“Yeah, she’s amazing. Rock solid.”
He turned to face me and cleared his throat a couple of times. “Noah, I’m going to tell you how things work in the real world. It might make you mad or sick to your stomach, whatever—but I want you to listen closely. Okay?”
I said sure—and braced for one of his rants.
“You know how much Dusty Muleman got fined for dumping his holding tank? For fouling nature with that awful crap? Guess what his punishment was!” My father was trembling with fury. “Ten thousand lousy dollars! Ten grand—that’s what he makes in one stinking night off that casino operation. It’s a joke, son. It’s chump change to a rich maggot like that!”
“Dad, take it easy—”
“No, you need to hear this. You need to know.” He hunched forward, eyes blazing. “Last year a few young hot-shots from the federal prosecutor’s office in Miami drove down here for a private bachelor party on the Coral Queen. You know what a bachelor party is, right?”
“No, but I’ll be glad to do some research.” I was trying to lighten the mood. “Yes, Dad, I know what a bachelor party is.”
“Don’t be a smartass, son. Just listen and learn. The party gets a little out of control, okay? On the boat there are some … well, let’s be nice and call them ‘dancers.’ Exotic-type dancers—”
“I get the idea, Dad.”
“Anyway, Dusty takes out a camera and he snaps some pictures. Now, these aren’t the sort of pictures that a person would necessarily want to frame and hang on the living-room wall—”
“Hold on,” I said. “You’re telling me that Dusty Muleman blackmailed the government’s lawyers?”
“Let’s say he didn’t hesitate to tell their boss what happened that night—and what was on that roll of film,” Dad said, “which I’m sure Dusty has locked away in a vault somewhere. Anyway, all of a sudden the feds are looking to cut a deal and close the case.”
“For a fine of ten thousand bucks.”
“It would’ve been even less, if it weren’t for Lice Peeking,” my father said. “He showed up one day at the Coast Guard station and gave a secret statement, testifying about what he saw when he used to work on the casino boat. He swore that Dusty ordered the crew to flush the holding tank whenever it got full, as long as nobody was around to see.”
I smiled to myself. That was pure Shelly—forcing Lice Peeking to step up and tell what he knew. It was obviously part of the price he had to pay if he wanted to be her boyfriend again.
“So Dusty agreed to cough up the ten grand,” Dad went on, “and he promised never, ever again to flush into the basin.”
“And they believed him? After all this?” I said. It was incredible.
“Oh, and dig this. To show how much he cares about the ocean, he offers to throw a big fund-raising benefit for the Save the Reef Foundation on the Coral Queen.” Dad chuckled bitterly. “It would be funny if only it were a movie and not real life.”
Now I understood why he’d slugged the doors. It was the surest way to stop himself from doing the same thing to Dusty Muleman.
“What happened to Luno?” I asked.
“He’s back in Morocco, probably living the high life,” my father said. “Dusty paid him off and put him on a jet, in case the feds went looking for him.”
“How’d you find this stuff out?”
“Shelly told me,” he said. “She’s slick. Dusty still hasn’t got a clue that she was in on your sting.”
Dad was thirsty, so I brought him some water and tipped the glass to his lips. He said that six of his ten knuckles had been fractured and that the doctors weren’t sure when the casts could come off.
“Until then, I guess I’m out of action,” he said dejectedly, “unless I learn how to steer a boat with my feet.”
“But you’re still getting back your captain’s license, right?”
“Absolutely, Noah. There’s no law against punching out your own house.”
We heard Mom’s car rolling into the driveway.
“Why don’t you let me be the one to tell Abbey all this,” I suggested.
“Good idea,” Dad said, “but be sure to leave out the part about the dancers.”
That night I was jolted awake by wailing sirens, one after another. I figured there was a bad wreck somewhere on the highway. The clock by my bed said 4:20.
With all the noise, it took me a while to go back to sleep. The next thing I recall, it was daylight and Abbey was shaking me by the shoulders.
“Get up, Noah, hurry!” she whispered. “The cops are here to arrest Dad!”
