High-Speed Showdown (5 page)

Frank could see that it was Miguel's job to operate the lever controlling the speed of the engine while Dennis was at the wheel. The deep rumble from the exhausts echoed in Frank's chest and seemed to hint at incredible power waiting to be unleashed.

They passed Geller's Neck and crossed into the open waters of the bay. As the boat started to rock in the waves, Dennis turned toward Miguel and nodded once. The engine note mounted to a roar. It was as if a giant hand were pressing Joe back into his seat. The bow of the boat rose, blocking his view ahead. Looking to the side, through the rainbow-streaked curtain of spray, he saw that the entire boat was riding two or three feet higher now. They were “on the step.” Instead of floating
in
the water, they were planing
on
the water. Only the tip of the stern and the two propellers were touching the surface.

Joe tapped Frank on the shoulder, grinned, and gave him a thumbs-up. No point in trying to shout over the racket of the engines. He was about to try some sign language when, without even slowing, Dennis made a sweeping turn to starboard. The boat heeled over so far that Joe was almost afraid he would fall out. Then it leveled off, just in time
for the bow to smash into an oncoming wave. The shock threw Joe forward. Only the safety harness kept his head from slamming into the back of Miguel's seat. Joe caught his breath, then met Frank's eye again. This time his grin was a little weaker.

All too soon they were back in the harbor, putt-putting toward the marina. Dennis nosed
Adelita
into the slip, and Miguel threw the gear lever into reverse, blipping the throttles just enough to bring the big boat to a dead halt. Then he jumped onto the dock, taking one of the bowlines with him. In minutes the boat was securely moored and the four were standing on the dock.

“That was fantastic,” Frank told Dennis. “Compared to our little runabout, it was like riding in a Formula One race car instead of a tired old family sedan.”

Dennis smiled. “Don't knock your runabout. You can take your friends out for a relaxing Sunday on the water, if you want. Not me. This beast of mine was built with one single thing in mind—winning races.”

“And that's what she'll do on Saturday,” Miguel said.

“We'll see,” Dennis replied. “With some decent wave heights, we might have a pretty good chance. Barry's the one to beat, and his boat doesn't handle rough water as well as
Adelita
.”

“How fast were we going today?” Frank asked.

Dennis shrugged. “No more than eighty-five on the straightaways,” he said. “I was holding it in.”

Joe whistled. “Weren't you afraid of getting a ticket?” he asked.

“There's no speed limit on open water,” Dennis said with a grin. “That's the main reason people buy these boats. They're one of the last ways around that you can really let ‘er rip.”

Dennis bent down to check one of the stern lines. As he did, his folder of charts slipped out of his hand. The navigational maps spilled out and started to blow across the dock. Joe and Frank scrambled to help Dennis grab them before they skated into the water.

Joe stopped one of the folded maps with his foot and bent over to pick it up. He froze with his fingers just inches away from it. Tucked into the chart was a paper that looked very familiar. He reached down and pulled it out.

Just as he thought. It was the Earthquest leaflet, with a skull and crossbones drawn near the bottom. But this time the scrawled words read: “Polluters Die—And You're Next.”

6 Dennis Menaced

Something about the stillness of Joe's posture alerted Frank.
With two quick strides he was next to Joe. In a low voice, he asked, “What's
the matter?”

Wordlessly, Joe held up the leaflet.

“What's that?” Dennis asked, coming over to join them.
After looking at the leaflet, he added, “Where'd you get that?”

“It was tucked into one of your maps,” Joe told him.
“This one.”

Dennis took the map and glanced at it. “Manasquam Inlet,” he
said, scratching his beard. “I haven't used that chart in weeks. That
leaflet could have been sitting there a long time.”

“I'm afraid not,” Frank responded. “I happen
to know that Earthquest just printed up those flyers
recently . . . without the threatening message at the bottom, though.
Where do you usually keep your maps? In the boat?”

Dennis shook his head. “I don't leave anything in
Adelita
. There's no safe place for stuff, so I lock
everything in the trunk of my car.”

