Big Game (27 page)

Hoenekker nodded, looking embarrassed about his failure to catch the hunter. “I'll bring in people right away.” He stepped aside to make some calls.

“That's the
other
reason J.J. wants this done tonight,” Mom whispered to me. “He doesn't want the public seeing armed guards surrounding his rhinos and asking what they're there for.”

Doc was still mulling things over. “I really don't want to do this,” he told J.J.

“I really wish you didn't have to,” J.J. replied. “But we're at a red alert here.”

Doc sighed heavily, then gave in. “These horns will need to be protected,” he told J.J. “Once they're off, they'll still be extremely valuable. They need to be delivered to the Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species.”

“Of course,” J.J. agreed. “I know the drill. And in the meantime, there's a safe in my office that's more secure than Fort Knox. We can keep the horns there for the short term.”

“This isn't going to be easy,” Doc told the billionaire. “It'll take most of the night to get every rhino done. I'm going to need a lot of help, and they'll all want double overtime.”

“I won't,” Vicky Benbow said.

We all turned to her, surprised. Vicky was so meek and quiet, everyone seemed to have forgotten she was there, even though she'd been standing right near all of us.

Vicky shrank back, embarrassed by the sudden attention. When she spoke again, it was barely above a whisper. “I'll work for free tonight if it means saving the rhinos. And I'm sure a lot of the other keepers would too.”

All around the room, people chimed agreement with this.

“I'm happy to volunteer as well,” Athmani told J.J.

“Me too,” Dad put in.

“And me,” I said.

Athmani turned to me and smiled. “You have done more than enough for the rhinos tonight, Teddy. What you need to do now is go home and get some sleep.” He looked to Dad. “We'll be okay, Jack. Go spend your precious time with your boy.”

“Teddy and I will be all right on our own,” Mom said, tousling my hair.

“Looks like I'm in,” Dad told Doc.

“Thanks,” Doc replied. “Glad to have you aboard.”

Dad knelt before me and gave me a tight hug. “No more adventures tonight, okay?”

“I've had enough,” I told him. “I promise.”

“I'm proud of you,” Dad whispered, then stood and gave Mom a kiss good-bye.

Mom and I headed out of the rainforest. We passed the saltwater crocodile tank, where Jon Mattingly was using a net on a long pole to gingerly scoop remnants of the gun off the bottom. There wasn't much left of it except splinters of wood.

“I should have stopped the gun from falling in,” I said. “I didn't think about it until it was too late.”

“Don't blame yourself for
anything
that's happened,” Mom told me. “As angry as I am with J.J. for putting you up to this, if you and Summer hadn't come up here, we might have a dead rhino right now. Or more. You
saved
them. You're a hero.”

I glanced back toward the group of people planning how to dehorn the rhinos. Even if Mom was right, I didn't feel good at all. Instead, I felt frustration for not being able to figure out who the hunter was and for not doing more to try to catch her. The rhinos were still in danger, and it was partly my fault. I'd stared right at the hunter, but I still didn't have the slightest idea who she was.

I didn't feel like a hero.

Instead, I felt like the biggest failure in the world.

“Teddy, wake up.”

I pried my eyes open to find my father sitting on the edge of my bed. My immediate thought was that something terrible had happened. I bolted upright, kicking the sheets off. “What is it? The rhinos?”

“The rhinos are fine,” Dad said comfortingly. “Doc took great care of them. We wrapped things up about half an hour ago.”

I glanced at my alarm clock. It was a few minutes after six a.m. Dad was still wearing the same clothes he'd been in the night before. He smelled like rhinos. “What's wrong, then?”

“Pancake escaped.”

I scrambled out of bed and started grabbing clothes out of my bureau. “When?”

“Sometime last night. We're not sure. Kyle just called from Monkey Mountain and said he wasn't there.”

“But the other orangs are?”

“Yes. The cage door is locked.”

I paused in the midst of trying to find a matching pair of socks. “Then how'd Pancake get out?”

“We don't know. But the video should have recorded everything. Want to come check it with us?”

“Definitely.”

“Okay.” Dad stepped out of the room to give me privacy but spoke through the door. “Your mother thought you should sleep in, but I figured you'd never forgive us if we didn't give you the chance to come along.”

“I said you needed your rest,” Mom corrected from the kitchen. “You had a lot of excitement last night.”

“Well, I'm up now,” I told her, yanking my jeans on. “And there's no way I'm getting back to sleep.” I grabbed the rest of my clothes and exited my room.

Mom leaned on her crutches in the kitchen, already in her work clothes, cutting a slice of homemade banana bread for me. “I assumed that'd be the case,” she said.

I got the rest of my clothes on as quickly as I could, then ate the banana bread as I hurried to FunJungle with my parents. A second trailer had been moved to Lakeside Estates the day before, bringing the grand total up to two. It didn't look like the fancy community Pete had promised so much as a dumping ground for crummy mobile homes.

It was cold and blustery outside. It had rained at some point in the night, and the ground was now icy, which made it trickier than usual for Mom on her crutches.

As we made our way to Monkey Mountain, Dad brought us up to speed on what had happened with the rhinos. J.J. had mobilized his security force, bringing in everyone necessary to work through the night. Some guards had provided protection for all the rhinos while others swept the zoo for any sign of the poacher. They hadn't found her—but she hadn't made any more attempts on the rhinos, either.

