Belly Up

  “Someone definitely let that snake out,” he drawled. “Cut the glass, then hightailed it out of here.”

  “Any idea who?” Martin asked, looking pointedly at me.

  Buck shrugged. “No fingerprints. And cutting glass ain’t exactly brain surgery. Anyone with a $5.99 glass cutter from Ace Hardware coulda done the job. I got Matthews checking out the recordings.”

  “Recordings?” Mom asked.

  “Yeah. We got surveillance cameras all over. On every entrance and exit to every building and most every hallway, too. Every exhibit in the park is wired. Just for instances like this. J.J. McCracken likes to protect his investments. These animals ain’t cheap.”

  “This hall has a camera in it?” Mom asked.

  Buck stuck a toothpick in his mouth and nodded toward the far end of the hall.

  We all looked that way.

  “I don’t see anything,” Mom said. I didn’t either.

  “No, I reckon you don’t,” said Buck. “But it’s there all right. Embedded in the wall. Tiny little thing. Fiber-optics or some such. J.J. owns a company that makes ’em. Course, J.J. owns a company that makes pretty much everything.”

  “They all feed into a central computer,” Martin explained. “Everything they see is digitally recorded.”

  “Matthews is reviewing it all right now,” Buck added.

  “So you can prove that Teddy didn’t do this,” Mom said.

  “Or maybe, we’ll prove that he did .” Large Marge said. She butted into our group, giving me the evil eye as usual. It didn’t bother me, though. I knew I hadn’t done anything. Soon enough, Marge—and everyone else—would see who the real culprit was.

  Buck’s phone rang. He checked the caller ID and smiled. “It’s Matthews,” he told us, then answered. “What’ve you got?”

  I couldn’t hear what Matthews said, but Buck suddenly looked like he’d sat on a tack. “What?” he asked. “How did that happen?”

  Whatever Matthews said next made him madder still. Buck noticed us all staring at him, then signaled us to stay where we were and stormed around the corner into the Triassic Period.

  Martin started after him, desperate to know what was going on, but then Pete Thwacker came racing down the hall. “Martin!” he yelled. “What’s going on? I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour!”

  “Someone let the mamba out,” Martin replied.

  “Mamba? What’s that? A dance?”

  Almost everyone sighed with annoyance at once.

  “It’s a snake,” Martin said, pointing to the sign. “The world’s most dangerous snake. Someone let it out.”

  “In here?!” Pete scrambled onto a bench, terrified. “Shouldn’t we evacuate?”

  “Calm down, you idiot,” Martin snapped. “You think we’d all be here if it wasn’t safe? The herpetologists have cleared the hall.”

  Pete looked relieved, but also confused. He probably thought a herpetologist was someone who studied herpes. “Why did you bring them . . . ?”

  “They’re people who study reptiles,” Mom explained. She pointed to a group of them. They waved back.

  “Oh.” Pete cautiously got down off the bench. “So if the snake’s not here, where is it?”

  The herpetologists all shrugged.

  Martin said, “We’re assuming it’s still in the building. Which means we have to shut World of Reptiles down until we find it.”

  “So what do you want? A press release?”

  “God, no! If we tell the media we’re closing another exhibit, they’ll start bad-mouthing the park. It’s only the dang reptile house. We’re gonna do this under the radar. Lock the doors and put a sign up saying the building’s temporarily closed for some reason or another. . . .”

  “Maintenance issues?”

  “Whatever. Just don’t mention the snake.”

  “Any idea how long it’ll be closed?”

  Martin turned to the herpetologists. “How long’ll it take to find the snake?”

  They all shrugged again. “Honestly?” one asked. “If it got into the atrium, there’s a billion places for it to hide. We might never find it.”

  Martin gaped at them, aghast. “What?!”

  “Miami Metrozoo lost a Burmese python once,” the herpetologist replied. “It took them six months to find it—and that thing was thirty-five feet long. The mamba’s small and black. It could be anywhere.”

  Martin rubbed his temples. He appeared to be in dire need of Pepto-Bismol. “That’s unacceptable. Let’s do everything we can. Get every available person in here tomorrow and sweep this place top to bottom. If we can’t find the snake, then . . . I don’t know. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  “You’d think about opening back up again?” Pete asked. “Do you realize what a PR disaster it’d be if a guest got bitten by a samba?”

  “Mamba!” everyone corrected.

  “You want to talk disasters?” Martin asked. “Think about what J.J. McCracken will do if we try to shut down a brand-new twenty-million-dollar building for a year.”

  While Pete considered that, Buck stormed back around the corner, mad as though he’d been bit by a snake. “We don’t have the records,” he announced.

  This, on the tail of everything else that had gone wrong, made Martin look like he might explode. “What?! How on earth . . . ?”

  “I don’t know. I’m on my way over there to find out. Matthews says the entire security feed from World of Reptiles went down tonight for an hour starting at six thirty.”

  I quickly did the math in my head. World of Reptiles closed at six thirty, half an hour before the rest of the park. That would have given someone half an hour to enter the building, cut the glass and free the snake without being recorded. The missing hour of footage would also have covered the entire time I was in the building. So there was no proof of who had set the mamba free—and no proof I hadn’t.

