Big Game (31 page)

“I'm not a menace,” I pointed out. “The orangutan broke into the stores, not me.”

“I know!” Marge bawled. “You're right, as usual. The great Teddy Fitzroy solves another crime while I end up covered in poo! It's not fair!”

I wasn't quite sure what to do. Up until that moment, I would have expected that seeing Marge soiled with poop and swearing off chasing me would be a dream come true. But now she seemed so sad and pathetic that I actually felt bad for her. I'd never seen an adult cry like this before, but I didn't really have time to deal with it either. So I gave her a quick pat on the back, trying to avoid touching any of the disgusting stuff on her, and did my best to be reassuring. “There, there,” I said. “Things will get better.”

Marge managed to stop crying and looked to me thankfully. “You really think so?”

“Well,” I said, “they couldn't really get much
worse
.” Then I raced off to see what had become of Hondo and Athmani.

I got to FunJungle Emporium first. Hondo was still lying there in the window display, unconscious after being coldcocked by the elephant. He was buried under a hundred stuffed hippos. The duffel bag lay in a pile of broken snow globes.

Bonnie ran up to me, angry as could be. “What on earth were you thinking with that gun? Someone could have been hurt!”

“Sorry,” I said, unzipping the duffel bag. “I was trying to stop them from stealing
these
.”

Bonnie gasped upon seeing the horns inside. Her anger instantly dissipated. “Are those real?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” I looked out through where the front gates had been. With his getaway car flattened, Athmani was searching desperately for another way to escape, but the few other cars in the area were locked. Which left Athmani out in the open in the big, wide parking lot.

“Athmani was in on this?” Bonnie asked, aghast.

I pointed to Hondo. “It was his idea. But Athmani made it all happen.”

The anger returned to Bonnie's eyes, but it was no longer directed at me. “I'll handle this, then.” She plucked the gun from Hondo's hand and stormed into the parking lot. “You get those hands up right now!” she yelled. “I have zero tolerance for poachers!”

Athmani realized he was caught. He froze and raised his hands in resignation.

Beyond him, far across the parking lot, a lamppost toppled as one of the elephants bumped into it.

“What on earth happened here?” someone demanded.

Pete Thwacker stood behind me. He was staring in shock at all the destruction around us: the busted front gates, the trampled landscaping, the flattened getaway car, and the broken display window with Hondo lying in the middle of it.

“The elephants sort of stampeded again,” I said.

“Really?” An ear-to-ear grin blossomed on Pete's face. “This is fantastic!” he crowed. “Look at this awesome devastation! The tourists are gonna love it!”

“It's a girl,” Doc said.

Everyone gathered outside Rhonda's house cheered. While the birth of
any
new rhino was something to be happy about, females were slightly more important to the survival of the species than males. Rhino pregnancies last sixteen months, only one baby is born at a time, and it takes at least another year to wean them. That means it can be three to four years between births, which is very slow for an endangered species. So the more females there are to make babies, the better.

“How's she look?” Mom asked.

“Healthy as can be.” Doc flashed a smile, looking as happy as I'd ever seen him.

It was ten in the morning. I should have been at school, but when word got out that Rhonda was in labor, Mom had called my teacher and said I was having a special educational experience at home. After all, rhinos weren't born every day.

Dad was already inside the rhino house, documenting the birth with a video camera. The rhino keepers were gathered outside with us, waiting for the chance to see the newborn, as were Pete Thwacker, Kristi Sullivan, and a few other PR minions. J.J. McCracken was also there, though he didn't seem as imposing as he normally did. Instead, he was giddy with excitement.

Summer was there too.

I hadn't seen her much in the week since World of Reptiles. Although she wouldn't admit it, I was pretty sure she'd been avoiding me. The dozens of texts she normally sent me every day had dwindled to nothing, and instead of eating at our regular table in the cafeteria, she'd been AWOL at lunchtime. She'd also blown off the basketball game the previous Friday, as well as pizza afterward with all our friends.

