14 DOWNWARD SPIRAL
JOE
THREE THINGS FLASHED BEFORE MY eyes in the span of a few seconds: our no-longer-missing marine biologist dangling from the ceiling in a cage; Captain Diamond about to impale me with a harpoon; and my life, because Captain Diamond was about to impale me with a harpoon!
The rickety spiral staircase shook with each of Diamond’s murderous steps, threatening to tear the whole thing loose from the wall. I had only a few seconds to act, and just as few options: jump over the side and drop two whole stories to the ground below; charge up the stairs toward a harpooner with a high-ground advantage; dive back out the window and hope I didn’t somehow knock both Frank and me off the ladder; or retreat down the stairs as quickly as I could and hope for a miracle.
I opted for the only one that didn’t involve almost certain doom. I ran down.
Diamond had two big advantages: a running start and a frighteningly long, pointy implement to close the distance.
But it turned out I had an unseen advantage of my own. Frank!
Diamond hadn’t realized there was someone else waiting to climb in the window. Frank hurled himself through the frame the instant Diamond stepped in front of it, throwing his body into the crazed captain before he could reach me. Not that I saw it happen. I wasn’t about to stop and turn around with that harpoon ready to make a Joe kebab, but I was close enough to hear Frank’s war cry, Diamond’s grunt, and an unidentified metallic screeching.
I figured out what the sound was soon enough—the rail tearing away from the narrow staircase, followed by me tearing away with it!
The metal steps twisted under my feet, throwing me off-balance. A second earlier, the guardrail would have caught me, but Frank’s and Diamond’s combined weight had torn it loose. I was airborne for only a split second before managing to catch hold of the detached rail. The metal dug into my palms and the rail gave another screech. This time it held, still attached higher up the staircase. Unfortunately, I was floating in the air a few feet away from the closest step.
When I looked up, I realized I wasn’t the only one dangling. The shaft of Captain Diamond’s harpoon had gotten wedged between the metal steps, and he was clinging to it with both hands.
If you counted EEE suspended from the ceiling in the shark cage, that made three out of four lighthouse occupants dangling a full twenty feet or more off the ground. Even if someone could survive a drop from that height, all the jagged, rusty debris cluttering the floor wasn’t going to make for a very cushy landing.
Thankfully, my bro still had something somewhat solid under him, at least for the moment. The ancient bolts fastening the spiral staircase to the crumbling stone wall looked like they might pull free at any moment. The wind had shifted, sending sheets of rain whipping in through the open window, turning the stairs into a mini indoor waterfall. Like they weren’t dangerous enough already!
Frank left Diamond grunting and shouting as the shark hunter tried to use his grip on the harpoon to pull himself back up. The storm had only gotten louder, and I couldn’t make out what Diamond was saying, but it didn’t take a detective to deduce that it wasn’t friendly.
“Give me your hand, Joe!” Frank shouted, reaching out to me with one hand while hugging the wall behind him with the other to keep from slipping off and following me over the side.
“I don’t think I can without losing my grip or pulling you down,” I said with a grunt of my own. “I’m gonna try to swing my feet over and maybe you can pull me up.”
The rail groaned angrily, pulling farther away from the wall, and I could tell from the worry lines on Frank’s forehead that he wasn’t any more confident my plan would work than I was. I almost made it on my second attempt, only to have my feet fall a few inches short of Frank’s grasp. I didn’t know how much more swinging either my palms or the free-floating railing could take, but I didn’t have any choice except to keep trying. The lightning was coming fast and furious, flashing us in and out of darkness, which didn’t make the job any easier.
I was gearing up for another attempt when I saw Frank look up toward the window. My first thought was that Diamond had made it back onto the stairs, but I knew that wasn’t the case when I saw the lines on Frank’s forehead melt away with relief.
“Quick! Help me pull Joe up!” he yelled up at the window. “Diamond’s been holding Trip captive. He tried to kill us when we tracked him back here!”
I couldn’t see who Frank was calling to, but there was lantern light shining through the window; it was obvious that Frank recognized the person as a friend. I thought Mayor Boothby might have caught the bravery bug and followed us after all, but it was a different Lookout resident who climbed through the window, carrying a small camping lantern.
