen merchandise.”

“In my bedroom?”

“It's cold enough in here to keep ice cream.”

I couldn't argue with that. “Marge, if you talk to Chief Hoenekker, he'll tell you I was with him until midnight last night. . . .”

“I'm well aware of that.”

“So you think that, after all that, I went back to FunJungle and robbed the ice cream stand?”

“I don't think anything.”

“No kidding.”

Marge tossed aside a handful of shirts and wheeled on me. “I
know
you did this. What better time to commit a crime than right after you've been with security? You might have everyone else here fooled with your goody-two-shoes act, but not me.”

I sagged against the doorjamb. “Why are you so determined to get me arrested?”

“Because it's my job. I'm supposed to root out trouble at FunJungle—and you're trouble.”

“No, I'm not.”

“You're not the one who jammed porcupine quills in the seat of my security vehicle?”

“No,” I said, although it was a lie. Not only had I placed the quills pointy-end up in her cart, but I'd also surreptitiously recorded her sitting on them and then posted it on YouTube.

Marge glared at me. “It took the doctor an hour to dig those out of my behind.”

“Well, it probably took him a while to find them. He had a big area to search.”

“That does it!” Marge pounded across the room toward me, as menacing as any of the gaurs had been the night before. She backed me into a corner and stabbed a thick finger into my chest. “I have had it with you, Fitzroy! One way or another, I am going to catch you one of these days, and when I do, I am going to wipe that smug little smile off your face for good! You are a nuisance, a pest, and an all-around bad egg!”

“And you're a bully,” I said.

Marge reared back as though she'd been slapped. “What'd you call me?”

“A bully. You're even worse than Vance Jessup. He was only a dumb teenager trying to make himself feel good by picking on smaller kids. You're an adult and you're doing the same thing. You've always been after me.” I'd never really thought of Marge in these terms until I'd said the words, but as I spoke, I realized I was right. “There's no evidence that I broke into that candy store or that ice cream shop, but you're determined to pin it on me anyhow, just like you were with the theft of the koala.”

For a brief moment, it looked as though I might have actually gotten through to Marge. A glimmer of understanding flashed in her eyes. But then it was gone, replaced by anger again. “There might not be any evidence now, but if it's out there, I assure you, I'll find it.” She turned away and went back to ransacking my room.

I started to protest, but as I watched Marge flinging my clothes about, I was struck by a thought. “Did you take pictures of the ice cream shop after the break-in?”

“Of course. Procurement of photographic evidence is standard procedure.”

“Can I see them?”

Marge turned back to me. Somehow she'd managed to get a dirty sock of mine perched on her shoulder, but she didn't even notice. “You already know what it looks like. You did it.”

“So?”

Marge considered that for a moment, then dug her phone out and brought up the photos. “Fine. Want to see the damage you did? Here you go.” She slapped the phone into my hands. “You try to erase any of those pictures, though, and I'll arrest you for tampering with evidence.”

I examined the photos closely. Like the candy store, the ice cream shop hadn't merely been burglarized; it had practically been destroyed. Once again, the front window had been shattered by having a trash can pitched through it. The floor was strewn with broken glass and garbage. The glass freezer cases that held the ice cream had been busted as well.

I found a photo that showed the garbage can lying on its side. It was one of the big metal ones that were all over FunJungle. (J.J. McCracken had insisted on having one every twenty feet; he had research stating that the basic theme-park tourist was so lazy, if they had to walk any farther to get to a garbage can, they'd end up simply dropping the trash on the ground.) The can was more than three feet tall with a solar compactor built into it.

A thought occurred to me. “Marge, this garbage can is huge. You really think that
I
could throw it through a plate-glass window?”

Marge began to argue, then stopped, her mouth half open, as she realized I had a point. “Maybe. It's only a trash can.”

“I'll bet it weighs a hundred pounds. I can't lift a hundred pounds.”

Marge narrowed her eyes. “Maybe you had help, then. Like that friend of yours who's always hanging around with you. Paco?”

“Xavier?”

“That's the one! He looks like he likes candy and ice cream. And that'd explain why the contraband isn't here: It's at his place!”

I gaped at Marge, stunned that she'd managed to take a solid piece of evidence that I was innocent and implicate my best friend with it as well. “Xavier didn't help me with this! No one did!”

“Aha!” Marge cried. “So you admit you did it!”

“No! Think about this!” I held up her phone, displaying her own picture of the destroyed ice cream store to her. “If I really wanted to get away with stealing all this ice cream, I wouldn't leave such a huge mess behind. In fact, I'd try to not make a mess at all so no one would even know I'd broken in. Here the ice cream hasn't only been stolen. All the furniture has been knocked over. And the freezer's been smashed open, even though there's no lock on it.”

Marge chewed her lip, actually trying to think. It looked like it wasn't easy for her. But then, Marge didn't have much practice at thinking. “What's your point?”

“This wasn't about getting candy or ice cream. It was about vandalism.”