Tyrannosaurus Wrecks by Gibbs Stuart

Author:Gibbs, Stuart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2020-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

15 SNAKES ALIVE

The billboards for Snakes Alive began to appear along the interstate twenty miles before we got there. SEE THE WORLD’S MOST DEADLY SNAKE! SEE THE WORLD’S MOST VICIOUS CROCODILE! SEE A REAL LIVE MAN-EATER! Each had a lurid painting of an animal next to it: a king cobra, a saltwater crocodile, and a Bengal tiger. Each mile or so, we passed another sign. At the bottom of each was the inevitable phrase: MORE FUN THAN FUNJUNGLE—AND A WHOLE LOT CHEAPER!

“It should say ‘a whole lot sleazier,’ ” Summer grumbled.

It was late in the morning after my campout at the Bonotto Ranch. The rest of the previous night had been uneventful after our mystery guests had escaped. Our presence there had scared them off for good. I had fallen asleep shortly after returning to the campsite with Sage, Dash, and Ethan; it had been a very long day.

I had woken early and searched for any clues I might have missed in the fading light the night before. Downriver, I found the footprints of our mystery guests, but they were from the kind of hiking boot that pretty much everyone wore. I didn’t find anything new around the dig, not that I really expected to come across anything else as blatant as the Weems Aerospace pen. But it was still incredible to be in the middle of a real dinosaur dig, surrounded by honest-to-goodness tyrannosaur bones.

We had to strike camp early. Sage needed to help out around the ranch, Dash and Ethan had to get to their summer jobs, and Summer had lined up more investigating for us to do. Once again, I hadn’t agreed to this so much as been thrust into it. I had turned off my phone when I went to sleep, and when I turned it back on, I found a long text chain from Summer saying that she was heading to Snakes Alive in the morning to question Rick, and she was doing it with or without me.

I also found a series of e-mails that I had been included on between Summer and Tommy Lopez.

Summer had written to Tommy with an update about what had happened at the Barksdales’ and our lead to Rick at Snakes Alive. Tommy had responded that this was great work, but then said he was still going to be out of town on business at least another day, at which point Summer had suggested approaching Rick with me, posing as normal kids who wanted to buy a snake. To my surprise, Tommy had been supportive. He even thought there might be an advantage to having Summer and me to talk to Rick before he did; no one would expect two teenagers to be running a sting operation. If Rick took the bait and offered to sell us something illegally, then Tommy could use that as evidence to argue for investigating Snakes Alive to his boss.

We weren’t being asked to do anything dangerous, Summer pointed out. We were merely going shopping. Except, instead of looking for books or clothes, we were looking for snakes.

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