Cap! I cheered in my brain, afraid that shouting out, holding on to the rail, and trying to swing all at once might be more than my straining body could handle. The captain of the R/V Sally assessed the situation quickly, looking from Frank to me to his archenemy, Captain Diamond, struggling to hold on to the harpoon.
Cap wasn’t the only member of Shark Lab that I could make out. Trip was gripping the bars of the dangling shark cage.
But the expression on her face wasn’t hope, like I expected. It was fury.
Cap looked at Frank with the same sick-to-his-stomach face he’d been wearing since Trip first went missing. “I’m sorry I didn’t take you boys seriously when you said you were detectives. I would have tried harder to make you go home. I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
He reached out his hand, only it wasn’t me he was reaching out to help. It was Diamond.
15 TOO MANY CAPTAINS IN THE KITCHEN
FRANK
THE INSTANT I SAW CAP turn away to reach for EEE’s captor, I realized Joe and I had overlooked an important detail earlier when we’d first spotted the silhouette watching us from the lighthouse: whoever was up in that tower couldn’t have had time to cut the houseboat loose and make it back down the coast to the lighthouse to spy on us. They had to be working with a partner.
But even if we had realized that the houseboat saboteur was still unaccounted for, the last person anyone on Lookout would have expected to team up with the self-proclaimed “Shark Hunter” was his shark-loving rival.
That wasn’t even the most devious part about it, though.
I looked up past “Cap” Rogers, the proud captain of a research vessel dedicated to shark conservation, to Dr. “Triple E” Edwards imprisoned in the shark cage suspended above his head. If I had it worked out right this time, Trip’s Shark Lab research partner was also one of her captors. Trip’s words were drowned out by the storm, but the way she was banging on the bars of the cage and screaming at him seemed to confirm it.
I growled in Cap’s direction, but bringing him to justice was going to have to wait. Joe was still in danger. Thankfully, while Cap was helping his ex-enemy climb back onto the spiral staircase, Joe had kept swinging. This time, he made it close enough for me to grab him around the ankles. And not a second too soon. The force of his swing finally yanked the railing free. We teetered on the step’s edge. A wrong breeze could have plunged us to the ground and turned us into chum. I managed to regain my balance and pull us both against the temporary safety of the lighthouse wall.
A glance up the stairs made it clear that we weren’t the only team that had gotten back together. Diamond was solidly on the staircase, and it didn’t look like he was going to ask us to stay for a friendly chat about the weather.
“Perfect,” Joe groaned, his arms hanging limply by his sides. “Safe again just in time to not be safe again.”
The good news was that the harpoon hadn’t made it back onto the stairs with Diamond. He sat weaponless beside Cap, catching his breath, massaging his own tired, tattooed arms. Seeing the shark hanging by its tail on each arm made me even more heated. It was obvious that Joe and I weren’t the only angry ones. Trip was still yelling down, but the wind, rain, and surf continued to overpower her ca
lls.
With each new wave, the ocean’s roar seemed to get louder. The entire lighthouse felt like it was shaking, like the next crash might bring the whole place down.
Cap’s lantern must have been intentionally dimmed to keep anyone in the distance from seeing a light where it shouldn’t have been. The beam didn’t reach the ground floor, so it wasn’t until the next lightning strike that I saw that the stone floor wasn’t just wet anymore—it was under a few inches of water. When the next wave slammed into the lighthouse, I could practically taste the sea spray from two stories up.
“How could you betray Shark Lab like this?” I yelled.
“I was trying to save Shark Lab!” Cap yelled back.
Diamond laughed bitterly. “You was trying to get paid, just like me, you hypocrite.”
Cap ignored him. “I was trying to fund our research. Without the R/V, the lab is landlocked. We can’t do any of our most important fieldwork without Sally. This was the only way I could make sure the lab thrived.”
