Bringing Down the Mouse (19 page)

He wasn't just cool; in that leather jacket, those piercing eyes, that swooping hair, he was confident, but strangely down-to-earth in a boy-next-door sort of way. But even though Charlie had spent the past four weeks working closely with the older kid, he still didn't know very much about him. Finn was still a mystery, and that, more than anything, was hard to resist.

“Finn,” he finally responded, his foot still resting on Finn's backpack on the floor in front of him. “Why did you quit the swim team? You were the best swimmer at the school. Maybe the best the school ever had. You would have won the national championship if you'd swum.”

Finn's eyes narrowed, and for the briefest second, Charlie thought he'd somehow angered the older kid—and that terrified him. But then Finn shrugged, the genial smile back on his face. No matter how much Charlie prodded him, it wasn't something he was ready to answer. Two and a half hours of conversation later, he still hadn't answered. Then the fasten seat belt sign
above their heads blinked on, and the captain's voice spilled through the cabin.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we're just beginning our initial approach into Tampa International Airport. Please take your seats as the flight attendants prepare the cabin for landing.”

Finn gave Charlie a little wink.

“Saved by the bell. Time goes by pretty fast when you're having fun, doesn't it? You better get back to your seat before Warden Walker sees us conspiring together and turns us over to homeland security.”

Charlie laughed, then rose, pushing himself back into the aisle. As he went, his trailing sneaker caught on the zipper to Finn's backpack, pulling the tines back a few inches, and Charlie saw a flash of green. It wasn't until he was halfway up the aisle, back toward the front of the cabin, that he realized what he'd seen.

Money. A stack of dollar bills, held together by a rubber band. He thought back to how the bag felt beneath his sneaker: bulging, full, lumpy. How many bills could you fit in a backpack? No doubt, Ms. Sloan had everything timed out to a T, and there wouldn't be time for ATMs. And dollar bills don't come up on X-ray machines, so getting the bills through the airport would have been easy.

Still, all that money; Charlie's eyes widened as he moved the last few rows to where Jeremy was now stretching, slowly coming awake. It was crazy to see it all in one place.

Charlie climbed over Jeremy and hastily strapped himself back into his seat. Jeremy was watching him, still rubbing the last vestiges of sleep out his eyes.

“Where you been? Out on the wing, taking in the sights?”

Charlie faked a laugh.

“Just doing laps. Ran into a nice flight attendant who got a bit chatty.” His head was still whirling, dollar bills flashing behind his eyes.

The plane leaned hard to the left, then began to descend. Jeremy bent halfway over Charlie, trying to push his face right up against the window. The lights of Tampa were visible down below, pinpricks shifting and swirling beneath the clouds. Jeremy exhaled.

“I can almost see it, man. Incredo Land. It's all down there, waiting for us.”

Charlie shivered as he watched the anticipation spread like a wildfire across his best friend's cheeks.

“WELL, YOU DON'T SEE
this every day.”

Charlie watched the swirling pinwheel of fire dancing dangerously toward him as he pressed his back against the rough bark of a swaying palm tree. The beat of the great tribal war drums reverberated through his bones, and he fought the urge to push Jeremy in front of him while he made a hasty retreat down the winding stone steps that led back into the main part of the open-air lobby. He knew he was overreacting, but he had to admit, the atmosphere was pretty immersive: the oppressively humid tropical breeze rifling through the fingerlike fronds of the palm trees that lined the stone pathway; the rivulets of blue-green water trickling down the craggy rock face of a twenty-foot cliff
directly ahead, the underbrush on either side so thick and green, it was like a waist-high carpet; the glowing tiki torches and multiple carved totem poles glaring at him from every angle, daring him to challenge the carefully crafted tropical fantasy.

And on top of all that, there was that flaming pinwheel, now only a few feet away, so close Charlie could feel the searing heat against his cheeks. It didn't help that the man spinning the torches—deftly guiding the twin flame-capped wooden poles around his wrists and palms like they were some sort of kerosene-infused propeller—was dressed only in a grass skirt and covered in bright red war paint. If this was supposed to be a tropical paradise, someone had a pretty twisted view of what the concept meant.

Then again, Jeremy wasn't the only witness to the scene sporting a ridiculously goofy smile as he clapped his hands together in beat with the throbbing drums. Charlie could count at least thirty other hotel guests gathered around the stone path, cameras flashing and cell phones recording as the spinning of the torches accelerated, faster and faster, until it seemed like the very air in front of the grass-skirted man was about to burst into flames.

Then suddenly, the drumbeat stopped. The man screamed something unintelligible—the fake language
of Mercury, presumably, because the hotel, Mercury Palace, was supposed to be some fantasy take on a tropical space outpost on the tiny superheated planet. Charlie doubted that any of the gathered tourists would have noticed if he had been shouting in Japanese, Chinese, or even Klingon, for that matter. The grass-skirted man tossed the two torches high into the air and, like rockets of pure flame, they leaped higher, higher, higher, then plummeted back down. He caught them in one outstretched hand and in one swift motion, doused them with a spray of water from his mouth. A magician's trick, Charlie knew, what Finn referred to as “misdirection,” a technique which used a simple distraction, such as a pair of flaming torches rocketing skyward, to disguise an action, such as surreptitiously filling your mouth with water from a pitcher hidden in nearby dense underbrush. But the crowd ate it up. The applause was twice as raucous as the drums had been, and nobody was clapping louder than Jeremy.

As the crowd finally disbursed, Jeremy placed a rubbery arm over Charlie's shoulder and turned him back toward the lobby, matching his friend's steps as they strolled down the winding stairs.

“And you thought that was going to suck. You could not have been more wrong!”

