The Battle of Bayport (13 page)

Bernie smiled. “Bull's-eye.”

I usually appreciate a good pun. Not this time. I thought about how guilty Mikey had felt for even aiming at the Don, and my anger at Bernie got even hotter. Thankfully Mikey hadn't been involved, but Bernie's cruel plot would have made every one of the militiamen who had fired a gun during the reenactment question whether they were a killer. Especially Mr. Lakin. Imagine not only being framed for murder, but being turned into an unwitting assassin!

Bernie's smile turned to a scowl as he raised the pistol. “Now let's see if I'm as good a shot as your history teacher.”

With the barrel leveled at my heart, my brain scrambled to come up with a good stall tactic. I doubted begging would do much good. I hated my next idea almost as much, but I had to try. If I couldn't reason with him, maybe I could flatter him. I swallowed my ego and tried to massage his.

“I have to give it to you, it's a pretty brilliant plan,” I said, choking back my disgust. “Heck, just using the reenactment to disguise the murder was genius, even without all the other stuff. With all those people already firing guns in Don Sterling's direction, you could take him out in plain sight without anyone being the least bit suspicious. You knew how hard it would be to match the bullet back to the shooter even if you pulled the trigger yourself, but you were smart enough to add another layer of deception and put more distance between you and the murder weapon by having somebody else pull the trigger for you. The shooter didn't even have to know his gun was loaded for it to work, just so long as you knew they were going to aim at Don Sterling during the battle. The police will be chasing their tails forever. And so what if they do get a clue? They'll be looking at Mr. Lakin instead of you. They never would have guessed the real bad guy wasn't even the shooter.”

My tactic worked. Bernie nodded at me approvingly.

“You're a sharp kid. It's a shame it has to end this way. In a perfect world, nobody else would have gotten hurt. Not even Lakin. The case would have gone cold before anyone solved it. These old smoothbore pistols don't leave markings. And even if the police did match up the gun, the evidence would point away from me. There was no reason for anyone to suspect me. Lakin was so convenient, it was perfect. But then he got inconvenient; he tried to talk to someone he wasn't supposed to and got in the way.”

My relief that our history teacher wasn't the murderer was stripped away by a new reality.

“What did you do to him?” I snapped.

“I got him out of the way,” Bernie replied simply.

“Everyone will just continue to think he went on the run from the police,” I said, my hope fading as I realized how well Bernie had stacked the odds against justice.

“Works for me,” Bernie said.

My heart sank. I didn't want to think about what Bernie had done to Mr. Lakin, but if I didn't figure out something quick, the same thing was going to happen to me. Bernie started to explain what he had in mind.

“Getting Lakin out of the way wasn't anything I couldn't handle, but it left some loose ends that would have been difficult for me to explain when the police came calling. Lucky for me, you showed up to help me tie everything up in a neat package for Olaf. I didn't want anyone else to get hurt, but you snooped your way into top secret intelligence. I can't allow it to fall into enemy hands, and sometimes a little collateral damage is necessary to complete a mission.”

I thought I knew what the next objective in Bernie's mission was, and it didn't end happily for Joe Hardy.

“So when they find my body, they'll also find the pistol with Mr. Lakin's fingerprints on it. It'll be the same one he fired at the reenactment, so even if they can't match up the bullet from the Don's body, the police will assume he used it to shoot both of us. Case closed.”

“They'll even find the entry wound in the exact same place on both bodies,” Bernie informed me.

My heart started beating faster. Apparently it wasn't ready to take a bullet.
Keep stalling, Joe Hardy!
yelled the voice in my head.

“But—” I started as my mind raced to come with up with something else to keep him talking.

“I'm sorry, kid. It's time we end this conversation. I have a rendezvous to get to,” Bernie said, and raised the gun again.

“Bishop,” I blurted.

Bernie lowered the gun a little and fixed me with a stare.

“That's who you wanted to stop Mr. Lakin from talking to. And Don Sterling. Bishop is who you're going to rendezvous with now too, isn't it?”

“You boys have been busy, haven't you? I think I underestimated you. I'm not going to make the same mistake again,” Bernie said as he started to thumb back the hammer.

