Two policemen grabbed me. One forced my hands behind my back while the other whipped out a pair of handcuffs.
“Get your hands off my son!” Dad shouted. He started toward me, but the other two policemen blocked him.
“You’re making a mistake!” Mom told them. “Just call J.J. McCracken. He’ll set everything straight.”
“There’s no mistake here,” Marge sneered. “Your son was the only one at the crime scene—and now we’ve found ironclad evidence he had the koala in his room. Case closed. Now back off or we’ll arrest both of you, too, for interfering with police business.”
Dad didn’t listen to her. Even though he was outnumbered, I could tell he was only thinking of me. Dad had been in plenty of dangerous places before, and he knew how to handle himself. He made a feint around the police and charged toward me. One of the policemen caught his arm and tried to twist it back behind him.
Dad swung around and slugged the cop in the chin.
The cop staggered backward, shaken.
His partner tackled Dad, knocking him down. “Bad idea,” he snarled.
Dad did his best to fight back, but the second cop was now on him as well. They overwhelmed him, pressing him into the icy ground.
The other policemen cinched the cuffs around my wrists and started to lead me away.
“No!” Mom cried.
“Teddy didn’t do anything, Marge!” Dad yelled. “He was framed!”
“Face the facts,” Marge taunted. “Your kid’s a bad egg. He should’ve been shipped off to juvenile hall long ago.”
Mom came toward Marge, looking ready to claw her eyes out, but Dad’s voice stopped her in her tracks. “No, Charlene! Get back to J.J.’s office. Tell him what these idiots are doing!”
Mom obviously didn’t want to abandon Dad and me, but realized she wouldn’t be any help if she got herself arrested too. “Don’t worry, Teddy,” she told me. “We’ll get this all sorted out. You’re going to be okay.” Then she raced back toward the administration building.
Bubba Stackhouse looked to Marge, unsure what to do.
Marge stopped the policemen who were leading me away. “I can handle the boy,” she said, then handed them the bag full of koala poop. “Run this up to J.J.’s office. When he sees the evidence, he’ll back us over Mrs. Fitzroy.”
The police seemed happy to get an assignment that took them out of the sleet. They quickly left me with Marge and hurried into the administration building.
Bubba turned to the two cops pinning Dad to the ground. Neither looked pleased that Dad had called them idiots. “You two take Mr. Fitzroy here to headquarters and book him for assault. Marge and I will run the kid to juvenile hall.”
Dad stopped struggling, aware it would only get him into more trouble. The cops pulled his arms behind his back and cuffed him as well.
Then Marge and Bubba marched me around a corner and I couldn’t see Dad anymore. We passed out of the employee area and into the park. Marge and Bubba each held one of my arms, keeping me squeezed in between them. Since my hands were behind my back, none of the tourists approaching us could see the cuffs on my wrists. Instead I probably looked like a kid on vacation with two very overprotective parents. Not that there were many tourists. The nasty weather had kept everyone but the diehards home.
I started to feel scared. Really scared. Although I’d been worried about Marge for the past few days, I hadn’t expected it would come to this. I figured that I’d have found the real thief—or someone else would have. Or at least Marge would have come to her senses and realized I hadn’t done it. Instead the stakes had been upped against me—and my parents hadn’t been able to protect me.
Even more disconcerting, however, was the fact that whoever had stolen Kazoo had planted evidence against me. Originally, my being at the crime scene had seemed like mere dumb luck: I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But now I had to wonder if that was true—just as my father had first warned the morning after. The real thief obviously knew I’d been suspected of the crime and had taken further steps to implicate me. Had I been set up all along, then? How much did the thief know about me?
As I thought about this, something occurred to me. “Why’d you decide to search our trailer again?” I asked.
“Because we did, that’s why,” Marge said, although she couldn’t keep eye contact with me, which I figured meant she was lying.
I turned to Bubba. “What really happened?”
“We got a tip,” the cop replied. Marge spun on him, annoyed that he’d spilled the beans, but he shrugged it off. “It’s not a secret, Marge. He has the right to know.”
“What kind of tip?” I asked.
“A phone call,” Bubba told me. “Yesterday afternoon.”
I thought back to Marge confronting me outside the costume room the day before. She’d been so confident; she must have just gotten the call.
“From who?” I asked.
Bubba shrugged again. “It was anonymous. The caller claimed they’d seen the koala at your place.”
“That’s a lie!” I said. “I never had the koala there!”
“The evidence says otherwise,” Bubba countered.
“It was planted!” I told him. “Probably by whoever called you! They set me up! You should be arresting them, not me!”
“Oh, so it’s a conspiracy against you?” Marge asked.
I said, “If I took Kazoo, where is he now?”
“You tell me,” Marge growled.