I jumped into a pair of jeans and ran to the living room. Abbey was a half step behind me.
My father was still in his pajamas, and sitting in his favorite armchair. On each side of him stood a uniformed sheriff’s deputy. I recognized one of them as the jowly guy from the jailhouse.
Standing in front of Dad was a young, barrel-chested man wearing a shiny blue suit. The man was jotting in a notebook, except he wasn’t a newspaper reporter. He was a detective.
“This is Lieutenant Shucker,” said my mother.
Abbey and I nodded hello. We were real nervous, though not as nervous as Dad. Mom was pouring coffee into his mouth as fast as he could slurp it down.
“Mr. Underwood, what happened to your hands?” Lieutenant Shucker asked. “You didn’t happen to burn them, did you?”
“No, I didn’t burn ’em. I broke ’em,” my father said. “Donna, show him the door.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” the detective said curtly.
“No, I mean show him the holes in the doors,” Dad explained.
Lieutenant Shucker examined the damage, but he didn’t seem impressed.
“Where were you this morning,” he asked my dad, “between three A.M. and four A.M.?”
“He’s been right here with us,” my mother interjected.
“That’s right,” I said. “Dad was home all night.”
“How do you know that for sure?” the detective asked snidely.
Abbey looked as if she wanted to bite him. “Geez, mister, check out his hands!” she said. “He can’t pick his own nose, much less drive a car!”
The two deputies began to snicker, then caught themselves. Mom’s jaw tightened. “Abbey, that’ll be enough from you.”
Dad tried to act indignant by folding his arms, but the casts were too bulky. “Officers, what’s this all about?” he demanded.
“Mr. Underwood, you have the right to remain silent,” Lieutenant Shucker said. “You also have the right to an attorney—”
“Wait a minute! Hold on!” I burst out. “You’re arresting him?”
“Not right this minute,” the detective said, “but we’ve got lots more questions. He’s definitely our prime suspect in this crime.”
“What crime?” Abbey and I exclaimed in unison.
“Yeah, what crime?” asked my father.
“Burning down the Coral Queen,” Lieutenant Shucker replied. “It’s called arson.”
TWENTY-ONE
The detective wouldn’t tell us anything more, but Shelly filled us in by phone later. It was a wild story.
Dusty Muleman had invited all the local big shots and politicians to the grand reopening of the casino boat. They all showed up, too, since Shelly was pouring free drinks. There were fireworks, a lobster buffet, and calypso music from the steel-drum band. The party rocked on until two in the morning. Afterward it took Shelly forty-five minutes to clean up the bar, and she was one of the last to leave the boat.
The first explosion took place shortly after three A.M., and within half an hour the Coral Queen was on fire from bow to stern. The new watchman, Luno’s replacement, nearly fried when a falling cinder ignited the ticket shed, where he was phoning for help. The watchman made a frantic attempt to douse the flames with a dock hose, then ran from the marina.
By the time the fire engines got there, the gambling boat was a floating torch. By the time Dusty Muleman got ther
e, it had burned to the waterline—seventy-three feet of smoldering ash and melted poker chips. Naturally, he believed that my father was the culprit. Knowing what Dad thought of Dusty, the sheriff didn’t need much convincing.
Even Abbey felt the circumstances were suspicious.
“You think he might’ve had something to do with this?” she asked me in private. “Maybe he paid somebody to go burn the boat.”
“Paid them with what?”
“How about with the thousand bucks he got from the sanctuary?”
“No way, Abbey,” I said. “Absolutely impossible.”
But she’d gotten me worried. What if Dad had flipped out again? Blown another gasket. Flown off the handle.
So when we were alone, I asked him.
“I won’t tell a soul if you were involved,” I said. It was a promise I wasn’t sure I could keep.
“Noah, it wasn’t me. I swear on a stack of Bibles.” He solemnly raised his right arm, cast and all. He was so intense that it startled me.
