Sly Cooper 5: Promises Made By Thieves

Chapter 23: Dimitri

Up till now, I wish someone else bailed.

I didn't want to be the odd lizard out, walking away after the cracker boxes got broken into. But I also wanted to head on back to my castle. Or at least return with some more snazzy attire recommendations for the rest of the gang to get us through the day we just had.

Who ever said noble detective work and tech were enticing? Giant lavender walrus barely saw the guy.

I will admit. The last three months without the fuzzy raccoon around haven't been the grooviest. I really did think the rest of the gang woulda had him back criticizing my suits by this time. I mean, they managed to beat me of all people when I was still under my contract with Arpeggio and the funky night club. Dimitri would never call Cooper the best of friends, but I do understand the emptiness felt through turtle, hippo, fox lady, and even walrus. I had to leave Blood Bath Bay and my family when I was 16 due to a significant crime uptick my mother and grandparents felt wasn't for me. Trying to go into art and restart my life was fine for a while, but I always wished I could return and do some undoing in my origin nest. If Cooper returning was going to make my friends whole one more time, then I wanted the little guy back.

The day has taken the energy out of me. But I've been with this gang just long enough to graph Turtle's exclamations. And this is his tempo when he's not just theorizing but certain he smells a hot rat. I somehow perk up. In less than thirty-five seconds, everyone else runs down and crowds the basement. Hippo smells like ripe mustard.

"What is it, Bentley?" asks Hippo. "Something from the book finally popped up?"

"No. It involves Penelope's weird postcards." Turtle has all five of them in front of him like the Solitaire game.

"Have you found where these places are?" Hippo suggests. "Anything on the net that's reported it?"

"Well, no."

"So what have you found?" asks Walrus.

"This." Turtle holds up a photo of old backstabbing Mouse Friend's graffiti on a plain picket fence with trash bags laying around. Turtle points to the artwork. "There's some sunlight here. On the right of the wall, and the second half of the vandalism. If the sun's shining on it from one side, that side should be brighter, but...it isn't."

I glimpse. Turtle's right. It's bychance an optical illusion, whatever in the world that may be. Or perhaps it ain't.

"What are you saying, Bentley?" inquires Hippo.

"Maybe..." Lightbulb flashes over little Bentley's head. "What if we've been focusing too much on the graffiti? What if it's not really there? What if Penelope wants us to focus on something different?"

"Assuming it even is Penelope," Fox lady brings up. "Why would she even help you? And who's to say she even is helping? You know what she did to your time machine plans, let alone your heart. Maybe it's someone else trying to pin the blame on her or confuse us."

"For now," says Bentley, with a hint of droopiness in the subject raised, "we have a possible lead." Bentley taps a button on his little chair, and some sort of showoffy traption creates a glow of the photo for us all to see and about quadruple the original size. "We haven't really been looking at the other details of the photo. Like, look. I see, on the outskirts, a mountain. With snow. Even though the rest of the picture makes it seem like the summer. And it isn't winter weather in most parts these days, plus Penelope just broke out of Heathrow a few months ago." Bentley puts down the photo and scatters all five on his desk. "Everyone, it's time for some investigating."

"I'll go get the hot dogs," pipes up Murray. "And prepare more. Looks like we're pulling a late nighter!" But Hippo is smiling about the possibility, and I'm intuitive enough to know he's happy not just about the idea of more grub.

Now that we know at least one of the photos is a little configured, we all do as he says and look a little more beyond the pictures. After some online comparisons, we find the mountain in the configured photo is Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya. Turtle then projects something called a radius, does an estimation for where this back lot would be, and looks at some funky overdetailed map of the planet to find it is a tourist road site. Plump dog Murray goes to get a map of the world in his storage and Bentley sticks a pin in it.

On the other side, Fox Lady finds and calls said tourist site, all the way in the hot, dry beautiful Kenya. I was there during a cruise. It's the life. She said they do not have any graffiti that matches our photo, bringing us further in business.

We divide into different teams to try and figure out hints to the other four pictures. I am no genius at all with this gadgetry and investigative snoopiness, but I know normally we'd pack and head out to Kenya. With these new revelations, not so much. Turtle explains we should look for some kind of pattern in the pictures besides the graffiti, and see if there's a pattern with where the photos were taken also.

We each take notes and compare them, gouging down hot dogs that are surprisingly sublime, even for my picky palate. And to our advantage, this house has more than one computing device. We still require taking turns but better than using only one.

Fox Lady and Murray figure out the next one. The lady recognizes the window and lower wall of the entryway to a canine fighting ring she busted about a year back. In France. So a ring in France and a tourist business in Kenya. No connection to the places nor countries.

Two others require information about the geography non-accessible to those not under some fancy-schmancy trust fund, so Turtle has to do some of his overcomplicated hacking to get at them, but we eventually find the other three.

One is a boathouse in Oman. The next is a palace in Sababa, Russia. A pattern seems to be coming to life. By the time the last one turns out to be a newspaper stand in Niger, we've got a groovy pentagon...and five integrated animals who are half comatose half springing like they're high on my favorite blow.

"These must all be right!" exclaims Bentley. "There's no way one of these is off. At any of these points, the ones to the sides are each angled by exactly 120 degrees and are therefore the exact same distance. Perfect shape!"

"Okay, so..." says McSweeney, feigning a non-groovy yawn. "What does it mean? Maybe...maybe whatever's in the middle of the pentagon?"

"That was my exact thought." Bentley does something that puts our map to another huge hologram and he places digital pins exactly where those places are. He then types something crazy in, probably code, and one line emerges from each pin, straight, until they all meet a specific place. Two numbers pop out.

"Latitude and longitude," the turtle thinks out loud. He writes them down.

"That's in Egypt," says Fox Lady.

Not skipping a beat like the dancer Bentley is at the tech, he zooms in on the exact coordinate, and we see, in the middle of some desert, a pile of rubble.

"What's that?" asks McSweeney.

Bentley does some more devoted searching, us all standing in ghostly silence, until he says, with a hint of shaky, "This is where the Pyramid of Djedefre used to be."

"That's..." stutters Fox Lady. "What do you mean by 'used to'? When did it crumble?"