“What radio transmissions?” Cricket panted back.
“Quinn radioed down to the sheriff when the Lookout was broken into, remember? He also radioed for help when he found us with Marvin. Grayson said that’s how he knew about Marvin being hurt, remember? Well, that must also be how he got Vargus’s name—he’s been listening in on radio transmissions!”
“So what are you saying?” Gary asked.
I was still trying to catch my breath. “I’m saying . . .call Robin! Call Quinn! Call whoever you want! I think we’re gonna need some backup!”
Casey whipped out his phone again and Cricket got busy with it while I unzipped the duffle bag and handed Casey and Gary stuff out of it—binoculars, a length of rope, the receiver. . . .
“Robin’s not home!” Cricket wailed, punching in another number. “I left a message, but what good’s that going to do?” She dialed Quinn’s number and muttered, “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon . . .”
I felt so stupid. I’d been putting off calling anyone for hours, and now here we were, in a restricted place where condor poachers and men in evil-looking jets were meeting to engage in high-stakes activities that could get us all shot.
Anyway, Cricket leaves a kinda panicky, kinda garbled, really long message on Quinn’s machine while the guys hurry over to the far end of the hangar with the receiver and the binoculars. And by the time Cricket’s hung up, Gary and Casey are waving us over.
“I got a signal,” Gary says as he folds up the receiver. “But we don’t need this thing anymore. They’re over there somewhere, and the jet’s on the tarmac.”
He steps aside so Cricket and I can look around the corner, and there on the private runway, about five hangars over, is the Raven Jet.
Casey hands me the binoculars. “The door’s not open yet, so I don’t think we missed anything.”
We watch and we watch and we watch, taking turns with the binoculars, but all that happens is a refueling truck goes up to the plane and fills it with gas. It gives us plenty of time to come up with a plan, though, and it gives Cricket time to try calling Quinn and Robin and the police again.
Then Gary points to a vehicle that’s driving slowly onto the tarmac. “Is that Mann’s SUV?”
Casey focuses the binoculars on it. “Bingo.”
“Okay,” Gary says. “Time to move.” He grabs the rope. “Just like we talked about—Casey and I approach from this end, you guys circle around from behind. We’ll wait for Sammy’s signal.”
I grab the duffle bag and stuff everything else in it. “And if we get caught, our story is your dad’s got a plane in one of the hangars and we’re playing hide-and-seek.”
“Are we sure we want to say hide-and-seek?” Cricket says, her eyes all panicky. “We’re too old for hide-and-seek! It sounds so lame!”
I look her in the eye. “Say it like you mean it and people will believe it.”
“That’s right,” Gary says. “If you act like you’re doing something wrong, people will know you’re up to something.”
She nods like she’s got it, but her eyes are still panicky, and she literally gulps when she swallows.
“We’re running out of time,” Casey says. “If we’re gonna do this, we’ve gotta move.”
So off we go—girls along the back of the hangars, guys across the front. And it was actually kinda interesting, ’cause we just rolled past cars and open doorways and people, and nobody stopped us. I mean, there we were, carrying a duffle bag that could have been full of explosives, and nobody stopped us.
Anyway, down the roadway between the fourth and fifth hangars we spot the Birdman’s jet on the tarmac. “Now what?” Cricket whispers, because between us and the runway are a bunch of vehicles and open doors that lead to little offices or rooms or storage places that are built into the plane hangar.
“We act like we belong,” I whisper back, but my heart’s hammering and my eyes are shifting around like I do not belong. It’s too late to turn back, though, so I take a deep breath and say, “Let’s go.”
We roll along, trying to act all casual-like, but that’s hard to do when your heart’s hammering and your skateboard’s making a racket and you’re toting along a duffle bag that looks like it could be packed with explosives.
“Smile,” I whisper to Cricket as we approach a guy wearing a blue jumpsuit and a trucker hat. “Smile like you’re having fun.”
“Hey, kids,” Mr. Jumpsuit says, putting up a hand like he’s a kiddie-school crossing guard. “You here with someone?”
