The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 4

by Roy MacGregor

  Travis had seen talent like this rarely. Certainly Slava, Dmitri’s Russian cousin, had similar skating skills, but this Aussie kid, Wiz, seemed to see the game as well as Sarah herself.

  It was almost impossible to get to know anyone in the midst of a hockey game. The three sat together on the bench when their line was off, but they talked little except about plays they might try. Wiz – Travis still had trouble thinking anyone might be called that – was certainly friendly enough, but he was also all business during the game, even if it was a meaningless exhibition match.

  “What’s the big D’s name, mate?” he asked Travis at one point.

  “Wayne Nishikawa,” Travis said. “Everybody calls him Nish.”

  “He’s bloody good, eh?”

  Travis nodded, a bit reluctantly. Nish was in full show-off mode, just as Travis knew he would be in an exhibition match. He was lugging the puck, keeping the puck, trying to score the fancy goals. But Jeremy was hot in the Owls’ net, and no matter how much Nish pressed he wasn’t able to beat him.

  It was a strange game. The players’ ability varied widely, but the coaches were careful to keep the weaker lines against each other – Sydney players in Owls sweaters against Sydney players on the Sharks’ side – and Travis and Sarah and their new centre against the top Owls lines. Ten minutes into the game, no one had scored a single goal.

  Travis couldn’t believe some of the things Wiz could do. He had exceptional speed, but he wasn’t a glory hog. He’d no sooner get the puck than he’d be looking for either Travis or Sarah on a break, and he used the points brilliantly, cycling pucks in the corner until he saw an opening to fire a pass out to Nish or Fahd or one of the Sydney defenders for a good shot. Wiz and Nish were clearly feeding off each other, trying to outdo each other with the perfect, unexpected pass.

  Wiz also had a trick that Travis would have given anything to learn. Just like an NHLer, Wiz could scoop up a puck from the ice, bounce it a couple of times on his stick, catch it dead on the blade, and then hand it over to Muck for a faceoff. Even Muck seemed impressed.

  Travis couldn’t count the hours that he and Sarah had spent trying to scoop pucks the same way.

  Andy Higgins scored first for the Owls on a hard slapper that beat Jenny to the five-hole. Then Simon Milliken scored. Fahd scored on a tip-in, and one of the better Sharks scored on a lucky rebound.

  “Well, mates,” Wiz said as they sat on the bench waiting for their next shift. “What say we put on a little show for them?”

  “You’re on,” said Sarah, heading over the boards.

  They changed on the fly, Sarah racing back to pick up a loose puck that Nish kicked up as a Shark pressed him against the boards behind his net. Sarah turned, reversed directions, and flew around the net and headed up Travis’s side.

  Travis instinctively crossed over.

  Sarah sent a high pass to Wiz, which he knocked down easily with his glove and kicked up onto his stick. He flew up across centre, looking for Travis on the far side.

  Travis rapped the ice for a pass, and Wilson, trying to read the play, dove to block the pass everyone thought was coming.

  But Wiz faked the pass, dropped the puck back into his skates, and, kicking it back and forth between his blades like a kid with a soccer ball, danced around Sam and moved in alone.

  He came in hard, and stopped dead, throwing Jeremy off completely. Without even a glance, he passed back to Sarah, now driving hard for the net. Sarah stickhandled quickly around Jeremy and threw it back to Wiz for the shot.

  But Wiz didn’t even try to take the puck with his stick. He angled his skates so the puck hit his left blade, then his right, and rebounded perfectly across the crease onto Travis’s stick.

  The net was completely empty. Travis could have done a math problem he had so much time. He just tucked the puck in and turned to look at Wiz, who was grinning from ear to ear.

  “Was that on purpose?” Travis asked as Wiz and the others came to slap his back.

  “You’ll never know, mate,” Wiz answered, laughing.

  They had an hour to play. The Owls went ahead, the Sharks caught up. Sarah scored a lovely goal on her usual shoulder-fake move. Dmitri scored a typical Dmitri backhander that shot the water bottle off the net.

  “What’s the score?” Sarah shouted as they realized time was winding down. The Zamboni driver was already starting up his machine.

