“Too bad y’all figured out about Boothby,” Diamond said. “Soon as I seen him ogling the bundle of stock he won, I knew that crook be ripe for the picking. Between us giving that old bitten board of his a paint job, and everybody seeing that fin I done made Shaggy wear, it was a lock the whole town would pin it on that make-believe shark.”
“Shaggy and the mayor couldn’t expose any suspicions they had without exposing their own skeletons in the process, but what about Dougie?” I asked. “Did you blackmail him, too?”
“Dougie wasn’t involved. He always visits the same spots every morning, so I planted the board where I knew he’d find it,” Cap confessed.
“No wonder you were so tired this morning,” Joe said. “Between that, terrorizing Trip, and staying up to self-sabotage the motorboat with chum to try to scare us off, you must have had a few late nights.”
Cap didn’t reply, but I could see the shame on his face in the lantern light.
“Except for Cap botching the scaring-y’all-off part, the whole operation started out smooth sailing,” Diamond said, sounding impressed with himself. “I gotta say, though, I didn’t expect Mr. Mayor to hand me an early birthday present like he done. That shark initiative of his was a heck of an added bonus.”
“Don’t get too excited,” I said. “The mayor’s ending it first thing in the morning.”
Diamond shrugged. “Can’t be having everything, I guess. It was worth it, though, just to see Cap’s face when I told Trip here what he accidentally done to them precious sharks of hers along with kidnapping her.”
Cap bit down on his lip. “This isn’t how I wanted it to go. I didn’t want the sharks, or anyone else, to get hurt.”
“Then you probably shouldn’t have framed a shark for your friend’s disappearance and stuck her in a cage in an abandoned lighthouse.” Joe pointed up at the shark cage swaying from the ceiling. It was swaying because the irate prisoner inside was pounding relentlessly on the bars. “I may not be superstitious like Shaggy, but that’s usually not a winning recipe for good karma.”
“He’s got a point there, ol’ buddy,” Diamond said with a yawn. “Now, as much as I haven’t enjoyed talking with y’all, I wanna get this over with while we still got some cover from the storm.” He looked at the gap in the stairs preventing us from reaching him—or the window, which also happened to be our only escape route. “Since it ain’t looking like you boys be going nowhere no time soon, I’m just gonna mosey on upstairs while y’all chat and get my speargun. I’ll be back in two shakes of a shark’s tail to bid you a safe voyage into the beyond.”
He vanished into the darkness.
“I’m so sorry you boys got dragged into this,” Cap said. Hunched over on the steps and drenched from the storm, he looked sorry too.
“Apology not accepted.” I scowled, wiping rainwater out of my face. Whatever roof was left on the lighthouse, it wasn’t doing its job. Though not as bad as the downpour assaulting the island outside, steady streams of water dripped from above and ran down the walls. Lightning glimmered off the water flooding into the ground level. The front door had been boarded up from the inside, as well as the exterior. Even if we’d wanted to wade into the water to try to break our way out, I doubted we’d make much headway before Diamond returned. Besides, leaving EEE trapped with him wasn’t an option.
“I thought Trip would come around if she gave me a chance to really explain,” Cap said.
“You know, there are more socially acceptable forms of persuasion than kidnapping, dude,” Joe told him.
“I tried to reason with her first,” Cap insisted. “She wouldn’t take the donations Maxwell tried to give us, and if she voted down the Mangrove Palace development, the stock I’d won would have been worthless. Shark Lab was running out of money to keep up with the Sally’s overhead costs and to pay the crew. We couldn’t afford to turn money down because its source didn’t line up exactly with our principles. Without a big infusion of cash, the whole lab risked going under. It’s been hard enough staying on top of Sally’s bank loan payments even with the Shark Lab contract. Without it—I couldn’t let the bank take her away from me!”
“It all keeps coming back to what’s best for you,” I said. “What about Trip and Shark Lab? What about the sharks? You were the loudest voice speaking out against Mangrove Palace! Was that all just to cover your tracks?”
“I was thinking about all of us! I mean, yeah, the construction could put the lemon shark nursery at risk, but there was no guarantee it would harm them. Not for sure. And think about what we’d gain! If that stock took off the way Maxwell said it would, we’d be able to sail the seas, researching sharks for the rest of our lives, worry-free! That was worth a small compromise, right?”
Cap looked at us like he was hoping we’d give him our wholehearted approval. What he got instead were two cold stares. I’d seen crooks tell themselves plenty of lies to justify their misdeeds, but all the rationalization in the world didn’t make criminal behavior like Cap’s okay.
“So in order to help sharks, you teamed up with a notorious shark hunter to kidnap a renowned shark advocate and inspired mass shark-hating hysteria by framing a shark for a crime it didn’t commit, all so you could help pass a construction project that would endanger more sharks?” Joe asked. “A small compromise is settling for onion rings when you really want whale fries. I don’t even know what you call that.”
“It doesn’t sound good when you put it that way,” Cap murmured.
“You didn’t help sharks,” I said. “You betrayed them.”
