“You, too, Shelly.”
I locked the door the instant it closed. As soon as I heard her tack up the OUT OF ORDER sign, I unzipped Abbey's backpack and removed the dye bottles.
The head on a boat is basically a glorified closet, with barely enough room to sit and do your business. This one smelled like a mixture of stale beer, Clorox bleach, and Shelly's fruity perfume, but it was still less obnoxious than most public commodes.
And as uncomfortable as it was, it was way better than being sealed up inside a liquor crate.
For a moment I wondered what my father would have thought if he could see me there, locked in the Mermaids' head on the Coral Queen. The parent part of him would have been mad at me for sneaking aboard, while the nature-loving part of him would have been proud of me for trying to nail Dusty Muleman.
Knowing Dad, he would've had one firm piece of advice: Don't get caught!
When I opened the first bottle of food coloring, I saw that Shelly was right. The gel oozed out like molasses. Carefully I squeezed the plastic container until every gooey purple drop landed in the toilet hole.
Then I gave a good hard flush to make sure the dye went where it was supposed to go. Shelly had warned me that the stuff could get gummy pretty quick. If it stuck in the plumbing pipes, our plan would be ruined.
There was only one way to check it out. I knelt down, pinched my nose, and peered into the nasty depths of the head. Not a speck of fuchsia could be seen.
So far, so good.
One bottle down, sixteen to go.
Time passes incredibly slowly when you're trapped in a restroom.
Whenever I got ready to make a break, people would stop in loud groups outside the door-talking, laughing, singing along to the music.
I was dying to get out of there, but I had to be patient. I had to wait for a lull.
I kept thinking of Abbey, alone in Rado's dinghy, reading her book by flashlight. Even though there were no dangerous wild animals in the mangroves, I was afraid she might get spooked by some of the freaky night noises. If you've never heard two raccoons fighting before, you'd swear it was a chainsaw massacre.
When I wasn't worrying about my sister, I was thinking about what else was happening on board the Coral Queen. With so much partying, the other toilets were probably getting flushed nonstop. If Dusty Muleman pulled his usual trick, all that raw waste would be streaming out of the basin later.
It made me mad, which was good. I needed to stay mad in order to do what I had to. Every two or three minutes I looked at my watch, wondering why the hands weren't moving faster.
Mom and Dad were probably still at dinner. Afterward they were supposed to go to a late movie in Tavernier. That meant they'd be home around twelve-thirty, so Abbey and I had to be back at the house and in bed before then.
The Coral Queen closed at midnight. If I waited until then to slip away, we'd have less than thirty minutes to run the dinghy back to Rado's dock, grab our bikes, and race home. I didn't like the odds because it was dark on the water and the dinghy was slow. I also didn't like the idea of three more hours in the ladies' room.
I decided to make a run for it, crowds and all, and pray that nobody would try to catch me. Shelly had said that most of the regular customers were so heavy into the gambling that a rhinoceros could get loose on board and they wouldn't care. I hoped she was right.
Quietly I gathered up the empty dye bottles-the only evidence that could ever incriminate me-and stowed them in Abbey's backpack.
But as I reached out and unlocked the door, the metal handle began to jiggle violently. Somebody was trying to get into the head.
I grabbed the handle with both hands and braced my shoes against the sink.
“Hey, open up!” demanded a croaky female voice. “I gotta go!”
Either she didn't see the OUT OF ORDER sign, or she was so desperate that it didn't matter. From outside came a heavy grunt, and the handle was nearly yanked from my grip.
The door opened no more than two inches, but it was enough to give me a startling peek at the intruder. She looked about eighty-five in both age and weight, which wasn't what I expected. She was pulling so ferociously on the door that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a three-hundred-pound sumo wrestler on the other side.
“You open up right this second!” the old woman squawked. “I gotta go now!”
She wore a shiny copper-colored wig that fit like a helmet. Her face was caked with powdery makeup, and her sparkly fake eyelashes were longer than a camel's. A cigarette dangled from parrotfish lips that were puffy and painted the color of sliced mangoes.
“Can't you read the sign?” I asked through the crack.
“What sign, Einstein?”
That's when I spotted the piece of cardboard between her feet on the scuffed floor. Shelly's tack must have come loose.
“Hey, you're not even a Mermaid!” the old woman snapped, spitting her cigarette. “Get outta that bathroom 'fore I call Security.”
It took all my strength to pull the door shut.
“You little sicko!” She let out a string of cuss words that would have put my Grandma Janet into cardiac arrest.
“Go away,” I pleaded. “This is an emergency.”
“Emergency? I'll show you a damn emergency.” The parrotfish lady pounded at the flimsy door with her bony fists. “My bladder's about to blow like Mount Saint Helen, you hear me, young man?”
Now she was shouting like a maniac. I knew it wouldn't be long before a crew member came running to see what was wrong.
“Listen up, you brat,” the woman said. “I'm gonna count to five and then I'm bustin' in-and you better not be sittin' on that john when I do. You read me, junior? It ain't gonna be pretty.”
“Please don't,” I said, but it was hopeless.
“One! Two!…”
There was no other choice. I stood up from the toilet, put on the backpack, and lowered one shoulder. When the nasty old buzzard barked “Five!” I crashed out the door, ducked under her flailing, twig-sized arms, and took off running.
Nobody would've paid much attention if she hadn't started shrieking: “Catch him! Catch that rotten little pervert!”
Luckily, I'm pretty fast and not real tall, so I was able to dodge and weave through the legs of the gamblers. A few of them glanced up, and one or two actually made a lame grab for my shirt. Fortunately, most of them had been celebrating hard and were in no condition to chase after me.
Shelly's eyes got as wide as saucers when I flew past the bar. A bleary, leathery-faced man who I assumed was Billy Babcock spun on his stool and exclaimed, “Is that a kid on the boat?”
I headed topside. An angry yell rose from behind me, and I turned to see two humongous guys in hot pursuit. They looked seriously ticked off. Each wore a tight red T-shirt with the words EVENT STAFF silk-screened across the front.
Shelly had warned me about them-the bouncers.
They bellowed at me to stop, but that wasn't going to happen. I scampered to the upper deck and ran straight for the bow. Reflected below, in the glassy basin, were the twinkling, Christmassy lights of the Coral Queen.
It was a long way down to the water; longer than I'd imagined.
“Game's over,” a voice said.
I turned to face the bouncers, 400-odd pounds of meat and muscle. Panting from the chase, they wore cocky grins. They thought they had me cornered, but they were wrong.
One of them beckoned with a beefy finger. “Let's go, boy.”
I kicked off my shoes and stuffed them into Abbey's backpack.
The other one spoke up: “Chill out, shrimp. Don't try anything stupid.”
After that “shrimp” remark, I couldn't resist messing with them. “If I fall overboard and drown,” I said, “you guys are in deep trouble.”