  “Who knows?” said Wiz.

  “I think we need one to win,” Travis said.

  “One it is, then, mate,” Wiz said as the coach called their line for the final faceoff.

  Wiz won it easily. He shovelled the puck to Nish, who swung back and around his net, hitting Sarah on the far side.

  Sarah passed cross-ice to Travis, who chopped the puck into the middle for Wiz, who was already at full speed.

  Wiz hit the blueline in front of Sam and did a perfect “spinnerama” move, leaving Sam on her knees while he spun like a top around her, the puck moving perfectly with him.

  Wiz moved in behind the goal, holding the puck. Both Travis and Sarah raced for the sides of the net, trusting in a pass.

  Wiz passed to Sarah, who rapped it back.

  Wilson tried to take out Wiz, but Wiz bounced the puck off the back of the net as Wilson flew by into the boards.

  Sam took out Travis. Andy, coming back hard, took out Sarah. Simon Milliken tied up Nish on the point so he couldn’t break for the net and a pass.

  Wiz stickhandled so loosely he might have been the only person on the ice. He looked up, smiling.

  Travis tried to scramble back, but Sam had too good an angle on him and was too strong for him to break away.

  Wiz did his little scoop move, and instantly the puck was lying on his stick blade as if he were about to hand it to the referee.

  Is he quitting? Travis wondered. Did the horn blow?

  But he wasn’t quitting. With the puck still balanced perfectly on his blade, Wiz skated out from behind the net, looped the stick in a fake that sent Jeremy over flat on his back, and then tossed rather than shot the puck high in under the crossbar.

  Muck’s whistle and the horn blew at exactly the same time.

  The Sharks – and the Owls who were temporary Sharks – mobbed Wiz, who was laughing at what he’d done.

  “No fair!” Jeremy was shouting to Muck and slamming his stick on the ice at the same time. “That’s illegal.”

  Muck just shook his head, grinning.

  “Never seen a goal like it,” he said. “But there’s nothing in the rule books to say you can’t do it.”

  6

  Murder, however, followed no rules. There was nothing fair about it. Nothing to say who might do it, or how.

  Travis wasn’t even certain it was murder, though a head cut clean off certainly suggested foul play.

  The facts were obvious: Great White Shark burps up human head. Obviously, someone had to die to produce the human head. But no one knew who, or how, or, for that matter, where all the other body parts were.

  “GRISLY DISCOVERY FOR CANADIAN HOCKEY VISITORS,” said the headline on the front page of that day’s Sydney Morning Herald. Below the headline was a photograph of the Screech Owls being brought out of the Aquarium by first-aid workers. Sam was bawling into Sarah’s shoulder. Nish looked like he’d already thrown up.

  It was the first time Nish hadn’t raced to see his picture in a newspaper. “Food poisoning,” he kept saying. “But no one will believe me.” And no one did.

  By the next day, they had a little more to go on. Police pathologists had determined the head belonged to a male Asian, probably aged between twenty-five and fifty. There had apparently been some minor dental work done on the man’s teeth, but the chances of finding the dental records of a man who could have come from anywhere in the world, who was but one of approximately a billion men in that age group who could be roughly described as “Asian,” were remote if not impossible.

  “Who was he?” Data kept asking. He had
used his laptop to connect to the Internet and had scoured every Southeast Asian newspaper he could find published in English to see if a man had gone missing at sea, but he’d come up with nothing.

  The police weren’t much further ahead. Mr. Dillinger had phoned them to ask if they had any new information. The poor shark had been drugged so it could be examined, but an X-ray and ultrasound had indicated no other human body parts inside, which meant the shark had somehow scooped up the head as it fell down through the water or else while it lay on the sea bottom. According to the Sydney coroner, marks on the neck area suggested the head had been severed by something other than shark’s teeth.

  “Which means,” Data added, “that the man was decapitated.”

  Mr. Dillinger grimaced. He didn’t like to put it that way, but obviously, the man’s head had come off somehow. In a terrible boating accident? Struck by a propeller? Caught on an anchor line?

