Hoot (15 page)

“You must've thought you was pretty slick,” he said, “sneakin' in and outta here whenever you pleased. You and your smart-ass sense of humor.”

The boy raised his head. “What're you talkin' about?”

“Don't play dumb, Roy. You're the one yanked out all the survey stakes, and put them gators in the port-o-johnnies—”

“What! You're crazy, man.”

“—and painted the cop car. No wonder you don't want me callin' the police.” Curly leaned closer. “What's your problem, boy? You got a gripe with Mother Paula's? To be honest, you look like a kid that enjoys a good pancake.”

“I do! I
love
pancakes!”

“Then what's the deal?” Curly said. “Why you doin' all this stuff?”

“But I never even been here before!”

Curly removed his foot from the kid's belly. “Come on, kid. Get up.”

The boy took his hand, but instead of letting Curly pull him to his feet, he yanked Curly to the ground. Curly managed to get one arm around the boy's neck, but he twisted free and hurled a handful of dirt into Curly's face.

Just like in that stupid movie, Curly thought as he clawed miserably at his eyes, except I'm not turning into a cheerleader.

He cleared the crud from his vision just in time to see the boy run off, the rattraps clattering like castanets on the toes of his shoes. Curly attempted to give chase but he made it only about five steps before tripping in an owl hole and falling flat.

“I'll get you, Roy!” he hollered into the darkness. “You're outta luck, mister!”

 

Officer David Delinko had Saturday off, which was fine. It had been a hectic week, culminating in that weird scene at the emergency room.

The missing dog-bite victim still had not been found or identified, though Officer Delinko now had a green shirt to match the torn sleeve he'd found on the fence at the Mother Paula's construction site. The boy who'd fled from the hospital must have left the shirt on the antenna of Officer Delinko's squad car, obviously as some sort of joke.

Officer Delinko was tired of being the butt of such jokes, though he was grateful for the fresh clue. It suggested that the emergency-room runaway was one of the Mother Paula's vandals, and that young Roy Eberhardt knew more about the case than he was admitting. Officer Delinko figured that Roy's father would get to the bottom of the mystery, given his special background in interrogations.

The policeman spent the afternoon watching baseball on television, but both Florida teams got creamed—the Devil Rays lost by five, the Marlins by seven. Around dinnertime he opened his refrigerator and discovered there was nothing to eat but three individually wrapped slices of Kraft processed cheese.

Immediately he embarked on a trip to the minimart for a frozen pizza. As was his new routine, Officer Delinko made a detour toward the Mother Paula's property. He still hoped to catch the vandals, whoever they were, in the act. If that happened, the captain and the sergeant would have little choice but to take him off desk duty and put him back on patrol again—with a glowing commendation for his file.

Turning his squad car onto East Oriole, Officer Delinko wondered if the trained Rottweilers were guarding the pancake-house site tonight. In that event, it would be pointless for him to stop; nobody would mess with those crazed dogs.

In the distance, a bulky figure appeared in the middle of the road. It was advancing in an odd halting gait. Officer Delinko braked the Crown Victoria and peered warily through the windshield.

As the figure drew closer, passing through the glow of the streetlights, the policeman could see it was a husky teenaged boy. The boy kept his head down and seemed to be in a hurry, though he wasn't running in a normal way; it was more of a wobbly lurch. Each step made a sharp clacking sound that echoed on the pavement.

When the boy came into range of the squad car's headlights, Officer Delinko noticed a flat rectangular object attached to each of his sneakers. Something very strange was going on.

The police officer flipped on the flashing blue lights and stepped out of the car. The surprised teenager halted and looked up. His pudgy chest was heaving and his face was slick with sweat.

Officer Delinko said, “Can I talk to you for a second, young man?”

“Nope,” answered the boy, turning to bolt.

With rattraps on his feet, he didn't get far. Officer Delinko had no difficulty catching the boy and hustling him into the caged backseat of the police cruiser. The patrolman's seldom-used handcuffs worked splendidly.

“Why did you run?” he asked his young prisoner.

“I want a lawyer,” the kid replied, stone-faced.

“Cute.”

Officer Delinko put the squad car into a U-turn so he could take the boy to the police station. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he spotted another figure hurrying up the street, waving frantically.

Now what? thought the policeman, stepping on the brakes.

“Whoa! Wait up!” shouted the approaching figure, his unmistakable bald head glinting under the streetlights.

It was Leroy Branitt, a.k.a. Curly, the foreman of the Mother Paula's project. He was huffing and puffing when he reached the police car, and drooped wearily across the hood. His face was florid and smudged with dirt.

Officer Delinko leaned out the window and asked what was the matter.

“You caught him!” the foreman exclaimed breathlessly. “Way to go!”

“Caught who?” The policeman turned to appraise his prisoner in the backseat.