“I didn’t!” he yelled, only to see our expressions and backpedal a second later. “Well, maybe some of them. The lemon sharks in the nursery might have been affected, but we could have used the profits from selling the stock to help so many more! We can’t help any sharks if Shark Lab isn’t out on the water conducting research. Trip said to trust her to come up with the money, like she always did, but I didn’t see how she was going to save the day this time, and it was my boat she was asking me to risk. What choice did I have?”
“Maybe one that didn’t involve multiple major crimes?” Joe suggested.
“It was only supposed to be for a day,” he said, as if that made it any better. “The captains all talk, and Diamond knew about my trouble with the bank. He came to me with the whole plan worked out. All I had to do was convince Trip to change her vote, and then we’d let her go.”
“And when she obviously didn’t?” Joe asked, pointing up at the still-caged prisoner shaking the bars and glaring down at her ex-partner.
“Then I figured we’d just hold her for an extra day, until after the vote. I thought once it was a done deal and the stock became something with real value, then she’d have to see how much great work we could do by giving Mangrove Palace a chance. I mean, it was going to happen anyway at that point.”
“But then your unwitting mayoral accomplice pulled a joker out of the deck by postponing the vote and playing the anti-shark card instead,” I said.
“Sure sounds like a losing hand to me,” Joe added.
“Me too,” Diamond’s voice growled from above.
All three of us flinched as the rogue captain stepped from the shadows with a speargun gripped in both hands. We flinched again as booming thunder shook the ancient lighthouse and the ceiling finally gave in to the storm’s assault, sending rotting planks raining down around us. A flash of lightning exposed the wild look in Captain Diamond’s eyes and made the sharks tattooed on his biceps shimmer like they were alive. Strands of long, wet hair clung to his face like sea snakes, and water dripped from his beard onto the bloody shark’s tooth inked on his chest, making it look like it was bleeding for real. In that moment, amid the blasts of thunder and raining debris, I could have sworn we were under siege by a real-life pirate captain.
“Delaying that vote sure put a kink in my line,” Diamond said. “No vote, the Tripster ain’t cooperating, and now we got a lighthouse full of folks who know exac
tly what we done. I think it’s time to cut bait on this whole operation.”
“Trip still might come around and change her vote!” Cap pleaded.
Diamond shot a glance up at the shark cage. “What you think about that, Trip? You ready to vote yes on Mangrove Palace?”
Her voice was too hoarse to make out, but from the anger on her face and the way she was pounding the cage bars, whatever she was yelling wasn’t the answer they were looking for.
“I’m gonna take that as a no,” Diamond said. “Good thing we don’t need her no more, anyway. Vote ain’t gonna be postponed forever, and once she’s gone for good, Maxwell’s development will be approved just fine.”
“That was never part of the plan!” Cap shouted.
“The plan was for you to play good cop, and me to play bad cop. Well, apparently your friend ain’t impressed by cops at all, and I’m done playing.”
Diamond shoved Cap against the wall and pushed past him to the gap in the staircase. “I’m gonna solve our little problem with Trip myself.” He aimed the speargun at me and placed his finger on the trigger. “Right after I say goodbye to these two.”
16 THE FINAL PLUNGE
JOE
TIME SEEMED TO FREEZE AS Diamond took aim.
Cap stood behind him, looking too stunned to speak. And then something changed.
“Nooo!” he screamed, grabbing hold of Diamond’s arm just as he pulled the trigger.
The twang of the speargun firing was loud enough to hear over the storm. The spear flashed through the air and struck with a thwack. Frank and I turned to look at each other to make sure our eyes hadn’t played tricks on us. Somehow, we were both hole-free! The lighthouse wall hadn’t been so lucky.
A thin cord ran from the end of the spear back to the speargun. It was designed to keep the shooter attached to the fish so he could pull in his catch, only now it connected Diamond to the wall instead. The speargun was still gripped tightly in his hands as Cap tried to wrestle it away. Their faces shimmered with light from the lantern still looped around Cap’s wrist. Both men were inches from the gap of open air where the staircase should have been.
The unloaded speargun wasn’t doing Diamond much good at the moment, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t use it to my advantage. I grabbed hold of the cord tethering the speargun to Diamond’s hands and yanked hard.
Captain Diamond must not have been used to his fish fighting back quite like this. My tug yanked him off-balance by only a few inches, and if he’d dropped the speargun right away or been just a little farther from the edge, he might have had a chance. His shriek echoed through the stormy lighthouse as he fell, the spear tearing out of the wall and falling after him.
Cap let go of Diamond just in time to save himself from the same fate. He was left standing at the edge of the last step, looking down at his falling former-enemy-turned-ally-turned-enemy-again. I couldn’t see Diamond land, but I heard the splash.
The sound from below was joined by a crash from above. Joe and I watched in horror as a beam slammed into the top of EEE’s shark-cage prison. Whatever was anchoring the chain holding up the cage had given way, and the whole setup started to plummet like an out-of-control elevator.
There was a sudden groan as the chain caught on something, snapping the cage to a stop just a few feet above Cap.
