Whale Done, page 20
“I didn’t even want to do that! All I did was suggest that TransPacific find some fall guys to pin the explosion on. I had no idea that they would force me to do it. But they didn’t want to bring in anyone else. Am I getting that getaway car or not?”
“We’re working on it,” a policeman informed her.
“Well work faster!” Trish yelled. “This koala smells like bad cheese.”
There was a soft rustle of wings above me, and Poe the raven landed on my shoulder once again. He had yet another shrimp clutched in his beak, which he quickly gulped down. He had eaten so much that he seemed to have gotten heavier since I’d last held him.
Trish looked at me skittishly. “What are you doing with that bird?”
“Nothing,” I said. “He just landed on me.”
“Why?”
“Because he likes me, I guess.”
“Well don’t try anything funny with it!”
“What can I possibly do with a bird?” I asked, although the moment I said it, I had an idea.
Trish wasn’t the only one watching Poe with concern. The indri was too, which made sense, as one of the natural enemies of lemurs are birds of prey. Ravens don’t hunt the way that hawks or eagles do, but to a lemur, he still looked like a threat.
On the other side of Trish and the indri, the party was descending even further into madness. The orangutan was gorging on a fruit plate, the wolf had joined the leopard in devouring everything at the carving station, most of the buffet tables had been toppled, and the chimpanzee had finally tired of throwing food and was now wallowing in a giant bowl of pudding. The only desserts left on the table were a smattering of baked goods.
“Poe,” I said to the raven, “get me a cookie.”
The bird obediently took to the air, flying in the most direct route to the dessert table, which took it directly over Trish and the indri.
The lemur squawked in fright and behaved in exactly the way Shasta had told me it would: it urinated all over Trish.
“My dress!” Trish shrieked, and flung her hostage to the ground.
The security guard who she’d stolen the Taser from immediately tackled her.
The weapon tumbled from her grasp and landed beside the indri.
Trish tried to grab the Taser, screaming in frustration. “This dress cost three thousand dollars! And you ruined it, you stupid koala!” Her fingers grazed the weapon’s handle.
Realizing that she meant harm, the indri reflexively grabbed the Taser away from her and accidentally pulled the trigger. The Taser fired at Trish, shocking her so badly that her entire body quivered.
The police rushed the stage. Brock Stoneman was right behind them. Now that he’d realized the leopard meant him no harm, he was playing the hero to the hilt, seemingly unaware that he had banana cream filling caked in his hair. “It’s all right!” he announced to the crowd. “You’re all safe now!”
A generator promptly exploded, setting even more of the fake jungle on fire.
“Although,” Brock added, “it might be smart to head for the exits. I’ll lead the way!” He fled through the crowd to escape.
Poe flew back to my shoulder with a chocolate chip cookie and dropped it into my hand.
The police were handcuffing Trish, who was wailing. “I don’t want to go to jail! I’ll give you incriminating evidence on everyone involved in the whale explosion! Or I know of plenty of other criminals I could rat out!”
Suzanne Patmore came along. She was watching everything with a somewhat shell-shocked expression.
“Sorry about the party,” I said.
“Honestly, this will generate far more publicity than a normal party would have.” Suzanne looked down at the indri. “I can’t believe Trish just got tased by a lemur.”
“I can,” Summer said. “This sort of thing happens all the time when Teddy’s around.”
“Really?” Suzanne looked at me curiously. “Your life sounds like it’d make for a great movie. We should talk.”
Epilogue THE POD
“Dolphins off the starboard bow!” Doc shouted.
I looked in the direction he was pointing. Sure enough, a half dozen dorsal fins were slicing through the water, only a hundred yards away from us.
“I see them!” Cass whooped enthusiastically, then turned our speedboat, and we raced across the ocean toward the dolphins.
