Ruby Redfort Take Your Last Breath (11 page)

Branching out from this were all the names of the people who had heard the strange whispering in the ocean.

And then a question:

Ruby sat staring at her own question for some minutes before catching sight of the time. She quickly reached across and switched on the portable TV that sat on her bedroom floor. The title music to
Crazy Cops
blared out, and the face of Detective Despo filled the screen. She sank down in her beanbag and let her mind concentrate on the life-and-death matters of a fictional cop.

The great advantage for Detective Despo was that he had a team of TV writers who made sure his cases were all tied up neatly by the end of each sixty-minute episode. Right at that moment Ruby envied him; she couldn’t help wishing that she had a writer on board to make sure her latest case came out right in the end, but regrettably for her, she didn’t live in a fictional world.

“Pirates! Pirates! They’ll rob us blind, cut our throats, and leave us for dead! They’ve already thrown that poor dog overboard.”

On hearing this, Mr. Sylvester fainted.

This all provided an excellent distraction, one that Sabina Redfort made good use of. She very quickly and very quietly made her way to the wheelhouse, snatched up the ship-to-shore radio, and sent out a Mayday call to the coast guard.

“Mayday, Mayday. This is the
Golden Albatross.
Do you read me? Over.”

She got no reply, but she wasn’t going to give up. Someone was bound to pick up the distress signal sooner or later.

“Mayday, Mayday. This is the
Golden Albatross
. Do you read me? We are in deep over-our-heads trouble. Over.”

Still no reply. This was very odd. The coast guard was supposed to answer immediately. Sabina’s voice rose louder.

“Mayday, Mayday, I repeat, do you read me? Over.”

“Yes,” said a voice — unfortunately not a voice from the radio, but rather a deep voice from just behind her. “It’s certainly over for you, lady!”

Sabina spun around, and there, standing a few feet away, was a smartly dressed young man who looked like he would be more comfortable in an office than on the deck of a pirate boat; he did not look one bit like the murderous type. However, the man at his side did. He was smiling, revealing a mouth full of gold teeth, some chipped, some missing. He was a small man, but he seemed to easily occupy the cabin with a monstrous malevolence.

In his hand was a very shiny and very sharp-looking knife.

“I was just . . . trying to cancel a . . . dental appointment,” stammered Sabina, not at all sure what she was saying, but she was staring at the man, and dental hygiene was the first thing that had come to mind.

The man snickered cruelly. “No need for teeth where you’re going.”

Sabina didn’t like the glint in his eye. He was obviously a man who enjoyed throwing dogs into the ocean; no doubt women, too. He grabbed her arm and pushed and dragged her back to the deck.

“Watch it, would you, Captain Hook; you’re wrenching my arm out of its socket.”

“No need for arms where you’re going,” laughed the pirate. Then he spied the gem on her finger. “Now give me your ring!”

Sabina shook her head. “But this is a family heirloom. It belonged to several of my great-grandmothers, and if you think —”

“You hand it over,” growled the pirate, “or I’ll kill everyone on board.”

“But . . . it won’t come off my finger,” protested Sabina.

“No need for fingers where you’re going!” he said, flashing the knife.

Goodness
, thought Sabina,
there’s not going to be much of me left.

“Let me cut it off. Save you the struggle.” He laughed again.

“You’ll do no such thing,” said Sabina, clenching her fists. The pirate lunged toward her, and Sabina lashed out, clocking him on the jaw. Sabina Redfort packed quite a punch, and the ring, which was diamond, gashed a scarlet ribbon across the pirate’s cheek.

“Oh my, that was an accident,” said Sabina a little nervously. “I was about to say, if you want this ring, you had better get me a little soap and water.”

The pirate didn’t look like he was about to oblige, but then he grinned.

“OK,” he said. “Here’s the water; good luck finding the soap.”

And with that he picked her up and threw her overboard.

Brant Redfort, horrified, bellowed, “Honey, don’t think of drowning! I’m coming to save you!”

And he did a swan dive from the bow of the boat and disappeared beneath the waves. The pirates, sensing they had in some way failed to create an atmosphere of blind terror, began shooting into the water. They continued to shoot for some minutes, wanting to be sure that these two have-a-go heroes would never resurface.

“We won’t be worth much to you if we’re all dead!” screamed Mrs. Sylvester. “Hostages have to be alive, remember.”

“Who said anything about hostages?” snarled the pirate.

This had the desired effect, and all the remaining passengers trembled and awaited their fate.

