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down the hallway.
    I nudged Agatha, who was still staring slack-jawed at the Suits. “Look,” she whispered.
    One of the Suits had the shrimpy kid whose locker was next to Agatha’s by the upper arm and was whispering in his ear in a really creepy, no-concept-of-personal-space kind of way. When the kid shook his head, the Suit pressed on the kid’s neck for a second and he slumped against the wall like his bones had gone to jelly. It was just for a second, and I wouldn’t even have noticed if Ihadn’t been looking right at them. Then the kid kind of straightened up, and when the Suit asked him something else, he nodded.
    “He’s done that three times now,” Agatha whispered. “Who are these guys?”
    “Beats me.” That didn’t look like a CIA move. That looked like a Vulcan nerve pinch, like on
Star Trek.
I didn’t even want to think what that meant. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
    Agatha snapped her jaw shut and nodded. “Right. But first things first.” She narrowed her eyes and got a scary focused expression on her face. It was like she’d woken up from a coma. “Do you have a cell phone?” She held out her hand, and when I was too slow, started snapping her fingers. “Come on! Come on! Cell phone!”
    “Okay! Fine!” I handed over my phone.
    “They can track us with these, you know,” Agatha said. “So first thing we do is destroy them.”
    “Hey!” I snatched my phone back. “I don’t think so.”
    Agatha rolled her eyes. “Fine, we hide them. But we can’t take them with us.”
    We decided that the best place for the phones was the dusty dead-bug area under the stairs. And I knew she was right—I’d read all about GPS stuff. But I still had a twinge when I turned my phone off and stashed it in the grime.
    “Now let’s get going.”
    “Great. Where?” I fiddled with the slashed strap of my backpack. As fun as this all was, it was important to remember that I was going around with a killer strapped to my back. And I can’t say I had a lot of faith in Agatha’s plan, no matter what it was. I mean, one more slash and I’d be carrying the jackalope in my pocket.
    “Twitchett.” Agatha adjusted her bag.
    Yeah, great plan, wish I’d thought of it. “Twitchett. Right. Where is he again?”
    Agatha smirked. “Trust me.”
    Great. But it’s not like I had a lot of other options.
    We dodged Mr. Burgess, the hall monitor, and hightailed it out of the school just as the bell rang. The parking lot was pretty dead except for this white van driving around, so it wasn’t that hard to run betweenthe cars without anyone spotting us. The Suits weren’t guarding the doors or anything, so that was good. I don’t know what we would’ve done if they had been. Forget the jackalope: I didn’t want to end up handcuffed in a dirty cell somewhere with someone shining a light in my eyes.
    We took off running, and you have to hand it to Agatha—she’s good with her evasive maneuvers. The route we took was so confusing, I wasn’t even sure where we were headed until I saw the giraffe waggling her tongue at me up ahead. “The zoo?” I squealed, and yes, my voice did crack a bit. But it was just from the shock. I mean, come on. And she called me an idiot? “Why would Twitchett be at the zoo? It’ll be crawling with Suit guys, don’t you think?”
    Agatha didn’t even bother to look back at me. She was really booking it. “It’s worth a shot. And even if Twitchett’s not there, Bob will be. And Bob’s great.”
    Terrific. Like I even knew who Bob was.
    Bob, apparently, was Professor Twitchett’s assistant. Or at least, that’s what Agatha told me as we peeredthrough the window of Twitchett’s lab building. Something I probably would know if I’d ever been to Twitchett’s lab.
    “So where’s Bob?” I asked after we’d scanned the room for the millionth time. So far we hadn’t seen any sign of Bob or any Mr. Suits or anything.
    “Weird. He’s not here,” Agatha said. “I