Poached (8 page)

First, something strange was going on. If the entire field trip was so excited to go see Kazoo, that meant no one knew Kazoo wasn't on display. Kazoo's kidnapping should have been the top story on the local news. FunJungle dominated the press in Central Texas; when the park so much as considered changing the ticket prices, it would make the front page of
the paper. It seemed unlikely that a whole class—including teachers and chaperones—could have missed the news. The only way no one could have known Kazoo was missing was if FunJungle hadn't revealed it. However, I couldn't imagine how anyone at FunJungle thought they could get away with that.

Second, I wanted to do some snooping myself. Summer's words kept coming back to me: If I didn't try to find Kazoo's kidnapper, no one would. Perhaps J.J. McCracken could get Marge to back off me for a bit, but if Marge truly believed I was the culprit, she wasn't going to look anywhere else.

As proof of this, there wasn't a single security guard anywhere near KoalaVille. If there had been, I would have kept my distance. In fact there didn't seem to be
anything
to indicate Kazoo's habitat was a crime scene. To my surprise, the exhibit looked exactly the same as it always did. There was no crime tape blocking it off—or, more to FunJungle's PR-minded style, signs claiming that the exhibit was
CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS TO ENHANCE YOUR FUNJUNGLE EXPERIENCE
. Instead there was actually a line of tourists snaking out the door.

It was all rather eerie. For a moment I found myself wondering if I had merely dreamed the whole thing about Kazoo being stolen.

“My class” excitedly headed toward the koala exhibit. But as they did, Freddie Malloy leaped into their path.

Freddie was the closest thing we had to a human celebrity at FunJungle—which wasn't saying much. He'd started out as an actor in the
FunJungle Friends Revue
playing the evil land developer, Baron Wasteland, who was the villain of the show. However, he'd aspired to more and had eventually convinced the administration to let him host a show he'd cooked up called
The World's Most Deadly Animals
. According to my father, the show might have worked out if Freddie had done what he'd promised, which was to present a few dangerous animals—like tigers, cobras, and Komodo dragons—and teach the audience about them. But Freddie had been far more interested in promoting
himself
, hoping to attract a TV network and score his own reality show. Therefore he kept provoking the animals so they'd be more exciting. He never hurt them, but he'd invade their personal space, make direct eye contact, and do other things they found threatening. Then they'd lunge or snap at him and Freddie would leap away and the audience would gasp in excitement. In theory. Unfortunately, Freddie sometimes lost his focus on the animals—which resulted in him losing other things, like fingers. (A gelada baboon had bitten one off, while the Komodo dragon was responsible for the other.) He'd also lost an earlobe (thanks to an ocelot) and a toe (Nile crocodile) and the tip of his nose (golden eagle). Each time, Freddie had managed to be surprisingly calm for a man
who'd just lost a body part, but many audience members had freaked out. They had fainted, vomited, and stampeded for the exits—and those were the adults. (Most of the kids had thought seeing a man lose a finger was pretty cool, but many parents had threatened lawsuits against FunJungle anyhow, claiming their children had been traumatized.)

FunJungle had shut
The World's Most Deadly Animals
down and sent Freddie back to being Baron Wasteland. Freddie was devastated by the demotion. Ever since, he'd been ambushing tourist groups in the hopes of being recognized.

“Hey, kids!” he shouted to the school group. “How's everyone doing today?”

Not a single kid responded, although the teacher gasped in fright at the sight of Freddie. Close up, the patchwork of scars on his face could be a bit disconcerting.

Freddie was obviously disappointed, but he soldiered on valiantly. “I can understand your reserve. It's not every day you get to meet a real celebrity. But you don't all have to be so shy around me. I don't bite. Although some of the animals I work with do!” At this, Freddie held up the hand that was missing two fingers.

The joke had never been that good when Freddie used it onstage. Here it was worse. The sudden reveal that his hand was maimed made several kids scream in terror.

One boy now actually recognized Freddie, however.
“Hey!” he exclaimed. “You're that crazy guy who gets attacked by animals all the time!”

