Hoax for Hire Read online

  My hand was on fire, and the feeling reminded me of the time Curtis had accidentally slammed my fingers in the van door, except worse because the van door hadn’t stayed shut. Panic clouded my brain, and I felt light-headed. For a second I thought it was from pain before I realized that my regulator had fallen out of my mouth when I screamed. I reached for it with my free hand, but it was just out of reach, twisted behind me and stuck on my air tank. My lungs burned. I was going to die down here.

  Frantic, I gave my hand another ineffective jerk, but Altie had me in her jaws and wasn’t letting go. I remembered the button under her jaw, but I knew from past experience that turning her off wouldn’t open her mouth. However, at that moment my lungs were starting to do that weird heaving thing inside my chest like they could bust through my rib cage and out if they just tried hard enough. Logic didn’t really matter anymore. I fumbled around for the button; my eyes burned as I tried to see through the murky water. Finally I found it and brought my free hand down on the button again and again, the water making everything feel like it was in slow motion. When Altie’s jaw still didn’t budge, I fumbled for the button and pulled downward. It resisted for a moment before springing free and bringing a trail of twisted wires after it. Altie’s eyes began blinking frantically, and I pushed my fingers inside her head, grabbed a wad of wires, and pulled backward again. Black spots were starting to appear in my vision, and I knew I only had seconds left before I lost consciousness. All too aware that this was my last shot, I pulled back and decked the sea monster right in its giant blinking left eye. Altie opened her jaws, and my hand popped free.

  I fumbled wildly for my regulator and shoved it in my mouth, inhaling the best mouthful of air in the history of ever. Crisis one solved, I used the mask-clearing skills I was now grateful Gramps had insisted I practice over and over on those nights in the pool. Blinking the last of the water out of my eyes, I held my hand up for inspection to the light from my now-crooked headlamp. My scuba glove was mangled and my hand was bleeding from a few small puncture wounds, but all my fingers were still there, and considering I’d just been bitten by a sea monster, I was going to consider it a win.

  I turned and swam for shore, my injured hand held tight against my chest.

  Chapter Three

  I actually expected some sympathy when I dragged myself dripping and half frozen out of the river, bleeding hand held piteously against my chest. Which just goes to show that a prolonged lack of oxygen can really do things to your brain.

  “Took you long enough,” Curtis said, grabbing the tank off my back.

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “And here I thought the empty air tank, impending hypothermia, and mangled hand were just perks of the job.” I gingerly worked my shredded glove off my hand and held it up to see the damage. It had started to swell and turn an impressive purple color, although my skin had a blue tint to it from the cold so it was kind of hard to tell. My insides felt like one big frozen block of ice.

  Curtis glanced at my hand, confirming that it was still there, I guess, and slung my air tank over his shoulder. “You’ll live. Now hustle. The EWs could be back here any minute, and you aren’t exactly inconspicuous.”

  I considered telling him that I could give a sea monster’s backside about the eyewitnesses and whether or not I was inconspicuous after my near-death experience, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. I’d spent the majority of my life swallowing the things that I wanted to say, and today wasn’t the day to change that habit. Sometimes I imagined myself as one of those gigantic dormant volcanos: peaceful on the outside but lots of hot angry lava hidden away on the inside.

  I was just turning to give the darkening river one last dirty look when something moved in the bushes off to my left, and I froze. Gramps always said there was nothing worse than an unaccounted-for eyewitness, although after almost dying at the bottom of the river, I found that hard to believe. I waited to see if something moved again. Was my mind playing tricks on me, or had I really just seen a pair of eyes? Should I call Curtis back? If someone was watching, we would have blown the biggest sea monster job Dad had ever been lucky enough to land. I blinked the last of the water from my eyes and stared at the bushes. A moment later a squirrel came running out of the underbrush, and I sagged in relief. It was just my oxygen-deprived imagination seeing things like blond hair and binoculars. Behind me Curtis let out a shrill whistle to hurry it up, and I turned and jogged after him on numb legs toward our van.

