Poached (26 page)

Then I noticed that directly above me was a large bubble of air. Some of the glass had still held, and there was a gap at the top, though the water was rushing to fill it. I kicked
upward and broke through. There were only a few inches left, but there was oxygen. I tilted my head back and sucked in air.

Marge and Bubba surfaced close to me, having followed my lead. They both gasped for breath as well, but the water was rising quickly.

“We have to swim now,” I told them, then took in as much air as my lungs could hold.

The water swallowed us up again.

The tube was now full, but as I'd figured, the rush of water had abated. There was no more current pushing against us. It was still a long way to the surface, though. And there were sharks everywhere.

I willed myself to be calm. I found myself thinking back to the first time my father had ever taken me snorkeling, off the coast of Kenya. “If you ever get pulled under,” he'd told me, “don't panic. Panic uses oxygen. You have a lot more air in your lungs than you realize. Just stay calm, ride out the undertow, then swim up.”

I swam toward the middle of the tube. Almost all the glass had been blown out, save for a jagged fringe along the edge of the steel ribs. I steered clear of that. The last thing I needed was to cut myself, get blood in the water and spark a feeding frenzy. I rose through the gap in the tube and kicked for the surface. Below me, Marge and Bubba followed.

The shark tank was thirty feet deep: three stories, though it
seemed more like a hundred as I swam up through it. The water was deathly cold—and my heavy winter jacket was of no use against it. In fact the jacket was now an additional threat to my life. There hadn't been time to peel it off after Bubba had finally undone my cuffs. Now it was saturated with water and weighing me down like an anchor. I tried to wriggle out of it, but couldn't get free and only ended up wasting precious seconds. As much as I tried to be calm, my muscles were still screaming for air. I kicked desperately, struggling toward the surface.

I was only about ten feet short when Taurus slammed into me.

I don't know if the bull was attacking. He might have merely been trying to chase me out of his territory. After the blast, he was no doubt on edge—and then I came swimming through his turf. Whatever the case, getting rammed by a seven-foot-long man-eater is absolutely terrifying. The shark knocked me sideways, blocking me from going any higher—and in my fright I coughed out the rest of my air.

Taurus circled around and came at me from the front this time. The bull moved with staggering speed, carving through the water like a torpedo. His mouth gaped open, displaying several rows of razor-sharp teeth.

Somewhere in the back of my brain, I remembered Dad telling me about swimming with sharks and what to do if one ever got too aggressive. Oddly, it was the exact
same advice he'd given me for dealing with Vance Jessup.

I made a fist, and as Taurus closed in, I punched the shark in the nose.

The sensation was surprisingly soft, like hitting a sponge. The bull veered away, disappearing into the distance with only a few flicks of his tail.

I had no idea if I'd scared him off, or if he was merely circling to hit me from behind again. I didn't plan to stick around and find out. I aimed for the surface.

Unfortunately, the remaining ten feet might as well have been a mile. The cold water had sucked the energy from my body, and my saturated jacket was so heavy I could barely move my arms. Swimming was now a herculean task. I tried as hard as I could, but I didn't seem to make any progress at all. My brain grew fuzzy from the lack of oxygen. My vision tunneled. My body felt like it was shutting down.

Suddenly someone plunged into the water beside me. The sharks around me darted away in fear. In my addled state, I couldn't even make out who the person was through the cloud of bubbles surrounding them.

Whoever it was reached out, grabbed my jacket, and yanked me upward.

I burst through the surface, gasping for air. The moment fresh oxygen hit my lungs, I felt like I was back from the dead. My strength instantly came back. My mind sharpened
and my vision cleared. I started treading water and found out who'd jumped in to save me.

My mother.

Her eyes were wide with fear. At the time I thought she was worried about the sharks, though I later realized she was really worried about
me
. She'd just witnessed my near death by drowning and shark attack. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” I gasped.

“Hang on to me,” she ordered. “I'll get you out of here.”

Now that Mom had proved it was safe, two security guards leaped in beside us, splashing into the shark pool like depth charges. Seconds later they surfaced with Bubba and Marge, who both gulped air as I had.

Mom looped an arm around me and sidestroked to the shallowest area of the shark tank. There was a low glass wall here that normally rose to only a few inches short of the surface. This allowed the smaller sharks to access the shallows while keeping the bigger sharks out. Since the water level had dropped in the shark pool due to the flooding of the tube, the glass wall now poked out above the surface. Mom helped me clamber up onto it. Water cascaded out of my clothes.

“I thought you were with J.J.,” I said to her.

“I never made it,” she said. “Building security kept me waiting in the lobby. And then word came over the radio about you and Marge being trapped in the tube. So I ran
over. I didn't realize that . . .” Mom's voice hitched, as though she were having trouble finishing the thought. “I had no idea that it'd collapse.” After that, she threw her arms around me and hugged me as tightly as she could.

I hugged her back, thinking about what she'd done. I wasn't quite sure how long it had been from when the tube had locked until Mom had rescued me. Fear screws up your sense of time. It had only been a few minutes at most, though. And Mom had run halfway across the park in that time. That would have been a practically Olympian pace. I could hear her heart thumping wildly in her chest, still spiking from the exertion.

Beside us Marge, Bubba, and the two guards who'd saved them clambered up onto the glass wall as well. Marge looked exhausted. Bubba was still gibbering with fear. “Sharks,” he whimpered. “Sharks everywhere.”

I broke the hug with my mother. “The tube
didn't
collapse,” I informed her. “Hank the Tank blew it up.”

Mom reacted with astonishment. “How?”