It was all very frustrating. After everything that had happened at World of Reptiles, I was desperate to talk to Summer, but she obviously had the opposite reaction.

And now that she was here, she was keeping some distance between us as well, staying close to her father. Although every once in a while, when I looked her way, I got the sense that she'd just been looking at me herself.

Around the rest of the Asian Plains, everything looked almost exactly like it normally did. At the front of the park, the gates were being replaced (although Pete had argued against this, as it was excellent elephant damage), and work had begun to replace the chain-link fence along SafariLand with a hunter-proof wall, but both those projects were so far away we couldn't even see them. All around us, the various Asian antelope grazed the same way they always did, oblivious to the birth of the rhino nearby. Every few minutes, a monorail cruised past, full of tourists equally as unaware. No one even looked at the small crowd of people gathered around the rhino house. They were much more interested in the rhinos they
could
see out in the plains.

The hornless rhinos still looked odd to me, though Pete and Kristi's disinformation campaign had been a success. “Rhinoplasty for Rhino Awareness” had made the national news, and plenty of stories about how endangered rhinos were had run across the country. Almost no one, even at FunJungle, knew the truth about why the rhinos had really been dehorned—or that the park had nearly been swindled out of them. I figured the story would probably blow up once Athmani and Hondo went to trial, but Pete seemed confident he could keep a lid on it. J.J. didn't seem to care. “I don't give a dang how bad it makes the park look,” he'd stated. “I'll do whatever it takes to make sure those con men go to jail for a long, long time.”

“Can we see the baby now?” Summer asked Doc.

Doc's smile faltered a tiny bit. There were probably lots of people he would have preferred to let into the rhino house first, but he couldn't say no to the daughter of the park's owner. “All right,” he said. “But there are some rules. The mother and her baby are bonding right now. I need you to keep your distance and stay quiet. Not a word. And you can only stay in for a little bit. When I signal you it's time to go, you go—got it?”

“Got it,” Summer agreed.

“Ditto for me,” J.J. said, then looked at me expectantly. “Care to join us?”

I pointed to myself, surprised. “Me?”

“Of course. I think you've earned this, given all you've done for our rhinos. You too, Charlene.” J.J. waved for Mom and me to join him.

I wasn't sure if J.J. was doing this because he really thought he owed me or because he was trying to make a good impression on my mother after forcing me to investigate a crime behind her back, but I wasn't going to turn down the chance. I hurried into the rhino house.

Mom followed me. She was still on crutches, but the cast was supposed to come off in a few days.

Summer seemed a little uneasy that her father had asked us to join them, but once we were inside the rhino house, she seemed to forget all about me. In truth, I forgot about Summer, too. For a few moments, at least.

The newborn rhino was adorable and awe-inspiring. She was slightly pinkish with enormous eyes, and like all the other rhinos at FunJungle except for her mother, she didn't have a horn. However, her rounded hornless nose looked cute, rather than strange. The remnants of her umbilical cord still dangled from her belly button. As we entered, she was getting to her feet for the first time. Rhonda helped her, nudging her lovingly, and then the baby took its first few wobbling steps.

Summer gasped with excitement beside me.

Dad had a bunch of cameras set up on tripods around the room, though he was also recording with a handheld video camera. He turned away from his work for a moment to grin at Mom and me, then went right back to filming the baby again.

The little rhino staggered over to Rhonda's side and began to nurse.

Doc signaled our time was up. Everyone seemed disappointed—I could have happily watched the baby all day—but we knew the deal and filed outside again.

“Well, that was certainly something special,” Mom told me, beaming. “But now, kiddo, it's time to get you to school.”

“Teddy can ride with Summer if he wants,” J.J. offered.

Summer looked caught off guard, unsure what to do.

“You're sure that's okay?” Mom asked. She was still angry at J.J. for how he'd dealt with me, although she had promised Dad she'd try to keep her cool around him.