  The van was one of those long white, windowless eyesores favored by kidnappers, drug dealers, and my dad, and Curtis already had it running by the time I managed to finally haul myself into the front seat. He’d turned the heat to full blast, and I almost groaned as the hot air hit my frozen skin. Before I had a chance to peel off my wet suit to really get the thawing-out process started, Curtis was gunning the van backward through the trees and away. It was a rule that you never hung around the scene of a hoax in case any EWs decided to come poking around, but I still found myself caught off guard as I was thrown forward, barely avoiding a head-on collision with the front windshield.

  “Easy,” I yelped, fumbling to secure my seat belt with my good hand as he took a turn way too fast. Curtis didn’t respond. His blue eyes held no hint of their usual humor. I knew he’d been nervous about pulling off this hoax without Gramps and Dad, but I’d underestimated how serious my normally easygoing brother could be when he suddenly found himself in charge. Curtis’s mouth was pressed into a grim line that made him look a lot like our mom used to. Even though she’d been gone for years, I could still remember her wearing that exact expression, usually when Dad was explaining his next hoaxing job or when he’d come home with bullet holes in the back of the van.

  A few minutes later Curtis pulled into a gas station and parked. “Let me see your hand,” he said.

  “Don’t start acting like you care now that we are away from your precious EWs,” I said as I struggled to remove the wet suit that had welded itself onto my body. This must be what a snake feels like when it’s trying to shed its skin, I thought as I twisted and flapped my arms in an attempt to free them. Curtis reached across and gave the suit a firm yank that popped my arms free. I breathed a sigh of relief as the van’s heat finally hit my bare skin.

  Curtis grabbed my arm and held up my injured hand, examining it like he actually knew what he was doing, which he didn’t.

  “What the heck happened?” he said.

  “Altie bit me,” I said. “Hard.”

  Curtis raised an eyebrow at me. “Altie bit you?” he repeated. “As in, our fake sea monster decoy?”

  “No, I ran into the real thing down there,” I said, cold and wet and irritable. “Don’t be dumb.”

  “I’m not being dumb,” Curtis said. “You could have. Gramps swears he saw the real Altie when he was my age.”

  “Right,” I said dryly as I poked gingerly at one of the deeper wounds. If this injury ruined my chances at the Culver photography scholarship, I was going to personally turn that Altie decoy into mulch.

  “Flex your fingers,” Curtis commanded. I complied, wincing as the movement made a few of the punctures bleed sluggishly. I could probably still type, I reasoned. No one said I had to draft all my essays by hand before I typed them up. But my final piece was due to the scholarship board in less than a week, and between getting hauled across the state for the Altie job and now this, it would be a minor miracle if I finished it on time.

  Curtis was still examining my hand, and I sighed and raised an eyebrow at him. “Feeling guilty that you cared more about the EWs than your brother’s hand?” I asked, wondering if I should tell him about my moment of panic when I thought I saw someone in the bushes, before deciding against it. What was there to tell? That I saw a squirrel? I was already looking pretty stupid for letting a fake sea monster bite me.

  “Not feeling even a little guilty,” Curtis said, letting go. “Just wondering how the heck you’re going to explain this to Gramps without getti
ng a lecture and his boot up our you-know-whats.”

  I groaned. I hadn’t even thought of that yet, although Curtis was exaggerating. Not about the lecture—that was a sure thing—about the boot. The only thing Gramps stuck his boot up was a very tricky Yeti suit he’d had to wear in Tibet once. Now that Curtis had freed my hand, I sat up and started working at the bottom half of the wet suit. The sooner it was off, the sooner I’d be able to feel my frozen butt cheeks again. The temperature gauge on the car said it was fifty degrees outside, and I knew in the big scheme of things that wasn’t that cold, but I was a Georgia boy, and we didn’t do cold. Not really.

  “I wouldn’t take that all the way off if I were you,” Curtis warned.

  I glanced up at him and frowned. “Why’s that?”

  “Because you’re just going to have to put it back on again in a few hours so we can disassemble Altie and pull the anchors. And there’s nothing worse than putting back on a cold, wet wet suit.”

  I held up my mangled hand. “I beg to differ.”

