room?” Unless she’d crept around behind the counter while I was doing my “Where’s dad?” act, I didn’t see how she’d pulled it off.
“Yeah, mine. It’s automatic check-in. You just go to the machine, use the credit card you used to make the reservation, and voilà! Instant room key.” She flopped down into the big red chair by the TV and grinned like a maniac.
“Credit card?”
Agatha shrugged and propped her feet on the footstool. “My dad gave it to me. It’s for emergencies. I figure this is an emergency, right?”
“They let you use a credit card?”
“It has my name on it and everything, okay? It’s totally legit. I use it all the time.”
“But won’t your dad get mad?”
Agatha rolled her eyes. “Look, if he freaks, I’ll just say the card was stolen. Why would I be reserving a room at the Grand Empyrean? In the middle of a school day? That’s just ridiculous. Use your brain, Jeremy.”
I have to admit I was impressed. Freaked out by her criminal mind, but impressed. Once my heart rate had gone back down to normal levels, I carefully unzipped the Dora suitcase and stood back to watch the traditional jackalope hissing and/or spitting show.
Then I hit the minibar.
“Bourbon counts as whiskey, right?” I said, looking at a couple of bottles. I opened one, put my finger over the top, and turned it over. I touched my finger to my tongue and then seriously wished I hadn’t. The whiskey burned like all get-out and tasted like armpit. I don’t know how Jack drinks that stuff.
“Great, I’m on the run with a drunk. Just my luck.” Agatha hauled herself out of the big red chair and started rummaging in the shopping bag.
“Not for me, you jerk. For him. It’s whiskey bourbon, right?” I was pocketing everything I could identify as whiskey. I didn’t know how long we’d have him, and it’s not like I could just go into a liquor store and explain that I had a jackalope to feed.
Agatha ripped the packaging off one of the disposable cell phones and tossed it to me. (Threw it at me, actually. It left a mark.) “What, does he care about brands too? He’s not hungry. I tried to give him a carrot and he didn’t want it. And even if he was hungry, he wouldn’t want alcohol.”
“Carrot? No wonder. Jackalopes like booze.” I grabbed one of the glasses from the top of the minibar and took the protective cover off.
“But he’s—” Agatha started, but I held up a hand and amazingly, it shut her up.
“An animal hybrid. I know. But he’s not.” I poured the bourbon into a glass and set it down next to Jack, who only sniffed it for a second before practically upending the glass in an attempt to guzzle it.
I grinned. “He’s a jackalope.”
12.
Presenting Señor Slappy
Can I just mention how much fun it is to spend an afternoon arguing the jackalope/animal hybrid question with Agatha? Because that’s all we did. And I don’t care how many times you tell me there are no such things as jackalopes, or how many different scientific theories and formulas you throw at me. If it looks like a jackalope and quacks like a jackalope, it’s a jackalope.
The fact that the jackalope was lying on its back on the floor singing campfire songs wasn’t helping her argument either.
“How did you teach him ‘Happy Trails’?” Agatha asked after the argument had finally petered out.
“I didn’t,” I said, chucking the empty bourbon bottle into the trash. “Campfire songs are in his blood. You can look. It’s on Wikipedia.”
“Hmm,” Agatha said, watching the jackalope wave a lazy paw in the air. “Hmm.”
I checked my watch. “We should get going if we’re going to meet Twitchett. I’ll get him back in his suitcase.”
“Maybe we should just leave him here.” Agatha put her wig and beret back on.
Not to be a Negative Nancy, but that sounded like the world’s worst idea. “We can’t leave him here. Isn’t the whole point to return him to Twitchett?”
Agatha just
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