We had returned to Long Beach three days after the movie premiere to search for whales again, although this time, Cass had convinced NOAA to loan us a bigger, faster, and safer boat. The idea was to spend more time watching the giant creatures, since our last encounter had been rushed (and very frightening). The boat seated ten people and had a cabin below with a kitchenette and—more importantly—a small bathroom. The large motors on the stern had allowed us to range farther from the port, so we were now cruising along the bluffs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It was only a few miles from the port, but we were still out of sight of the container ships and the oil rigs. Here, steep cliffs rose directly from the water’s edge; at times, with the pristine rocky coast on one side and the ocean on the other, I could almost imagine that we off were in the wilderness, rather than on the fringe of the second largest metropolitan area in the United States.
Since there was plenty of room aboard, Summer and Kandace had come with us. The trip was a reward for our help figuring out who had been behind killing the whale—and then blowing up the carcass. Trish had quickly made good on her offer to turn over evidence against her accomplices in return for less jail time. She had provided dozens of emails and recorded phone calls with executives at TransPacific Shipping, revealing their desperate plot to destroy the evidence that the Golden Lotus had been responsible for the death of a second whale.
The emails also provided evidence as to how the fatal incident had occurred. It turned out that the captain of the Golden Lotus had ignored the official shipping lanes laid out to protect marine wildlife. Instead of staying on the western side of Channel Islands National Park near Malibu, he had traveled to the east of them, following the narrow strait between the islands and the mainland. This had saved a slight bit of time and fuel, but he had passed directly through a marine sanctuary, where the ship had struck the young whale. Once all this information was made public, TransPacific Shipping had immediately accused the captain of violating maritime law, while the captain claimed the company had ordered him to do it to cut down on costs. They were already suing each other.
Meanwhile, those same emails revealed that TransPacific hadn’t forced Trish to recruit Chase and Scooter as fall guys. In fact, the plan had been Trish’s idea from the start, although TransPacific had hired the demolition experts to blow up the whale. Trish wasn’t doing as well financially as it appeared. All the jewelry and expensive dresses she wore to make herself look successful—as well as her high-end sports car—had left her in massive debt. She had been desperate to dig herself out, which was how she had ended up freelancing for TransPacific in the first place—and why she had been willing to break the law for them. The company had promised her a large cash payment in return for getting rid of the dead whale. Turning over evidence had helped her case, but Cass felt that, at the very least, Trish was going to end up doing several hundred hours of community service as a penalty for her crime.
“If there’s any justice, they’ll make her pick every single piece of plastic off the beaches in Southern California,” Cass had said. “That should take a few centuries.”
We hadn’t seen any whales yet that day, which had been a bummer, but the dolphins looked to be a nice consolation. As we got closer to them, it became evident that the pod was quite large.
“There must be a hundred!” Summer exclaimed.
“Or more!” Kandace cried. She hadn’t been nearly as enthusiastic to go out on the boat as the rest of us, but now, seeing the dolphins, she seemed giddy with delight.
I certainly was. The dolphins weren’t bothered by our presence at all. In fact, several of them came right up alongside us and surfed in the wake that our boat created. Their bodies shimmered just beneath the surface of the water. At times they were so close I could have leaned over the edge to pet them. I could see that they had very distinct coloration: their bellies were white, their sides were gray and their backs and fins were black.
“They’re spinners!” Cass yelled over the roar of the motors, meaning spinner dolphins. They were the most common dolphins off the coast of California and were named for their habit of leaping from the water. Sure enough, as we watched, one sprang out of the ocean not far ahead of us and twirled in the air.
The largest of the dolphins around us were seven feet long, although I also spotted some three-footers that were probably less than a year old. No matter their age, they were all surprisingly fast, easily keeping pace with the speedboat as it raced along. Occasionally, another dolphin would burst from the water and spin. It really looked as though they were having fun, enjoying seeing us just as much as we enjoyed seeing them.
“It’s a shame Binka couldn’t come today,” Kandace said. “She would have loved this.”
