Together we trudged down the beach to a paved lot where her Jeep was parked. “Promise me you'll go home and wash up,” she said.
“Promise,” I said.
“And, Abbey, promise me that you'll try to keep your brother from getting into more trouble.”
“You bet,” Abbey said halfheartedly.
Shelly looked around to make sure the three of us were alone, which seemed obvious since her Jeep was the only car in the lot.
“I'm going to tell you guys somethin', but you don't know where you heard it, okay?” She leaned close, and the air turned to pure tangerine. “There's a man who works at the Coast Guard station, a civilian named Billy Babcock. He's got a major gamblin' problem, you understand? He's addicted to it.”
“You mean like drugs,” Abbey said.
“Yeah. Or booze,” said Shelly. “Billy can't stop betting, no matter how hard he tries. Blackjack, dice, roulette, you name it. He's a regular on the Coral Queen, like, four nights a week. Sometimes more. You see where this is heading?”
I did. “Does he owe Dusty money?”
Shelly nodded. “Big-time. So much money that Billy couldn't pay it all back if he lives to be a hundred.”
“So he's repaying it another way.”
“You got it, Noah,” Shelly said. “Every time the Coast Guard gets ready to pull a surprise inspection on the Coral Queen, Billy Babcock calls Dusty the day before to warn him. That's why they never catch 'em emptying the tank.”
Abbey flopped her arms in dismay. “So Dad was right after all. Dusty is being tipped off.”
“Hey, you didn't hear it from me,” Shelly said.
“But-”
“Shhhh!” Shelly pointed toward a white pickup that was rolling into the lot.
The truck pulled up and parked near the Jeep. Stamped on the door of the cab was: DEPARTMENT OF PARKS AND RECREATION.
A man in a tan uniform got out and gave us a friendly nod. From the bed of the pickup he removed a small sledgehammer, a half dozen metal posts, and a stack of cardboard signs.
“You folks on your way to the beach?” he asked.
“What's up?” said Shelly.
The man showed us one of the signs. DANGER, it warned in big letters. BEWARE OF CONTAMINATED WATER.
Beneath those words, in smaller red lettering, it said: SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK.
“Contaminated with what?” asked my sister, acting as if she didn't know.
“Human waste,” said the man from Parks and Recreation. “We got a call from a guy who was fishing out here this morning. The health department came and sampled the water-it tested off the charts. You all might want to try Long Key, or maybe Harris Park.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Shelly said, playing along.
After the man went off to post the warning signs, my sister and I said goodbye to Shelly and began walking to our bikes.
“Noah, what you did back there for that sea turtle, that was very…”
“Dumb? I know.”
“No. Cool,” Abbey said, “in a really twisted way.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“We can't give up on this,” she added grimly.
“Now you sound like Dad.”
“Well? You're the one who went into that scuzzy water-twice! Doesn't it make you furious?”
“Yeah, it does.”
Furious and sick at the same time. But I thought of Abbey's spying mission the night before, and what a disaster it could have been. I'd never forget the cold-blooded look in Luno's eyes when he saw us standing in Dusty's ticket shack.
“Mom doesn't need any more excitement from us,” I told my sister.
“She won't have to know a darn thing,” Abbey said, “because next time we'll do it right.”
The “we” was a given. I wasn't about to let my sister go anywhere near that marina again without me.
We unlocked our bikes and started pedaling home in the thick July heat. I knew I stunk from the crappy water, but Abbey claimed she didn't smell a thing. I kept thinking about how easy it was for Dusty Muleman to get away with what he was doing. With so many big boats on the water, nobody had been able to trace the pollution along Thunder Beach directly to the Coral Queen.
Or maybe nobody had tried hard enough.
It was time that somebody did.
“We can't get Dad involved in this, either,” I said to Abbey. “He's had enough trouble already.”
“Definitely.” She grinned. “Noah, does this mean you've got a plan?”
“Don't get carried away,” I said, which ought to be the Underwood family motto.
THIRTEEN
Dad was serious about getting serious.
The same morning he was released from jail, he went out and got himself hired by a company called Tropical Rescue. It wasn't the sort of work that my father could put his heart into, but I knew why he took the job.
It was the boat.
They let him use a twenty-four-foot outboard with a T-top and twin 150s-not for fishing but for towing in tourists who ran out of gas or rammed their boats aground.
Normally my father has no patience for these sorts of bumblers. He calls them “googans” or even worse, depending on what kind of fix they've gotten themselves into. But Dad needed the job, so he buttoned his lip and kept his opinions to himself.
Unless it's a life-or-death emergency, the Coast Guard refers disabled-boat calls to private contractors like Tropical Rescue, which charge big bucks. They stay busy, too. It's amazing how many people are too lazy to read a fuel gauge, a compass, or a marine chart. They just point their boats at the horizon and go. All around the Keys you can see their propeller trenches-long ugly gouges, like giant fingernail scrapes, across the tidal banks. It takes years for the sea grass to grow back.
Dad's first rescue job was a boatload of software salesmen from Orlando who were stranded all the way out at Ninemile Bank. Somehow they'd managed to beach a brand-new Bayliner on a flat that was only four inches deep. That's not easy to do, unless you're bombed or wearing a blindfold.
Miraculously, Dad restrained himself from saying anything insulting. He didn't get mad. He didn't make fun of the bonehead who'd been driving the boat.
No, my father-the new and improved Paine Underwood-stayed calm and polite. He waited patiently for the tide to come up, tugged the Bayliner off the bank, and towed it back to Caloosa Cove. He told us he almost felt sorry for the software salesmen when he handed them the bill, which didn't even include the hefty fine from the park service for trashing the sea grass. It was probably one of the most expensive vacations those guys ever had.
Even though Dad didn't like dealing with googans, he was ten times happier on the water than he was driving a taxi. That meant Mom was in a better mood, too, laughing and kidding around the way she used to do.
The two of them were getting along so well that Abbey and I were extra careful not to mention the sticky subject of Dusty Muleman's casino boat. We discussed our new plan of attack only when we were alone and away from the house, where our parents couldn't hear us.
A couple of days after my father got out of jail, the Parks Department took down the pollution warnings at Thunder Beach. The next morning, Abbey and I put on our bathing suits and grabbed a couple of towels and dashed outside. Mom and Dad figured we were heading for the park, which is exactly what we wanted them to think.
Because we were really going to Shelly's trailer.
I had to knock a half dozen times. When she finally came to the door, she didn't seem especially delighted to see us. Her eyes were puffy and half closed, and it looked like somebody had set off a firecracker in her hair.
“Time izzit?” she asked hoarsely.
“Seven-thirty,” I said.
She winced. “A.M.? You gotta be kiddin' me.”
Abbey said, “It's important. Please?”
We followed Shelly inside. She sagged onto the sofa and tucked her legs up under her tatty pink bathrobe.