“Him! The little sneak who's been messin' up our place.” Curly straightened and pointed accusingly at the teenager. “He tried to bust into my trailer tonight. Lucky I didn't shoot his fool head off.”

Officer Delinko fought to contain his excitement.
He'd actually done it! He'd caught the Mother Paula's vandal!

“I had him pinned and he got away,” Curly was saying, “but not before I wrung his name outta him. It's Roy. Roy Eberhardt. Go ahead and ask him!”

“I don't need to,” said Officer Delinko. “I know Roy Eberhardt, and that's not him.”

“What!” Curly was fuming, as if he'd expected honesty from the young burglar.

Officer Delinko said, “I assume you want to press charges.”

“You bet your shiny tin badge I do. This creep tried to blind me, too. Threw dirt in my eyes!”

“That's an assault,” Officer Delinko said, “to go along with the attempted burglary, trespassing, destruction of private property, and so forth. Don't worry, I'll put it all in the report.” He motioned to the passenger side and told Curly to hop in. “You'll need to come down to headquarters.”

“My pleasure.” Curly scowled at the sullen lump in the backseat. “You wanna hear how he got those ridiculous rattraps on his tootsies?”

“Later,” said Officer Delinko. “I want to hear everything.” This was the big break that the policeman had been waiting for. He could hardly wait to get to the station and pry a full confession out of the teenager.

From training films, Officer Delinko remembered that delicate psychology was necessary when dealing with uncooperative suspects. So in a deliberately mild voice, he said: “You know, young man, you can make this much easier on yourself.”

“Yeah, right,” the kid muttered from behind the mesh partition.

“You could start by telling us your real name.”

“Gee, I forget.”

Curly chuckled harshly. “Puttin' this one in jail is gonna be fun.”

Officer Delinko shrugged. “Have it your way,” he told the teenaged prisoner. “You got nuthin' to say, that's cool. You're entitled under the law.”

The boy smiled crookedly. “What if I got a question?”

“Go right ahead and ask it.”

“Okay, I will,” said Dana Matherson. “Either of you dorks got a cigarette I could bum?”

SIXTEEN

The doorbell rang while the Eberhardts were eating lunch. “On a Sunday, honestly!” Roy's mother said. She believed that Sundays should be reserved for family activities.

“You've got a visitor,” Roy's father said when he returned from answering the door.

Roy's stomach knotted because he wasn't expecting anybody. He suspected that something newsworthy must have happened last night at the pancake-house property.

“One of your buddies,” Mr. Eberhardt said. “He says you guys had plans to go skateboarding.”

“Oh.” It had to be Garrett. Roy was almost dizzy with relief. “Yeah, I forgot.”

“But, honey, you don't own a skateboard,” Mrs. Eberhardt pointed out.

“It's all right. His friend brought an extra,” said Mr. Eberhardt.

Roy rose from the table, hurriedly dabbing his mouth with a napkin. “Is it okay if I go?”

“Oh, Roy, it's Sunday,” his mother objected.

“Please? Just for an hour.”

He knew his parents would say yes. They were happy to think he was making friends at his new school.

Garrett was waiting on the front steps. He started to blurt something, but Roy signaled him to keep quiet until they were away from the house. Wordlessly they skated the sidewalk to the end of the block, where Garrett kicked off of his board and exclaimed: “You won't believe it—Dana Matherson got busted last night!”

“No way!” Roy was trying to act more surprised than he was. Obviously the Mother Paula's property had been under surveillance, just as he'd anticipated.

“The cops called my mom first this morning,” Garrett reported. “He tried to break into a trailer to steal some stuff.”

As the guidance counselor at Trace Middle School, Garrett's mother was notified whenever a student got into trouble with the law.

Garrett said, “Dude, here's the killer—Dana told 'em he was
you
!”

“Oh, nice.”

“What a butthead, huh?”

“And they probably believed him,” Roy said.

“Not even for a minute.”

“Was he alone?” Roy asked. “Anybody else get arrested?”

Anybody like Beatrice Leep's stepbrother? he wanted to say.

“Nope. Just him,” Garrett said, “and guess what—he's got a record!”

“A record?”

“A rap sheet, dude. Dana's been busted before, is what the cops told my mom.”

Again, Roy wasn't exactly shocked by the news. “Busted for what?”

“Shoplifting, breakin' into Coke machines—stuff like that,” Garrett said. “One time he even knocked down a lady and swiped her purse. Mom made me promise not to tell. It's supposed to be a secret, since Dana's still a minor.”

“Right,” said Roy sarcastically. “You wouldn't want to ruin his fine reputation.”

“Whatever. Hey, you oughta be doin' somersaults.”

“Yeah, what for?”

“ 'Cause my mom says they're gonna lock him up this time.”

