The Genius Files #4 (14 page)

“Okay, you saw it,” Pep yelled. “Come back now.”

Coke glanced up and across the street for a moment to locate the window from which the shots had been fired. Then he looked down at the street.

“Hey, there's something written on the
X
,” he said.

“What is it?”

Just as Coke was bending down to read the tiny letters in the
X
, two motorcycles came roaring around the bend on Elm Street.

“Coke, get out of the way!” his sister shouted.

He looked up. It was a three-lane road, but both of the motorcycles were in the center lane, and they were heading directly toward him at top speed. Their handlebars were nearly touching each other.

“What the—”

“The bowler dudes!” Pep screamed, pointing at the weird, bowler-shaped helmets the bikers were wearing.

The bowler dudes didn't look like they were going to veer around Coke. He couldn't jump to his left. He couldn't jump to his right. There was only one way to go.

Up.

Using the skills he had learned in his karate classes, Coke went from a deep crouch to pushing against the ground with all the energy he had to propel his body upward. He got pretty high—at least three feet in the air.

The bowler dudes, taken by surprise, reached out to grab Coke's legs as they passed, but missed him by inches. The rearview mirror of one of the bikes, however, caught on the bottom of Coke's T-shirt as he leaped.

As it passed by at close to fifty miles per hour, the mirror pulled at the shirt, flipping Coke around. His body did a 360 in the air and he landed roughly on his backside. The motorcycles kept right on going, roaring away down Elm Street.

Coke, dazed, still had the sense to crawl to the curb just before several cars came speeding down the street. His shirt was ripped and he was gasping for breath, but he seemed to be all right. Pep dragged him out of harm's way.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I think so,” Coke said, still gasping for breath. “How could they know we were here? How did they know to come down the road at that moment?”

“They know things,” Pep said. “And now
we
know that they're trying to kill us again. I
knew
we shouldn't have trusted them.”

If Coke had jumped a millisecond earlier, or a millisecond later, he would have been hit by the motorcycles and surely killed. If his body had spun around a few miles per hour faster or slower, he would have landed on his head and very possibly been killed. If it hadn't been for these lucky breaks, it would have been the
second
assassination to take place at that exact same spot on Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.

D
id you ever have a really bad day when just about everything was going wrong? That was the kind of day Coke was having. So far, a cow had been dropped on him and he was almost run over by a couple of motorcycles. And it was still early afternoon.

There's a little hill on the north side of Elm Street in Dealey Plaza near some concrete steps. It's referred to as “the grassy knoll.” Many Kennedy assassination experts believed at least one of the shots that hit the
president came from this spot and
not
from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Coke and Pep went over and sat down on this grassy knoll to regain their composure. They had about ten minutes until it was time to meet their parents in the parking lot.

“Are you going to be okay?” Pep asked.

“Yeah. I'm indestructible. You know that.”

“That was a really dumb thing you did,” Pep told her brother.

“I know.”

Coke lay back on the grass, looking up at the sky. His T-shirt was ripped and his knees were scraped from crawling across the street.

“So . . . what did you see?” Pep asked him.

“Huh?”

“Just before those motorcycles came, you told me there was something written in the
X
,” Pep reminded him. “What did it say?”

“Oh, yeah,” Coke said. The near miss with the motorcycle had almost made him forget that he had bent down to look at the words on the street. “You're gonna laugh. It said
BUY ITCH
.”

“BUY ITCH?”

“It must be some kind of an ad,” Coke said. “I guess
they're selling an anti-itch cream. Can you believe that? Companies will advertise
anywhere
, even in a place like this.”

“Not necessarily,” Pep replied. “Maybe
BUY ITCH
is an anagram that we're supposed to figure out.”

“Are you serious?” Coke said, sitting up. “You think somebody would send us a cipher by putting letters on an
X
in the middle of the street?”

“Why not?” Pep said. “They put one at the bottom of a swimming pool, remember? They put one on the radio. When we were in Chicago, they put one on the scoreboard at Wrigley Field!”

“But what could
BUY ITCH
mean?” Coke asked, as he juggled the letters around in his head.

Pep took her notepad and pencil from her pocket and wrote
BUY ITCH
at the top of a page. Then she got to work, writing down every possible combination of those letters.

“CUT BY HI,”
she said softly as she wrote. “No, that can't be it.
I CUB THY
. . .
CHIT BUY
. . .
”

It was just nonsense words. It didn't seem like
BUY ITCH
could possibly mean anything besides
BUY ITCH
. Coke looked up at the passing cars, while his sister continued working on new letter combinations in her head.

“Wait a minute!” she said suddenly. “I think I've
got
it!”

She wrote this on her pad:

HUB CITY

“Hub City?”

“‘Hub City' is an anagram for
BUY ITCH
!” she told her brother. “We need to go to Hub City.”

“Oh, great,” Coke said. “Now all we have to do is find out where Hub City is.”

When the twins met their parents in the parking lot, Mrs. McDonald took one look at Coke and went into “Mom Mode.”

“What happened to your shirt?” she asked.

“It ripped.”