  “It’s the damn electrical contractor J.J. hired,” Buck was saying. “Lazy cost-cutting nitwit. The best quality cameras in the world don’t mean squat if the wiring’s lousy. This isn’t the first time this has happened, y’know. . . .”

  My phone buzzed in my pocket. I answered it warily, fearing it might be whoever had tried to get me killed again.

  Instead, it was Summer. “Dude,” she said. “I heard someone tried to kill you!”

  I was thrilled to hear her voice. “Yeah,” I said. “Hold on.” With all the conversations going on around me, it was way too loud to talk. I slipped around the corner into the dinosaur area, in such a hurry to get some privacy, it didn’t even occur to me I was entering an area where the mamba might still be loose.

  The dinosaurs had been shut down for the night. They were all frozen in mid-roar. I stopped by a dimetrodon to talk. “How’d you hear about me?”

  “Daddy. Buck called him—and he called me because apparently whoever lured you in there used a fake text from me as bait. How sick is that?”

  “Uh, pretty sick.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Fine. I didn’t ever really see the snake. . . .”

  “Still. If it was me, I would have had a meltdown. I hate snakes. Can you meet up tomorrow?”

  My heart nearly leapt out of my chest. I did my best to sound calm, though. “Uh, sure. Yeah. I think so.”

  “Cool. Cause you have to give me the skinny on everything that happened. I mean, whoever did this is obviously the same guy who knocked off Henry, right? We must discuss. Plus, I found another lead myself.”

  Something creaked softly behind me. I turned around in time to see Large Marge duck behind a stegosaurus. It was practically the only thing in the whole park big enough for her to actually hide behind. Still, it left her within easy eavesdropping range. I wondered how much of my call she’d already overheard.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Let’s just say, Henry had more enemies than you’d think.”

  “Who?”

  “I need to tell y
ou in person. I don’t trust the phones.”

  “Who’d want to tap your phones?”

  “Who wouldn’t? Meet me where we had lunch. Eleven sharp.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, and Teddy? I’m glad you’re still alive.”

  “Me too.”

  Summer laughed, even though I hadn’t meant it to be funny. “See you tomorrow,” she said, then hung up.

  I was upset the conversation had been so short, but excited to have an excuse to see her again. It almost made having someone try to kill me seem worth it.

  It turned out to be harder to make the appointment with Summer than I’d expected. For the first time in my life, Mom wanted me to stay by her side all day.

  “I don’t want you running around FunJungle all by yourself,” she explained as we headed to Monkey Mountain. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Not during visiting hours, it’s not,” I replied. “No one’s going to try to hurt me with a thousand tourists around.” In truth, I wasn’t completely sure this was true, but meeting up with Summer seemed worth the risk.

  “It’s not long-term. Just until security finds whoever tried to hurt you last night.”

  “That might take weeks! What am I supposed to do? Hang out in your office all day?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Mom. You let me be by myself all the time in Africa—and there were a ton of dangerous animals there.”

  Mom grabbed my hand and stopped walking, wanting me to pay complete attention to what she had to say. “This is different, Theodore. I knew you could handle yourself in Africa because animals aren’t really that dangerous. They rarely try to harm people unless they’ve been provoked—and even on those occasions, they’re not that hard to scare away. But humans are different. If a human really wants to hurt you, he won’t give up that easily. He’ll keep coming after you. He’ll keep trying new tactics until he finds one that works. What you’ve gotten involved in here isn’t a game. This is dangerous and you need to behave accordingly.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I meant it too. Until that point I hadn’t realized how worried Mom was about me—and her words got me more concerned about my safety as well. But from my point of view, meeting up with Summer to pursue our investigation was looking out for my safety. Mom might have believed we could trust FunJungle’s security force to find out who’d been behind the mamba incident, but I didn’t. First, they hadn’t seemed too intent on investigating in the first place. Second, they weren’t a real police force. Buck Grassley might have had some law enforcement experience, but most of his people didn’t. Many didn’t seem that much more competent than Large Marge, who couldn’t have found a criminal if he was mugging her in broad daylight.

  So it made sense that the best way to protect myself was to find the bad guy before he tried to hurt me again. If Summer had a lead, it ought to be investigated. And unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be anyone willing—or capable—to follow up on it besides us.

  Of course, I couldn’t tell Mom any of this. I hadn’t even told her that I planned to meet up with Summer again. She would have argued that our investigation stood a better chance of getting me into more trouble than getting me out of it. Moms are overprotective like that. Even mine.

  So I pretended to be the perfect kid all morning. I went to work with Mom and stayed in her office, reading a book while she worked on her computer. Well, I tried to read a book. The truth was, I could barely concentrate. I was eager to see Summer again and find out what her big lead was—and I had to be constantly on the alert for a chance to sneak away. I’d never had time pass so slowly in my life.