Much of the veterinary staff had returned to work for the night as well. Since the operation was relatively simple, everything had been done in the field, rather than going through the trouble of bringing the rhinos into the animal hospital. Each rhino had been led into a house like Rhonda's, away from the other animals, and then sedated. Doc had removed each horn himself. It wasn't that he didn't trust anyone else to do it, Dad said, so much as that he didn't want to make anyone on his staff do such a distasteful thing. The sedation was the most dangerous part of the surgery. Doc had used a special saw to cut the horns off, and he'd taken great care to get as much of each horn as possible.

“So all the rhinos are safe now?” I asked.

“Assuming the hunter was actually going for their horns and not merely looking to kill them for sport,” Mom said.

“Right,” I agreed, hoping that wasn't the case. It was still hard for me to imagine anyone killing a rhino merely to kill it—especially after talking to Violet's aunt and uncle—but you never knew what humans might sink to.

“And there's still Rhonda,” Dad said.

“What's wrong with Rhonda?” I asked.

“Doc thought it was too risky to sedate her during her pregnancy,” Dad replied. “She's close to due, and he doesn't want any complications with the baby. So J.J. assigned teams of armed guards to protect her twenty-four hours a day. She's going to stay locked up and under protection until her baby is born.”

“How long will that be?” I asked.

Dad shrugged. “Even Doc can't tell for sure. He thinks it's only a few more days, but it could be another week or two.”

“J.J. really approved that much protection for that long?” Mom asked skeptically. “He didn't gripe about how expensive it would be?”

“He says he's willing to pay whatever it takes to protect his rhinos,” Dad told us.

“You can't believe anything that snake says,” Mom grumbled. Her anger at J.J. didn't seem to have lessened overnight. “The man's as two-faced as they come.”

“Maybe so,” Dad admitted, “but I do think his concern for the rhinos is real.”

Mom gave Dad a hard look, annoyed at him for taking J.J.'s side. “The man can't be trusted. He moved our entire house simply because he felt like doing it. He promised he wouldn't build roller coasters here, and now he's building them. He forced our son to investigate a crime and lied to him about why. . . .”

“He didn't lie to me,” I said defensively. “He thought I could help find the hunter.”

Mom winced, looking upset with herself. Like she'd said something she hadn't meant to.

“You don't think that's the reason?” I asked.

“I'm sure it's part of the reason,” Mom hedged. “But with J.J. McCracken, there's always an ulterior motive. You have a history of investigating things without permission here. Sticking your nose where it doesn't belong. Well, if J.J. makes you part of his team, he can keep a better eye on you. He can make sure you report everything you find directly to him. And he can exert control over what you investigate and what you don't.”

I didn't really want to believe all that. I wanted to think that J.J. had come to me only because he respected my crime-solving abilities. But I realized Mom was probably right. Which immediately made me question everything J.J. had said and done over the past few days. I found myself wondering if he even might be involved in trying to get the rhino horns somehow. After all, he had admitted FunJungle was losing money—and rhino horns were worth a lot. He obviously wasn't the hunter—he wasn't a woman, and he was a good few inches shorter than the person I'd encountered at World of Reptiles—but he could have hired someone to get the horns for him.

We arrived at Monkey Mountain. Mom entered her code on the security keypad and led us inside.

“Are the rhino horns in J.J.'s safe?” I asked.

“Yes,” Dad told me. “After we finished the dehorning, Athmani took them to J.J.'s office.”

“You didn't go with him?” Mom asked.

“I came home to see
you
,” Dad replied. “But I know they got there. J.J.'s the only one with the combination, and he stayed here all night so that he could put them in the safe himself. Athmani sent me a photo of them inside as proof.” He dug out his phone and brought up the picture.

I examined it as we walked through the halls. The safe was surprisingly large, the size of a small closet. There were several shelves, one of which looked like it held stacks of cash. The horns were piled on the bottom shelf. There were eight in all, four from our Asian rhinos, four from the African ones. Cut loose from the rhinos, they didn't look like anything special, merely lopsided whitish pyramids. “How much do you think they're worth?” I asked.

“They're each a few pounds,” Dad said. “At current prices, that's around four million dollars' worth of horns. Maybe even more.”

I shook my head in disbelief. It was hard to believe anything could be worth so much money. Or worth killing a living thing for.

And now J.J. McCracken controlled all the access to them. I really hoped that this time he could be trusted.

Mom led us into the backstage area of the orangutan exhibit. Kyle was waiting for us there.

The exhibit looked almost exactly the same as it had the day before. The cage door was closed and locked. The orangutans were inside, behaving like it was a completely normal day. But Pancake was gone.

On our side of the steel bars, six feet above the ground, the metal cover for the air-conditioning vent had been removed. The air-conditioning shaft was visible beyond. It was big enough for a young orangutan to get through.

“That's obviously how he's been getting out of the building,” Kyle said. “Clever guy. Look how careful he was. Instead of ripping it off, he actually unscrewed it so he could put it back on again.”

The vent cover was lying on the floor. Sure enough, the four screws that had held it in place were all lying beside it.

“But how'd he get out of the cage in the first place?” I asked.

“Let's check the footage,” Dad said. “Teddy, let me boost you up.”

Dad had mounted his camera up by the ceiling of the room. Now he knelt beneath it and laced his fingers together, making a step with his hands. I put my foot in it, and he stood, hoisting me up to his shoulders. From there, I was able to reach the camera easily.

“The memory pack is attached to the back of it,” Dad told me. “Unclip it and leave the camera there for now.”

The camera was still running, having been recording all night. I flipped it off and unclipped the memory pack, which was a black box the size of a deck of cards. “Got it.”