Big Game (17 page)

“It's
hair
,” I said. “It's a ponytail.”

“Whoa,” Hoenekker said. “That's not a
he
after all.”

“No,” Athmani agreed. “It looks like our poacher is a woman.”

“As you can see, all
the orangutans are present and accounted for,” Kyle teased. “I've been keeping a careful eye on them today.”

I sighed, realizing Mom must have told him about my theory. I was back at Monkey Mountain, standing in front of the orang exhibit. I'd stopped there on the way to Mom's office. Kyle had wandered up, a takeout bag from PastafaZoola in his hand. I hadn't actually expected any of the apes to be missing—although, in truth, I'd secretly
hoped
one might be, so it would prove my theory right.

The exhibit, like every other one at Monkey Mountain, was spectacular. It had been modeled after an actual place in the rainforest on Borneo, the orangutans' natural habitat. Although most of the trees were fake, they
looked
real enough, and they provided plenty of places for the orangs to climb and play. Unlike chimps and gorillas, orangutans spend most of their time above the ground, and this was certainly the case at FunJungle. The adults were nestled in crooks of trees, either eating or sleeping, while the younger ones were constantly on the move through the branches. At the moment, to the great delight of the tourists around me, they appeared to be playing a game of arboreal tag, chasing one another all around the forest.

“Where's Pancake?” I asked. “I don't see him.”

“My goodness!” Kyle gasped, overdramatically. “You're right! He's busted out again!”

“Where is he really? Still sick?”

“I guess so. You heading to see your mom?”

“Yeah.”

“Come on back.”

Kyle led me to the closest door that accessed the employee area of Monkey Mountain, then entered that day's code on the security keypad. It clicked open and we slipped through quickly, trying not to draw much attention. A family still noticed us, though. I saw the kids staring after me jealously, wondering why I got to go behind the scenes and they didn't.

If the kids had been able to see the backstage area, they might not have been so jealous. The corridors were dull, unpainted cement, and the housing areas for the animals were much less beautiful than the parts tourists could see. Except for a window that looked out onto the gorilla exhibit, my mother's office looked pretty much like any other office in the world.

On the way through, Kyle paused by a window that went from the hall into the backstage area of the baboon exhibit. I joined him to see what he was looking at.

Bababoonie was curled up in the corner of his cage, which was unusual. As the dominant male, he was extremely proud and was usually parading in front of the tourists. “How's his tooth?” I asked.

“He definitely busted it,” Kyle said. “I don't know how. Chewing on the bars or something. One of his big canines. Doc's going to replace it today.”

“How?”

“The same way
you'd
get a tooth replaced if you cracked one. Doc will make a mold of the old one, use that to sculpt a new one, and then screw it into Bababoonie's jaw. Primate teeth are almost exactly the same as ours.”

He led the way onward to the office.

Dad was waiting there with Mom. Both of them were eating lunch. Homemade tuna-fish sandwiches and carrot sticks. Mom had the camera feed from the orangutan backstage area up on her computer monitor. Pancake was still lounging listlessly. Dad was sitting at Kyle's desk.

“Hey,” I said, pleased to see him. “I didn't know you were gonna be here.”

Dad tossed me a sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. “If my son's going to play hooky from school, I figure I might as well eat lunch with him.”

“That's my desk,” Kyle told him.

“Sorry.” Dad grabbed his sandwich, hopped out of the chair, and waved graciously to it. “It's all yours,” he said, then perched on top of a large black case marked
FRAGILE.

“What's that?” I asked, taking a bite of my tuna salad.

“Camera equipment,” Dad told me. “To record the orangutans.”

“There's already cameras to record the orangutans,” Kyle said. He sat at his desk and unloaded his takeout bag from PastafaZoola. He'd gotten the lasagna, which I considered a mistake. It was always frozen and then reheated, and sometimes they didn't cook it all the way through. Kyle was still pretty new at FunJungle, though; he hadn't learned which foods to avoid yet.

“Yes, there are cameras,” Mom agreed. “But I can't get what I want off of them at the moment.” She turned to me. “I did what you suggested when I got back from Doc's. I called security to see if they could dig up any footage of Pancake getting out of his exhibit. . . .”

Kyle laughed. “You really think that could have happened?”

“I thought it'd be best to examine the evidence before completely dismissing the theory,” Mom told him. “Unfortunately, security can't give me the evidence right now. Both techs are too busy scanning all the park footage for any trace of the rhino hunter.”

“Oh,” I said. While this was disappointing, it was also reassuring to know that security was working so diligently to find the shooter.

Dad patted the black camera case. “So I'm going to install our own camera. Then we'll have access to the footage without needing to go through security. It'll record all night, and we can check it in the morning to see if we really have an escapee or not.”

“Looks like not to me.” Kyle pointed to the camera feed from the orangutans. “Seeing as Pancake is still there.”

“But he's still not feeling well,” I countered.

“Animals get sick,” Kyle said. “They don't usually break out of their exhibits, rob ice cream stores, and then break back in again.”

“Most animals aren't as clever as Pancake is,” Mom told him.

Kyle rolled his eyes, like he couldn't believe any of us were taking this seriously, but he didn't say anything else.

“Can we go see Pancake?” I asked.

“After you finish your lunch,” Mom said.

I crammed as much of my tuna-fish sandwich into my mouth as I could, then spoke with my cheeks stuffed like a chipmunk's. “Okay. Now?”

Dad laughed while Mom shook her head and sighed. “For heaven's sake, chew your food,” she warned. “Or you'll choke to death.”

“I'm kind of interested to get in there myself,” Dad said, balling his used tinfoil and tossing it into the recycling bin.

