Poached (24 page)

There was a knock at the door. J.J.'s secretary poked his head into the office. “I hate to bother you, Mr. McCracken, but your call with London starts in two minutes.”

J.J. frowned, like he was annoyed he had to do this. “All right,” he sighed, then handed the photos of Hank Duntz to
his secretary. “Call Mark Middleman at corporate security right now. Tell him Teddy here confirmed it was Hank the Tank on the property yesterday—and that he was poking around Shark Odyssey.”

“Do you think we should close that exhibit?” the secretary asked.

J.J. considered that. “Run it past Middleman. And get Pete Thwacker in on it too.” He turned back to my family. “I'm sorry I have to bring this to a close, folks. But duty calls.”

We were already on our feet, knowing our time with J.J. was up.

“We understand,” Dad said. “Thanks for taking the time to listen to Teddy.”

“My pleasure.” J.J. bent to look me in the eye. “Although this doesn't give you a free pass to keep snooping—
comprende
? Hank the Tank is a dangerous man. My people have got this now. So leave it to us and get to school.”

“All right,” I said.

“You've got a good kid here,” J.J. told my folks, and then ushered us out the door.

I glanced back at J.J. as we passed through his secretary's office. The smile was already gone from his face. Instead his eyes were narrowed in my direction. J.J. quickly forced the smile back on, then closed his door.

J.J.'s secretary saw us to the elevator, and before I knew it, we were out of the administration building again.

It was cold and raw outside. The sleet was falling even harder. My parents and I paused under the eaves of the building, in no hurry to head out into it.

The nasty weather echoed my mood. I probably should have been happy, given that J.J. McCracken himself had just complimented me, but I wasn't.

“What's wrong?” Mom asked. I could never hide my feelings from her.

“I kind of get the feeling that, well . . . that J.J. was only pretending to be nice to us so he could get the information he wanted.”

Dad and Mom shared a look, then nodded. “I kind of got that feeling myself,” Dad said.

Mom pulled my winter jacket tight around me and zipped it up. “And now you're upset because, after all you've done, he's only giving you a pat on the back and sending you off to school?”

“Sort of,” I said. “But more than that, I feel like he wasn't being completely honest with us. Like the deal with him and Walter Ogilvy isn't exactly what he says it is.”

Dad grinned. “J.J. was right: You
are
a smart kid. I can guarantee you J.J.'s version was whitewash. J.J. McCracken's no saint when it comes to business. Ogilvy isn't the only one with dirty hands here.”

“Now, now,” Mom chided. “You're talking about the man who cuts our checks. The man who has given both of us very nice jobs.”

“Jobs that he threatened so he could keep Teddy in line,” Dad countered. “And now he's acting like that never even happened, like he's been Teddy's biggest fan all along. I'm thankful for J.J. McCracken's jobs, but I don't trust him. And I know you don't either.”

Mom frowned, but she didn't deny this.

And then Large Marge emerged from the sleet. Bubba Stackhouse was with her. And there were four other police officers with him. They all wore heavy parkas over their uniforms to protect them against the lousy weather, which made Marge and Bubba even thicker than usual.

“Well, well, well,” Marge said with a grin. “Isn't this a surprise? I was just on my way to make my case to J.J. to arrest you—and here you are.”

Bubba Stackhouse nodded to his officers, who surrounded us.

“You're wasting your time,” Mom said. “We're coming from J.J.'s office right now. He knows who's behind Kazoo's kidnapping.”

“No, he only
thinks
he does,” Marge shot back. “I'm sure you folks fed him all sorts of lies to keep Teddy looking innocent. But J.J. hasn't seen the evidence I've got. And
when he does, I can guarantee he'll change his tune.”

“What evidence?” Mom asked. Though she was trying to hide it, I could hear she was worried.

So was I. Marge seemed way too sure of herself. I felt like a young deer that was surrounded by wolves.

“We just visited your trailer again,” Marge said. “While you were snowing J.J., we were inspecting Teddy's room. And look what we found.” Marge held up two evidence bags. One of them had a clump of gray fur that definitely looked like it came from a koala. The other held several small, oblong black pellets.

“Is that . . . ?” Dad began.

“Koala fur and koala poop,” Marge said. “Meaning your precious son here has been in possession of a koala recently.”

“I've never seen any of that before!” I protested. “Someone must have planted it!”

Marge ignored me completely and turned to the police. “Arrest him,” she said.

Two policemen grabbed me. One
forced my hands behind my back while the other whipped out a pair of handcuffs.

“Get your hands off my son!” Dad shouted. He started toward me, but the other two policemen blocked him.

“You're making a mistake!” Mom told them. “Just call J.J. McCracken. He'll set everything straight.”

“There's no mistake here,” Marge sneered. “Your son was the only one at the crime scene—and now we've found ironclad evidence he had the koala in his room. Case closed. Now back off or we'll arrest both of you, too, for interfering with police business.”

Dad didn't listen to her. Even though he was outnumbered, I could tell he was only thinking of me. Dad had
been in plenty of dangerous places before, and he knew how to handle himself. He made a feint around the police and charged toward me. One of the policemen caught his arm and tried to twist it back behind him.

Dad swung around and slugged the cop in the chin.

The cop staggered backward, shaken.

His partner tackled Dad, knocking him down. “Bad idea,” he snarled.

Dad did his best to fight back, but the second cop was now on him as well. They overwhelmed him, pressing him into the icy ground.

The other policemen cinched the cuffs around my wrists and started to lead me away.

“No!” Mom cried.

“Teddy didn't do anything, Marge!” Dad yelled. “He was framed!”