“I think Binka’s having a pretty good day anyhow,” Summer replied.
Like Trish, Jackson Cross had been happy to turn over evidence against his accomplice to make himself look better; in this case, it was Roswell Crowe. The Colony had quickly turned on Roswell when they learned he’d been destroying beaches all along the coast to shore up Jackson’s beach, and so had the neighbors around Roswell’s second home in Bel Air. (“It’s just more public relations,” Cass had noted. “These billionaires burn twenty times the fossil fuel that normal people do to air-condition their ninety-room mansions—and use a hundred times the fresh water to irrigate their giant lawns—but then they turn into huge crusaders for the environment when it makes them look good.”)
Roswell had already been under investigation for shady business practices with his construction company. The revelation that he had also committed environmental crimes had badly weakened his negotiating position for his divorce, and Binka’s lawyers had pounced. Binka had gone to her legal firm to renegotiate the contract that day. Her lawyers had gleefully informed her that, by the time they were done, in addition to the Malibu house, Binka might end up with the Bel Air home as well, and maybe even the condo in Aspen.
Meanwhile, many of Jackson Cross’s neighbors were threatening to sue him for altering the beach without permission. Chase Buckingham’s father, the big-shot lawyer, was leading the charge.
Of course, Chase’s father was also suing TransPacific for framing his son—and for reckless endangerment and property damage as a result of the exploding whale. Many other residents of the Colony had joined this lawsuit, citing everything from the loss of multimillion-dollar paintings to nervous breakdowns as a result of “volatile cetacean carnage.” Cass claimed that the case would certainly take years to settle, but it could ultimately put TransPacific out of business.
“Even better,” Cass had said, “it’s made the public aware of how much harm the shipping industry can do to marine life. Now that Brock Stoneman is tweeting about how TransPacific killed two whales out of negligence, millions of people are taking notice. Maybe that will turn into some actual support for policing shipping lanes—which could even result in more funding for NOAA and other organizations.”
I knew there was also a good chance that this wouldn’t happen, but Cass had a point. Brock Stoneman and the other wealthy residents of the Colony could reach huge sections of the population in ways that other people couldn’t. When they talked about things, their followers listened. Ironically, in trying to avoid bad publicity by blowing up the whale, TransPacific had created bad publicity for itself that was a hundred times worse.
After a while, the dolphins got tired of swimming alongside us. Or maybe they simply grew bored of us. The pod veered away from our boat and disappeared into the depths of the ocean.
Cass cut back on the throttle. We slowed down, and the noise of the engines dropped to a low purr so that we no longer had to shout to be heard.
Doc and Kandace took advantage of the lull in the action to sit in the stern of the boat with Cass. Summer and I stayed at the bow, keeping an eye on the ocean, hoping the dolphins might change their minds and come back.
“That was amazing,” Summer declared. “Best part of the whole week.”
I shot her a sidelong glance. “Even better than getting to meet Wynn Gyoko?”
“Wynn was cool,” she replied with a grin, “but he wasn’t that cool.”
“He’s the lead singer of one of the biggest bands in the world,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but he hasn’t even solved one mystery. Whereas my boyfriend has solved so many, I’ve lost count.”
Things had gotten much better between us over the days since the movie premiere. Even though the party itself had ended in disaster, our relationship had come out stronger. After being reminded of what a great team we made, we had apologized to each other for how we had behaved and figured out a compromise to solve our problems. Summer had decided to tweet that she wasn’t seeing Wynn Gyoko because she was in a relationship with someone else, but then refused to give any more details, allowing me to keep my life private. The media had instantly gone bananas, wondering who Summer’s secret boyfriend was, which ended up getting her even more followers than she’d had when everyone thought she was dating Wynn.
That had forced us to change some of our vacation plans. Kandace had wanted to take us to some fancy restaurants and do some more shopping in Beverly Hills, but now we couldn’t for fear of being hounded by the paparazzi. Instead, we needed to lie low, spending most of our days on beaches and hiking trails—which was perfectly fine with both Summer and me.