“Juvie hall?”

“No doubt,” said Dana, “on account of his rap sheet.”

“Wow,” Roy said quietly.

He wasn't in the mood to turn somersaults, though he couldn't deny experiencing a sense of liberation. He was tired of being Dana Matherson's punching bag.

And while he felt guilty about making up the bogus cigarette story, Roy also couldn't help but think that putting Dana behind bars was a public service. He was a nasty kid. Maybe a hitch at juvenile hall would straighten him out.

“Hey, wanna do the skate park?” Garrett asked.

“Sure.”

Roy got on his borrowed skateboard and pushed off hard with his right foot. The whole way to the park, he never once checked over his shoulder to see if he was being stalked.

It felt good, the way Sundays ought to feel.

 

Curly awoke in his own bed, and why not?

The Mother Paula's vandal was finally in custody, so there was no reason to spend the night on guard at the trailer.

After Officer Delinko gave him a lift home, Curly had entertained his wife and mother-in-law with a blow-by-blow account of the exciting events. For dramaticpurposes, Curly had jazzed up a few of the details.

In his version of the story, for instance, the surly young intruder disabled him with an expertly aimed karate chop (which sounded more serious than having dirt thrown in your face). Curly also decided it was unnecessary to mention that he'd tripped in an owl burrow and fallen. Instead he described the chase as a breathless neck-and-neck sprint. Officer Delinko's role in the capture of the fleeing criminal was conveniently minimized.

Curly's performance went over so fabulously at home that he was confident Chuck Muckle would go for it, too. First thing Monday morning, Curly would call Mother Paula's corporate headquarters to give the vice-president the details of the arrest, and of his own heroics. He couldn't wait to hear Mr. Muckle choke out a congratulation.

After lunch, Curly sat down to watch a ball game. No sooner had he settled in front of the TV than a Mother Paula's commercial came on, promoting the weekend special: $6.95 for all the pancakes you could eat, plus free sausage and coffee.

The sight of Kimberly Lou Dixon playing Mother Paula made Curly think of the cheesy movie he'd rented,
The Last House on Witch Boulevard III
. He couldn't recall whether it was due back at Blockbuster that afternoon or the following day. Curly hated paying late fees on video rentals, so he decided to go to the trailer and get the tape.

On the drive there, Curly was distressed to remember that he'd left something else at the construction site: his gun!

During the night's commotion, he had somehow lost track of the .38 revolver. He didn't recall having it when he was riding in Officer Delinko's patrol car, so it must have slipped from his belt while he was scuffling with the kid outside the trailer. Another possibility was that he'd dropped it when he stepped in that darn owl hole.

Misplacing a loaded gun was a serious matter, and Curly was highly annoyed with himself. When he arrived at the fenced lot, he hurried to the area where he and the teenager had wrestled. There was no .38 lying around.

Anxiously Curly retraced his steps to the owl den and pointed a flashlight down the hole. No gun.

Now he was genuinely worried. He checked inside the trailer and saw that nothing had been disturbed from the night before. The door was too damaged to be reattached, so Curly covered the opening with two sheets of plywood.

Then he began a methodical search, back and forth across the property, eyes glued to the ground. In one hand he carried a heavy rock, just in case he encountered one of the poisonous moccasins.

Gradually a harrowing thought seeped into Curly's brain, chilling him like ice water: What if the teenaged burglar had swiped the revolver from his waistband while they were fighting? The kid could have stashed it in a Dumpster or tossed it in some bushes as he ran away.

Curly shuddered and pressed on with the hunt. After about half an hour, he'd worked his way down to the section of the property where the earthmoving equipment was parked in preparation for the site clearing.

By this time he'd almost given up hope of finding the gun. He was quite a distance from where he last remembered having it—and in the opposite direction from where the vandal had fled. Curly figured there was no possible way that the .38 could turn up so far from the trailer, unless an exceptionally large owl had picked it up and carried it there.

His eyes fixed on a shallow depression in a soft patch of sand: the imprint of a bare foot, definitely human. Curly counted the toes, just to make sure.

The foot appeared to be considerably smaller than Curly's own; smaller, too, than those of the husky teenaged burglar.

Farther ahead, Curly came across another footprint—and then another, and still another after that. The tracks led directly toward the row of earthmoving machines, and Curly advanced with a growing sense of unease.

He stopped in front of a bulldozer and shielded his brow from the sunlight. At first he didn't notice anything wrong, but then it hit him like a kick from a mule.

The driver's seat was gone!

Dropping the rock that he'd been carrying for protection, Curly dashed to the next machine in line, a backhoe. Its seat had disappeared, too.

In a snit, Curly stomped toward the third and last piece of equipment, a grader. Again, no driver's seat.

