I shuddered to think what that creepy Luno might have done if he’d caught Abbey sneaking around with the video camera.
Dad leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Look, I wasn’t trying to be some kind of hero when I pulled the plugs on Dusty’s boat. I was only trying to stop him from using the ocean as a cesspool. And it backfired, okay? So now—”
“Time’s up.” The deputy slapped shut his magazine.
My father squeezed my arm. “Things’ll be different when I get home. That’s a promise, Noah.”
I left the jail with mixed-up feelings. I wanted things to be different at home, for Mom’s sake, but I sure didn’t want Dad to make himself into a whole different person.
Yet maybe there was no other way.
Later Abbey and I packed a lunch and rode our bikes to Thunder Beach. It was one of those bright hazy days with no horizon, when the sea and the sky melt together in a pale blue infinity. The heat rippling off the dead-calm water made the lighthouse seem to flutter and shimmy in the distance.
We sat down on the warm sand and ate our sandwiches and shared a bottle of water. I tried to gently tell Abbey the truth about her videotape, but she was one step ahead of me—as usual.
“It stunk, I know,” she said. “I already erased it.”
“You had a cool plan. It’s not your fault it didn’t work out.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
When I told her what Dad had said at the jail, she got quiet for a while. Finally, she said, “So that’s a good thing, right? Him promising to behave.”
“I guess. Sure.”
A cherry-red speedboat went tearing past the beach, then made a tight circle and roared back in our direction. The driver was a muscle-bound guy with so much gold hanging from his neck, it was a miracle he could sit up straight. He slowed to an idle and shouted something to a large blond woman who was sunning herself alone, about fifty yards from Abbey and me. The speedboat’s engine was so loud that we couldn’t hear what the man said, but the woman got up and sweetly motioned him to come closer to shore. When he did, she beaned him with a beer can.
“Whoa, baby!” Abbey exclaimed. “She could play quarterback for the Dolphins!”
“I think I know who that is,” I said.
The speedboat took off at full throttle, the driver heaving the beer can over the side. When he rooster-tailed past us, he was scowling and rubbing his forehead.
“You know that lady? Oh, don’t tell me.” Abbey peered curiously at the blond sunbather. We were too far away to be able to see the barbed-wire tattoo, or the hoops in her ears.
“Follow me,” I told my sister.
Shelly was shaking the sand off her towel when we walked up. She was wearing a neon-yellow swimsuit and round mirrored sunglasses. Her face was smeared with so much zinc oxide that it looked like she’d fallen nose-first into a frosted cake.
“Well, if it isn’t the amazing young Underwoods,” she said.
“What did that guy in the red boat say to you?” Abbey asked with her usual bluntness.
“He asked me for a date, sort of,” said Shelly. “But he needs to work on his manners.”
“You sure nailed him good,” I remarked.
“Trust me, he deserved it.” She winked at Abbey. “Now if he was Brad Pitt and not some loser gym monkey from Lauderdale, it’s a whole different story. I’d be sitting beside him right now, speeding off to Bimini.”
I told Shelly that Dad was back in jail.
“That really bites,” she said. “You guys want somethin’ to drink?”
Abbey took a Coke, but I said no thanks. I noticed the beer can that Shelly had used to clobber the speedboat driver floating about twenty yards off the beach.
She frowned. “Man, I hate litterbugs.”
“Me too,” I said, and started wading out.
“Hey, stud, where do you think you’re going?”
“To get the beer can. It’s no big deal,” I said.
“It is too a big deal,” said Shelly. “Check out the water, Noah.”
I glanced down and felt my stomach pitch. The shallows had a darkish yellow tint. Strands and clots of foul, muddy-looking matter floated here and there, around my legs.
“What is it?” Abbey asked.
“Something seriously gross,” I said. Now I could smell it, too.
“Then get out!” Abbey shouted.
“That’d be my advice, too,” said Shelly. “And pronto.”
As disgusting as it was to be wading through the Coral Queen’s toilet crud, I couldn’t leave that beer can out there to float away.
