Bonfire Masquerade Read Online Free Page B

STRIKE ONE
    â€œThis is sick!” I yelled again. ATAC had really come through this time. Our hotel was the nicest place I’d ever been—and we’d been in some pretty fancy places on our ATAC missions.
    We were in the penthouse suite, which turned out to have a small rooftop cabana next to a private pool! We had our own elevator up, which would come in handy in case we needed to get out in a hurry. Best of all, ATAC had hooked up the suite with some high-tech electronics. I was investigating the setup right now.
    â€œLook, ESPN 2! In high-def!”
    â€œRad,” replied Frank. “Now we can watch … what is this? Competitive foosball?”
    â€œSo some of their shows are lame. It’s still objectivelyawesome that we have a huge flat-screen television with every channel on Earth.”
    We’d been in New Orleans for about four hours, and I’d already decided it was my new favorite city. It wasn’t even officially Mardi Gras yet, but there were still tons of people out in the streets in costumes. Everyone seemed to be having a great time. It was definitely the happiest place I’d ever been.
    Well, aside from all those fires and everything.
    â€œSo what do we got, bro?”
    Frank was sitting at one of the desks in our suite, going through the package that had been waiting for us when we arrived.
    â€œNot much,” he said. “This is a list of the twenty or so places where this gang has already struck. So far, the local police haven’t found anything that connects them. Different areas of town, different owners, different kinds of places. Some of them probably didn’t even have much to steal.”
    He pulled out a large folding map of the city and hung it on the wall. Then he took out a box of different-colored thumbtacks. He put a tack in each place that had been robbed. Then, with a tack of the matching color, he hung up the description of the location. When he was done, it looked exactly like … nothing. No clue there.
    â€œSomething to keep thinking about,” I said. “Next.”
    â€œHonestly, there’s not much else. Well, there’s this.”
    Frank pulled a smartphone out of the box. It looked like it had been dropped—badly.
    â€œWhose is it?”
    â€œSome rich kid named Andrew Richelieu. Apparently, the gang stole it from him during one of the robberies downtown. He didn’t even notice it was gone. The police recovered it from the crime scene and traced it to him. It’s broken, and they haven’t been able to recover anything from it—no prints, no voice-mail messages, no outgoing calls. I think if we try taking out the SIM card and putting it in a new phone—”
    I cut Frank off. “That’s totally happened to my phone before. Remember when those bank robbers shot me, and my phone stopped the bullet? Toss it here. Let me work my mo-Joe on it.”
    Frank picked up the phone and walked it over to me. I held it up for a second and looked at the cracked case. I weighed it in my hand.
    Then I hit it as hard as I could against my other hand.
    WHAP!
    â€œJoe! What are you doing?” Frank leaped out of his chair.
    â€œRelax, bro. Watch.”
    I held up the phone and hit the power button. Nothing happened. We stared at it.
    â€œUhh … ,” I said. Maybe I was wrong about that whole “mo-Joe” thing.
    Then, suddenly, the screen came to life.
    â€œHa! Score one for the Joe-ster.”
    â€œNice job, Joe!” said Frank. He came over with a long cable.
    â€œWhat’s that for?” I asked.
    He plugged it into the side of the phone, then pressed a button on a remote control he had in his other hand. Suddenly the screen of the phone was replicated, hundreds of times its normal size, on the television.
    â€œWhoa. We have got to get ATAC to redo our rooms at home.” This place was seriously awesome.
    The phone still wasn’t working 100 percent. We