Treasure Hunters

by James Patterson

  The police officer was wearing a much cleaner version of the black hat with the red band that Maurice had worn the last time our boat was chased across the Caribbean. His crisp white shirt had shoulder boards and button-down pockets, one stuffed with what looked like parking tickets.

  “Right,” the officer said. “I’m Police Constable Jackson Wilmot. You are?”

  “Tommy.”

  “Do you have a last name?”

  “Definitely.”

  The cop lowered his sunglasses and arched his eyebrows to let Tommy know he’d like to hear what that last name was.

  “Oh, right. Duh. Kidd. I’m Tommy Kidd. We were just, you know, out here, chillin’.”

  “Is that so?” said Constable Wilmot.

  “We were going deep-sea fishing,” I said with a great big, innocent smile.

  Constable Wilmot flipped open a black leather ledger. “You would be Bickford Kidd, is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir. How did you know my name?”

  “An interested third party provided it to our Family Support Unit. Are Rebecca and Stephanie Kidd also on board this vessel?”

  Yeah. Storm’s real name is Stephanie.

  “Maybe,” said Tommy.

  Constable Wilmot lowered his shades again and arched another eyebrow. “Did you, perchance, leave port without your two sisters?”

  “Constable Wilmot,” I said, “why, all of a sudden, is our family fishing expedition something for the RCIPS to worry about?”

  “We have reason to believe that you, your brother, and your two sisters are currently in the Caymans without adult supervision.”

  “Yo,” said Tommy, “I’m eighteen. In, like, six more months.”

  “And I hope to be invited to the party.” I think that was the constable making a joke. You sometimes can’t tell when the joke teller has a British accent. “However, for the next six months, you are a minor in the eyes of the law. Therefore, as both of your parents are deceased—”

  “What?” said Beck, climbing up the steps from the cabin to join us on the aft deck. “Who said Mom and Dad are dead?”

  Constable Wilmot rocked back on the heels of his shiny black shoes. “Certain interested parties.”

  “You mean certain interested liars,” said Beck, handing the constable a sheet of paper.

  “And what, pray tell, is this?”

  “An e-mail from our not-dead dad. He’s meeting us back in George Town as soon as we’re finished out here with our scuba lessons.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “Scuba lessons?” said Constable Wilmot, taking off his sunglasses so we could all see both of his eyebrows hunching up like skeptical caterpillars.

  “That’s right,” said Beck, because she didn’t see me trying to shush her without the police officer seeing me shush her.

  “According to your brother, ma’am, you are currently on a deep-sea fishing expedition.”

  “Well,” said Beck, “technically, we, uh…”

  “We chase after the fish in our scuba gear,” I said. “We use spearguns.”

  “Fascinating,” mumbled Constable Wilmot as he briskly read the e-mail Beck had just handed him. “This is from your father?”

  “That’s right,” said Beck. “He’s back at the dock. Waiting for us.”

  “Might I inquire as to why this e-mail was sent from the same address it was sent to?”

  “Well, um, you know, the Internet…”

  “Actually,” I said, “Dad finds it way easier to use only one e-mail address because everything is synced through his cloud. Used to say stuff like, ‘Concepts like from and to are kind of meaningless these days with cloud computing, don’t you think?’ ”

  The constable folded up the e-mail and handed it back to Beck. “This e-mail is obviously a forgery.” He reached for the radio clipped to his belt. “Jenkins? We have four to escort back to George Town. We’ll need to tow their boat into port as well.”

  “Excuse me?” Storm had made her way back to the stern of the ship. I noticed that the front of her shorts and shirt were sopping wet. “Do you work for the United States of America?”

  The constable lowered the radio. “Excuse me?”

  Storm pointed to the flag flying from the taffrail at the back of the boat.

  “We are flying under the flag of the United States of America,” said Storm.

