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“Where are you going?” Mr. O asked.
Brooks and I shared a glance. “Can you read this map?” I asked her.
“It’s a gateway map,” she said, her voice trembling. “I can read some of the glyphs… not all.” She ran her long fingers along the distressed edges. “I think I can figure it out.”
Ms. Cab was squawking at the top of her chicken lungs.
Hondo popped his knuckles. “I’m coming, too.”
“No way,” I said.
“You want your mom to lose her mind, call the police?” he said. “It’s the only way. I’ll leave her a note, telling her we went fishing for the weekend. That’ll buy us time. Besides,” he said, flexing his biceps, “you’re going to need my luchador moves.”
He was right. I couldn’t involve Mom, and I couldn’t just up and leave. She’d lose it for sure. Plus, I didn’t need the attention of being a missing kid. “Fine,” I said reluctantly.
Mr. O took my arm gently. “Before you go, I have something that might help your journey. Come.”
So I followed him out, but not before I grabbed the smallest and least creepy eyeball I could find.
17
Mr. O asked the others to wait at Ms. Cab’s, because what he had to show me was a secret. We made our way across the road and through the side gate to his greenhouse.
“You cannot believe my discovery,” he said as we stepped inside his little oasis. There were rows and rows of pepper plants: red, green, purple, and yellow. And they came in all sizes. Some of the peppers were as small as walnuts and others were as long as bananas.
The place was warm and smelled fresh, like the desert after a summer rain. I didn’t want to offend the guy, but I didn’t see why I had to drop Mission Puke to see his garden. Especially when the future of the world was at stake.
Mr. O paced, rubbing his chin. “I’ve done it, Zane.” He pointed to a single red pepper shaped like a bulging tomato. It clung to a tiny green plant, its weight bending the stem. “Meet La Muerte.”
“You named a pepper after the Grim Reaper?”
“The Guinness Book will put my name in writing now.” He pushed back his straw hat and smiled.
“For a pepper?” I didn’t mean to sound unimpressed, but I didn’t get what was so special about La Muerte.
He tugged on his pant leg and smiled, still pacing. “If I get in the book, Antonia… she will find me famous. She will go to dinner with me.”
My face must’ve been blank, because he clapped me on the shoulder and laughed. “I asked her, ‘When will you go out with me?’ and she said, ‘When you are famous.’ Do you see now? If I’m famous, she will love me.”
Oh. OH.
I had to give the guy credit. I mean, he had a goal to marry Ms. Cab, and no matter how many times she told him no, he never quit. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t think his being in a book could make someone love him. “So how’s the pepper going to get you in the world record book?”
“The one in the book now—it’s the hottest in the world. It—how do you say?—it paralyzes only the brain.”
Only?
“Like, forever?” I asked.
His eyes glittered with excitement. “For maybe dos horas. But my pepper, it lasts many hours longer. One bite and she will freeze your legs, then your arms and hands.” He stood stiff to illustrate. “Then the brain. So La Muerte is now the hottest. I break the record.”
Definitely respected the guy.
Mr. Ortiz had taught me about how, long ago, the Spanish used to grow peppers in monasteries and thought they had magical properties. I knew he grew weird varieties, but all this time his top secret mission was this?
What he said next was an even bigger surprise.
“But that isn’t important anymore.” He grabbed my arm and shook it excitedly. “I have spent years to make this, Zane. All the other fails were good steps to this moment.” He swept his arm in front of him. “All these plants, they grew only to give me this. It was their destiny. Don’t you see?” he said, still grinning like a kid on his birthday. “I thought all this time I was trying for the world record, but it was for you. Destiny had a different plan. Yes?”