“Where is the pulley you used to raise it?” Frank hollered. “We need to try to stabilize the cage before it drops all the way down!”
The terror on Cap’s face was easy to see in the next lightning flash. He looked down at the flooding ground floor.
“It’s down there!” he called back, his voice wavering. “Underwater!”
“We can’t just let her fall! There must be something we can do!” I shouted.
“I—I… I don’t… I…” The lantern shook in Cap’s hand as he trailed off. “What—what have I done?”
“Tell me where the pulley is!” I yelled. “I’m going to dive for it!”
Cap’s expression turned from hopelessness to panic. “You can’t dive into surging floodwater in the dark! There’s debris everywhere! It’s too dangerous! I can’t have you hurt too because of me!”
“He couldn’t have developed a conscience a couple hours ago?” I asked Frank, looking around frantically for anything else that might help.
I don’t know if Trip heard us, but she must have realized hanging around waiting for a daring rescue while she was on the verge of plunging two stories inside a free-falling steel cage wasn’t a great option. The diver-size opening at Trip’s eye level hadn’t done her any good as an escape route earlier when the shark cage was still secured to the ceiling, but now that the chain had given way, she didn’t have any other choice. The cage was still too far from the wall for her to make a leap for the stairs, which left only one option. A ridiculously dangerous one. We watched as she climbed out through the opening and then clung precariously to the outside of the cage.
“She’s going to try jumping into the water from up there!” I gasped.
“It’s too shallow!” Cap hollered.
Trip looked down into the darkness. Even in the dim light cast by Cap’s lantern, I could see the look of determination on her face. When the next thunderclap boomed, she nodded to herself and braced her legs against the bars. While she was taking deep breaths, I was holding mine.
“I think she’s counting down from the thunder until the next lightning strike to give herself the best view,” Frank guessed.
As soon as the next lightning flash arrived, she readied herself and was just about to leap when the situation shifted—literally! The roar of the waves below had become almost as loud as the thunder above, and the next wave to hit didn’t just crash into the lighthouse. It nearly knocked it over! The entire structure seemed to moan as it tilted farther to the right, slamming us into the wall. Between the relentless battering of the storm and all the human-made ruckus inside, the condemned lighthouse was finally starting to collapse!
The shifting of the building had smashed the shark cage into the wall, raining shattered stone down on us. Trip barely managed to hang on to the outside of the cage without being thrown as it ricocheted off the wall. This time when the cage slowed, it was dangling only a few feet away from the spiral staircase above Cap, where the railing was still intact, close enough for her to jump!
She didn’t hesitate for a second—and neither did the shark cage. She leaped from the edge at the same instant that the chain snapped, sending the now-empty prison cell plummeting the rest of the way without her. Trip grabbed hold of the rail and pulled herself over onto the stairs. As scared and tired as she must have been—I know I was!—she locked her eyes on Cap and marched right for him.
Cap must have realized that no amount of explaining was going to help his case. He scrambled for the window.
The storm had other ideas. Another massive wave crashed into the side of the lighthouse, smashing right through the boarded-up front door. The impact knocked Cap to his knees as the tide surged through the opening, filling the entire lower story.
Cap tried to get back to his feet and grab hold of the window ledge, but Trip got there first. Then she seized him by the back of his shirt and flung her traitorous friend off the stairs into the rising water.
Trip, Frank, and I all looked down to watch him disappear below the water’s surface. But he wasn’t under for long. With the front door no longer blocked, this time, when the wave retreated, most of the water retreated with it.
Cap and Diamond were left flopping around on the floor like fish ready for the dinner plate—or a jail cell.
Diamond was tangled up in an old fishing net, and Cap was grabbing his ankle like it might be broken. Neither of them would be getting off the hook this time.
Trip looked back across the gap in the stairs at Frank and me. “Welcome to Shark Lab, boys,” she called, her voice low and raspy. “You’re team members for life.”
17 CATCH OF THE DAY
FRANK
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br /> THE STORM STARTED TO LET up after that. Trip crawled through the window while Joe and I took what was left of the stairs, and together the three of us were able to get our prisoners out of the lighthouse without anyone getting swept out to sea.
By the time dawn broke a couple of hours later, the ocean was calm again and the skies were clear.
We found Diamond’s escape dinghy stashed in the channel not far from our paddleboards. Trip made one more run back to the lighthouse to reclaim her own board before we set out for town, picking up Boothby in the dinghy on the way. We paddled out side by side, leaving the ruins of Alligator Lighthouse in our wake, somehow still standing, but just barely.
Most of the fishing boats were getting a start on the day as the three of us paddled into the marina, hauling the catch of the day tied up in the dinghy behind us.
“Go figure,” I told Joe and Trip. “We traveled to Florida to help a marine biologist save the sharks, and ended up helping save the marine biologist from human predators instead!”
More from this Series
Secret of the Red Arrow
Book 1
Mystery of the Phantom…
Book 2
The Vanishing Game
Book 3
Into Thin Air
Book 4
More from the Author
Demolition Mission
Sea Life Secrets
A Treacherous Tide Page 11