“Wait! You still haven't told me why you wanted Don Sterling dead. You didn't have any beef with him, not that anyone knew about.”

“Because Don got greedy and didn't want to share. I found something he didn't want me to. He could have been generous, but he decided to go behind my back and try to cut me out.”

“So you cut him out instead. The same with Mr. Lakin when he tried to talk to Bishop. That way you could keep Bishop to yourself without anyone else getting in the way.”

I got a sinking feeling when I realized that Frank and I were the ones who'd told Bishop to talk to Mr. Lakin. The crime was coming full circle, and it all ran through the Englishman. I sure hoped Frank was having better luck with him than I was with Bernie. Bernie had already gotten rid of everyone else who had tried to meet with Bishop, and the only upside of me being on the other end of Bernie's pistol was it meant he was here with me, and my brother was safe for the time being.

Just then an alarm went off on the military watch wrapped around Bernie's thick wrist. He glanced down.

“It's time to go,” he said. “The rest will just have to stay a mystery.”

I didn't even have time to reply. In one fluid motion Bernie took aim, cocked the hammer all the way back, and pulled the trigger.

I stood there, hands tied, looking down the barrel, watching helplessly as the flint-tipped hammer hit metal, igniting the powder in the pan. People say you see your life flash in front of your eyes. Not for me. Time did seem to freeze, though, that much is true, and everything on the ship seemed to go all quiet, like it was just me and the muzzle and my final thoughts. I thought about missing Aunt Trudy's cooking and my dad's after-dinner lessons on proper investigative protocol. I thought about how lucky I was to have had teachers like Mr. Lakin, and I thought about Jen and how much it stunk that I wouldn't get to see if things would
work out for us. And Mikey, too, about not getting a chance to tell him he didn't kill the Don after all, so he wouldn't feel so bad. Mostly I thought about how proud I was to have been one of the Hardy boys and how much I was going to miss solving mysteries with my brother Frank.

The last thing I saw were the flames leaping toward me from the muzzle of the gun. I barely even heard the shot.

T
HE FEW MINUTES BEFORE THE
gunshot went off seemed like the longest of my life. I knew that if I didn't do something quickly, they were going to be Joe's last. My brother was doing a great job of stalling, but I was running out of time.

As I scrambled to come up with a plan before Bernie pulled the trigger, the rope and the cutlass had sparked a totally unexpected memory—the dream I'd had earlier about rescuing Daphne from the pirate who looked like Mr. Lakin!

Okay, so before you start thinking I'd lost my mind, daydreaming pirate fantasies while my brother was about to be gunned down by a cold-blooded killer, let me explain. In
the dream, I'd been swinging from a rope across the bow of the ship with a cutlass clenched between my teeth. Get it? Even with Joe being held at gunpoint below, I had to smile to myself. Who says dreams don't come true?

Okay, so Joe didn't make nearly as pretty a damsel in distress, and Bernie made a much more frightening villain, but it still just might work. We were also deep inside the hull instead of on deck, but I still had the main ingredients for a daring rescue—the rope attached to the ceiling and the cutlass I'd taken from the armory.

On closer inspection, the crate I was hiding behind was actually a big bin used to lift cargo between the two levels. There were a couple of large duffel bags inside, but I wasn't concerned with the bin's contents. I was focused on the ropes running from the bin up to the ceiling beam over Bernie's head. I gave one of the ropes a tug, and it held tight. Good. That meant the rope was securely attached to the beam and would support my weight so I could swing from it. That's what I hoped, at least.

I did some rapid calculations in my head. Distance. Angle. Velocity. If I was right, the rope would hold and I'd have just enough of it to reach Bernie, taking him out before he could shoot Joe.

I looked down across the cargo hold at my target. The height made my head spin, and my heart was thump-thump-thumping so loud I was afraid Bernie would hear. If I was wrong, I'd miss Bernie, or worse, end up careening
to the floor with nothing to break my fall, and then both Hardy boys would be kaput.

The alarm on Bernie's watch went off.

“It's time to go,” I heard Bernie say to Joe.