  “Chopped off with a machete!” Fahd offered.

  Mr. Dillinger just looked at Fahd, the team manager’s big, wrinkled face looking sad and anxious for a change of topic.

  “But why?” Sam asked.

  “And who?” Sarah added.

  That morning, the Owls set out for Homebush Bay, the site of the Summer Olympic Games. They took the Green line train out to Lidcombe Station, then switched to the Yellow line that looped out around Olympic Park and back.

  It was another beautiful day. Travis was already beginning to notice a major difference about Australians. No one here ever talked about the weather. At home it was almost a constant topic of conversation – Will it last? Enjoy it while it’s here! What’s the forecast? But in Sydney the weather seemed entirely taken for granted. If every day was bright and warm, if every sky was blue, what was the point in discussing it?

  Olympic Park was fantastic. They walked along the waterways and parks around the site and saw where the Olympic Athletes Village had been. They toured the Olympic pool with its high, jagged “shark’s fin” architecture. They saw the Olympic Stadium where the stunning opening ceremonies had been held and the Olympic Flame lit.

  There were other peewee teams already there, all of them excitedly preparing for the Mini-Olympics part of the tournament, and if Travis thought some of the Australian players looked out of their element on ice, they certainly looked at home here.

  “I think I’ll try pole vault,” Dmitri said.

  Several of the Owls went over to the pole vault area with Dmitri to watch. He picked out a thin, flexible pole, paced off his run, walked back once to measure the height he’d need to clear the bar, walked out, paused, and then ran, dropping the tip of the pole so it caught and whipped him high, perfectly shooting his legs up and away before releasing the pole while he floated easily over the bar.

  “Is there anything Dmitri can’t do?” Sam asked, laughing and cheering with the rest.

  They spent much of the afternoon trying out different venues and equipment. Dmitri and Sarah kept pretty much to the track. Fahd went over to the archery field with Lars. Jeremy and Gordie Griffith spent time in the basketball court pretending they were Vince Carter and trying to slam-dunk off a small trampoline that some of the workers had set up in front of one of the nets. Derek and Jesse took on Liz and Jenny in doubles tennis at the same courts where Serena and Venus Williams had won the gold medal in doubles.

  Everybody was busy but one lonely Screech Owl: Wayne Nishikawa. He wouldn’t join Travis at the handball courts. He wouldn’t play tennis. He wouldn’t go with Fahd to the archery. Sarah asked him if he wanted to swim in the Olympic pool, but he wasn’t interested. Sam asked him if the two of them should work on their diving, but he said he wasn’t ready.

  “Look,” Travis said, “if you had your choice of anything, what would you do?”

  Nish didn’t miss a beat. “Go to Bondi Beach.”

  Travis remembered that Bondi Beach, on the other side of the city, was where they had held the beach volleyball competition. But hadn’t they torn down the volleyball stadium when it was over?

  “There’s nothing there,” Travis said.

  “That’s what you think,” Nish said.

  Travis watched in astonishment as Nish dug deep into his wallet and produced a page torn from a Sydney guide book he must have picked up in the hotel lobby. He carefully unfolded the page and handed it over, a look of triumph on his beaming face.

  Travis took the page, and saw at once what had caught his friend’s eye.

  BONDI BEACH CULTURE

  No visit to Sydney is complete without a visit to Australia’s most famous beach. But visitors be warned – Nude Sunbathing is Everywhere at Bondi!

  Travis handed the crumpled page back to Nish.

  “You never give up, do you?”

  “Everyone has a calling in life,” smiled Nish. “Some become priests. Some become doctors or teachers. I’m a natural-born nudist.”

  “C’mon,” Travis suggested, changing the topic, “the girls are at the diving pool. Let’s at least check it out.”

  They headed along the wide Olympic Boulevard until they came to the International Aquatic Centre. A side door was open for the visiting peewee teams, and they raced up the steps and in. The building took Travis’s breath away when he saw how massive it was inside. It seemed there were as many seats as in an NHL hockey rink. The Olympic pool was at one end, with the medal podium still there beside it. At the far end of the building was the diving pool, with the one-metre and three-metre boards flanking the high tower. From where Travis stood, the tower appeared as high as a bungee jump – only with nothing but the water below to break your fall.