I smile at him. “My dad’s over in hangar B-3. He’s jawin’ with his aviation buddies, and we got bored.”
He nods like he knows all about it and backs away. “Once the bug bites ya, there’s no help for it.” He kinda waves and says, “Hang around here long enough and it’ll bite you, too!”
We start rolling away and I call, “See ya later!” kinda loud so that anyone else in the vicinity’ll know we’re not hiding anything.
“Wow,” Cricket whispers as we move along, “you are smooth.”
“I am shaking,” I whisper back.
When we get to the front side of the hangars, Cricket looks to the left and says, “Where are the guys? I hope they didn’t get caught!”
Then, like Casey had read her mind, we hear, “Ar, ar, ar, aroooo.”
“There they are!” Cricket says, pointing toward a truck that’s parked about fifty yards to our left.
There’s a bright yellow and blue biplane right in front of us, so we duck around it and take cover. And when I look across the runway through the binoculars, what I see looks like something out of a movie. The Raven Jet is in the background; the SUV has parked about two hundred feet from it. For a moment everything’s still, and then the jet door opens and a man carrying a briefcase comes down the steps. From his neck to his toes, he’s dressed in black. Just like his jet.
“The Birdman!” Cricket whispers.
And then, coming out of the plane a few steps behind him is a boy, maybe ten or twelve years old.
“He brought his son?” I whisper, not quite believing my eyes.
“What’s he thinking?” Cricket whispers back.
Then the doors of the SUV open and Grayson and Janey emerge. My heart is ka-blamming around so hard I can barely breathe. “This is it!” I whisper as the four of them meet up halfway between the SUV and the jet.
The Birdman opens the briefcase. Right there in the middle of the runway in broad daylight, he opens the briefcase.
I zero in on it with the binoculars.
It’s full of money, all right.
Lots of it.
I stand up, give the guys a wave, and there they go, rolling toward the powwow on the runway.
I dump the binoculars in the duffle bag, grab the bungee cords, and hand Cricket the shooting net. “Let’s do it!”
She just stands there, and I can see her knees shaking.
Now, what I really want to do is grab the shooting net and go, but I have zero experience with it. Cricket’s the one who knows how to use it. So I tell her, “Think Marvin. Think Marvin and Big Mama and get mad. These jerks have no right to steal her! She belongs in the wild with her son!” I lean in a little. “Do you want them to get away with this?”
Cricket takes a deep breath, then her nostrils flare and her face firms up and she says, “No.”
I look across the tarmac at Gary and Casey.
They’re already halfway there.
And they’ve been noticed.
I toss down my skateboard and jump on. “Then let’s go!”
At first I’m all fired up, but as Cricket and I come in from the opposite direction as Casey and Gary, I start feeling really . . . weird. I mean, normally doing stuff like ditching a bad guy or tackling a bad guy or hijacking a bad guy’s car helps me get rid of my jitters and focus.
But as we’re approaching the powwow on the tarmac, I start feeling really disconnected. Like I’m floating above my body watching it push across the runway on
a skateboard.
I feel kinda dizzy.
Kinda weak.
Really scared.
And that’s when it finally hits me that this whole thing is out of control—I am way out of my league.
This is dangerous.
Ol’ Swoopy Hair is moving toward Casey and Gary, and it’s easy to see that he’s not planning to pass out business cards. Janey’s hanging back with the Birdman, trying to charm him into believing nothing’s wrong, reaching for the briefcase as she motions him toward the truck.
And then she sees us.
She does a double take, then looks behind her at where Casey and Gary are stretching out a rope as they move toward Grayson.
“Dad!” she shouts, and now the Birdman is looking both ways, too. And you can tell he’s thinking, What’s going on here? But we’ve got an advantage.
We’re kids.
I mean, really, how seriously are you supposed to take kids on Rollerblades and skateboards wielding a rope?
So the Birdman doesn’t race off to his plane and try to zoom his way to freedom. He just kind of stands there whipping his head back and forth while Casey and Gary spread out, stretching the rope tight, aiming it right for Grayson Mann’s stomach.