Whenever my father takes us out on the boat, he always stops to scoop up trash that other people have tossed overboard—Styrofoam cups, bottles, chum boxes, plastic bags, whatever. Dad says it’s our duty to clean up after the brainless morons. He says the smart humans owe it to every other living creature not to let the dumb humans wreck the whole planet.
So what we Underwoods do is pick up litter wherever we see it.
Even when it’s drifting in sewage.
When I came sloshing with the beer can out of the shallows, Abbey stepped back and said, “Noah, that is so nasty!”
“I guess it’s true,” Shelly said, “that the nutcase doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means you’re just like your old man. Here, gimme that thing.” With two fingers Shelly plucked the can from my hand and held it at arm’s length, like it was radioactive.
“Notice the dent,” she observed with a chuckle. “Gym Monkey must’ve had a hard noggin.”
She dropped the can into a tall trash barrel. Then she turned back to me. “I told you Dusty was dumping again, didn’t I?”
It wasn’t like I’d forgotten. From where Abbey and I had been sitting earlier on the beach, the water had looked normal and safe. Once you stepped in, though, it was a different story.
Shelly said, “Okay, Nature Boy, now you run straight home and scrub yourself down in a hot shower.”
“Don’t worry.” I was already busy scraping at my legs with a sea-grape leaf.
Abbey stood at the water’s edge, gazing out in heavy silence. Shelly put an arm around her tense little shoulders and said, “Let’s hit the road, kiddo. Before your flaky brother gets any more bright ideas.”
Abbey turned to me. “The fish are gone. Those little green minnows we always see here.”
“They’ll be back,” I said, “when the water clears up.”
Suddenly a loggerhead stuck up its knobby brown head. It might have been the same one that I’d seen that day with Thom and Rado, but I couldn’t be sure. One turtle head looks a lot like another.
“No!” my sister cried out. “Noah, do something!”
The loggerhead obviously didn’t know it was swimming in filth. I began jumping and clapping my hands together, trying to spook it away from the beach, but that didn’t work. The turtle floated lazily at the surface, blinking up at the sun.
Abbey began to shake and cry. Shelly told her not to worry, turtles were tough customers. “They’ve been on this old planet a lot longer than we have. They’re survivors,” she said.
“Not this one,” my sister sobbed. “Not if she gets sick from the bad water.”
Abbey was right. Absolutely right.
So I charged back into the waves, kicking and splashing and hollering like a lunatic. It wasn’t the brightest thing I’ve ever done, but it definitely got that loggerhead’s attention. In a fright it ducked under and scooted off, leaving only a boiling swirl.
This time nobody said much when I came out of the dirty water. Abbey looked like she wanted to give me a hug, but she was understandably reluctant to get slimed. Shelly just shook her head in disbelief and tossed me a towel.
Together we trudged down the beach to a paved lot where her Jeep was parked. “Promise me you’ll go home and wash up,” she said.
“Promise,” I said.
“And, Abbey, promi
se me that you’ll try to keep your brother from getting into more trouble.”
“You bet,” Abbey said halfheartedly.
Shelly looked around to make sure the three of us were alone, which seemed obvious since her Jeep was the only car in the lot.
“I’m going to tell you guys somethin’, but you don’t know where you heard it, okay?” She leaned close, and the air turned to pure tangerine. “There’s a man who works at the Coast Guard station, a civilian named Billy Babcock. He’s got a major gamblin’ problem, you understand? He’s addicted to it.”
“You mean like drugs,” Abbey said.
“Yeah. Or booze,” said Shelly. “Billy can’t stop betting, no matter how hard he tries. Blackjack, dice, roulette, you name it. He’s a regular on the Coral Queen, like, four nights a week. Sometimes more. You see where this is heading?”
I did. “Does he owe Dusty money?”
Shelly nodded. “Big-time. So much money that Billy couldn’t pay it all back if he lives to be a hundred.”
“So he’s repaying it another way.”