Mom knew there was no point in trying to dissuade both of us any longer. “Oh, all right.” She grabbed her new crutches and got to her feet.

Dad hoisted the camera case onto his shoulder and started for the door.

I followed him and Mom dropped in behind us.

Kyle waved good-bye from his desk. “Have fun.” He jammed a forkful of lasagna in his mouth, then gagged. “Ugh! This is half frozen!”

While he was spitting it into the trash, we slipped out of the office.

“What did Athmani want with you today?” Mom asked as we headed through the corridors of Monkey Mountain.

I was still trying to chew up all the sandwich I had in my mouth. “What do you mean?”

“You went off with him after you left me at the medical clinic.” Mom wasn't having any trouble adapting to her crutches at all. In fact, she was flying along on them like she'd been using them her whole life.

I hadn't realized Mom had been watching me with Athmani. I pretended to be busy chewing to give myself time to work out an answer. “He just had some questions about what happened in SafariLand last night.”

“Like what?” Mom sounded as though she didn't quite believe me.

“Whether I'd had a good look at the hunter. Did I think he was going after Rhonda again. Stuff like that.” I hated lying to my parents. Absolutely hated it. But I knew that if I told them the truth, that J.J. had railroaded me into helping, they'd go right to him to complain, and then J.J. would be upset with me for betraying his confidence and things would probably get worse from there.

“Does security have any leads?” Dad asked.

“Athmani said they had footage of the hunter going over the fence on one of the security cameras, but they couldn't tell anything about him from it.” I purposefully omitted the part about the hunter being a woman, because Hoenekker had warned me not to share anything I'd learned after our meeting. Even with my parents.

“They don't have anything?” Mom sighed. “Guess that's why they're monopolizing all the security footage.”

“I suppose,” I said, although talking about the cameras made me think of something. I tried to pick my words carefully, not wanting to let on how much I knew. “Dad, you followed the hunter over the fence last night, right?”

“Well, I didn't exactly follow him,” Dad corrected. “I lost him in the exhibit. But then I found where he'd gone over and used that route myself.”

“Athmani said it was close to where one of the security cameras was posted.”

Dad thought about that for a moment. “Was it? I didn't notice. Or maybe I couldn't see it. It was awfully dark out there.”

We reached the door to the orangutan area. Inside the employee areas, the doors didn't require coded keypad entries, but there was still security to protect the animals. Mom's official FunJungle ID had an electronic sensor built into it. She waved this in front of a sensor built in the wall—which wasn't so easy to do on crutches—and then the door unlocked automatically. “What are you thinking?” she asked me.

“Well, there aren't very many cameras out on that fence,” I said, holding the door open for Mom. “They're pretty spaced out. So why did the hunter go over so close to one?”

“He was in a hurry,” Dad said.

“On the way
out
. Not on the way in. If you were going to sneak into the park to commit a crime, you'd probably take your time doing it, right? So wouldn't you scope out the fence and pick the spot
farthest
from a camera?”

Inside the orangutan care room, Mom and Dad both turned to me, impressed. Dad said, “I didn't even think of that. I wonder if Hoenekker has.”

I lowered my eyes, even more frustrated that I couldn't reveal I was actually helping investigate.

“Maybe the hunter didn't see the camera,” Mom suggested. “Your father didn't see it in the dark.”

“But I wasn't looking for it.” Dad set the camera case down and popped the latches on it. “If I were planning on sneaking into the zoo—or anyplace—I'd certainly be on the lookout for security cameras.”

In a way, Dad was an authority on sneaking into places. On occasion, he had been assigned to take photos of animals in countries that were closed to tourists and journalists. At times like that, he had to find other ways over the border. (For example, he'd once had to infiltrate Somalia to get photos of herola, one of the most endangered antelope in the world.) It was dangerous—Mom had made him promise to stop taking those assignments—but he'd been very good at it. After all, he'd never been caught.

The backstage area for the orangutans was a mess—but there was a good reason for that. Orangutans, like all primates, are very smart and need plenty of mental stimulation. So the keepers gave them lots of stuff to play with—the orangs were very fond of cardboard boxes and burlap bags—as well as mental challenges to work out. These usually involved food; the keepers would hide treats inside wads of newspaper or freeze them inside giant cubes of ice, and the apes would have to figure out how to get it. None of these things were allowed on exhibit because they made a mess and looked inauthentic in the rain forest (as if an Indonesian rain forest inside a fake mountain in Texas was in any way authentic in the first place), but the orangutans loved them, so their backstage area was often full of garbage.

Pancake was the champion cardboard box shredder of the orangs. He could turn a good-size box into scraps within minutes. But today he had ignored the three that had been given to him. In fact, he hadn't moved from his nest of burlap sacks.

However, he perked up as we entered, excited to have company—and intrigued by Dad's big camera case. When Dad opened it, he hauled himself up and approached the bars of his enclosure, grunting eagerly, wondering what could possibly be hidden inside the mysterious black object.

“Hiya, Pancake,” Dad said. “You look like you're feeling a little better.”

“He does,” Mom agreed. “He was pretty miserable when I first saw him this morning.”

Pancake knew my whole family and seemed to especially like Dad. Now he grinned at him, revealing a set of teeth that, except for their size, looked surprisingly human.

Although I normally would have been thrilled to be so close to one of the orangutans—it wasn't something I got to do often and it was always a treat—I was distracted by several things at once. I was still thinking about the hunter and how she'd climbed over the fence. It was hard to believe she hadn't seen the security cameras, even at night. If anything, the cameras were
designed
to be seen. That way they'd act as a deterrent; someone was much less likely to climb the fence if they thought they'd be recorded doing it.