“You mean that folder of maps was locked up until just before we
went out in the boat?” Joe asked.

“No, I had it with me earlier. I wanted to use my lunch hour to get
more familiar with the waters off Bayport,” Dennis replied.

“So you took the folder to lunch at the inn,” Frank said.
“Did you leave it at your table while you went to the buffet?”

Dennis frowned in concentration. “You know, I think I must
have,” he finally said. “I don't really recall. I did talk to
Magnusson on my way back to the table, though, and I can't see myself juggling my
plate, glass, and silverware with a portfolio tucked under my arm.”

Joe asked, “Can you think of any other time today when the folder
was out of your sight?”

Dennis's frown deepened, and his eyes shifted back and forth from
Frank to Joe. “Say, you guys do a good imitation of detectives, don't
you?” he said. It seemed to Frank that there was a new coolness in his voice.

“Anyway, the answer's no,” Dennis
continued. “Whoever put that thing in my map folder must have done it during
lunchtime. Any more questions? Because Miguel and I have work to do.”

Frank glanced at Joe, then said, “No, that's all I can think
of, Dennis. Thanks for the ride. We'll see you later.”

He and Joe handed Dennis the maps they'd rescued, then left. As they
started down the dock, Joe said, “There's another possibility, you
know.”

“You mean that Dennis may have put the leaflet there himself and
wrote those words on it?” Frank said. “I know, I thought of that. But if he
did, what was he planning to do with it? Slip it to someone else? Or pretend to find it,
so we'd all think that he's a target of the harassment, too?”

Joe let out a sigh. “I wish that, just once, we'd find
ourselves investigating a case that was simple and straightforward.”

Frank grinned. “You mean, like, ‘Mister, Stevie took my bike
and won't give it back. Will you get it for me?' Let's face it, if we
did get a case like that, it'd turn out that the bike was really Stevie's
after all and that a criminal gang wanted it because some rival crooks had hidden the
floor plans for the local bank inside the handlebars!”

“I guess you're right,” Joe said with a laugh.
“Hey, look, there's Susan Shire. Why don't we try to get some
information from her?”

Dennis's ex-wife didn't look much like a
glamorous TV star at that moment. She was bending over the open engine hatch of a sleek
metallic purple boat. Her hair was pulled back roughly into a ponytail, she was wearing
a big T-shirt stained with grease, and she had a big black smudge on one cheek. Frank
called to her.

“Who—” Susan said, straightening up. She was holding a
flashlight in one hand and a small screwdriver in the other. She recognized Joe.
“Oh, it's you. The one who rescued Dennis this morning, when I shoved him in
the water. I should thank you . . . I guess.”

“Don't mention it,” Joe said wryly. He pointed with his
chin toward the boat engines. “Are you having problems?”

Susan gave a short laugh. “Does a duck quack?” she demanded in
return. “Look at it this way, these engines are incredible
if
every one of a few hundred delicate parts works exactly the way
they're supposed to. And if some of them
don't
do
what they're supposed to, all you've got is a very big, very expensive boat
anchor.”

“This morning Dennis seemed to think somebody had been messing with
his engines,” Frank said.

“Well, aren't you the little diplomat,” Susan replied,
with a lopsided grin. “He accused
me
of doing it, in
case you missed that part of the scene. Believe me—Dennis never was very good at
recognizing
his own shortcomings. And as for accepting
responsibility for them, well, what can I say!”

“I've heard other people complain about somebody messing with
their boats, though,” Frank said, stretching the truth a little.
“There's talk that somebody's out to sabotage the meet.”

“I guess it's possible,” Susan said. “There are
all kinds of crazies out there. But if you ask me, people who say things like that are
just making excuses for themselves in advance.”

“Did you hear about Chuck, Barry Batten's throttleman?”
Joe said. “He got bad stomach cramps and had to be taken off by the first-aid
squad. He thought it was the shrimp salad at lunch, but Barry claimed he'd been
poisoned.”