I was about to argue further, but something caught my eye. A glimpse of orange in the distance. I peered through the sleet. A thickset man with an orange baseball cap was passing the Polar Pavilion. He was moving away from us, so I couldn’t see his face, but I thought I recognized the lumbering gait. Hank the Tank. And he was heading toward Shark Odyssey.
“There!” I shouted. “That’s the guy you should be arresting, not me!” I reflexively tried to point, but couldn’t with my arms cuffed behind my back.
“The guy in the orange Astros Cap by the Polar Pavilion! His name’s Hank Duntz and he works for Walter Ogilvy! J.J. was just telling me about him. That’s the guy who took Kazoo!”
“Can the lies,” Marge told me. “What do I look like to you, an idiot?”
Almost any other time I would have answered yes. But right then I was at Marge’s mercy.
“I don’t see anyone,” Bubba said.
I looked off toward the Polar Pavilion again. Sure enough, Hank had disappeared. There was simply too much sleet to see him. “He was there,” I insisted. “He’s probably heading for Shark Odyssey. I saw him poking around there yesterday. J.J. says he does the dirty work for Ogilvy, who wants to bankrupt FunJungle. Hank stole Kazoo. And now he’s planning to do something in the shark tank.”
“The only person who’s messed with the shark tank lately is you,” Marge sneered.
“Just call J.J. and tell him Hank the Tank is here,” I pleaded. “It’ll only take a few seconds.”
Marge didn’t even respond to me. Instead she turned to Bubba. “Don’t pay him any attention. You can’t trust a thing that comes out of this kid’s mouth.”
“I’m telling you the truth!” I shouted. “If you don’t listen to me, something very bad is going to happen to this park—and it’s going to happen on your watch.”
“And if you don’t shut your trap, I’m gonna tape it shut,” Marge snapped.
I turned my attention to Bubba, who seemed at least a little more reasonable. “Please, Mr. Stackhouse. I’m not as bad as Marge says I am. She only has it in for me because I once swapped her black jelly beans with rabbit poo.”
Bubba wavered. For a moment I thought I’d gotten through to him. But then he shook his head.
We were almost to the front gates. A tourist family was coming through the turnstile, braving the lousy weather. Two parents and three kids, all around my age.
I wasn’t thrilled about what I had to do, but Marge and Bubba weren’t leaving me any choice.
“Help!” I yelled to the tourists. “I’m being kidnapped! Help!”
The tourists looked at Marge and Bubba, alarmed. They backed away, not wanting to get involved.
“Help me!” I screamed, like my life depended on it. “Please! You’re my only hope!”
The father reluctantly stepped forward, blocking Marge and Bubba’s path. “What’s going on here?” he asked.
“Don’t listen to this kid,” Marge told him. “I’m with park security—”
“No she isn’t!” I yelled. “She’s only pretending to be! They grabbed me in World of Reptiles when my parents weren’t looking!” Normally, my ruse probably wouldn’t have worked, but today Bubba’s and Marge’s parkas were concealing their official uniforms.
The mother pulled out her cell phone. “I’m calling the police,” she said.
“Wait!” Bubba held up a giant hand. “I’m a cop and I can prove it. Let me show you my ID.” He let go of me to unzip his parka.
I spun away from Marge, wrenching my arm free from her grasp. Bubba realized his mistake and tried to grab me, but Marge lunged for me at the same time and they slammed into each other. Marge slipped on a patch of sleet, stumbled, and pulled Bubba down with her.
The tourists watched it all, unsure what to do. The mother still had her phone in her hand.
“Tell the cops to come to Shark Odyssey at FunJungle!” I told her, and then took off.
It isn’t easy to run with your arms cuffed behind your back, but I did my best, charging toward the shark exhibit as fast as I could.
Marge and Bubba scrambled to their feet and came after me. Both were seething with anger, which seemed to make them faster than usual. Between that and my slower-than-average pace, they closed the gap on me as we raced through the park. Marge kept yelling at people to stop me, but I kept yelling at people to stop her and Bubba instead. No one seemed sure what to make of the situation. If I’d been much older, I probably wouldn’t have gotten away with it, but the few tourists around seemed to doubt Marge’s claim that a twelve-year-old boy could be a wanted criminal. So no one intervened. They all simply stood back and hoped someone else would handle things.
Marge and Bubba both got on their radios. Bubba called the two cops he’d left in charge of Dad, while Marge put out a general APB to all FunJungle security. “I am in hot pursuit of Teddy Fitzroy in connection with the kidnapping of Kazoo the Koala and need backup. All available security personnel please respond. We are proceeding along Arctic Way—”
“Tell them we’re heading to Shark Odyssey!” I yelled back. “They can ambush me there!”