Grayson doesn’t know what to do—if he tries to duck, they’ll lower the rope. If he tries to jump, they’ll raise it. And he probably could have just grabbed the rope and pulled, but instead he runs back toward Janey and the Birdman.
And that’s when the Birdman finally understands that something is terribly wrong. He looks back and forth a few more times, but then his son grabs the briefcase and charges for his jet.
“Wait!” Janey cries, chasing after the boy. And there’s no way Grayson Mann is going to let a gazillion bucks fly off into the sunset—he chases after him, too. But the Birdman turns around and blocks them, trying to protect his kid.
“Now, Cricket! Now!” I shout as we move in, and then POP! she sends the capture net flying. It sails through the air like a giant fishnet stocking, quivering and wobbling and finally gulping them up.
“Great shot!” I shout, only the Birdman is on the far end of it and manages to scramble free.
Grayson and Janey, though, stumble and tangle, and then splat, they hit the tarmac like a big blob of poacher pudding. And while Casey and Gary chase after the Birdman, Cricket and I pounce on them, pinning them down. But they’re punching and flailing and fighting like crazy to get free, and net or not, there’s no way we’re going to be able to hold them down for long. “Help!” I shout over to the guys because the Birdman’s out of reach anyway, bounding up the steps to his getaway jet.
Sirens start up somewhere in the distance. And before either of our netted villains can wrestle free, Casey and Gary glide in and loop the rope around them. I hop off and start to bungee kicking and flailing and cussing body parts together through the netting. “How’s it feel, Oswald?” I call. “You and your decoy daughter are gonna get stuck in a nice little cage where you can spend time wishing for your freedom.”
“Look!” Casey shouts, because the Raven Jet is already taxiing down the runway.
Then all at once people are coming at us from everywhere. There are real cops and airport cops and men in blue jumpsuits with trucker hats. There are people with sirens and golf carts and megaphones. And then there’s Quinn. And Robin. And Bella and Gabby. And everyone’s talking at once. Everyone but me. I know it’s gonna take forever to sort this mess out, and I don’t really care who explains why the town’s celebrity newscaster is bungeed to his decoy daughter on the tarmac. What I care about is getting over to the SUV.
So I sneak away and try the handle of the back hatch.
It’s unlocked.
I swing it open and find myself face to face with . . . a big white sheet.
But when I throw back the sheet, there, staring right at me through the bars of a cage, is one big, hunchy, ugly bird.
“Hey, Big Mama,” I say with a grin, but what I’m thinking is, What an amazingly beautiful sight.
TWENTY-EIGHT
It did take a while to sort everything out. Adults can be so . . . I want to say dense, but that’s not it. And it’s not bubble-brained, either. I mean, it isn’t that they can’t process what you’re telling them because it’ll shatter them—it’s more like their brains can’t process it because of who’s telling them.
I mean, how can we know more than they do?
We can’t possibly be right.
Or telling the truth.
We’re “kids.”
But a condor in a cage is pretty powerful proof, and after they finally accepted that we did know more, that we were right and telling the truth, then we had to suffer through a whole rash of I-can’t-believe-you-did-that’s.
It was so dangerous!
And lawbreaking!
The utter gall of it all!
I wish someone would invent a calamine lotion for adult overreaction.
I’d buy buckets.
Anyway, in the end, the evidence spoke for itself and the birdnappers became jailbirds. A cop at the showdown told us that poaching an endangered species can get you a sentence greater than armed robbery, and if that’s true, I can’t say I’m sorry that they’ll be facing real time in the big cage.
Quinn wasn’t sorry, either. He got to face off with Janey right there on the tarmac, and even though she put on this huge act of how she hadn’t known what her father was doing and how she really loved Quinn and still wanted to see him, he’s no birdbrain. He laughed in her face and said, “The only place I’ll see you is in court.”