“He put some kind of explosive on it. There was a remote detonator.”

Mom's eyes narrowed angrily, but then I started shivering and she grew concerned about me again. “We need to dry you off,” she said.

From the top of the glass wall, we could get to the edge of the exhibit. There were now lots of people crowding the
viewing deck. Most of them were park security, but there were also the Shark Odyssey staff and some random FunJungle employees who'd raced over from other exhibits. (It appeared someone had thought to prevent tourists from coming in.) Several people reached out to help Mom and me climb over the wall onto the viewing deck. Others helped us pry off our wet jackets and put their dry ones around us.

Bubba and Marge came over the wall behind us, though they needed the help of a lot more people to do it.

The park's emergency medical staff burst through the doors. I caught a glimpse of a crowd of tourists gathered around the building, being held at bay by a few guards. The medics surrounded Bubba, Marge, and me, wrapping us in warm blankets and checking our vital signs. Mom and the guards who'd gone into the tank for Bubba and Marge grabbed blankets too.

Next, the policemen who'd been assigned to take Dad into custody arrived with Dad in tow. Apparently, they'd realized this was more important, although Dad was still handcuffed. The cops brought him directly to me.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Thanks to Mom,” I said. “She dove into the shark tank to get me.”

Dad looked to Mom, who shrugged as though this were no big deal. “Of course she did,” Dad said. Then he gave her a kiss so big I had to avert my eyes.

The other police were checking on Bubba right next to us. He was wrapped in several blankets, but a great deal of his pale white flesh still peeked out from under them. He didn't seem to care, though. Now that he was safe, his fear had turned to anger. “Did anyone catch the guy who did this?” he demanded. “The guy in the Astros cap?”

“We got him,” a security guard reported. According to the patch on her uniform, her last name was Patmore. “He was caught trying to slip out of the employee entrance to the park.”

“Where is he?” Marge asked.

“The park-security holding cell,” Officer Patmore replied.

Bubba glanced toward my father. “Unlock his cuffs,” he ordered his policemen.

“But he interfered with an arrest—” one began.

“An unlawful arrest,” Bubba corrected. “He was only trying to protect his kid. The guy in the holding cell is our man. Has he said anything?”

Everyone looked to Officer Patmore expectantly.

“No,” she admitted. “He took the fifth and demanded a lawyer.”

Bubba sighed with annoyance. “Of course he did. The guy's a pro. We won't get squat out of him.”

An idea suddenly came to me. Despite everything that had happened, I broke into a smile. “I know how to make him talk,” I said.

Dad ran home to get
Mom and me some new clothes, and once we were dressed and warm, we headed to Mom's office at Monkey Mountain. Marge and Bubba met us there. While Marge had some spare uniforms at FunJungle, Bubba didn't, so he'd been forced to dress in clothes from FunJungle Emporium: neon-blue sweatpants, an Eleanor Elephant T-shirt, and a lime-green XXXL “FunJungle Fanatic” sweatshirt. Rather than a policeman, he now looked like a color-blind tourist.

None of the other police or security staff were with us, although a few guards were posted outside the office door. The office wasn't big enough for a crowd—and Bubba wanted privacy anyhow. Dad and I were only there because Mom had insisted on it in return for the police using the Monkey Mountain facilities.

The GPS tracker on my ankle bracelet had shorted out in the shark tank, so Bubba removed it. He didn't bother putting a new one on, as he now had another suspect in the crimes at FunJungle:

Hank the Tank sat in a chair with his hands cuffed in his lap. He still wore his orange Astros cap, but for once he didn't have his sunglasses, as Bubba had confiscated them. This was the first time I'd ever seen his eyes: They were surprisingly small and dark, like a pig's. Although he'd been caught fleeing the scene of a crime, Hank didn't look the slightest bit concerned. In fact he wore a cocky grin, as though facing off against us was going to be fun.

Bubba, however, was back to his normal, tough-guy self. Any weakness he'd shown in the shark exhibit was long gone. “I'm only giving you one chance to come clean,” he warned Hank. “And if you don't, we'll do this the hard way.”

“What's that?” Hank asked, nodding toward Bubba's protruding belly. “You gonna sit on me?”

Bubba furrowed his brow. “Why'd you rig the tunnel to blow?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Hank replied.

“Like heck you don't,” Marge snarled. “We've got security video of you entering the shark exhibit shortly before the tube went and taking off right after.”

“There's a lot of guys who look like me,” Hank said, knowing full well that wasn't true.

There was a sudden commotion outside the door. Then J.J. McCracken stormed in, seething with anger. Everyone snapped to attention, but J.J. didn't pay us any mind. He went right up to Hank and demanded, “Where's my koala?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Hank said again, like it was his mantra.

“Don't shovel that manure at me,” J.J. told him. “I know who you are and I know who you work for. You might think you're making the right move, protecting Warren Ogilvy like this, but you don't know that snake the way I do. He'd sell his own mother down the river if he thought it'd save his skin. His lawyers won't bail you out of this. They'll throw you to the lions. But if you tell us the truth, I'll do my darndest to make sure you get off scot-free. So why don't you wise up and spill the beans?”

“You're making a mistake,” Hank said. “I'm just an innocent tourist.”

J.J. snapped. He turned so red I thought steam might whistle out of his ears. “Don't play dumb with me! It's bad enough that you destroyed my shark exhibit, but there's a koala's life hanging in the balance here!”

He might have raged on, but Marge placed a hand on his arm and said, “Before you go on, sir, we have a plan to get Mr. Duntz here to talk.”

J.J. whirled on Marge. “We do?”