Susan rolled her eyes theatrically. “That Barry!” she
exclaimed. “I stopped listening to that stuff about five minutes after I met him.
He is a classic paranoid. And he's also unbelievably
superstitious . . . Anything that happens, he's convinced
it's connected to him. Too bad about Chuck, but he shouldn't have risked
that shrimp salad. It looked to me as if it had been sitting out too long.”

Joe was about to ask another question when Susan added, “Sorry,
fellows, but I don't have any more time to chitchat. I've got a lot of work
to do.” She turned back to the engines.

Frank and Joe walked away. “So,” Joe said in an undertone,
“Susan Shire had lunch at the inn also.
She could have put
that leaflet in Dennis's mapcase to bug him. They obviously don't get
along.”

“Maybe,” Frank said. “But whoever was responsible for
Dennis's leaflet had to know about the other one, the one that Magnusson got this
morning. And the two are so much alike that they probably came from the same person. I
can see why Susan might decide to do something to shake up Dennis. But would she go to
all the trouble of faxing that other leaflet to the meet office first?”

Joe scratched his head. “Well, she might . . . if it
was part of a bigger plan to ruin the meet,” he suggested.

“Okay, sure,” Frank replied, frowning. “But what motive
would she have for doing that? I get the impression that she's expected to do well
in the big race. Why wreck it?”

“I
don't know,” Joe said,
frustration showing in his voice. “It's just a theory. What we need now are
a lot more facts.”

Frank nodded decisively. “Right. And the best way to get them is to
talk to the people who have them. Let's head over to the inn and do a little
high-level mingling.”

 • • •

Joe and Frank made sure to get home in time to set the table for dinner.
Afterward, Laura Hardy, their mother, said, “I'm off to a meeting of the
neighborhood improvement committee. We're going
to try to get
a traffic light put in at that corner by the elementary school.”

“Good luck,” Aunt Gertrude said. “As for me, I'm
going to watch a rerun of one of my favorite shows. Boys, would you care to join
me?”

“Sorry, Aunt Gertrude,” Joe said with a smile.
“I'm allergic to black-and-white television. It makes me break out in
colored spots.”

Frank said, “We'll clear up. Then we have to put in some work
on our latest case.”

It didn't take the two brothers long to wash and dry the dishes and
clean the kitchen counters. Soon they were back at the dinner table with a supply of
felt-tip pens and index cards.

Frank started by making a card for each of the important people in the
case. “Okay,” he said when he had finished. “What do we know so
far?”

Joe took the deck of cards, thumbed through it, and stopped at Barry
Batten. “A lot of people think Batten is a royal pain in the neck,” he said.
“They also think that he's going to win the cup on Saturday.”

“Unless a black cat crosses his path or something,” Frank
pointed out. “The one thing they all mentioned was how superstitious he is.
Remember that story about the time he dropped out of a race because he didn't like
his horoscope in the newspaper?”

“He's pretty cold-blooded, too,” Joe said. “Did
you notice that with his friend Chuck lying there
sick, all he cared
about was fishing his helmet out of the water, and then finding a replacement for Chuck?
It wouldn't surprise me if
he
poisoned Chuck's
shrimp salad.”

Frank said, “Let's not go overboard, Joe. In that case, why
would he make a big deal of telling us Chuck had been deliberately poisoned? Why not let
us assume that it was food poisoning?”

“Oh. Yeah. Well, anyway . . . ” Joe
flipped to the next card. “Dennis. He seems like a really nice guy. But two
different people mentioned how furious he is that Susan wins more races than he
does.”

Frank clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back to gaze at the
ceiling. “How about this?” he said. “Dennis wants to make sure Susan
loses. But if he simply does something to her boat, it'll be really obvious that
he's the one who's responsible. So he creates a whole campaign of sabotage
as a smoke screen.”

“That's clever,” Joe said. “A long shot, but we
should keep it in mind. For Dennis as well as his ex-wife. How about Carl Newcastle?
He's one of the few racers who's actually from Bayport. He owns a big
trucking company here in town. The company picks up the bills for his racing. Nobody
seems to know what he and Barry were squabbling about this morning.”