I knew the park well enough that if I’d wanted to, I probably could have given Bubba and Marge the slip, but that would only have bought me a little more time. However, if I could get a few dozen security agents to converge on Hank the Tank, they could catch him—and maybe get him to confess that he’d stolen Kazoo, not me.
As I neared Shark Odyssey, there was still no sign of Hank. I wondered if he’d already gone inside—or if he was even there. It occurred to me that I’d merely assumed Hank was heading to the sharks—if he wasn’t, then I’d just made a huge mistake. I could see several other security guards closing in on the exhibit from various directions.
Even though I’d seen Hank enter through the security door before, I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know the code—and if I had, I couldn’t have entered it with my hands locked behind my back. I still wanted to draw security inside, though.
Some tourists were coming out the exit as I arrived, holding the door open. I barreled through them.
“Circle around to the entrance!” Marge ordered the security guards. “We’ll trap him inside!” Then she and Bubba came through the exit as well.
I charged into the shark tube. For once it was devoid of tourists, a sign of what a slow day it was at the park. However, Bubba was bearing down on me. Halfway through the tube, he snagged my arm.
“Gotcha!” he wheezed, exhausted from his run.
Marge staggered into the tube, even more worn out than Bubba. She was so winded I thought she was going to throw up. “Nice work,” she gasped.
A few sharks swam past us outside the tube.
I was suddenly overcome by a very bad feeling. If Hank Duntz was plotting something at Shark Encounter, the tube at the bottom of the tank now seemed like the worst place to be. “We have to get out of here!” I said.
Bubba and Marge didn’t move. They were both too wiped out from their run. Bubba glared at me, as though he was angry I’d made him exert so much energy. “We’ll go when I say it’s time to go.”
“You don’t understand!” I said. “Something bad is about to happen here!” I tried to pull free of Bubba’s grasp, but he wasn’t going to let me get away with that again.
Instead he clenched my arm tighter. “Marge was right,” he told me. “You can’t be trusted. So do us all a favor and shut your trap.”
“We’re in danger!” I yelled.
“You never learn, do you, Teddy?” Marge asked.
At both ends of the shark tube, metal doors slammed shut, sealing us inside.
“I do learn,” I said. “You just never listen.”
Now, Marge and Bubba finally grew concerned.
“What are those doors for?” Bubba asked, his eyes wide with fear.
“Safety,” Marge told him. “They seal off the rest of the exhibit in case something goes wrong with the shark tube.”
“But we’re in the shark tube!” Bubba wailed. In the space of a few seconds he’d gone from imposing to terrified. Rather than a big, tough policeman, he now seemed like a little kid. “I don’t like sharks. I don’t like them at all.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Marge said, although she didn’t seem to believe this herself. “Just a glitch in the security system.”
“It’s not a glitch!” I told her. “It’s Hank the Tank! I told you he was up to something bad!”
Bubba let go of me. He stared at all the sharks circling above us and trembled in fear.
I ran to the closest metal wall and kicked it. It didn’t do a bit of good. The steel door was sturdy as a sequoia tree. “Help!” I yelled. “Is anyone outside? Help!”
There was no response from the other side of the door. I looked up through the glass ceiling, wondering if any of Marge’s security guys were in the viewing area above. If so, there was a chance they could see us down in the tube. I couldn’t make out anyone, although it was tough to see through all the water.
Above us, Taurus the bull shark slid past ominously.
“I really don’t like sharks,” Bubba whimpered. “And I’m not so good in enclosed spaces, either.”
Now that I was looking up, I noticed something else in the tube. The ceiling wasn’t entirely glass. It was supported every twenty feet by steel ribs, which arced around the tube. Along the central rib was a thick wad of what looked like gray Play-Doh. Normally, I might have thought it was some kind of sealant for cracks in the glass, but there were wires snaking out of it. They connected to a small receiver that was taped to the steel rib.
Bubba glanced up at it. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but he grew even more frightened. “Get away from it!” he yelled. “It’s an explosive!”
We all scrambled to the far end of the tube and flattened up against the steel door.
The receiver beeped.
“Don’t look at it!” Bubba ordered.
I turned away and tucked into a ball.
The putty exploded.
It wasn’t a huge blast. If it had been outside, it probably wouldn’t have even been that loud. In the enclosed tube, however, it echoed like crazy. A concussion of air hit me and the scent of acrid smoke filled the air. And then I heard the cracking.
I spun around.
Smoke drifted all along the top of the tube. Above us, the blast had spooked the sharks, which all darted about wildly.
A web of cracks was spreading quickly through the glass in the center of the tube. Water began dripping through, raining onto the floor. The cracks grew bigger as the water pressed down from above. The glass wasn’t going to last more than another few seconds.
And when it went, the shark tube was going to flood with us inside it.