Me and my 12-foot-tall purple 3D-printed naked plastic statue of Buddy Hield just stood there in the trees by the zoo parking lot as we heard the man give directions to several other men on how to bury whatever it was they were burying.
“Can’t you assholes dig faster?” asked the voice in an annoyed tone. “The sun will be up soon. Plus, the body’s starting to smell.”
My heart dropped. The group of men was indeed burying a body. Whether human or animal, I wasn’t quite sure, until one of the men doing the digging spoke up. “This guy’s not going to be ripping drugs off us anymore, that’s for sure,” he said with a laugh.
I took a nervous glance at Buddy, who, per my instructions when we were in the zoo petting the goats, was being careful not to make any noise at all. I didn’t want him to react badly to the grim conversation we were overhearing. He’s a lot smarter than most plastic statues and if he realized that he was in the presence of murderers, he might become distraught. Which is kind of funny because he’s sort of a murderer himself when you think about it, except the dude he murdered was trying to mug me so it was fine.
I was also trying to be so quiet that I was barely breathing. I didn’t want to attract the attention of these men because if they had murdered once, they were perfectly capable of murdering again, especially if they sensed that I had caught them red-handed in the disposal of a murder victim.
“I think that’s deep enough. Throw him in,” said the man in command. “Hey, did you hear something?” There was silence for a while, and I thought we had escaped detection. Then, without meaning to, I leaned too far away from a branch I was trying to avoid, and inadvertently took a small step to my right, where my foot landed on a crunchy leaf. Immediately, I heard rustling as the men headed towards where me and Buddy were standing.
“Run, Buddy!” I yelled, running in a perpendicular direction to try to get back to the moving van in the parking lot that was now our escape vehicle.
“Get ’em!” the ringleader yelled. “They’re gonna turn us in!”
Me and my best friend Buddy burst out from the trees, not caring if there was any kind of zoo security that would hear us. We were running for our lives, and because of his immense height, Buddy got to the van way before I did, so I was running across the parking lot by myself, totally exposed.
Just as I had almost reached the van, a man burst out of the treeline in front of me, pointing a gun right at my chest. “You’re dead, asshole,” he snarled as I heard more running footsteps behind me. I looked back to see that four more men were there, all of them armed. I was surrounded.
All I could think was, “at least Buddy got to pet the goats.”