  Worse, Mom spent an unusual amount of time in her office that morning. Most days, she’d have been working with the gorillas in one way or another, taking care of them in their private quarters or maybe observing them out in their yard. But not that morning. She just sat at her computer. Didn’t even take a bathroom break. As the minute hand slowly crept toward eleven, I was beginning to think I’d have to text Summer to say our meeting was off—when I got an idea.

  One of Mom’s innovations at Monkey Mountain was the camera grid. There were dozens of cameras in the exhibits which allowed her—or any other primatologist—to monitor the animals from their computers. There were thirty in the gorilla habitat alone; there wasn’t a place the apes could go and not be recorded. This was exciting for Mom, as it was the first time she’d ever been able to watch her subjects without them knowing she was watching. As much as Mom could fade into the background in the wild, the gorillas never completely forgot she was there—and that would inevitably have some slight effect on their behavior. But the gorillas didn’t know about the cameras. Obviously, being in a zoo affected their behavior too, but the exhibit at FunJungle was so well designed, Mom claimed it was as close to the wild as she could get without going back to Africa.

  There were also security cameras in the building—and all those could be accessed from the researchers’ computers as well. (I’d known about all of these before Buck Grassley had mentioned them the previous night, although I hadn’t been aware that every building at FunJungle was as well-wired as Monkey Mountain—or that all the cameras fed into a central security bank.) Sometimes, when the gorillas were close to the glass of their exhibits, Mom used the security cameras to get better views of them.

  Mom shared her office with another primatologist who was at the vet lab with a sick squirrel monkey that day. He’d left his computer on. I got on it and started surfing through the camera feeds. It didn’t take long to find a park guest breaking the rules. In fact, I had several moronic rule-breakers to choose from: An obese man was blowing raspberries at the macaques, a skinny woman was trying to get a vegetarian colobus monkey to accept a hot dog, and a father was actually dangling his five year old daughter over a railing in a misguided attempt to let her pet a baboon. (Thankfully, the baboon was smarter than the father and kept its distance.) But the winners of the Most Annoying Visitors Award were a trio of teenagers.

  They were banging on one of the gorilla exhibit’s big plate glass windows, riling the apes. Of course, there were plenty of signs telling them not to do this for fear of upsetting the animals, but they obviously wanted to upset the animals. They laughed and howled as the gorillas reacted to their idiocy; Tembo, the silverback male, stood on his hind legs, making aggressive postures while the females and children leapt about, agitated. A lot of tourists had gathered to watch. Most seemed to realize the teens were doing something wrong, but no one had the nerve to tell those jerks to stop.

  No one but my mother, that is.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said. “Look at this.”

  She glanced over and was instantly filled with rage. Mom never liked to see any animals being tormented, but she was extremely protective of her gorillas. As I’d suspected, she immediately snapped to her feet and stormed toward the door. “Stay here,” she told me. “I’ll be right back.”

  According to official FunJungle policy, Mom wasn’t supposed to get involved in incidents like this any more than I was. She was supposed to call security, but she never did. I found it interesting that Mom didn’t trust security to handle a couple rude teenagers but still thought they could find the criminal who’d come after me the night before.

  I waited thirty seconds after she’d left, then whipped the apology I’d already written for her out of my book, set it on her desk, and slipped out the door.

  As I scurried toward the exit, I heard Mom giving hell at the top of her lungs. At the risk of being caught, I doubled back and peered into the viewing room. The crowd of tourists had grown even larger, eagerly watching Mom berate the teenagers for their behavior. Though Mom wasn’t a physically imposing woman, she could be really scary when she got angry. The teens cowered under her gaze, looking like they were facing an escaped lion, rather a ticked-off scientist. “You think it’s funny, upsetting these animals?” Mom roared. “How’d you like it if you were trapped in a room and Tembo was
banging on your windows? Because we could arrange that.”

  The teenagers whimpered apologies and accused one another of having started the trouble.

  Mom had broken them quickly. It wouldn’t be long before she was headed back to her office. I raced for the exit—and my meeting with Summer.

  “It’s about time,” she said as I came around the Dumpsters. “I thought you were blowing me off.”

  “Sorry.” I gasped, out of breath. I’d run all the way across the park to get there. “I had to wait until my Mom—”

  “Relax. I’m just busting your chops.” Summer grinned. She was wearing a T-shirt, a baseball cap, and sunglasses rather than one of her trademark pink outfits. She was so well-disguised that if she hadn’t been waiting in our secret spot, I might not have recognized her.

  “Did you have to ditch your bodyguards again?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but not the way I did yesterday. They’re still so peeved at me, there’s no way they would’ve even brought me to the park today. . . .”

  “Don’t they work for you?”

  “No, they work for my father. And if they want to keep me under lock and key all day all they have to do is claim there’s a security risk. So I had to give them the slip early. I ducked out of the house before breakfast. My bodyguards sit in the hall outside my room, so I went out the window and down the trellis. One of our cooks gave me a ride here in return for some autographed stuff he can sell on eBay.” Summer twirled in her outfit, mimicking a fashion model. “This is how I dress on the down-low. I’ve been here all morning. No one’s recognized me yet. It’s been awesome! I even had to pay for my own ticket to get in.”