“You keep telling yourself that, Cap’n Crunch,” Diamond said, sneering. Clearly, being partners in crime didn’t make the captains BFFs. “You being a spineless jellyfish is about the only thing that loudmouth scientist and I done agree on. If she hadn’t lost her voice that first night, I mighta cut my own ears off just for some peace and quiet.”
That explained why we hadn’t been able to hear Trip screaming. It was reassuring to know she’d given her kidnappers an earful. Not having a voice didn’t seem to slow her down much either. She continued to shout silently and pound on the bars, making the whole cage sway.
The captains’ bickering revealed that money was part of the motive, and Cap’s insistence that he was trying to fund the lab’s research revealed another. But I couldn’t quite put the pieces together. Cap had told us he was struggling to make payments on the R/V and that Shark Lab didn’t have a lot of money in reserve. Apparently, things were even worse than he’d let on. But how could kidnapping the person who ran the organization he claimed he was trying to help solve that? It wasn’t like they could hold her for ransom.
“How does putting the head of Shark Lab in a cage help Shark Lab?” I shouted at Cap. “Whoever’s paying you, it can’t be worth it.”
“I don’t much like the sound of these guppies whining either.” Diamond shook the kinks out of his arms and climbed to his feet. “Now let’s stop yammering and do what’s gotta be done.”
Cap grabbed him by the shoulder. “Hold on a second. You’re not saying we should actually harm them?”
Diamond brushed away Cap’s hand and stalked forward. “I’m a man of action, Crunchy. I’m done saying. I’m just doing.”
“They’re only kids!” Cap protested.
“Sharks, kids. Don’t make no difference to me.” Diamond shot a glance up at EEE. “They’ve seen the endangered fish we been keeping in that live tank up there. You think we let them go, they ain’t gonna go squawking straight to the fuzz?”
“Well—well, yes. But still, that’s not… you can’t just… I mean—” Cap fumbled to mount a defense.
“Uh-huh.” Diamond grunted dismissively, cracking his knuckles to display the words SHARK HUNTER tattooed across the backs of his hands. “Time to do a little hunting.”
“Here we go again, bro.” Joe sighed, climbing back to his feet and cracking his own untattooed knuckles.
If Diamond was intimidated, he sure didn’t show it. The way I figured it, we could stand our ground on the slippery, narrow staircase or let him chase us down to the boarded-up, flooding ground floor. Neither option one nor option two sounded like a lot of fun.
Before I had a chance to pick, the lighthouse decided it liked option three better. There was another metallic screech as Diamond took his next step. The screech was quickly joined by the shark hunter’s own shriek as the section of steps in front of him tore out of the wall. He reached back frantically, fumbling to grab hold of Cap before he could drop to the ground floor below along with the falling chunk of metal. Whether Cap wanted to help his frenemy or not, this time he didn’t have a choice. He yanked himself backward with Diamond clinging on, to keep his falling accomplice from pulling them both over.
There was now a large gap in the steps separating us from the bad guys. The good news was they couldn’t easily reach us. The bad news was we were trapped on a section of steps leading down to a flooding chamber with no exit.
Diamond got back to his feet and stared at the gap like he was measuring it up to see if he could leap across, then appeared to think better of it. He pounded a frustrated fist against the wall instead, smashing a dent in the fragile stone.
“This is your fault,” he snarled at Cap. “We shoulda gotten rid of the evidence and cleared this place out soon as that vote was postponed, like I wanted.”
“She’s not evidence!” Cap shouted back. “She’s my friend!”
“You probably shoulda thought of that before you agreed to let me snatch her,” Diamond countered.
“Yeah, I don’t know about Lookout, but in Bayport, kidnapping isn’t something decent people usually do to people they consider friends,” Joe said. “Or anyone really, for that matter.”
“It was only supposed to be for a day or two,” Cap explained, as if that made it any better. “I thought she’d come around.”
“So you had Diamond do the dirty work of abducting Trip while you were onshore with us creating your alibi,” I said, filling in the blanks.
I didn’t know if Trip could hear us, but the angry pounding on the floor of the cage above us grew more intense.