“I had nothing to do with torching the Coral Queen,” he said. “Please believe me—and please tell Abbey to believe me, too.”
And, in the end, we did.
Because my father had never lied to us about something serious. Whenever he screwed up, he admitted it right away. He always took the blame, the responsibility—and the punishment. Why would he change now?
Mr. Shine, our lawyer, was at the house when the detective and two deputies returned that afternoon with a search warrant. They snooped around for a long time, but they couldn’t find anything that connected Dad to the boat arson.
Lieutenant Shucker was visibly disappointed. “I ought to lock you up anyhow,” he said to Dad. “It’s crystal clear what happened—you had the motive, you had the opportunity….”
“Without evidence you’ve got no case,” said Mr. Shine, looking less mopey than usual. “I would kindly advise you to stop bothering my client.”
“Evidence?” the detective scoffed. “You want evidence? Just look at the brand-new casts on his hands—obviously he burned himself while he was lighting the fire.”
Dad angrily clacked his plaster paws together. “What a load of bull!”
“We’ll see about that. I’ll be back tomorrow with another warrant, Mr. Underwood, and a doctor to saw off those casts. If your fingers are barbecued, you’re goin’ straight to the slammer.”
“But what about the fist holes in our doors?” Abbey protested. “That proves he’s telling the truth.”
“Nice try,” Lieutenant Shucker said sarcastically, “but you could do the same thing with a tire iron.” Then he stood up to leave.
My mother had been sitting on the sofa, not saying a word. I figured she was just depressed, thinking about Dad returning to jail and how he might never get his captain’s license and how our quiet, seminormal life was a total mess again. That’s what I was thinking anyway.
But it turned out that Mom wasn’t depressed at all. She was merely waiting for the right moment to drop a little stink bomb on the snotty detective.
“Here, Lieutenant,” she said pleasantly, “you might want to take a look at this.”
She handed a computerized printout to Lieutenant Shucker, who studied it suspiciously.
“It’s the bill from the emergency room,” Mom said.
“Yeah, Mrs. Underwood, I can read.”
“From when my husband was admitted for severe injuries to both his hands.”
The detective frowned impatiently. “So? What’s your point?”
My mother is truly awesome in situations like that. Nothing fazes her. She stood beside Lieutenant Shucker and calmly pointed to a line of type on the computer receipt.
“He was treated for fractures, not burns. It says so right here, Lieutenant.” Mom smiled. “That’s my first point.”
The detective grunted.
“My second point,” Mom went on, “concerns the precise time my husband arrived at the hospital. See? It was 11:33 in the morning. Yesterday morning, Lieutenant.”
“Oh.”
“Approximately sixteen hours before Mr. Muleman’s boat was set on fire.”
“Yeah, I can do the math,” the detective grumbled.
“Which means my husband couldn’t possibly have been the arsonist,” Mom said, “unless you’d care to demonstrate how a person with all ten fingers sealed in hard plaster would go about striking a match.”
Lieutenant Shucker’s big round chest seemed to deflate. Mom led him to the front door, the two deputies skulking close behind. “Goodbye now,” she called after them, “and good luck solving your case.”
We waited at the window until they drove away. Then Abbey started whooping, and we all slapped high fives—me, my sister, Mom, Mr. Shine, even Dad with his lumpy five-pound casts.
“Donna, that was amazing,” he said. “Truly amazing.”
“Better than amazing!” Abbey crowed. “It was outrageous!”
“No, incredible!” I hollered. “Amazingly, outrageously incredible!”
Mom blushed. “We’ll see,” she said. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”
But Lieutenant Shucker never came back.
And later, when we learned who actually burned down the Coral Queen, we congratulated my mother all over again. Dusty Muleman had gotten exactly what he’d deserved, just as she had predicted.
Luckily, Dad’s anger-control counselor took pity on him and didn’t mention his broken hands in her letter to the judge. Instead, the counselor stated that Mr. Paine Underwood had made “significant though sometimes painful progress” in managing his temper, and that he presented “no immediate threat to himself, his family, or the innocent public.”