  “Be that as it may, miss, you are currently in the jurisdiction of the Royal Cayman Islands Police—”

  “I don’t think so, sir. While you were interrogating my brothers and sister, it seems we drifted into international waters.”

  That was why Storm’s clothes were soaked! She’d hoisted our anchor so we could coast farther out to sea.

  “As I’m certain you know, constable,” Storm continued, “oceans, seas, and waters outside national jurisdictions are referred to as the ‘high seas’ or, in Latin, mare liberum, meaning the ‘free sea.’ ”

  “You must be Stephanie,” said the constable, looking slightly seasick.

  “I prefer to be called Storm, the nickname given to me by my father.”

  “Now deceased.”

  I could see dark gray thunderclouds boiling up in Storm’s eyes as she glared at Constable Wilmot.

  (Yep. That’s why Dad gave her the nickname.)

  “Officer,” she said, sounding like a momma grizzly who’s been to law school, “according to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, once a vessel is twelve nautical miles out from the baseline of a sovereign coastal state’s shores, said vessel falls under the jurisdiction of the nationality of the state whose flag it is entitled to fly.”

  I smiled. Because I knew Storm was relaying, word for word, a page she had memorized from that book on maritime law.

  “Therefore, since you do not operate under the sovereign authority of the United States of America, you have no jurisdiction over us on the high seas. Kindly leave our vessel.”

  I felt like singing “God Bless America.” Or at least chanting “USA! USA!”

  “I am impressed with your knowledge of maritime law,” said Constable Wilmot. “However, I beg to differ with your calculation of our current position in relation to—”

  Before he could finish, Beck whipped out her digital camera and took a snapshot.

  “Young lady,” sniffed the constable, “this is hardly the time or place for—”

  “Check it out,” said Beck, showing the camera’s display window to the constable. “It’s a GPS camera.”

  I joined in: “According to a whole bunch of satellites that never tell a lie, we are definitely in international waters. And you, Constable Wilmot, need to get off our boat.”

  The RCIPS officer stared at the tiny screen.

  Nodding grimly, he reached for his radio.

  “Jenkins? Belay my original orders. Only one to come aboard.” He gave Storm a crisp salute off the brim of his cop cap. “Well played, young lady.”

  Storm saluted back. “Enjoyed sparring with you, Officer.”

  The constable went back to his police boat, which turned tail and sailed back toward the Caymans.

  Meanwhile, on the deck of The Lost, we Kidds were locked in a major-league, American-style group hug.

  Around Storm.

  CHAPTER 18

  The first thing Tommy did when he returned to the helm was flip the “silence switch” on our AIS transponder so nobody could track where we were headed.

  “Always a wise move,” he said with a wink, “in pirate-infested waters.”

  Or if your ship’s movements are being closely monitored by the police from your last port of call. Or maybe Louie Louie.

  Let’s face it: Somebody had sent the RCIPS boat after us. My money was on our parents’ so-called friend. I’d seen how Louie Louie was drooling over the treasure on display in the deckhouse. He must’ve figured there was even better loot stashed somewhere down below.

  “I’m going into The Room,” Storm announced.

  “Why
?” said Beck.

  “Anything I see that looks superimportant, I’m going to temporarily stow in some of the secret compartments. Just in case we have any more unexpected company.”

  Storm went off to wherever she had last hidden The Key.

  “How much longer till we reach the dive site?” asked Beck.

  “I guesstimate twelve hours,” said Tommy.

  “We’ll be hauling gold bars out of a shipwreck before we know it!” I cheered.

  “But what if there’s nothing down there?” said Beck. “What if we come up empty-handed?”

  “Yo, chill, Beck,” said Tommy. “Talk like that could jinx the dive.”

  “But I’m serious. We need to find this treasure, or we’re sunk.”

  “Whoa. Bad choice of words, li’l sis. Just chillax. No matter what, we’re gonna be golden.”

  “Promise, Tommy?”

  “Promise.”

  Around eight the next morning, we dropped anchor directly over the spot where the tiny treasure map said we’d find one of the galleons from the lost Córdoba fleet.