No time to second-guess. I made sure I had a good grip on the rope with one hand, raised the cutlass to cut the rope free with the other, and . . .

“The rest will just have to stay . . . ,” Bernie began.

“Now, Frank!” my brain screamed . . .

“. . . a mystery.”

Just as Bernie raised the gun to shoot Joe, I thwacked the cutlass through the rope, chomped down on the blade, and
SWUNG
.

For one awesome split second it felt like I was flying as I swung through the air across the cargo hold. A split second later the rope went slack in my hands, and I was hurtling toward the ground like I'd been shot from a cannon. The ceiling beam I was swinging from had snapped!

A split second after that two things happened at once: The gun went off and I slammed into Bernie with the force of a human cannonball. The pistol jerked free of his hand and went flying, flames still pouring from the muzzle. Bernie and I went flying as well, tumbling across the floor in a tangle of arms and legs. I thought I heard a scream—oh no, Joe!—but I didn't have time to finish processing the thought. The broken beam was hurtling toward us like a missile, and it was pulling the cargo bin
and duffel bags soaring through the air along behind it in an all-out aerial assault.

I was pinned under Bernie, unable to move, a sitting duck primed for the plucking. But this time Bernie's size worked to my advantage—I had my own hulking human shield. He threw up his arms like he meant to block the beam. His arms were big. The beam was bigger. The beam won. It smashed into him, and I went free-falling through the air for the second time in under a minute as the rotted wood caved in beneath us and we both smashed straight through the floor. We landed in a heap not far below, and everything started to go dark as we were swallowed in a cloud of centuries-old dust. My ears were ringing so loudly from the gunshot, I could barely even hear all the debris crashing down around me.

It was strange, though. For a second I imagined there were hundreds and hundreds of gold coins falling from the sky, and then Joe looking down on me like an angel from above, calling out softly as if in a dream, “Frank, Frank.”

I
T MAY HAVE BEEN MY
imagination, but I swear I was able to see the musket ball flying at me in slow motion. I shut my eyes, hoping to block it out like a bad dream. The darkness was filled with the explosion of the gunshot, the smell of gunpowder, and a cacophonous crashing noise. With all the chaos echoing around me, it sounded like I was back in the middle of the reenactment all over again. Was I having some sort of weird flashback on the way to the great beyond? I opened my eyes expecting to see clouds or cherubs with wings or whatever it is you see when you get to heaven, but if this was heaven, it was really dusty.

I blinked the dust out of my eyes. It looked like I was still onboard the
Resolve
. The awful thought crossed my mind that I had turned into one of the
Resolve
's fabled ghosts,
doomed to forever haunt the ship and scare kids like me. I frantically patted myself down, looking for bullet holes, but couldn't find any. I was still alive! And in one piece! But where was Bernie? The place where he'd been trying to shoot me from a few seconds earlier had been replaced by a giant hole in the floor. I looked around and noticed a much smaller hole just an inch or two to the left of my head, the size of .75 caliber musket ball. The wood was singed, and smoke still trickled out from the bullet hole. Talk about a close call!

I cautiously made my way across the room to the hole where Bernie had been and peered down. Was that Frank? And was he lying in a pile of gold coins? I had to be having some kind of bizarre near-death experience, right? Nope. The dust started to settle and there was Frank, looking dazed, his fall broken by Bernie, who was knocked out with a giant goose egg growing out of his oversize skull. A couple of the black duffel bags like the ones I'd seen on the motorboat had torn open around them, filling the hidden chamber beneath the collapsed cargo-hold floor with what could only be the King's Pride Treasure. Way to go, bro!

That wasn't all, though. Frank had done more than just rescue me, knock out the villain, and find the stolen gold. There was someone else down there with them. It was hard to tell with all the dust, but it looked like there was an old guy in a powder-blue plaid suit bound and gagged in the corner of the room. Was that . . . Mr. Lakin! And he was alive! When
Bernie had told me that he'd gotten Mr. Lakin “out of the way,” I'd assumed the worst. But our history teacher wasn't dead. He'd been tied up down here the whole time.