“You got it, Noah,” Shelly said. “Every time the Coast Guard gets ready to pull a surprise inspection on the Coral Queen, Billy Babcock calls Dusty the day before to warn him. That’s why they never catch ’em emptying the tank.”
Abbey flopped her arms in dismay. “So Dad was right after all. Dusty is being tipped off.”
“Hey, you didn’t hear it from me,” Shelly said.
“But—”
“Shhhh!” Shelly pointed toward a white pickup that was rolling into the lot.
The truck pulled up and parked near the Jeep. Stamped on the door of the cab was: DEPARTMENT OF PARKS AND RECREATION.
A man in a tan uniform got out and gave us a friendly nod. From the bed of the pickup he removed a small sledgehammer, a half dozen metal posts, and a stack of cardboard signs.
“You folks on your way to the beach?” he asked.
“What’s up?” said Shelly.
The man showed us one of the signs. DANGER, it warned in big letters. BEWARE OF CONTAMINATED WATER.
Beneath those words, in smaller red lettering, it said: SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK.
“Contaminated with what?” asked my sister, acting as if she didn’t know.
“Human waste,” said the man from Parks and Recreation. “We got a call from a guy who was fishing out here this morning. The health department came and sampled the water—it tested off the charts. You all might want to try Long Key, or maybe Harris Park.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Shelly said, playing along.
After the man went off to post the warning signs, my sister and I said goodbye to Shelly and began walking to our bikes.
“Noah, what you did back there for that sea turtle, that was very …”
“Dumb? I know.”
“No. Cool,” Abbey said, “in a really twisted way.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“We can’t give up on this,” she added grimly.
“Now you sound like Dad.”
“Well? You’re the one who went into that scuzzy water—twice! Doesn’t it make you furious?”
“Yeah, it does.”
Furious and sick at the same time. But I thought of Abbey’s spying mission the night before, and what a disaster it could have been. I’d never forget the cold-blooded look in Luno’s eyes when he saw us standing in Dusty’s ticket shack.
“Mom doesn’t need any more excitement from us,” I told my sister.
“She won’t have to know a darn thing,” Abbey said, “because next time we’ll do it right.”
The “we” was a given. I wasn’t about to let my sister go anywhere near that marina again without me.
We unlocked our bikes and started pedaling home in the thick July heat. I knew I stunk from the crappy water, but Abbey claimed she didn’t smell a thing. I kept thinking about how easy it was for Dusty Muleman to get away with what he was doing. With so many big boats on the water, nobody had been able to trace the pollution along Thunder Beach directly to the Coral Queen.
Or maybe nobody had tried hard enough.
It was time that somebody did.
“We can’t get Dad involved in this, either,” I said to Abbey. “He’s had enough trouble already.”
“Definitely.” She grinned. “Noah, does this mean you’ve got a plan?”
“Don’t get carried away,” I said, which ought to be the Underwood family motto.
THIRTEEN
Dad was serious about getting serious.
The same morning he was released from jail, he went out and got himself hired by a company called Tropical Rescue. It wasn’t the sort of work that my father could put his heart into, but I knew why he took the job.
It was the boat.
They let him use a twenty-four-foot outboard with a T-top and twin 150s—not for fishing but for towing in tourists who ran out of gas or rammed their boats aground.
Normally my father has no patience for these sorts of bumblers. He calls them “googans” or even worse, depending on what kind of fix they’ve gotten themselves into. But Dad needed the job, so he buttoned his lip and kept his opinions to himself.
Unless it’s a life-or-death emergency, the Coast Guard refers disabled-boat calls to private contractors like Tropical Rescue, which charge big bucks. They stay busy, too. It’s amazing how many people are too lazy to read a fuel gauge, a compass, or a marine chart. They just point their boats at the horizon and go. All around the Keys you can see their propeller trenches—long ugly gouges, like giant fingernail scrapes, across the tidal banks. It takes years for the sea grass to grow back.