  (Thanks for drawing the giant X on the water, Beck. I’ve always thought there should be one bobbing up and down in the waves when we reach a treasure site.)

  “Gear up!” called Tommy.

  Beck, Tommy, and I were already in our wet suits.

  Storm, as always, would be staying with the boat. She never went on dives. She couldn’t stand the feeling of the snug and rubbery wet suit, and besides, someone had to be on board in case of emergencies.

  We dipped our fins into the water to make them easier to pull on and hoisted the heavy air tanks over our shoulders.

  I yanked my straps tight across the chest and locked them down. I turned the valve on my tank, jammed the regulator into my mouth, and snapped my mask into place.

  Dive leader Tommy sliced into the water like a knife. Beck slipped in right behind him.

  I leaped off the deck and plunged into the turquoise-blue water.

  It was time to hunt some treasure!

  CHAPTER 19

  Everything went silent.

  I could hear my own breathing but not much else. Beck’s swim fins scissor-kicked a few yards ahead of me, creating a swirl of tiny air bubbles that sent neon-bright fish scurrying away in every direction. I raced to catch up with her.

  It didn’t take long to reach the bottom. The water trapping our sunken treasure ship was maybe forty feet deep. I saw a fish that looked like a snake with fins wiggling above a coral reef colored seven shades of pink. To my left, Tommy was stirring up a murky whirlwind of sand, running a submersible metal detector back and forth across the sea floor.

  He shook his head.

  Nothing.

  Beck was to my right, plunging her metal-detecting probe into the sandy bottom. I followed her lead, poking the ground around me. If we came upon coins or silver bars or another conquistador helmet, our detectors would start pinging in our ears.

  Nothing.

  We searched and searched.

  For forty-five full minutes.

  Our tanks were running dangerously low on air, and I could tell Beck was as frustrated as I was.

  Suddenly, Tommy signaled that he had found something.

  Beck and I swam over to where he was yanking a squarish object (a sea chest, maybe?) out of a muddy blur of sand and shells. The thing was so caked with ocean dreck that there would be no telling what it was until we cleaned it up. We helped Tommy shove whatever he had just found into a catch net, and the three of us kicked our fins and hauled the bundle, which was very heavy, up to the surface.

  When we finally heaved the net up onto the deck, it landed with a heavy thud.

  Tommy tore his regulator out of his mouth and flipped back his mask. “This is it, you guys! The big one! Boo-yah!”

  “That net was so heavy!” shouted Beck.

  “Gold always is!” I added enthusiastically.

  The three of us clambered up the dive ladder and got to work hosing our treasure off and cleaning it up. Which is when we realized a couple of things.

  One, it wasn’t Spanish. Two, it wasn’t treasure.

  It was a small, rotting chair the color of driftwood, with a hole in the seat. Beneath the hole was a rusty bucket with a handle attached.

  “It’s an old-fashioned potty-training seat,” said Storm, who’d wandered over to inspect our find. “You know, guys, I don’t think many conquistadors used those. The other conquistadors might’ve laughed.”

  Tommy, Beck, and I just stood there, dripping on the deck, staring down at the haul from our first treasure hunt without Dad or Mom.

  DAHLIA’S TOITY, it said across the back.

  Was this a sign of bad luck to come?

  Was our whole treasure-hunting business doomed to end up in the crapper?

  At the moment, it sure felt that way.

  CHAPTER 20

  “Bickford?” said Beck. “Might I see you up at the bow?”

  “Of course, Rebecca.”

  As you can probably tell, our total failure on the dive had put my sister and me in the mood for Twin Tirade No. 427.

  “We made a huge mistake!” Beck screamed the instant we were alone in the bow pulpit. “We can’t keep hunting treasure without Dad and Mom! We stink!”

  “One bad dive doesn’t mean we’re out of business,” I said. “We’ll go back down.”