“She put up as much of a fight as some of the sharks I’ve landed too.” Diamond looked up at the cage. He sounded kind of impressed. “If we hadn’t lucked out with the weather and that fog hadn’t rolled in just in time so I could creep right up on her in the rowboat, she might have been the one that got away. Everyone knows she takes her little paddleboard out to see the cutesy-wootsy little baby sharks just about the same time every day, and can’t nobody see what’s going on in that little blind curve along the coast. Good thing, too, ’cause it took me a lot longer than I liked to land her and get her strung up.”
“Not so long that you couldn’t head over to Chuck’s to put in an appearance and make sure you were accounted for,” I said. “Picking a fight with Cap so no one would have any idea you two were a lot cozier than you seem was a nice extra touch.”
“Aw, you hear that, skipper? The kids think we’re cozy.” Diamond ruffled Cap’s hair in a not-so-playful way.
Cap shoved his hand away. “I never should have let you talk me into this.”
“You practically jumped right into my arms when I told you how much we could make out for if we played our cards right,” Diamond said.
“Who was paying you?” I asked. Cap and Diamond’s bickering had given Joe and me a lot of the puzzle, but there were still key pieces missing. Who could and would fund an operation to take Dr. Edwards out of the picture? I could think of only one name with both the means and the motive. “Was it Maxwell?”
When Cap winced and looked away, I thought I had my answer.
Diamond just laughed. “That fat cat ain’t got nothing but everything to do with this.”
“Your grammar is as big a mystery as this case,” said Joe. “Maxwell has nothing to do with it? Or everything to do with it? Which one is it?”
“Little of both,” Diamond replied, clearly enjoying whatever game he was playing. “He don’t know it, but we’re about to make him richer right along with us.”
“Is this about the stock you stole from Boothby?” I asked, trying to figure out something Maxwell wouldn’t know about that might still benefit him along with the kidnappers. Trip not being around to cast her vote against his resort would certainly count, and once you added the skyrocketing value of the Mangrove Palace Development Corporation stock, you had the financial part of the equation as well. But when the mayor had said he’d won the stock from Maxwell, I hadn�
�t been envisioning the small fortune Cap and Diamond seemed to be talking about. “How much did the mayor win?”
“Oh, a nice hunk,” Diamond said. “But he ain’t won half as much as your man Cap.”
Joe and I both gawked at the R/V Sally’s captain.
“I meant to burn it,” Cap said guiltily. “That’s what Trip did with hers.”
“You and Trip are both members of Chuck’s Poker Club?” I asked. Now that I thought about it, I understood that the Shark Lab–founding councilwoman qualified for membership, but it hadn’t occurred to me that she might have been among the card sharks at Lookout’s underground gambling den.
Cap nodded sadly. “That’s where Trip and I first became friends and decided to partner my Sally up with Shark Lab. She usually goes more for the social scene than the games, but she’s been playing poker since she was a kid, so she knows her way around a deck of cards. She couldn’t wait to take some of the air out of Maxwell’s sails.”
Small chunks of plaster tumbled down onto the stairs from the ceiling above as Trip shook the cage in frustration. Diamond brushed some off his shoulder without bothering to look up.
“I was fuming that night at Chuck’s. Half the room done scored that stock off Maxwell, and I couldn’t win a single hand,” Diamond griped. “I wanted to get in on that action too.”
“Let me guess. Everyone who won stock that night was either dead set against his development or had the power to influence the vote,” I said.
Diamond scratched his beard for a second. “Come to think of it, yeah.”
“We figured Maxwell was too savvy to lose that stock by accident. He knew that by doling out shares, he was winning over friends and softening enemies without even having to say a word,” Joe explained.
The idea that he’d been manipulated by Maxwell seemed to hit Cap hard. The developer might not have paid him off directly or had any idea just how much it would influence the Sally’s captain, but he’d planted the seed by putting that stock in Cap’s hands. By giving Cap a financial stake in his development corporation, Maxwell also gave Cap a reason to want Mangrove Palace to get built. Cap had been one of the development’s biggest opponents, and without the prospect of a big payday, he never would have betrayed Shark Lab or Trip.
A Treacherous Tide Page 10