“I can
see
that!” said Mrs. McDonald. “How did it rip? I left you on your own for less than an hour, and now you look like you got run over by a truck.”

“Funny you should say that, Mom,” Coke told her. “You see, I was standing on the
X
in the street where President Kennedy was shot when these two motorcycles came out of nowhere and almost ran me over.
So I jumped up in the air and flipped around, and—”

“Ha-ha! That's a good one, son,” said Dr. McDonald. “How do you come up with this stuff?”

“I guess I just have a vivid imagination, Dad.”

They got in the car and Dr. McDonald paid the parking attendant. But Mrs. McDonald wasn't finished nagging Coke.

“I wish you would take better care of your clothes,” she told him. “We just bought that shirt the other day, and now it's ruined.”

“I'll try, Mom,” said Coke, who knew from experience that it was always better to agree with his mother than to argue with her.

They got back on the road and after a few minutes everyone had calmed down a little.

“Can we borrow your computer, Mom?” asked Pep. “We need to look something up.”

“What for, sweetie?” Mrs. McDonald said from the front seat.

“It's an assignment for school,” said Coke, who was always the better liar of the two.

“You're working on schoolwork over summer vacation?” Dr. McDonald asked, turning around so he could see it with his own eyes. “Are you feeling okay?”

Mrs. McDonald handed her laptop back, warning the kids to be careful with it because her entire website—her entire
career—
was stored in that little
box. Then she turned the radio back on. “How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away” was playing, and Dr. McDonald turned it up loud.

Coke took the laptop and Googled “Hub City.” In 0.19 seconds, he had 125,000 results. He clicked the first one on the list.

“It says Hub City is a manufacturer of worm gear,” he whispered to his sister.

“What's worm gear?” Pep asked. “Clothing for worms?”

“It has something to do with motors,” Coke explained.

Coke scrolled down to see some of the other results for “Hub City.” He hoped that the search would turn up the name of a city with that nickname. Unfortunately, the top search results included the name of a hockey club in Boston, a drag racing track in Mississippi, a bicycle store in Maryland, a Ford dealership in Louisiana, and a brewery in Iowa.

“There's no way of knowing which Hub City is
our
Hub City,” Pep said. “It's another dead end.”

As frustrated as she was, Pep was a chronic list maker, and she dutifully added the new message to her list in the notepad. . . .

1. I WILL MEET YOU IN LLANO ESTACADO

2. A PIECE OF THE BLARNEY STONE

3. HUB CITY

There was still no obvious connection between the items, no clear thread that tied them all together. But after what had happened to her brother in Paris and Dallas, one thing was increasingly clear—someone was out to harm them . . . again.

I
nterstate 30, which starts in Little Rock, Arkansas, stretches west over 350 miles, across Texas. In the Dallas area it's known as the Tom Landry Highway, in honor of the longtime coach of the Dallas Cowboys. The McDonalds were only on the road for fifteen minutes when they pulled off at the exit marked A
RLINGTON
.

“Why are we stopping
here
?” Pep asked.

“You'll see,” said Mrs. McDonald. “It's a surprise.”

“I don't like surprises,” Coke said, rubbing his bruised knee. He'd already had enough surprises for the day.

“Oh, you'll like this one,” his mother assured him.

The twins looked around anxiously as Dr. McDonald pulled off the highway on the right and merged onto Six Flags Road.

“We're going to Six Flags!” Pep shouted excitedly. “We're going to Six Flags!”

Six Flags, as you probably know, is a popular amusement park chain. There are nineteen of them in North America. The twins had been to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom back home in California, and they could barely contain their enthusiasm.

“I hate to break it to you,” Mrs. McDonald said, “but we're
not
going to Six Flags.”

“Why not?” asked Pep, deflated.

“Where are we going, then?” Coke asked as they drove right past the sign for S
IX
F
LAGS
O
VER
T
EXAS
. Another sign pointed toward R
ANGERS
B
ALLPARK
.

“Are we going to a Rangers game?” Pep asked.

“No . . . ,” Mrs. McDonald said mysteriously.

The car pulled into a parking lot. A large office building in the distance had a sign in big letters on it: USBC.

“What's that?” Pep asked.

There was no need to answer, because as they got closer Pep could see what the letters stood for—United States Bowling Congress.

Other signs indicated the International Bowling Museum and Hall of Fame, the International Bowling Campus, and the International Bowling Training and Research Center. It was all part of a giant bowling complex.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Coke said. “They do bowling research? You roll a ball down an alley and try to knock down pins. What is there to
research
?”

“Keep an open mind, son,” said Dr. McDonald. “I think you're going to like this.”

“I'd rather go to Six Flags,” Coke grumbled.

They parked near a giant white bowling pin and Mrs. McDonald bought tickets for the bowling museum.

Everything
has a history. If you take any object, any activity, any sport, there was somebody who invented it a long time ago. Somebody else probably improved it or perfected it. A third person may have made it into something that millions of people use or do every day. And if we personally are interested in that thing, we want to know more about it. That's why there are museums devoted to yo-yos, mustard, Spam, gourds, rock and roll, spies, and yes, bowling.