Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs (17 page)

“You mean, how do you intercept a homing pigeon on its route?” he asked.

“Yeah, something like that.”

I glanced over at Reggie, slumped in the seat beside me. Normally, this was just the sort of thing Reggie was into. Ask him the smallest question about how lions hunt, or mention that bats can see in the dark, and he becomes a walking, talking one-man science exhibit.
I thought homing pigeons, with their ability to fly hundreds of miles and never get lost, would be something Reggie could geek out on for hours. He would know about strapping a tiny radio transmitter to the pigeon's back and building a receiver, or implanting it with some radioactive I don't know what that we could trace using something else I'd never heard of.

But Reggie just sat. “I don't know,” he said.

This was too much.

I stared out the window. We passed a bakery thrift shop. I made a joke about who would want someone else's old bagels and muffins. Reggie just stared at the back of the seat in front of him.

“
What
is wrong with you?” I asked.

He kept staring at the seatback. “Amanda broke up with me,” he mumbled, and then I think he started to cry.

This was not good. I was a princess with a blaster in the middle of solving a mystery. I needed him to help me intercept Oreo. I didn't know what to do. I didn't dare look over. Reggie, on the bus, crying. It was impossible. I thought about what my brothers would do, but I wasn't one of my brothers. “I'm sorry,” I managed. That's what people said to me when my grandpa died, and Reggie seemed that wrecked. This wasn't like when you're crushing on someone for a week or two, then sort of forget about them when there's a long weekend and you don't see them for four days. This was genuine heartbreak.

Crap.

He got himself together then, blotted his eyes with his hands, cleared his throat. “It's like that,” he pointed at the front of my Green Day T-shirt.

I looked down, and read upside down:
I
GD
.

The heart is a hand grenade.

The parking lot at the humane society was almost empty. A few cars sat parked at the far end. The shelter was closed. The pretty new building cast a long shadow on the vacant lot behind it. I knew Frank worked all his jobs part time, so I crossed my fingers he'd already left for his security guard job. I doubt he'd show up at the de Guzmans' to walk the dogs. Just to make double sure he was gone, Reggie and I knelt behind an old car and watched the pigeon coop for ten or fifteen minutes. There was nothing. No one came in or out. The place was deserted.

“This is kind of cool out here,” said Reg. I could tell he was trying to get in the spirit of things, but I realized that I wasn't going to be able to count on him much; still, it was good to have the company.

“What should we do?”

“Well, you blew the door off that closet. We could always blow up the pigeon coop.”

“Ha ha,” I said.

“I don't know. I think the best idea is just to steal the bird.”

“Thank you, drive through please,” I said.

“Can you think of anything else?” he said.

“No, I can't. That's why you're here, Mr. Brainiac.”

“Steal the bird, that's my idea.”

“How do we know which one is Oreo?”

“Probably, he looks like an Oreo. Or the bird version of an Oreo.”

“Great,” I said.

Even though I was hands down the Most Awesome Escape Artist in my entire family and was full of magical adrenaline, I was still dead afraid of birds.

We crunched through the brush, past the Dumpsters in their tidy little storage pen, through the gap in the chain-link fence, to the pigeon coop. I could hear the evil birds cooing from inside. The human entrance for the coop was on one end of the water tank. It was one of those black wrought iron security doors some people have in place of a screen door. I didn't want Reggie to think I was some stupid girly girl afraid of birds, so I didn't stop and think.

To stop and think would be to stop and run away screaming. I pretended birds didn't bother me in the least. No worries, I thought. Pretend they're ferrets, ferrets with feathers and wings. The door wasn't locked or anything. I walked right in, with Reg right behind me.

I want to say there were eight thousand pigeons, all of whom fixed me with their evil Jell-O bird eyes and
prepared to peck my guts out, but only a few dozen birds were ambling here and there on their red feet, paying me no mind at all. The window at the opposite end of the tank was affixed with perches, and the floor was made of wooden slats, probably so Frank or someone could clean out the massive amount of bird poop.

The birds were mostly white, smaller than I expected. They had slim necks, some with iridescent feathers. A few had gray stripes on their wings.

“Check it out,” whispered Reggie. “There's your bird.”

He pointed to a bird sitting on one of the window perches. He was all black with white wings and a white band around his middle, just like an Oreo.

Perhaps it was the heat, or maybe these birds were used to humans, but as I reached out to grab Oreo, he didn't screech or flutter his wings, or try to bite me. He wasn't like Jupiter, he didn't back away, fluff his wings, quake with fear. He looked bored and turned his back, which allowed me to drop my hoodie on top of him, scoop him up, dash out of the coop, and trot through the field toward the street. We jogged a block or two until I spied Patsy's, the hamburger joint. There was a service station with a pay phone on the corner. I fished for a quarter in my back pocket and called home.

It was nearly nine o'clock when I walked through the door of Casa Clark with a pigeon wrapped in my sweatshirt, hours late for dinner. I spied the time on the big kitchen clock over the sink, where Mark Clark was washing the dinner dishes, in his business-casual khakis and pink polo shirt.

It must have been just him and Quills at the big dining room table that night. Morgan was still camping out somewhere in the desert of Eastern Oregon. It looked as if Mark Clark had made my favorite spaghetti dish, angel hair with Parmesan and black olives. I knew I was in deep trouble because he wasn't listening to his eighties music on his boom box, something he normally does when he's in the kitchen. He scrubbed the pots with too much energy and his mouth was a thin line inside the
circle of his goatee. I was too exhausted to worry about the trouble I was in.