Curly spat out a cuss word. Without seats, the earthmoving machines were basically useless. The operators had to sit down in order to work the foot pedals and steer at the same time.

The foreman's mind was racing feverishly. Either the kid they'd caught last night had a hidden accomplice, or someone else had sneaked onto the property after Curly had departed.

But who? Curly wondered in exasperation. Who sabotaged my equipment, and when?

Fruitlessly he searched for the missing seats, his mood darkening by the moment. No longer was he lookingforward to calling Mr. Muckle at Mother Paula's headquarters; in fact, he was dreading it. Curly suspected that the grumpy vice-president would take great delight in firing him over the phone.

In despair, Curly headed for the portable latrines. Having guzzled almost a whole pitcher of iced tea during lunch, he now felt like his belly was about to burst. The stress of the situation wasn't helping, either.

Curly armed himself with the flashlight and entered one of the Travelin' Johnnys, leaving the door slightly ajar in case a hasty exit was required. He wanted to be sure nobody had booby-trapped the toilet with foul-tempered reptiles again.

Cautiously Curly aimed his flashlight down the dark hole of the commode. He gulped as the beam illuminated something shiny and black in the water, but upon closer scrutiny he saw that it wasn't an alligator.

“Perfect,” Curly muttered wretchedly. “Just perfect.”

It was his gun.

 

Roy was aching to sneak over to the junkyard and visit Mullet Fingers. He wanted to find out what had happened last night at the Mother Paula's property.

The problem was Roy's mother. She invoked the Sunday rule as soon as he returned from the skateboard park, and a family outing was launched. Making good on his promise, Roy's father took them out the Tamiami Trail to an Indian tourist shop that offered airboat trips through the Everglades.

Roy ended up having a great time, even though the noise was so loud that it hurt his eardrums. The tall Seminole who was driving the airboat wore a straw cowboy hat. He said the engine was the same type used on small airplanes.

The rush of wind made Roy's eyes water as the flat-bottomed boat whisked across the sawgrass flats and weaved through the narrow winding creeks. It was cooler than a roller coaster. Along the way they stopped to look at snakes, bullfrogs, chameleons, raccoons, opossums,turtles, ducks, herons, two bald eagles, an otter, and (by Roy's count) nineteen alligators. His father got most of the action on video, while his mother took pictures with her new digital camera.

Although the airboat was very fast, the ride across the shallows was like gliding on silk. Again Roy was astounded by the immense flatness of the terrain, the lush horizons, and the exotic abundance of life. Once you got away from all the jillions of people, Florida was just as wild as Montana.

That night, lying in bed, Roy felt a stronger connection to Mullet Fingers, and a better understanding of the boy's private crusade against the pancake house. It wasn't just about the owls, it was about everything—all the birds and animals, all the wild places that were in danger of being wiped out. No wonder the kid was mad, Roy thought, and no wonder he was so determined.

When Roy's parents came in to say good night, he told them he'd never forget their trip to the Everglades, which was the truth. His mom and his dad were still his best friends, and they could be fun to hang out with. Roy knew it wasn't easy on them, either, packing up and moving all the time. The Eberhardts were a team, and they stuck together.

“While we were gone, Officer Delinko left a message on the answering machine,” Roy's father said. “Last night he arrested a suspect in the vandalism at the construction site.”

Roy didn't say a word.

“Don't worry,” Mr. Eberhardt added. “It wasn't the young man you told me about, the one who ran away from the hospital.”

“It was the Matherson boy,” Mrs. Eberhardt cut in excitedly, “the one who attacked you on the bus. And he tried to convince the police he was you!”

Roy couldn't pretend not to know. “Garrett told me all about it,” he admitted.

“Really? Garrett must have an inside source,” Roy's father remarked.

“The best,” said Roy. “What else did the policeman's message say?”

“That's about it. I got the impression he wanted me to ask if you knew anything about what happened.”

“Me?” Roy said.

“Oh, that's ridiculous,” his mother interjected. “How would Roy know what a hoodlum like Dana Matherson was up to?”

Roy's mouth was as dry as chalk. As close as he felt to his parents, he wasn't prepared to tell them that he'd mooned Dana, purposely lured him toward the Mother Paula's property, and then made up a story about a stash of cigarettes inside the trailer.

“It's certainly a strange coincidence,” Mr. Eberhardt was saying, “two different kids targeting the same location. Is it possible the Matherson boy hooked up with your friend, Beatrice's stepbrother—”

“No way,” Roy interjected firmly. “Dana doesn't care about the owls. He doesn't care about anything but himself.”

“Of course he doesn't,” Roy's mother said.

As his parents were shutting the bedroom door behind them, Roy said, “Hey, Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Remember how you said the pancake people could do whatever they wanted on that land if they had all the permits and stuff?”