  “Come on up!” a voice called.

  Travis and Nish scanned high into the ceiling. It was Sarah at the very top of the tower. She was wearing a red maple leaf Canadian swimsuit, and her hair was dripping wet. Had she already jumped?

  “KKKAAAA-WWWAAAA-BUNGAAAA!”

  The jungle cry came from behind Sarah. A blur of red roared past her – red swimsuit, red hair, red face – and out onto the diving platform. It spun once in a perfect somersault and plummeted down, down, down, to crash into the water with a splash so big it reached Travis and Nish.

  Sam.

  “That must have stung,” said Nish.

  But before Travis could answer, the water broke again, wet red hair flying, fist pumping, red face defiant.

  “EEEEEEE-AAWWWWWW-KEEEEEEE!”

  “She’s insane,” Nish said matter-of-factly. Sam, yelling the same stupid yells Nish always yelled. Sam, the centre of attention just like Nish always had to be. But according to Nish, she was the insane one.

  Sam swam to where the two boys stood and eased out of the pool. She walked right by them and headed straight back to the tower, hands on her hips, water dripping in a trail behind her.

  “You here for our practice, Big Boy?” she called over her shoulder to Nish.

  “Didn’t bring a bathing suit,” Nish answered, flustered.

  “Since when did that ever stop you?” Sarah yelled down from high up the tower.

  Then she jumped, as graceful in mid-air as she was on the ice, as completely in control falling as she ever was skating or running. She completed a perfect jackknife, then opened up to slice into the water with hardly a ripple.

  “She’s good,” said Sam, nodding in approval.

  “She’s good at everything,” said Travis.

  “I gotta get going,” Nish said. He was already walking towards the door.

  “What about our practice?” Sam yelled.

  “Later,” Nish said. “It’ll have to be later. I’m busy right now.”

  Travis stared after his friend. He had seen a familiar look in Nish’s eyes. It had nothing to do with being “busy.” Nish was just terrified of heights – almost as much as he was afraid of being laughed at.

  7

  There was a note waiting at the front desk for Sarah and Travis when they came down for breakfast the next morning:

  Dear linemates!


  My dad is taking the boat out today. We’ve room and snorkelling equipment for the three of us and four more. Check with your coach – my dad has already called.

  Wiz

  “Seahorses!” Sarah shouted. “Finally, I’m going to get to see real wild seahorses!”

  She ran straight back to her room to tell the other girls. Travis figured he should check first with Muck. The Screech Owls coach said he had indeed got a call, and there was no problem with it as far as he was concerned. Wiz’s father, it turned out, was a former NHL player, Des Roberts, who’d ended up working in Australia helping build ice surfaces, and now lived here permanently. Muck and he had even known each other back in junior days.

  “He’s fully certified for diving,” said Muck. “So’s his wife, and she’s going along, too. So off with you – and enjoy yourselves.”

  Wiz had said there would be room for Sarah and Travis and four more. Sarah was bringing Sam and Jenny. Travis figured he’d ask Fahd and Nish.

  “Snorkelling?” Nish said, rolling the word around his tongue like it was something a pig wouldn’t swallow.

  “Yeah,” Travis said. “C’mon. You took that course – here’s your chance.”

  Nish shrugged. The previous winter Travis had talked him into signing up for scuba lessons at the local pool. Sarah had taken the lessons too, and though all had learned how to use air tanks well enough to pass the course, none of them had dived anywhere but in the pool.

  “I’m up for it!” shouted Fahd.

  “We have to go out in a boat?” Nish asked.

  “Get real,” Travis said, losing his patience. “You want us to swim out the harbour?”

  But Travis knew what Nish was getting at. He really did have a weak stomach. He didn’t like heights. He didn’t like being at sea.

  But Travis knew how to get him. “Sam’s going,” he said. “You wouldn’t want her to think you’re chicken, would you?”

  Nish reddened a bit, then suddenly brightened. “What about snorkelling at Bondi Beach?” he suggested.