Whether he’s still a threat to innocent doors remains to be seen.
By coincidence the Coast Guard sent Dad his captain’s license on the same day that the fire investigators released their findings about the Coral Queen.
The story took up the entire front page of the Island Examiner, including photographs of Dusty Muleman and the burned boat. There was no photo of Jasper Jr., which was a shame since he was the star of the arson report.
Dusty’s first mistake had been allowing Jasper Jr. and Bull to hang out aboard the Coral Queen on the night of the grand reopening. Dusty’s second mistake had been losing track of those two nitwits while he celebrated.
By the time the party had ended, Dusty wasn’t thinking too clearly. He staggered from the boat, assuming that his son had already gone home.
He was wrong. Jasper Jr. and Bull had decided to throw a party of their own in one of the storage holds. They had snuck off with a handful of Dusty’s prized Cuban cigars and a twelve-pack of beer that they’d swiped from behind Shelly’s bar.
Unfortunately for them, the place they’d chosen for their smoking experiment was the same one where Dusty Muleman had stored several surplus boxes of fireworks. Being the leader in all things stupid, it was Jasper Jr. who lit the first cigar, inhaled deeply, gagged violently, and spit the thing twenty feet across the room … where it landed in an open crate of bottle rockets, which soon began to ignite, one after the other.
Before long, flames were shooting all over the place. The two party boys were lucky to get out alive.
Jasper Jr. was coughing so hard from the cigar that he was useless, so Bull threw him over his shoulder and ran through the smoke and sparks toward an open deck. They landed in the water at the same instant the Coral Queen’s fuel tank blew up.
When questioned a few days later, Jasper Jr. and Bull denied knowing how the fire started. However, arson investigators couldn’t help but notice that both kids had scorched eyebrows and singed earlobes. Jasper Jr. wasted no time blaming the boat disaster on his best buddy, the guy who’d saved his life. At that point Bull wisely terminated the friendship and offered a detailed statement to the fire department.
The fact that his own son had burned down the Coral Queen was not the worst news that Dusty Muleman would receive. The wor
st news was that the crime-scene technicians had found something unusual in the charred rubble of the casino boat—a fireproof, waterproof lockbox that was packed with cash.
“More than one hundred thousand dollars,” according to Miles Umlatt’s article in the Island Examiner, “all of it in fifty- and one-hundred-dollar denominations.”
Dad’s theory was that Dusty had been skimming from the profits of the gambling operation, a crime of great interest to the Internal Revenue Service—and also to the Miccosukee Indians who were supposed to be Dusty’s partners.
Fed up with all the rotten publicity, the Miccosukees announced that they intended to sue Dusty for embezzlement, and evict what was left of the Coral Queen from their “tribal grounds,” meaning the marina. Dusty’s casino scam was scuttled for good.
“What goes around comes around,” Mom remarked after seeing the headlines.
Abbey and I are finally starting to believe it.
A tropical wave blew through the Keys on the Saturday before Labor Day. We were all hanging around the house, waiting for the rain to quit, when the mail arrived.
Mixed in with the usual heap of bills and catalogs was a funny postcard. The picture side showed a scarlet macaw posed on a mossy branch in a beautiful rain forest. The bird was winking and holding an ancient gold coin in its great curved beak.
The message was addressed in a scraggly thin scrawl to “The Unbelievable Underwoods.”
Dear Paine, Donna, and my two favorite champs, This is the first postcard I ever wrote, so you should feel honored. I’m attaching 29,000 pesos in stamps, just to make sure it gets all the way to Florida. If it doesn’t, you can blame the shrimper who was supposed to mail it for me when he got to port.
Obviously I’m still alive, which is always sunny news from my point of view. Even better, I’ve got a red-hot lead on the whereabouts of Amanda Rose. With a touch of luck, she and I may be homeward bound by the time you receive this card. On the other hand, I could also be dead, which would seriously mess up my retirement plans.
But don’t bet against the family karma!
Love to all, esp. Abbey and Noah