Dad’s first rescue job was a boatload of software salesmen from Orlando who were stranded all the way out at Ninemile Bank. Somehow they’d managed to beach a brand-new Bayliner on a flat that was only four inches deep. That’s not easy to do, unless you’re bombed or wearing a blindfold.
Miraculously, Dad restrained himself from saying anything insulting. He didn’t get mad. He didn’t make fun of the bonehead who’d been driving the boat.
No, my father—the new and improved Paine Underwood—stayed calm and polite. He waited patiently for the tide to come up, tugged the Bayliner off the bank, and towed it back to Caloosa Cove. He told us he almost felt sorry for the software salesmen when he handed them the bill, which didn’t even include the hefty fine from the park service for trashing the sea grass. It was probably one of the most expensive vacations those guys ever had.
Even though Dad didn’t like dealing with googans, he was ten times happier on the water than he was driving a taxi. That meant Mom was in a better mood, too, laughing and kidding around the way she used to do.
The two of them were getting along so well that Abbey and I were extra careful not to mention the sticky subject of Dusty Muleman’s casino boat. We discussed our new plan of attack only when we were alone and away from the house, where our parents couldn’t hear us.
A couple of days after my father got out of jail, the Parks Department took down the pollution warnings at Thunder Beach. The next morning, Abbey and I put on our bathing suits and grabbed a couple of towels and dashed outside. Mom and Dad figured we were heading for the park, which is exactly what we wanted them to think.
Because we were really going to Shelly’s trailer.
I had to knock a half dozen times. When she finally came to the door, she didn’t seem especially delighted to see us. Her eyes were puffy and half closed, and it looked like somebody had set off a firecracker in her hair.
“Time izzit?” she asked hoarsely.
“Seven-thirty,” I said.
She winced. “A.M.? You gotta be kiddin’ me.”
Abbey said, “It’s important. Please?”
We followed Shelly inside. She sagged onto the sofa and tucked her legs up under her tatty pink bathrobe.
“Killer headache,” she explained, running her tongue across her front teeth. “Large party last night.”
She was
clearly in pain, so we got straight to the point. “We need your help,” I said, “now.”
“To do what?”
“To stop Dusty Muleman. You promised, remember?”
She laughed—one of those tired, what-was-I-thinking laughs. She looked across at Abbey. “And you promised to keep your big brother outta trouble.”
“We won’t get in any trouble,” Abbey said evenly, “if you help us.”
It sounded like Shelly was having second thoughts. I wondered if she really was afraid of Dusty Muleman after all.
In a discouraged voice she said, “I don’t know what we can do to stop him. He’s tight with all the big shots in town.”
“But he’s poisoning Thunder Beach,” I said. “You know how sick a kid could get from swimming in that bad water? Same goes for the fish and the dolphins and the baby turtles. It sucks, what Dusty is doing. It’s awful.”
“Yeah, but—”
“And don’t forget what happened to Lice,” I added. “Remember how you told me you had a dog in this fight? Remember—”
“Lice is exactly what I been thinkin’ about,” Shelly cut in. “Say they really killed him, okay? You s’pose they’d hesitate to do the same to me or you, if somethin’ goes wrong?”
It was about time she got worried, and who could blame her? If she was right about Lice being dead, then Dusty and Luno were cold-blooded murderers.
But one glance and I knew Abbey wouldn’t back off, no matter what the risks. Neither could I.
“Shelly, I know it’s dangerous—”
“Not to mention crazy,” she said.
“Yeah, and probably crazy,” I agreed. “Look, if you don’t want to be a part of this, it’s okay. I understand.”
She shut her eyes and rolled back her head. “Uh-oh, here comes the guilt.” She pressed her knuckles to her ears. “Enough already, Noah. This poor blond head’s about to explode.”
Shelly stretched out on the sofa. Abbey got some ice cubes from the refrigerator and wrapped them in a dish towel, which Shelly gingerly positioned across her brow.
After a minute or two of muffled moaning she said, “Guess I wasn’t feelin’ so brave when I got up this mornin’, but hey, a promise is a promise. Count me in.”