Before Zack or Cody had a chance to further discuss the events of the next chapter, their mother, Carey, came upstairs. "Sorry to keep you two waiting for so long, but my new choreographer is Simon Cowell's evil twin and we'll leave it at that. So, what do you two want for supper?"

"Oh, you know the usual," sniffed Zack as though he were someone important.

"Yeah, I'll take leftover chicken, too," said Cody, rolling his eyes.

"Coming right up!" said Carey cheerfully. She merrily walked into the kitchen to prepare supper. As she did, she decided to strike up a conversation with her boys: "So, what have you two been doing while I was downstairs?"

"We've been getting our homework done and it's actually a lot of fun," replied Zack.

Because Carey had her back faced to the boys during Zack's response, she assumed it was Cody who had answered and said, "That's nice, Cody."

"Uh, Mom?" said Cody. "That was Zack who just spoke."

Carey nearly dropped the pan full of leftover chicken. "Zack?" she repeated. "Zack thinks a homework assignment is fun? Dinner will have to wait boys; I'm going to call an ambulance."

"No, Mom, seriously, Cody and I are actually having a lot of fun," said Zack. "There's this book by Agatha Christie and we have to re-write it in any way we want."

"But product placement doesn't count, no matter how many times I've tried to tell Zack," added Cody.

Zack sneered, "Heh, heh, heh, watch it."

It was nightfall.

Try as he did, Zack couldn't get to sleep. He kept thinking that he had forgotten something, but what?

Zack rolled over in his bed as his mind kept drifting away to what he had done earlier the day: There was the kick-butt rewrite, for sure. Before that, he had decided to enter the hotel doing a pop-a-wheelie on his bike—

His bike.

Zack knew right then and there what it was that he had to do. He yanked the covers off, revealing that he was still wearing his street clothes, got out of bed, and snuck out of the apartment.

The first thing Zack noticed when he came down to the lobby was that everything was quiet.

Too quiet.

Zack slowly crept around in the dark with the stealth of a panther. Although his night vision wasn't the greatest in the world, he could see enough to know that his bike wasn't in the lobby.

Wait, that was because Mr. Moseby confiscated it.

Zack hadn't thought to bring something to break into Mr. Moseby's office with him, so he decided to at least search behind the front desk. He crept behind the desk and looked underneath it. There was no sign of Zack's bike—but there was something far more interesting.

Zack bent all the way down and crawled underneath the desk. There were papers scattered all over the ground, as though Mr. Moseby had been looking at them earlier and dropped them in a hurry. And amongst those papers was a picture of a younger-looking Mr. Moseby with two other men on either side: The man on the left was the creepy man that had been at the Tipton earlier that day and the man on the right had dirty blonde hair and stubble.

Zack turned the photo over and the following words were written in Mr. Moseby's handwriting: Karl, me, and Jack, may his soul rest in peace.

"Jack is dead?" gasped Zack. "Wait, I never knew Jack. Why should I care? Oh well."

Zack's reading skills in the dark weren't too sharp, so he stuffed the papers in his front jeans pocket.

CrEEaaAAKK

I am not alone, Zack realized. He stayed absolutely still until he was sure it was safe to go on. Even then, he crawled on the floor against whatever he could. Finally, he was underneath a nearby table that had been set up for a buffet. He hid under that for about five minutes. During those five minutes, he noticed something strange: There was a cheque addressed to Muriel for sixty-thousand dollars.

Deciding he would need this later, Zack picked up the cheque and put it in his pocket before crawling out from underneath the table and going back up to his hotel room, deciding his bike wasn't nearly as important as this.

By the time Zack made it back upstairs, he wasn't tired anymore. Not only that, but he had a sudden creative inspiration, so he picked up a pencil and began writing…