“Er, yes,” Freddie said, then whipped out some glossy photographs of himself. “Would you like an autograph?”

“No,” the boy said. “I want to see Kazoo.”

The rest of the class eagerly echoed this, and the teacher quickly led us past Freddie, who sagged with disappointment. I almost felt bad for the guy. But then I remembered my father saying that FunJungle had done Freddie a favor by closing his show. If they hadn't, he would probably have provoked an animal into biting his head off by now.

The school group hurried into the koala line. From inside the exhibit I could hear the standard thrum of excited tourists, as well as Kristi Sullivan dispensing her standard koala facts over the loudspeaker. (“A newborn koala is only the size of a jelly bean!”) Though I was desperate to get in and see what on earth was going on with Kazoo, I stayed at the rear of the class. A dozen kids were arguing over who got to be first, drawing the attention of all the chaperones, and I figured it was safer to remain off their radar.

An excited young couple in matching Kazoo T-shirts joined the line right behind me. They seemed to be in their midtwenties and were so excited they couldn't stand still.

“Are you here to see the koala?” the woman asked me.
As if there might have been another reason I was standing in the koala line.

“Yes,” I said.

“Us too!” the man exclaimed, as if this were the most incredible coincidence. “We're so excited. We've never seen a koala before.”

“Except on TV,” the woman added. “We just love them, though. They're so adorable. We came all the way from Oklahoma City.”

“Just to see Kazoo?” I asked.

“And the rest of FunJungle, of course,” the man said. “But Kazoo was the kicker. It's our honeymoon!”

“Wow,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks!” the bride chirped. “We really wanted to go to Australia to see wild koalas, but the plane tickets there are crazy expensive. And then FunJungle got Kazoo and started offering all these deals . . .”

“We're staying at the FunJungle Caribbean Resort for half price,” the husband told me. “It's just like being in the
real
Caribbean, only closer!”

That was actually the promotional line from the resort's commercials.

“It just seemed like fate,” the bride told me. “So we drove down right after our wedding. We only got here last night. The resort even gave us a free bottle of champagne on
account of our just getting hitched. And now we're about to see Kazoo. Our first real koala! I'm so excited!”

I didn't know what to say. These two amped-up newlyweds were going to be devastated to learn that Kazoo was gone. Their honeymoon would be ruined.

There was a FunJungle employee stationed at the door of the exhibit. His job was to wave people in once there was room for them so that the viewing area didn't get too crowded. He was only a teenager, probably just out of high school, but people still paid attention to him. He waved my class inside.

All the students filed in ahead of me. I cringed reflexively, expecting to hear them scream.

Instead I heard them all gasp with delight.

I entered and gasped myself. Only I was doing it in surprise.

There was a koala in the exhibit.

It was difficult to see, since it was tucked into a crook of one of the eucalyptus trees in the back. And, as usual, it was asleep. I couldn't even see its face, as its head was tucked down between its arms, like a student who'd fallen asleep at his desk in math class. Its big, fuzzy ears poked out, however, which was enough to trigger squeals of delight from the schoolgirls.

The kids all crowded around the viewing windows,
pressing their noses against the glass. “Aw nuts, he's sleeping,” one boy groused, and many other kids echoed his disappointment.

“Let's wake him!” another boy suggested, and then, despite the
PLEASE DO NOT BANG ON GLASS
sign posted right over his head, he began to bang on the glass.

Thankfully, a teacher swooped in and grabbed the kid's wrist after only a few seconds. “Roscoe, if you can't behave yourself, you'll have to wait outside,” she hissed.

“So what?” Roscoe asked. “The koala's not doing anything anyhow.”

Kazoo hadn't so much as flinched at the sound of his glass being banged on, but that wasn't unusual. A bomb could have gone off in the room and Kazoo probably would have slept through it.

Kristi Sullivan was in her usual spot, perched at the small podium, rattling off facts as though nothing were unusual. “The baby koala begins its life by consuming only its mother's milk,” she was saying, “But after a few months it begins to eat pap, which is actually a special form of the mother's feces.”