Later, when we were hanging out by Big Mama, he put his hand on Cricket’s shoulder and there were actual tears in his eyes. “How can I ever thank you?” he asked her, then kissed her on the temple.
She blushed deep red and I could tell—that was all the thanks she needed.
Grams, on the other hand, was horrified when she heard what had happened. “Grayson Mann? The Grayson Mann? That can’t be!”
“His real name’s Oswald Griffin, Grams. And I’m sorry to break it to you, but his news days are over.”
Turns out I was wrong about that. He’s been on the news a lot. KSMY’s competing station out of Santa Luisa has had a field day covering the story. And believe me, they haven’t been waiting around for him to fix his hair before shooting him.
Anyway, in the days that followed the showdown on the tarmac, a couple of things happened.
First, I went back to the Kuos’ and actually unpacked my very stinky backpack and returned stuff to Robin. I saw Gary a lot while I was at the Kuos’, and it made me really happy that he’d gone from being a pimply porcupine holed up in his dungeon to a guy who was in and out all the time, joking with his sister and being . . . I don’t know . . . one amped teenager.
He was especially hyper when he found out via his connections on the Internet that the Birdman was not the man we’d seen at the airport. “He’s not really a Birdman,” he told us, “he’s Birdboy. He’s a twelve-year-old spoiled-to-death prince.”
“No!” I said. “Was he that kid we saw at the airport?” “Must’ve been—which is why he snagged that briefcase of cash!”
We’d already been told that there was probably nothing that could be done about someone from another country trying to buy a condor—that our national laws didn’t cross into foreign territories. So maybe Birdboy won’t get nailed, but Quinn vowed to shut him down, and between him and Gary working Internet angles, I have no doubt that’ll happen.
We also found out from Quinn that Grayson-slash-Oswald said he didn’t want to actually hurt Marvin, but he’d had to shoot at him because he’d attacked him and thrown up on him while he was trying to secure Big Mama.
“He barfed on him?” I asked.
Quinn nodded. “It’s a defense mechanism.”
No kidding.
But anyway, Grayson was also apparently totally miffed that he’d been busted by kids. “He thought he was so clever,” Robin told
us, “leaving false clues everywhere. Between Luxton Enterprises, throwing beer cans around inside the Lookout, calling the taxidermist, using Vargus’s name on the horse rental form . . . he was sure everyone would be completely bamboozled.” She grinned at Cricket and me. “Guess he never met a good Scout.”
Uh-oh.
Anyway, while I was at the Kuos’ unpacking and stuff, I came across that fax we’d gotten from Trail Riders. And seeing it gave me this little hiccup of an idea, which, the more I thought about, the more I wanted to try and pull off.
So I used my favorite weapon one last time to call Trail Riders.
When I had Thomas Becker on the line, I said, “Yes, Mr. Becker, this is Ulma Willis again. Marshal for the United States Department of Fish and Wildlife?”
“Yes, ma’am. Of course I remember you.”
“I’m following up to let you know that the issue with the condor poacher has been resolved and that we were mistaken about Vargus Mayfield. He had nothing to do with it and is no longer under investigation.”
“Oh. Well, thank you, ma’am, for that information.”
Then I told him, “Have a good day, Mr. Becker,” and got off the phone.
After that, Cricket and I went back to Grayson Mann’s garage for one final press and peek.
Okay, press and enter.
And grab!
But all we grabbed was the cowboy hat and sunglasses. Then we hurried back to the Kuos’ and got Gary to drive us over to Vargus Mayfield’s.
“Hey, Vargus,” I said when he answered the door.
“Huh?” he said back, acting more like a junior high kid than an almost college graduate.
So we told him what we wanted, and at first he didn’t really believe it, but since money was involved, we managed to twist his arm and drag him out to Trail Riders.
Now, since it would have been kinda suspicious for all of us to go inside, Cricket and Gary waited in the truck while Vargus and I went inside to run our little scam. Vargus was looking as much like Grayson as he could, wearing the cowboy hat and sunglasses, and me, I looked like regular ol’ me in my ball cap and jeans.