I'd spent the short ride from the service station to Casa Clark trying to explain my day to Quills, who kept looking over at me from beneath raised eyebrows. I sat between Quills and Reggie, who looked out the window a lot and sighed. Nabbing Oreo had distracted him for a while, but now he was back to moping. Poor Reggie.

Oreo sat on my lap, swaddled in my hoodie. He was very still. I worried that maybe I'd suffocated him—you would think I wouldn't mind, given my hatred of birds—but I was grateful to him for having allowed me to pick him up without trying to peck my eyes out. I didn't want anything bad to happen to him, at least while he was being kidnapped by me.

“So let me get this straight,” said Quills. I could hear the smile in his voice. “First, you busted out of an abandoned shed at the humane society …”

“Behind the humane society in a vacant lot. And I didn't bust out. Frank let us out, because Tonio, Sylvia's brother, brought Frank the diamond. Then the cops were supposed to arrive and catch Frank red-handed, with hostages
and
the stolen diamond, but they didn't show up …”

“You called the cops and they didn't show up?” asked Quills.

“It's a long story …” I said. “But I thought Sylvia was
on my side. When we were being held captive, she acted like she hated Frank. Then Tonio showed up and Frank let her out and suddenly they were all lovey-dovey.”

“And that's when Frank chloroformed you …”

“He put a towel against my face with something that smelled like medicine and that made me sleepy.”

“Sounds like chloroform to me. Straight out of some bad seventies detective show.”

“I don't know.” I peeked inside the small bundle on my lap, even reached in and touched Oreo's black feathers with my finger.

“Here's a question for ya,” continued Quills. “Why would Louis de Guzman hide an expensive gem in his thirteen-year-old's ring instead of shipping it? The guy's loaded. He needed to save the hundred bucks or something?”

“Big-time jewelers do it all the time, Quills! Don't they, Reggie? Don't say it like it's this unbelievably ridiculous thing! And if I'm lying, then what were Reg and I doing out on Columbia Boulevard? I didn't have anything better to do than steal a pigeon out of a pigeon coop? 'Cause you know how much I love birds.”

“Well, it's not just any pigeon! It's got de Guzman's red diamond hidden in its craw. Mwa-ha-ha!” He laughed his phony evil bad guy laugh.

The air-conditioning was on high in the Electric Matador—Quills's old Ford Ranchero with the bullhorns
strapped to the front—but it didn't work, just blew warm air into my neck. I really wished Quills would get off my back. He could be a real pain sometimes. We drove for a few blocks, passed El Taco Loco, where they have the best three-dollar burritos on earth.

“You hungry?” asked Quills. His voice had softened. He was trying to make amends, but that just irritated me more. It was that boy way of saying you're sorry, where you just act nice all of a sudden.

“I feel as if I'm about to hurl, actually,” I said.

We rode in silence. I didn't even reach over to turn on the radio.

“You gotta admit, Min, this all sounds pretty farfetched.” Quills tried again.

“Look, before last week I hadn't even heard of red diamonds. I didn't even know they existed. I was just looking for something to do—you and Mark Clark are on me all the time about finding something to do, so I found something to do! You don't understand. I had that stupid accident and it made me so different from every girl I know. Before I thought I was ugly and awful, but at least that's something girls my age understand. I don't want to go to the mall and try on lip gloss. I don't want to obsess about my clothes. It would be a whole lot easier if I did, believe me!”

Quills didn't say another word.

Then Reggie did a strange thing: He reached over and
patted my hand, then held it there. It felt all right, having Reggie hold my hand, although I did something that was probably not very nice: I closed my eyes and pretended he was Kevin. Then Quills dropped Reggie off at his house, and my brother and I drove home in silence.

Mark Clark sat at the dining room table with his arms crossed and listened to the whole mad story. Oreo sat on the floor of Jupiter's wire cage in the middle of the dining room table. We couldn't think of anything else to do with him. He stood in the middle of the cage and looked around.

The more I told the story, the more impossible it seemed, even to me. At home I no longer felt like a princess with a blaster. My shoulders hurt. My back hurt. The inside of my
ears
hurt. How is that even possible? From the explosion maybe?

Mark Clark chuckled when I got to the part about using the capacitor to blow off the lock on the electrical closet door. He couldn't resist saying that he knew I'd like basic electronics.

“Quills thinks I'm lying,” I blurted out. I couldn't help saying that. It was the sight of that stupid bird in Jupiter's cage. Where was Jupiter? Was he gone forever? I slumped into a chair at the table, put my head on my arms, and cried like an idiot. “They took Jupiter, too.” I cried even harder.

My brothers just sat there. They are boys, and this is what boys do when you cry. They sit there and wait for it to be over.

“Well, I don't think you're lying,” said Mark Clark. “But I do think you're engaging in what they now call high-risk activity, but used to be called being just plain stupid.”

“How was I being stupid? I went to the humane society to talk to somebody. It was in public. I didn't get in his car or anything. It wasn't my fault that the guy I thought was Shark turned out to be Frank, the de Guzmans' dog sitter. It's not my fault Chelsea turned up and told him everything, is it?”

Mark Clark rubbed his forehead. I could sense he thought I had a point.

“Anyway,” I went on, “you can blame Morgan. I was about to just quit looking for the diamond, but he said that sometimes you just have to pursue something because it's there and because it interests you.”

Mark Clark said nothing. We watched Oreo peck around the bottom of the cage. Finally, Mark Clark said, “So there's a red diamond sitting in the craw of this bird.”

“Well, I think so. I knew they were sending a bird named Oreo out with the diamond, and this was the only bird in the coop that looked like an Oreo.”

“I can see that,” said Mark Clark.