Several of the kids squealed with disgust.

“I know it sounds terrible,” Kristi told them, “but it's really a wonderful way for the mother to pass on the microorganisms that will allow her baby to digest eucalyptus leaves.”

I kept my jacket hood up and my back to Kristi so that she wouldn't recognize me. Then I pressed my own nose against the glass, staring at the koala, wondering how he could possibly still be there . . . and if he was, how I could be in trouble for stealing him. I stared at the white tufts of Kazoo's ears, trying to make sense of everything.

And then, suddenly, I realized exactly what was going on.

Someone shrieked behind me. I spun around, startled, to find it was only the new bride. She and her husband had just been allowed into the viewing area, and she couldn't control her excitement. “It's him!” she screamed. “It's Kazoo! Get a picture, honey!”

“I'm already on it!” the groom replied. He had his digital camera out and was firing away.

“He's so cute!” the bride crooned. “Isn't he the most adorable thing ever? I want one!”

“Me too!” her husband agreed. “A pet koala! How awesome would that be?”

I started to turn back to the glass, but I wasn't fast enough. The bride spotted me and rushed over. “Could you take a picture of us and Kazoo?” she asked.

I considered saying no, as I didn't want to attract any attention—and the bride and groom were magnets for it. (Since the koala wasn't doing anything, lots of people were now watching the newlyweds, amused by their over-the-top
enthusiasm.) But the bride looked so excited; I couldn't bring myself to turn her down. “All right,” I said.

“Thanks so much!” the bride sang. “That is soooo nice of you.”

The groom handed me his camera and quickly showed me how to work it while his bride kept expounding on how absolutely adorable Kazoo was. “Look at those ears! And that nose! He's so cute I just want to eat him up!”

This drew Kristi's attention, and she swiveled our way. “You're not alone in finding him lovable,” she said. “Humans have a natural tendency to consider certain physical traits appealing: things like large eyes, large ears, and large noses. We find our own human babies cute because they have these features—and koalas have them too.”

Kristi kept looking our way, so I kept the camera to my eye, hiding my face from her. “Let me get a couple pictures,” I said, so I'd have an excuse to keep the camera up. “To make sure I get a good one.”

“Why, thank you!” the bride said. “What a chivalrous young gentleman!”

“This attraction to cuteness is actually a very important human trait,” Kristi went on. “When we think something is cute, we have an innate desire to take care of it. And as we all know, babies need a great deal of care. So when you find a koala adorable, in a way, you're actually feeling the
genetic drive that makes humans such great parents.”

I had now snapped more than a dozen pictures. The groom was beginning to get suspicious, as though he thought I might be plotting to make off with his camera. “Okay,” he said, reaching for it. “I think that's enough.”

I glanced over at Kristi. She had finally turned away and was now correcting some tourists who mistakenly believed that koalas were from Austria rather than Australia.

I handed the camera back to the groom. “Have a great honeymoon,” I told him, and then hurried for the exit. I'd seen all I needed to. Now I needed to get out of KoalaVille while I could. I scurried past Kristi's podium, where she was explaining, “Australia is a warm continent in the South Pacific, with plenty of eucalyptus for koalas to eat. Whereas Austria is a cold, mountainous country in central Europe.”

Unfortunately, the exit was blocked. A tourist family was trying to drag their daughter out, but she was digging her heels in. “I don't want to go!” she cried. “Kazoo hasn't done anything yet.”

“We've been watching him for an hour!” her frazzled father pleaded. “He's sleeping. Please, let's go see some animals that actually move.”

“Like monkeys!” her desperate mother added. “You love monkeys! And they move all the time.”

“No,” the little girl demanded. “I want to stay here. Kazoo's going to wake up soon. I know it.”

I wouldn't bet on it
, I thought.

“We'll come back later,” her father said. “I promise. But for Pete's sake, let's leave KoalaVille.”

He tried to pull his daughter away, but she clamped on to the door frame with both hands and wouldn't let go.