The Fantastic Family Whipple (31 page)

“Good work, Arthur,” commended a noticeably impressed D.S. Greenley. “Now just stay put. I’m on my way.”

“Right,” said the boy. “We’ll just keep standing here, watching them as hard as we can until you get here.”

“Don’t you worry, Arthur. We’ll get them this time—thanks to your exceptional detective work. Now, don’t make
a move till I get there—I shouldn’t be more than ten minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

The line went dead, and Arthur found himself alone again inside the rain-battered phone box.

Not wanting to put the operation at risk by stepping out into the open a second time, Arthur cracked the door and stealthily extended his arm through the resulting gap. He then gave a thumbs-up, followed by two flashes of five fingers, hoping Ruby would know that he meant:
Hang on, backup is coming in ten minutes
—and not:
Proceed north, fifty-five degrees
—or:
Thumb fingers fingers
, which would have been very confusing. They really should have come up with a standardized set of signals before the stakeout, but it was too late for that now.

Retreating back into the relative cover of the phone box compartment, Arthur resolved to sit and wait. It was not yet nighttime, but the sky was dark with thunderheads, and light was scarce. Through the rain-distorted glass, he could see the glowing tips of the saboteurs’ cigarettes as the giant and the dwarf continued their cryptic conversation against the warehouse wall.

Several minutes passed, and the barrage of raindrops on the phone box roof gradually slowed to a drizzle, affording Arthur a slightly clearer view. Fortunately, the suspects had neither altered their position, nor seemed to suspect being under surveillance.

D.S. Greenley would be arriving any moment now, and the assassins would be taken away in shackles, thereby absolving Sammy the Spatula of all wrongdoing. Arthur’s heart leapt at the thought of it.

He traded another round of thumbs-ups with Ruby from her position in the alley, then shifted his eyes back to the suspects. Everything was going according to plan.

Until it didn’t.

Before Arthur knew what was happening, the giant and the dwarf extinguished their cigarettes and stepped out from underneath the overhang, where the giant began fiddling with something on the wall. The next moment, the loading bay door to their left began to open, its massive steel-sectioned face hoisted upward by some unseen motor.

Arthur leapt to his feet. His first stakeout as a junior detective was crumbling before his eyes. If his suspects were to enter the warehouse, there was no telling where they might disappear to, making it unlikely for even the police to find them. He had to do something.

Throwing the phone box door open, Arthur burst out into the misty air and charged across the street, the wild-eyed look of a man possessed carved into his face.

“Aieeeeeyah!” came the boy’s involuntary battle cry.

As the baffled giant and dwarf turned to see what sort of wounded animal was hurtling toward them, Arthur realized he had no idea what he was going to do once he reached them.

His battle cry fading into self-conscious silence, Arthur skidded to a stop a few yards in front of his suspects, where he stared up at the giant for one uneasy moment—and then down at the dwarf for another. Both men’s eyes were filled with equal parts bewilderment, annoyance, and rage, prompting Arthur to take a stumbling step backward in an abrupt bid for retreat.

“Get ’em, Arthur!” called a voice behind him.

The boy turned to find Ruby standing a few paces to his rear, her eyebrows arched in defiance. As glad as he was to see that she supported his half-baked plan, her vocal encouragement had now rendered it impossible to abandon.

Arthur turned to face his foes once again—and found that their expressions had grown even more hostile. “I…” he stammered, floundering for either a brave word—or an excuse.

The giant cut the boy off with a loud grunt, and then, covering half the distance between them in one gargantuan stride, moved menacingly toward Arthur, raising his right arm into the air. Now trembling, the boy held his hand to his face in a pathetic attempt to shield himself.

But before the crushing force of the giant’s fist could reach Arthur’s skull, there came a howl of sirens.

The next moment, two police cars screeched onto the lot on either side of them, effectively halting the giant in his tracks. The car doors flew open, and four men leapt out—three of them in full police uniform, the fourth in a gray trench coat.

“Freeze!” shouted the plain-clothed officer. “Step away from the boy!”

Exceedingly thankful for his timely arrival, Arthur immediately recognized Detective Sergeant Greenley.

“On the ground—now, now, now!” barked the sergeant.

For a moment, the giant and the dwarf simply stood there, knees half-bent and hands half-raised, seemingly stunned by the officers’ abrupt arrival. Without delay, the three uniformed men swooped in to enforce Greenley’s command, the smallest of them going for the dwarf, while the other two tackled the giant. Soon, both suspects had been brought to the ground, where they proceeded to writhe and squirm with cries of protest.

“Let me go!” squealed the dwarf.

“Hands behind your head, now!” ordered Greenley.

“You’re making a mistake!” growled the giant.

“We’ll see about that,” said Greenley as the uniformed officers clapped handcuffs onto their detainees.

Now, the series of events leading up to that moment—from Arthur leaving the phone box to the police arriving and restraining the giant and the dwarf—had taken place in a mere matter of seconds, so that the loading bay door, which had been set in motion prior to the giant’s incapacitation, was only just reaching its halfway point as Greenley uttered that soon-to-be-regretted phrase. A moment later, the bottom of the massive metal door had reached eye level, and the warehouse’s shocking interior was revealed.

It was a boardroom.

At the room’s center was an enormously long table, behind which hung a series of ornately framed painted portraits of aging men in burgundy blazers. But far stranger than the existence of such a polished meeting chamber inside so grimy an exterior were the chamber’s occupants.

In the high-backed chairs surrounding the table sat two dozen men, all wearing the same matching burgundy blazers—half of them giants and half of them dwarves.

Arthur turned to D.S. Greenley in time to see his eyes bulge in terror.

“Police! All of you—stay where you are!” cried the sergeant, knowing full well that if they decided to do otherwise, he and his men would be unable to stop them.