RUBY WOKE ON WEDNESDAY MORNING
to hear her radio making an unpleasant noise, like an orchestra tuning up. She lifted her head wearily from the pillow and through the blur of her poor eyesight saw a gray furry shape.

“Bug,” she groaned. “You wanna switch that off?” It was a trick of his to step on the radio, turning it on. It usually got Ruby out of bed.

The dog ambled over to where she lay and licked her nose.

“Cut it out, would you, Bug?”

She dragged herself up, then tripped over the happy husky and landed on her behind.
Darn it!
She crawled over to the radio and blindly fiddled with the dial.

“If you’re gonna switch the radio on, at least tune it to something that sounds like a tune.” To her surprise she found it
was
tuned. Mrs. Digby had obviously been in with the vacuum, since the dial was set to easy-listening Chime Melody. However, the track that was playing was anything but easy listening: it sounded like a whole bunch of grasshoppers were playing badly tuned violins.

Jeepers, is that enough to give anyone a sore head.

Ruby looked at herself in the mirror.

“I guess I’m up,” she muttered. She showered and dressed and fixed her barrette in her hair, then looked at herself in the mirror.

Better,
she told herself. She pulled on a T-shirt that said
wake me if things get interesting.

School that day basically involved trying to coax Clancy out of packing his bags and heading for the hills.

“I think I should just get outta here, make a run for it,” he said. He seemed to mean it. “I won’t survive two minutes in the ocean, not two minutes.”

“Clance, you’re overdramatizing. The worst that could happen is you get stung by a jellyfish.”

“A jellyfish!” squealed Clancy, by now flapping his arms furiously. “I don’t like the sound of that. No, I’m gonna head for Colorado — it’s landlocked. I could camp out for a few months until this whole thing blows over.”

Ruby rolled her eyes. “Clance my friend, you’re beginning to lose it. It’s just a
school swimathon
.
” But Clancy Crew could not be calmed.

“You know how I am about jellyfish; if I get stung, I’ll most likely have an allergic reaction and sink.”

“You can borrow my Spectrum anti-sting canister, how about that? That’s gotta reassure you,” said Ruby.

By Thursday, Clancy was worse: he was hardly able to speak, and in physics when Mr. Endell asked him what he would do if an asteroid struck Earth, Clancy replied, “Thank my lucky stars.”

Elliot tried to jolt him out of it by making him laugh, but most of his jokes seemed to revolve around some poor bozo meeting a gory end, and so his efforts resulted in Clancy Crew sinking lower into his sweater. He actually looked like he was shrinking.

By Friday, Clancy had adopted the demeanor of a condemned man. He had stopped wrestling with his fate and seemed to accept that there was no way out; he was going to have to swim that swimathon even if it meant swimming heroically — or perhaps weeping like a coward — toward certain death.

After school, just as Clancy was leaving for home, Ruby caught up with him.

“Hey, Clance, do you want me to come over?”

Clancy shook his head. “Nah, that’s all right, Rube. I gotta get my sleep; it’s my only chance.”

“You know you’re not gonna die, Clance; you’re being awful pessimistic.”

“Can you guarantee that?” asked Clancy, searching her face for assurance. He wanted to believe her, he really did.

“I gave you my anti-sting; there’s no way you can die of a jellyfish attack,” said Ruby.

“I know,” said Clancy. “But there’s worse than jellyfish out there.”

As she looked into his desperate eyes, she thought of that old saying: a drowning man will clutch at straws. Clancy needed a straw right now, one that he could put all his faith in:
RULE 20: NINETY PERCENT OF SURVIVAL IS ABOUT BELIEVING YOU WILL SURVIVE.

Ruby reached into her inside jacket pocket and unclipped something from the lining.

“Here,” she said. “Why don’t you take this? It’s the luckiest thing I got.” She handed him a tiny tin button. It seemed to be totally plain, just an ordinary white button, until you held it in your hand and felt something embossed on its surface. Ruby had found it when she was just a little kid, next to the sidewalk on Cedarwood Drive. She had kept it all these years; she wasn’t exactly sure why. She usually had it pinned to the inside of her jacket, a habit started when she was a toddler and aware that her mother would consider the pin a hazard and take it away. Now that she was grown there was of course no need to hide it, but it had become a “thing”— something she did — and so the button remained out of sight. “Just don’t lose it, and give it right back, OK?”

Clancy looked at this small object lying in his hand. He believed her about the luck. Ruby could see that in his eyes.
This tiny object might just save my life.
That’s what he was thinking. “Really?” he said, and his face looked brighter. “I can borrow it?”

“Yeah, take my good luck, why don’t you.”

He smiled. “Thanks, Rube.”