  Curtis snorted. “It’s your own stupid fault if Altie bit you.” I stuck my tongue out at him as he climbed past me into the back of the van to get on his own wet suit and check out the remaining air tanks. Hurt hand or no hurt hand, disassembling Altie was a two-man job. Feeling resigned, I leaned my head back against the battered seat of the van and shut my eyes as I let the top half of my body bake in the glorious blast of the heating vents while my lower half stayed frozen in soggy misery. Man, I hated sea monster jobs.

  Chapter Four

  Eight hours later we were on our way home, and I was finally starting to feel my toes again. I sat with them pressed against the heating vent like they were hot dogs over a fire, and it was awesome. The fact that Curtis hadn’t even mentioned the strong foot smell that had permeated the entire van meant that he was either still too frozen to notice or too tired to care—probably a combination of both. Behind us, Altie’s dismembered body was strapped to the inside of the van with bright red bungee cords, meticulously disassembled and loaded. I found myself giving her ugly crocodile mug dirty looks from time to time as my hand throbbed. I’d won our battle, but that fist-sized dent in her head and the mess of ripped-out wires were going to be really fun to explain to Dad. I’d have to really play up the near-death experience, but even that probably wouldn’t get me completely off the hook for mangling one of his precious monsters. While I’d been worried about hiding my injury from Gramps, I was more worried about hiding the wrecked equipment from Dad. I sniffed. Dad wouldn’t notice an injury unless it included a full body cast, and even then somebody would probably have to point it out to him.

  Curtis glanced at me. “Should we go to the hospital to see if you need stitches? Or an X-ray or something?”

  I shook my head. I was pretty sure nothing was seriously wrong with my hand. “No, we just need to get home. Besides,” I snorted, “can you imagine trying to explain it? Somehow I don’t think we could just cruise in there and tell them that a sea monster tried to take a chunk out of me.”

  “Are you sure?” Curtis asked. “Because if your hand turns green and falls off or something, Gramps will never let me hear the end of it.”

  “I’m sure,” I repeated, although that lovely possibility had never actually occurred to me. “How did meeting the client go?” I asked. In the rush to get Altie out of the lake, I’d forgotten to ask the most important question: Had we done the job well enough to get paid?

  Curtis nodded. “I was a little worried at first because the beach was deserted when I got there. Luckily an entire busload of field-tripping kids showed up before I had to resort to any kind of drastic measures to draw a crowd.”

  “Gramps doesn’t approve of drastic measures,” I said.

  Curtis shrugged. “I needed everyone’s attention on that river when Altie made her appearance, so I was prepared to get all kinds of drastic. Especially since our client was there to see it all go down. We’ve never had that before. Talk about pressure.”

  “But you did it?” I said, wanting the clarification.

  “Done and done,” Curtis said. “It was just a matter of directing the loudest kid’s attention to the river at the right time, and I let him do the rest while I supervised the situation and made sure everyone remembered to document the amazing occurrence by yelling things like, ‘Where’s my phone? Get a picture of that thing! Is that a sea monster?’ You know. The usual stuff. Anyways, the thirty grand will get wired to Dad’s account once he completes the final sea monster hoax.”

  “Then what’s in there?” I asked, jerking my chin toward the fat envelope Curtis had shoved between the front windshield and the dash. “You were just supposed to confirm with him that we pulled off the third hoax to his specifications.”

  Curtis nodded. “I did that. He wasn’t very excited to see me and not Dad, but he cheered up when I told him that, for a bonus five hundred dollars cash, I’d get him an extra two eyewitnesses. The more people who got an eyeful of Altie, the bigger the headlines would be. And you know that’s all he really cares about.”

  “Was that what took so long?” I asked, feeling slightly annoyed as I remembered my excruciatingly long wait in freezing cold water.

  “Five hundred bucks is five hundred bucks,” Curtis said. “You know the rules. Always go above and beyond, or they will find someone else to hire.”

  I glanced over at Curtis and scoffed, “Do you really believe that garbage Gramps says about the Gerhard family?”

  He shrugged. “I do. Dad said they put in a bid for this job too and lost. Why else would Dad and Gramps be so twitchy about keeping our jobs and contacts secret?”