Fortunately, the blazered men appeared to be heeding his orders—at least for the time being—and simply sat silently glaring outward.

It was a bizarre sight indeed. Arthur had the sickening sense that he and his comrades had stumbled upon some clandestine death cult—the sort that could make a couple of children and four policemen disappear in minutes without a trace. But as the dwarf coldly addressed D.S. Greenley, an even more unexpected explanation was offered.

“You, sir, have just handcuffed the newly elected co-presidents of the Global Guild of Dwarves and Giants, on their way to deliver their inaugural speeches, no less! Congratulations, officer—this must be some sort of world record for police stupidity!”

Arthur could see that D.S. Greenley shared his own confusion.

“But—you were going for the boy!” cried Greenley, pointing his finger at the giant. “I saw you! How do you explain
that
?”

“I simply wished to give the lad a leaflet on dwarf/giant sensitivity. Check my breast pocket. There’s a stack of them in there. You might want to give one to him and his friend there—they both could badly use some education on the subject.”

Greenley nodded to his partners, who promptly hoisted the two men to their feet, their once tidy jackets now sullied and wet from the rain-slicked pavement. Standing on pointed toes, one of the officers searched the giant’s pocket, uncovering a small stack of leaflets, thereby substantiating the giant’s claim.

Not sure what to make of this, Greenley turned to the dwarf. “Where were you on the night of March the first?”

“I don’t know—do you see a calendar stitched to my sleeve?”

Greenley shot the dwarf a stern look, and he reconsidered.

“Probably a hundred miles away at the old headquarters, packing boxes. We’ve only just moved to this new location a week and a half ago. As you can see, we haven’t even had time to paint or put up the proper signage.”

“So you weren’t anywhere near the Whipple estate, then?”

“Ahh, that was the night of that self-indulgent birthday binge they host every year, wasn’t it?”

Greenley nodded.

“Weren’t invited,” replied the dwarf. “Apparently it doesn’t matter to them that we’re the leaders of one of the most respected branches of the World-Record Breakers Union, so long as we haven’t broken any world records ourselves. Some of us have more important business to attend to than constantly trying to make ourselves feel special—such as protecting the rights of exceptionally sized people everywhere! And anyway, after what ended up taking place at this year’s debacle, I’d say we owe them a debt of gratitude for
not
inviting us. As it stands now, I wouldn’t go near that house if they paid me.”

His face filling with desperation, D.S. Greenley abandoned all subtlety and blurted, “These children—one of whom is in fact Arthur Whipple—say they witnessed you leaving the scene of a murder attempt today, after two men matching your descriptions were witnessed perpetrating an act of sabotage!”

“Oh,” the giant countered calmly, “you mean the children who have been blatantly stalking us for the past half hour?”

Arthur gulped and glanced at Ruby, who widened her eyes and pulled the corner of her mouth to one side in the widely accepted expression for “oops.” It seemed they hadn’t been nearly as stealthy as they had thought.

“I mean, we’re used to having children stare at us every now and then, living in this narrow-minded society of ours,
but to be tracked like animals through the city after volunteering at an Exceptional-Size Awareness booth…I guess that’ll teach us to try and get involved with community sporting events from now on.”

“And as for these preposterous claims,” added the dwarf, “that we were somehow involved in sabotage and attempted murder simply because we match some vague description—well, clearly, we’re not the only exceptionally sized people on the planet.” He motioned to the boardroom behind him. “It could have been anyone.”

At this, one of the dwarves at the table, a tan-faced, silver-haired man, rose to stand on his chair. “Officer,” he started in an oddly deep voice, “if I may—” But he was promptly cut short.

“I’ll do the talking here, Mr. Lowe!” snapped the tiny co-president. “I won the vote fair and square, despite your shameful smear campaign; if you want to be the voice of the GGDG, you’ll have to do a far sight better at the next election!”

The silver-haired dwarf hung his shoulders, muttered something under his breath, then returned to his seat.

“Now,” sighed the dwarf in handcuffs, turning again to Greenley, “where was I? Ah, yes. Your glaring mistreatment of this guild’s members!”

“Indeed,” the giant concurred. “I truly hope you’re not suggesting we all look the same—or that it should be considered strange for two persons of contrasting sizes to socialize!”

It was at that moment Arthur noticed the giant was significantly shorter than he remembered him being at the party. The man presently standing before him couldn’t have been over eight feet tall, but the giant he had seen at the Birthday Extravaganza had measured nine feet, at least. Likewise, the dwarf now appeared significantly taller—standing almost three feet high, where the clown from the party had measured only two. Suddenly sick to his stomach, Arthur realized that he and Ruby had indeed followed the wrong giant/dwarf duo.

“I hate to say it,” concluded the dwarf, “but this sounds like a case of size-profiling in the worst degree. Not all dwarves are baby-thieves and witch servants, you know!”

“Yeah,” added the giant. “And not all giants make their bread from ground-up human bones!”

“Well,” replied the dwarf, turning unexpectedly to face his lofty companion, “let’s be honest, Stuart. That does still happen a lot more than it should. You giants do love your bone bread. I’ve actually been meaning to talk to you about this—and I wish you didn’t have to find out about it this way, but it’s already been added to the agenda for the next meeting, because frankly, it looks bad for everyone in the GGDG that you still insist on baking that stuff. Even if you have largely limited the ingredients to animal bones, we believe it’s an insensitive practice which needs to stop.”

“Who’s we?”

“The dwarves.”

“I see. Well, I never would have voted for the merger if
I’d known this is how we giants would be treated! Because, as you know, Brian, the art of bone-bread baking is an ancient giant tradition passed down through countless generations, not unlike your ridiculous custom of sneaking into people’s houses and fixing their shoes.”