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the fastest runner. She plays club soccer, and she’s really good, like she is at everything. Victor, Cameron, and I had a hard time keeping up with her. Also the
temperature was like sixteen thousand degrees. We ran past some more giant stone buildings and turned a couple of corners, and then Victor said, “We’re almost there. It’s across
the street and up that way, where those trees are.” He pointed to the right.
    I looked at my phone.
    “It’s nine forty-two,” I said. “We have eighteen minutes.”
    “Okay,” said Suzana. She looked at me and said, “You’re sure you don’t want me to do it?”
    I shook my head. “We talked about this last night. They said the message was for me. If they see you, they might freak out.”
    She nodded, but she wasn’t happy. She actually
wanted
to be the one to go meet the weird guys. I definitely did not, but I didn’t see how I could get out of it.
    Suzana took off the parachute bag and handed it to me. She looked at Victor and Cameron and held up her phone. “You guys ready?”
    They both said yeah and held up their phones.
    “We all take video,” she said. “But we
stay out of sight
. And if anything bad happens, we all call 911.”
    They nodded. I tried not to throw up.
    “Okay, Wyatt,” she said. “You go over first. Stand by the statue. We’ll go down the street and come to the statue from the other direction, so when they see you they
won’t see us. But we’ll be watching you. Good luck.”
    I just nodded, because my mouth was too dry to talk. I went to the corner and waited for the light to change. I kind of hoped it never would. But it did.
    I took a deep breath, let it out, and started across the street.

I crossed the street and turned right, toward where Victor had pointed. I really didn’t like being alone. I felt like I had a nest of snakes
squirming around in my stomach.
    It took me a couple of minutes to reach the Boy Scout statue, which was on a big stone pedestal next to a round water pool that didn’t have any water in it. The statue was pretty weird. It
was a Boy Scout wearing a uniform and hiking along with a walking stick in his hand. On either side of him, a little behind, are a man and a woman. What makes it weird is, the man isn’t
wearing any clothes, except for a tiny piece of cloth that barely covers him. He’s like, “Here we are, hiking along on a Boy Scout hike, and by the way I’m naked.”
    Sometimes I do not get art.
    There were a bunch of tourists in the area kind of milling around; also some homeless people. But I didn’t see the weird guys, and I didn’t see Matt. I stopped in front of the statue
and turned around slowly, trying to look casual. I didn’t see anybody I recognized. I was holding my phone in case the weird guys texted me.

    I stood there for maybe a minute, which felt like an hour.
    My phone burped.
    I looked at it.
    other side
    I figured that meant I was supposed to go around to the back of the statue. l looked around. I still didn’t see the weird guys, but obviously they could see me, which was creepy. I started
walking around the statue. I hoped Suzana and the other guys were keeping me in sight. My legs felt like spaghetti.
    There were a few people on the other side of the statue—some people sitting on the grass eating, a lady with a stroller, some kids on skateboards—but what I noticed right away was
the person on a bench maybe twenty yards behind the statue, facing away from it. I couldn’t see the person’s face, but I could see that, in the hot sunlight, the person was wearing a
black overcoat, just like the one the big weird guy had on the night before. And if that wasn’t enough of a giveaway, the person was wearing a blond wig, exactly like the one the little weird
guy had worn. There might as well have been a sign pointing at the bench saying suspicious PERSON .
    At first I figured it had to be one of the weird guys, but then I had another idea:
Maybe it was Matt
. Maybe