  “Here’s a thought,” I said. “Because everything we do is illegal?”

  “Well, Gerhard family or no Gerhard family,” Curtis said, “Altie is one of our recurring gigs and the easiest since it’s practically in our backyard. So a few extra EWs is always a good thing.”

  “I guess,” I grumbled, not sure five hundred dollars was worth risking hypothermia for.

  “I guess?” Curtis said. “You and I both know that if we screwed this up, then we’d be eating the tickets to Scotland and Africa for Dad and Gramps. And the last thing we need is to be spending money we don’t have.”

  “I know that,” I said, thinking about all the overdue notices from the bank that had been coming in the mail. Hoaxing in general didn’t pay well or even at all sometimes. Half the time Dad did hoaxes for a couple hundred bucks or less, and even those jobs had been getting harder and harder to come by recently. Curtis was convinced that hoaxing was going to die out completely if we didn’t take the business digital, but that suggestion always got shut down hard. So it was no wonder that a payday this big had snapped Dad out of his usual preoccupied fog. I could still picture the way his eyes had lit up as he told us about the Sea Monster Grand Slam. He’d called it the hoax job of the century, and it was definitely the best-paying one we’d ever had by a long shot.

  Sea monsters were pretty run-of-the-mill cryptids for us, second only to the many variations of Bigfoot when it came to popularity, but there were a few sea monsters that stood out above the rest. Apparently this deep-pocketed client wanted my dad to pull off a grand slam and hoax the four big ones to drive up interest in some movie they were producing. The kicker was that all the hoaxes had to be done in one week. In order to get paid, he had to pull off a Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu hoax in the Congo of Africa, a Loch Ness Monster hoax in Scotland, the Altamaha-ha hoax we’d just completed here in Georgia, and finally a Champ hoax in Vermont. The amount of travel involved alone made it nearly impossible, but the alternative was our house getting foreclosed, so Dad had agreed to the ridiculous time line.

  The plan was for him to deal with the Loch Ness Monster and Champ. Meanwhile Gramps would handle Mbielu in Africa and then fly back to help us with the Altamaha-ha job since it was closer to home. Of course, Dad hadn’t planned on Gramps getting stuck in Africa and us having to pull off the Altie hoax all o
n our own.

  “By the way, Gramps called when you were in the river,” Curtis said, snapping me back to the present.

  “Checking in?” I guessed.

  Curtis grinned and nodded. “Of course. It killed him that he missed this. He lives for sea monster gigs.”

  “I’ll be glad when he gets back tomorrow,” I said, stifling a yawn. “The house feels weird with him and Dad both gone.”

  Curtis nodded. “Agreed. He said Africa was a success, though. He pulled off the Mbielu hoax and even had a chance to do a little Mokele Mbembe hunting since he was apparently near some tribe that had a recent sighting.”

  “Let me guess,” I said with a sniff. “He talked to some very informative natives who described detailed sightings of a living dinosaur. They pointed to the pictures he showed them of a prehistoric brachiosaurus and told stories of disappearing villagers. And on top of all that, he even thinks he found a partial footprint.”

  “Close,” Curtis said. “Dung.”

  “Dung?”

  Curtis nodded. “According to Gramps a verifiable Mokele Mbembe pooped, and he found it. He’s got a big old sample of it he’s bringing home to run tests on. Although with his luck, it’s probably just a poor elephant that had the runs.” Curtis laughed at his own joke, and I cracked a half-hearted smile. Gramps was a true-blue cryptid hunter, just like his father and grandfather before him. There was nothing he loved more than being on the trail of an elusive legend like the Mokele Mbembe, although he loved a good hoax when the opportunity presented itself, like it had last week after Dad had already left for Scotland.

  “Saddle up, boys!” Gramps had said, barging into the kitchen. I’d been sitting at our table, my social studies books spread across its battered surface, trying to study for tomorrow’s test. I glanced up to see his arms overloaded with grocery bags. My brain was still trying to remember the date World War I began when Curtis came into the kitchen, taking the bags out of Gramps’s arms.