Charlie shrugged, because he knew better than to try to argue with Jeremy when he got like this. Besides, Charlie's heart wasn't really in it; even though all the other kids from Nagassack had done the sensible thing, heading straight to bed after the proctors had checked them in to the hotel and given each pair a set of room keys, Charlie wasn't going to throw water on Jeremy's euphoric mood. When he'd suggested that they swing by the nightly fire dance show, Charlie had acquiesced.

Jeremy was going to take in every sight, every sensation; even a faux-Mercury tropical paradise—as if the planet Mercury could even sustain such a place, as close to the sun as it was—was a thrill to him. He didn't care that everything around them was as manufactured as the fake volcano that dominated the hotel's outdoor swimming pool or the white sand beach on the other side of the craggy waterfall. It didn't matter to Jeremy that the guy in the grass skirt was just some guy they hired; it was all part of the experience. The Mercury was one of the two original onsite properties that Incredo Land had opened, situated on the Sea of Tranquility Lagoon. It was like a gateway to the futuristic amusement park, and for Jeremy, a place for the magic to begin.

Strolling along with his friend through the kitschy
hotel lobby, past the wicker chairs, half-coconut-shell sconces, and overgrown, lush indoor hedges, Charlie couldn't help but feel proud of himself to have gotten Jeremy there, even though his friend had no idea that Charlie had anything to do with it. The past few hours had almost made up for the distance that had grown between him and the rest of the Whiz Kids over the past five weeks. Jeremy was on cloud nine, and from there, the view was spectacular. “I bet I could do that,” Jeremy continued as they moved out of the lobby and out onto the path that led to the hotel's cabinlike rooms. The rooms were in two- and three-story sections that encircled the main part of the hotel, which contained the lobby, a few restaurants, and a handful of shops hawking Incredo Land merchandise, magazines, and toiletries. “I'd be great at torch spinning. I've got the hands for it.”

“Right,” Charlie countered. “I've seen you almost set yourself on fire toasting marshmallows.”

“Yeah, but deep down I think I was supposed to be an alien.”

They stepped over a low hedge and then moved up a set of stairs that led to the two-story section that contained their room. Jeremy fumbled the keys out of his pocket, catching them right before they fell to the ground. He grinned sheepishly.

“You've got the hands for it all right,” Charlie said.

Jeremy unlocked the door to their room and ushered Charlie inside with a dramatic flourish. A stiff breeze from the high-powered air-conditioning system hit Charlie in the face as he stepped through the threshold to the wood-colored room. It was pretty much in line with the lobby decor: a lot of wicker and bamboo, a textured carpet, fake tiki lamps instead of lights, and a sliding glass double door taking up one whole wall, which led out onto a small porch with more wicker furniture. Beyond the wicker, there wasn't much of a view, just more tropical hedges and dense underbrush. Charlie guessed that beyond all that green, paths led to the monorail stop that would take them to the park, and maybe beyond that, you might be able to get a glimpse of the giant Space Station perched high on the horizon, but from where he was standing, it was wicker, grass, and Jeremy, who had suddenly launched himself across the room and into the closest of the two double beds.

Charlie shut the door behind him, noticing as he did so that the bellman had placed their luggage on a low table by the bathroom. Then he turned toward the other bed, seeing that Jeremy had left him the one closest to the sliding glass doors.

“I get the bed with the view? How generous of you.”

Jeremy was splayed out flat on his back, his head resting on his hands, his elbows out to either side like the bent cords of a crossbow.

“Actually, that bed already had your name on it.”

Charlie looked at the empty bed and saw the envelope on the center of one of pillows. Even from across the room, he could read his name in bright red block letters across the front of the envelope.

Curious, Charlie crossed to the bed and retrieved the envelope. It was as thick as a deck of cards, and had some weight to it. Curiouser and curiouser. He used a finger to break the seal, tore the flap open—and then his eyes went wide. He quickly shifted his body so that his back was turned toward Jeremy, then opened the envelope wide and peered inside.

Wow.
Dollar bills, in a thick stack, held together by a rubber band. He rifled through them with his fingers, counting as quick as he could.
Two hundred dollars, give or take a few.
It was a small fortune. Even though there was no note inside the envelope, no instructions or anything, Charlie understood exactly what he was looking at.

This was his stake. Tomorrow morning, the Carnival Killers would be hitting Incredo Land. The midway games would cost money to play. Probably one or two
dollars a game, and he'd be playing all day long. His head swam as he leafed through the bills again. His thoughts immediately flashed to Finn on the airplane and the backpack beneath his feet. Of course, Finn had been playing the Sherpa, carrying their stake from Logan to Tampa. All in dollar bills, because dollar bills made more sense than higher denominations. A twelve-year-old walking into a carnival with a handful of twenties would look pretty suspicious. Nobody looked twice at one-dollar bills.

Another thought hit Charlie. If he had gotten two hundred dollars in an envelope—well, that meant the rest of the team had probably gotten similar stakes.
Seven kids, fourteen hundred dollars.

Had Miranda put up all that cash? For a paper for her graduate school program? It seemed curious, a little hard to understand. Had she gotten some sort of grant to do the paper? Or was she just spending the money out of her own savings?

“Is it a love letter?” Jeremy called out, still on his back. His voice sounded heavy, as it was now well past ten, and they'd had a heavy dinner of burgers and fries at the airport after the flight. “I bet it's a love letter. Did Crystal sell off some cheap rhinestones to make sure it was the last thing you saw before you went to sleep?”

Charlie resealed the envelope and shoved it into his pocket.

“It's a note from Warden Walker, actually. My dad called him about his cell phone—you know, how I accidentally packed it along with my stuff.”

Another white lie, which Jeremy had amazingly seemed to accept, because his eyes were already closed and he was minutes from a good, heavy snore.