  “Why? Do you want to find Dahlia’s binky, too? Maybe her dirty diapers?”

  “No, Rebecca, I want to find the gold from that lost Spanish galleon.”

  “Hello? Earth to Bickford? Were you even under the same water I was? There is no lost Spanish galleon down there.”

  “Yes, there is!”

  “Really? How many conquistadors were named Dahlia?”

  “If the lost galleon isn’t down there,” I shouted, “why did someone draw a map saying it was?”

  “Because they’re stupid… uh… stupidheads.”

  (Yes, as noted earlier, Beck often struggles to express herself verbally. So, she tries to make up for it with her drawings.)

  Oh, come on. Is that really necessary? What would Dahlia say if she saw what you did with her toity?

  “We need to find that treasure,” I insisted.

  “No, Bick, we need to face facts. Our treasure-hunting days are over. They have been ever since Dad drowned.”

  “Dad did not drown! He isn’t dead!”

  “Well, we sure are.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  “Yes, we are. We have to give up this stupid family business, once and for all.”

  That hurt. “Really?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Wow.”

  “That would stink, wouldn’t it?”

  “Totally.”

  This was probably our fastest cooldown ever.

  Beck pouted. “I don’t want to go to real school. All they have to draw with are crayons and finger paints. No charcoals or fine-tipped pens. Some schools don’t even have art classes!”

  I was getting really sick of Beck’s bad attitude, but her rant gave me an idea. “Beck—that’s it! A fine-tipped pen… We could have botched the map transfer!”

  “What?”

  “What if we did something wrong when we copied the tiny treasure map onto the chart? Think about it—that thing is the size of a postage stamp. A thick-tipped pen could have put us a millimeter off here or there, and we ended up in the totally wrong spot.”

  “You’re right! We just have to study that tiny map much more carefully.”

  “Come on,” I said. “Storm still has it. We’ll ask her to chart it again.”

  “Maybe we should scan it into the computer!” said Beck as we dashed along the sides of the ship, hanging on to the railings the whole way. The wind was whipping along pretty fiercely, buffeting and billowing our sails. “Then we can lay it up against the digital charts in our navigational app.”

  “Excellent suggestion, Rebecca!”

  “Why,
thank you, Bickford.”

  We reached the stern and saw Storm crawling around on her hands and knees searching for something. Tommy was up in the wheelhouse.

  “Storm?” I said.

  “I was studying the tiny treasure map because maybe I made a mistake when I drew up the chart, and the wind whipped up, and—”

  She stopped.

  “I am so sorry.”

  Tears were streaming down both her cheeks.

  That gusty wind?

  It had given our tiny treasure map a hasty burial at sea.

  CHAPTER 21

  I think if Storm weren’t our sister, Beck and I would have thrown her overboard, too.

  But she is our sister, so we love her all the more for being, well, Storm.

  So that night we tried to forget how Storm just completely ruined our lives, and we tried really hard to love her again.

  “Accidents happen,” I said.

  “Usually when I’m around,” Storm said, moping.

  My sisters and I were down in the girls’ cabin. Storm was sitting on the edge of the lower bunk, staring at her knees and sobbing.

  And saying “I’m sorry” a lot.

  “I am so, so sorry, you guys. Seriously. You have no idea how sorry I am.”

  “Well,” said Beck, “we are where we are. There’s nothing we can do to change what happened.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to dismiss our latest disaster as if it were no big deal. “So we lost a treasure map. At least we still have each other.”

  Okay. I knew it sounded cornier than the worst greeting card on the sappy rack. But I had to say something.

  Storm looked up. Instead of thunderclouds and lightning bolts in her eyes, all I saw was a dull sadness.

  “That’s just it. You three are stuck with me. I’m no good for anything. I won’t dive. I’m no help running the sails or working the rigging. Let’s be honest, I’m nothing but a bloated blob of ballast. A lump of deadweight that’s dragging the rest of you guys down.”