“Face the facts,” Marge taunted. “Your kid's a bad egg. He should've been shipped off to juvenile hall long ago.”

Mom came toward Marge, looking ready to claw her eyes out, but Dad's voice stopped her in her tracks. “No, Charlene! Get back to J.J.'s office. Tell him what these idiots are doing!”

Mom obviously didn't want to abandon Dad and me, but realized she wouldn't be any help if she got herself arrested too. “Don't worry, Teddy,” she told me. “We'll get this all
sorted out. You're going to be okay.” Then she raced back toward the administration building.

Bubba Stackhouse looked to Marge, unsure what to do.

Marge stopped the policemen who were leading me away. “I can handle the boy,” she said, then handed them the bag full of koala poop. “Run this up to J.J.'s office. When he sees the evidence, he'll back us over Mrs. Fitzroy.”

The police seemed happy to get an assignment that took them out of the sleet. They quickly left me with Marge and hurried into the administration building.

Bubba turned to the two cops pinning Dad to the ground. Neither looked pleased that Dad had called them idiots. “You two take Mr. Fitzroy here to headquarters and book him for assault. Marge and I will run the kid to juvenile hall.”

Dad stopped struggling, aware it would only get him into more trouble. The cops pulled his arms behind his back and cuffed him as well.

Then Marge and Bubba marched me around a corner and I couldn't see Dad anymore. We passed out of the employee area and into the park. Marge and Bubba each held one of my arms, keeping me squeezed in between them. Since my hands were behind my back, none of the tourists approaching us could see the cuffs on my wrists. Instead I probably looked like a kid on vacation with two very overprotective parents. Not that there were many tourists. The
nasty weather had kept everyone but the diehards home.

I started to feel scared. Really scared. Although I'd been worried about Marge for the past few days, I hadn't expected it would come to this. I figured that I'd have found the real thief—or someone else would have. Or at least Marge would have come to her senses and realized I hadn't done it. Instead the stakes had been upped against me—and my parents hadn't been able to protect me.

Even more disconcerting, however, was the fact that whoever had stolen Kazoo had planted evidence against me. Originally, my being at the crime scene had seemed like mere dumb luck: I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But now I had to wonder if that was true—just as my father had first warned the morning after. The real thief obviously knew I'd been suspected of the crime and had taken further steps to implicate me. Had I been set up all along, then? How much did the thief know about me?

As I thought about this, something occurred to me. “Why'd you decide to search our trailer again?” I asked.

“Because we did, that's why,” Marge said, although she couldn't keep eye contact with me, which I figured meant she was lying.

I turned to Bubba. “What really happened?”

“We got a tip,” the cop replied. Marge spun on him, annoyed that he'd spilled the beans, but he shrugged it
off. “It's not a secret, Marge. He has the right to know.”

“What kind of tip?” I asked.

“A phone call,” Bubba told me. “Yesterday afternoon.”

I thought back to Marge confronting me outside the costume room the day before. She'd been so confident; she must have just gotten the call.

“From who?” I asked.

Bubba shrugged again. “It was anonymous. The caller claimed they'd seen the koala at your place.”

“That's a lie!” I said. “I never had the koala there!”

“The evidence says otherwise,” Bubba countered.

“It was planted!” I told him. “Probably by whoever called you! They set me up! You should be arresting them, not me!”

“Oh, so it's a conspiracy against you?” Marge asked.

I said, “If I took Kazoo, where is he now?”

“You tell me,” Marge growled.

I was about to argue further, but something caught my eye. A glimpse of orange in the distance. I peered through the sleet. A thickset man with an orange baseball cap was passing the Polar Pavilion. He was moving away from us, so I couldn't see his face, but I thought I recognized the lumbering gait. Hank the Tank. And he was heading toward Shark Odyssey.

“There!” I shouted. “That's the guy you should be arresting, not me!” I reflexively tried to point, but couldn't with my arms cuffed behind my back.

“Who?” Bubba asked.

“The guy in the orange Astros Cap by the Polar Pavilion! His name's Hank Duntz and he works for Walter Ogilvy! J.J. was just telling me about him. That's the guy who took Kazoo!”

“Can the lies,” Marge told me. “What do I look like to you, an idiot?”

Almost any other time I would have answered yes. But right then I was at Marge's mercy.

“I don't see anyone,” Bubba said.

I looked off toward the Polar Pavilion again. Sure enough, Hank had disappeared. There was simply too much sleet to see him. “He was there,” I insisted. “He's probably heading for Shark Odyssey. I saw him poking around there yesterday. J.J. says he does the dirty work for Ogilvy, who wants to bankrupt FunJungle. Hank stole Kazoo. And now he's planning to do something in the shark tank.”

“The only person who's messed with the shark tank lately is
you
,” Marge sneered.

“Just call J.J. and tell him Hank the Tank is here,” I pleaded. “It'll only take a few seconds.”

Marge didn't even respond to me. Instead she turned to Bubba. “Don't pay him any attention. You can't trust a thing that comes out of this kid's mouth.”

“I'm telling you the truth!” I shouted. “If you don't listen
to me, something very bad is going to happen to this park—and it's going to happen on your watch.”

“And if you don't shut your trap, I'm gonna tape it shut,” Marge snapped.

I turned my attention to Bubba, who seemed at least a little more reasonable. “Please, Mr. Stackhouse. I'm not as bad as Marge says I am. She only has it in for me because I once swapped her black jelly beans with rabbit poo.”

Bubba wavered. For a moment I thought I'd gotten through to him. But then he shook his head.

We were almost to the front gates. A tourist family was coming through the turnstile, braving the lousy weather. Two parents and three kids, all around my age.