However, we did have two special things planned for the days ahead. Doc had arranged a behind-the-scenes tour of the San Diego Zoo Safari Park for us—and we were supposed to have lunch with Suzanne Patmore and her creative executives to discuss optioning the story of our crime-solving adventures.
It seemed that the dolphins weren’t coming back, so Summer and I abandoned the bow and joined the others at the stern. We had brought a cooler full of sandwiches and drinks, which the adults were digging into.
“If you think it’s beautiful over here,” Cass was telling Doc, “wait until you see the Gulf of Baja.”
“We’re going to Mexico?” Summer asked, excitedly. “Isn’t that awfully far for this boat?”
The adults turned to us. Cass looked amused while Doc appeared slightly embarrassed.
“You’re not going to Mexico,” Cass informed her, then pointed to herself and Doc. “We are.”
“For another sea lion rescue?” I asked.
Now Cass grew even more amused, while Doc grew even more embarrassed.
“You can really be a dummy sometimes,” Summer told me.
Finally, I understood. “Oh. It’s like a romantic thing.”
“Yes,” Cass confirmed, and Doc turned redder yet.
Summer looked to Doc. “You finally got up the nerve to ask her out?”
“No,” Cass said. “I finally got tired of waiting for him to do it.”
“I have plenty of vacation time racked up,” Doc explained. “So I decided to extend my trip for another week. After we all go to San Diego, Cass and I are going to keep heading south.” Despite his embarrassment, Doc looked as happy as I’d ever seen him. That wasn’t saying too much, because Doc was usually crabby, but it was still a good thing.
“I think that’s wonderful,” Kandace proclaimed.
“So do I,” Summer agreed.
“And me,” I added.
“Me too,” Doc said, looking at Cass, who blushed.
Kandace’s phone chirped, indicating she had received a text. She looked at it, then gasped with excitement.
“What is it?” Summer asked.
“It’s from Suzanne Patmore’s office,” Kandace reported. She had been handling details with the studio, since Summer and I were still kids. “They want to know if you’d be open to Brock Stoneman joining the meeting tomorrow. If the movie happens, he’d like to play your father, Teddy. Would you be all right with that?”
“Of course!” I exclaimed, then thought to add, “And I’m sure my dad would be thrilled. Brock’s his favorite actor.”
I had finally told my parents the truth about everything that had happened during my time in California. There was no way I could have kept it a secret; the chaos at the movie premiere had made the national news. I had to do it twice, since Dad was still in Argentina, and while both had chastised me for not being completely honest with them, I still felt much better afterward. Plus, neither of my parents was quite as upset as I had thought they might be. If anything, Mom was upset at Doc for dragging me into the investigation. I knew she had called him and given him an earful, but he was in such a good mood because of Cass, he took it all in stride.
“This is turning out to be quite a trip,” Kandace observed.
“Sure is,” Summer agreed. “Teddy has solved two crimes, destroyed a movie premiere, seen a whale explode, and gotten a movie deal.” She looked to me and teased, “Good thing your house burned down.”
“You’ll be getting a new one soon enough,” Kandace said. “J.J.’s on it. He’s having brand-new top-of-the-line trailers delivered for your family and everyone else as soon as he can. By the time school starts, you’ll have a home again. And until then, you and your family are welcome to stay with us.”
“Thanks,” I told her. The last week certainly hadn’t been perfect, but it had been a good trip, overall. Even though we hadn’t seen a—
“Whale!” Summer shouted, pointing off the port bow.
Sure enough, a telltale spout of mist hung in the air a few football fields away from us. A second later, a second spout erupted close by.
“There’s another!” Doc exclaimed.
“All right! We’ve got some blues!” Cass leaped to the wheel and fired up the engines.
Summer and I ran to the bow so we’d have the best view possible.