“Of course.” J.J. grinned. “Summer's heading that way anyhow. We're testing out a new bodyguard today.” He pointed to the hulking man who'd been hired to replace Hondo. “I think we can trust him. He can't be worse than the last guy.”

It had turned out that getting the rhino horns had been Hondo's idea from the start. In fact, he'd taken the job with the McCrackens only with the intent of figuring out how to get the horns; he had connections to a crime syndicate in Vietnam willing to pay millions for them. But while he'd figured out that it wouldn't be hard to kill the rhinos, getting away with the horns was more difficult. Then he'd met Athmani.

Athmani's job at FunJungle was only short-term. He knew that within a few months he'd be back in Africa again, and sadly, being on the front lines in the war against poachers was a rough life. It didn't pay well, and it was extremely dangerous. More than a thousand African park rangers had been killed by poachers in the past few years, and Athmani was looking for a route to a better life. The enemy had approached him many times in Africa, but he'd always refused them because he didn't want to harm any rhinos. Now, at FunJungle, he saw a way to get the horns while letting the rhinos live. With Hondo's help, he could make more in a few hours than he would have in an entire lifetime of honest work in Africa. The money was too tempting to resist.

“Which is exactly why poaching is out of control right now,” Mom had told me. “You can't stop the slaughter by merely going after the hunters. You have to stop the demand. You have to educate people that they're paying millions of dollars and dooming animals to extinction for something that is medically useless. If we don't, your children might very well grow up in a world without wild rhinos.”

Standing in the Asian Plains outside the rhino house, I could see two of the other Asian rhinos in the distance. Although they didn't have horns, they were going about their lives as usual. The SafariLand monorail had paused near them, and the tourists were piling up to take pictures. It seemed to me that, for any one of those people, a world without rhinos would be a much sadder place.

I noticed Summer was watching the rhinos too, smiling at the sight of them.

“You're cool with me riding with you?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. The first words she'd actually spoken to me in a week.

“You're sure?”

Summer bit her lip, then seemed to realize that she couldn't avoid me forever. She stepped away from the adults, indicating that I should join her.

“I know I've been acting strange lately,” she said. “I just . . . I didn't quite know how to handle things after the other night. It was all kind of, well . . . embarrassing.”

“It wasn't your fault that you almost fell into the crocodile pit. We thought Athmani was trying to kill us.”

Summer shook her head. “Not that. I mean, that was scary and all, but . . .” She took a moment, trying to figure out what to say next. “I kissed you.”

Now
I
wasn't quite sure what to say. So I didn't say anything at all.

Summer continued. “I need you to know that wasn't, like, a big deal, ‘I'm in love with you' kiss. It was more like a ‘thank you for saving my life' kiss. I was happy to be alive, and I didn't really know what I was doing.”

“I'd figured as much,” I said. Although the truth was, I'd secretly been hoping that kiss was the other kind.

Relief descended on Summer. But she still seemed nervous around me. “Whew. Oh, cool. I was worried that you might have had the wrong idea there. I mean, I didn't want to get in the way between you and Violet or anything. . . .”

“Me and Violet?” I asked.

“Yeah. In case you're interested in her.”

“I'm not.”

Summer took a step back. “But she's the head cheerleader. And she's gorgeous. And she likes you.”

“I guess,” I said. “But I like
you
.”

The words hung there for a moment. I started to feel like an idiot for saying them, wishing I could take them back.

But then Summer blushed. And smiled a little. “You do?”

I felt myself blushing as well. “Yeah. You didn't know?”

“I thought you only liked me as a friend.”

Another silence fell over us. Neither of us was quite sure what to say again, though I felt a lot happier than I had in the last week, and at the moment, it had nothing to do with the newborn rhino. Before either of us could figure out what to do next, J.J. called to us. “Hey, you two! You can talk in the car! You've got school today!”

Summer and I headed back toward him.