The Potato Chip Puzzles_ The Puzzling World of Winston Breen - Eric Berlin [45]
Not allowing himself to think, Winston jumped off the porch. He snatched the key out of Rhonda Weeks’s fist, and ran.
“Hey!” she yelled, but Winston and Bethany were already twenty feet away. “Get back here!” she screamed. Other people glanced their way, but nobody made a move to stop them. His fevered brain tried to see into the future. Maybe this would all work out. He’d get back to the Ferris wheel, and if by some miracle Mr. Garvey was still chasing Jake and the man in the green jacket, then Winston would give the key to Mr. Lip Ring. They’d get Mal off the ride and out of the park before Rhonda Weeks caught up.
If everything went just right, there was a microscopically thin chance he might get away with this.
That thin chance vanished in the very next moment. Winston glanced behind him as he rounded the first corner and saw something he hadn’t considered when he came up with this wacky idea: The guy who’d been on the telephone was no longer on the telephone. He had burst out of the office and was running straight at them. He looked very fast.
“Oh, no!” he said. Bethany looked over her shoulder and saw the problem. How could they possibly keep ahead of this guy?
“Come on,” Bethany said, and ducked into the arcade again. Winston followed, trying not to panic. They had a head start, but it wouldn’t last long. They had maybe ten seconds to figure something out.
Winston saw a photo booth with a curtain. A hiding spot! He started to jump in, but Bethany grabbed his arm, “No! Come with me!”
She ran down an aisle of arcade games, practically dragging Winston. She stopped abruptly and shoved Winston into the gap between two machines. There was barely enough room for him . . . but then, astonishingly, Bethany squeezed herself into the same gap, forcing Winston even further backward. He was as squashed as Santa coming down a chimney.
“Keep going,” she hissed.
“There’s nowhere to go,” he whispered back.
“Yes, there is. Look.”
Winston looked and saw that Bethany was right. The gap they had squeezed into was narrow but long, and where Winston thought it ended, it instead bent into a little L-shaped corner. Winston rounded this corner, and Bethany followed. They ended up in an even smaller space, packed as tightly as peanut butter inside a jar. But they were undoubtedly out of sight.
“That security guard would have looked in the photo machine first thing,” said Bethany.
They were standing nose to nose or, more accurately, nose to chin: Bethany was about three inches taller than he was. Winston was all too aware how this would look to anybody who discovered them. He fervently hoped they were not discovered.
“How did you know about this place?” he whispered.
“My brother and I played hide-and-seek in here last year,” she said. “He never found me.”
“How long should we stay here?” Winston said. Bethany shrugged and shook her head.
Winston tried to listen beyond this fortress of video games, but he couldn’t hear anything. The guy could be right outside their little cramped space. There was no way to know. But they couldn’t stay here forever. Indeed, they couldn’t stay here very long at all.
“We’ll count to ten, and then we’ll run,” he whispered, and Bethany nodded agreement. Even a slight nod caused their heads to bonk together.
Winston forced himself to count slowly. He could feel his blood pumping in his veins; they needed to get back to the Ferris wheel. He was also a cauldron of emotions—delight, discomfort, amazement—at being so physically close to this girl who, he had to admit, he liked very much.
He reached ten, and they eased out of their hiding place. Bethany looked both ways down the aisle of arcade games.
Shaky with relief, she said, “It’s okay. Let’s go.” They started running again. Winston still expected that guy to land on them at any second. But he was gone.
They ran down the pathway toward the final corner, euphoric at making it back to the