The Chocolate Pirate Plot (27 page)

Then he leaned down, close to my ear, so that I could hear him over the motor. “Not too fast,” he said. “The guy's afloat. We don't want to run him down.”

Looking ahead, I could see nothing but the moon on the water. Then a dark lump broke its silvery path. The water around the lump was disturbed.

The man in the water was thrashing around.

I pointed the boat directly toward him. “Steady,” Hogan said. “Steady. Not too fast. You're doing fine.”

Then another shot was fired. I gave a wordless yelp. And I increased the throttle speed just slightly.

I felt Hogan and Joe's urgency. We had to get that guy out of the water, and we had to do it right that minute.

“A little to the left!” Hogan's voice commanded me. “Circle around him. Put the boat between him and the shore. Nettie! You get that life jacket on! And get down!”

It did cross my mind to wonder what good a life jacket would do if we went into that cold, spring-fed lake. I expected to die of the shock.

I also wondered whether Aunt Nettie could swim. I'd never known her to go to the beach—even to wade.

And I wondered whether bullets would bounce off life jackets.

But I obeyed Hogan's directions and managed to get the boat between the man in the water and the shore. Then I cut the throttle to idle, and we lingered where we were, floating at the mercy of whatever currents moved through the lake.

Just as I swung into place, I heard a splash. When I looked back, Joe was no longer kneeling at the gunwale. He'd gone into the water.

It had been fifteen years since Joe had worked as a lifeguard. I breathed a prayer, asking that he hadn't forgotten his skills. An injured man wasn't going to be easy to get out of the water.

Hogan rushed down the center aisle. The boat tipped and bucked. I couldn't see what was happening.

I heard a cry. It wasn't very loud, but it sounded like agonizing pain. Then there were words, words spoken by a new voice. “Oh, God!”

“Sorry, guy,” Hogan said. “We're going to get you out of here!”

I looked back. I could see dark legs lying flat on the deck. Joe and Hogan had been able to lift the man into the boat. He was alive. And he was in pain. I was relieved, but I knew the crisis wasn't over.

Then the boat bucked and tipped again. I saw Joe flop over the stern onto the deck.

At that same moment, another shot was fired, and a bullet hit our bow.

“Lee!” Joe shouted. “Dig out!”

I dug.

I didn't worry about lights. I just looked at the moon and tried to guess what direction was west.

I was mighty grateful when Joe came to the front of the boat. I knew I could never run that weedy, crooked river channel in the dark. Heck, I doubted I could do it in broad daylight.

Since Joe was at the helm, I moved back to the deck. This wasn't the easiest thing to do, with the sedan traveling at top speed, but I felt that someone should pay attention to the wounded man.

Aunt Nettie beat me to him. He had rolled onto his side and curled into a ball. He was bleeding from a wound in his back.

Joe's shirt was lying on the deck. It wasn't exactly sterile, but this didn't seem to be the moment to worry about that. I folded the shirt into a thick pad and used it to apply pressure to the wound. Aunt Nettie had pulled off her police jacket, and she draped it over the man's shoulders like a blanket.

I saw that he was wearing jeans. I remember thinking that the guy must be a champion swimmer; if I went into the drink in jeans, I'd sink straight to the bottom. We needed to get those heavy denim pants off him—they must be like wearing sheets of ice—but this didn't seem to be the moment for that either.

Suddenly a bright light washed over us.

We'd been hit by a spotlight. “Get down!” Hogan must have shouted, because we heard him. And I could hear the roar of a boat's motor, and it wasn't the gurgle-gurgle of the sedan.

Aunt Nettie dropped to her stomach, but ol' dumb Lee looked up to see what was happening.

And what was happening was that the inflatable—the pirate ship—was racing toward us. It must have come out of the boathouse, and it was heading toward us fast. Of course, I couldn't see it clearly, because I was blinded by its spotlight. I only knew what must be happening.

The inflatable's modern, high-powered outboard motor was maybe twice as fast as the sedan's antique gurgling inboard.

They could run us down in about two minutes.

And they had guns.

I've had moments when I thought my life was absolutely at an end. The night my high school friend almost hit the bridge abutment. The night my pal Lindy and I went over an embankment, skidded through the bushes, and came to rest on the January ice of Lake Michigan. The time the snowmobile chased me. The time when—well, there have been times I'd rather not remember.

But the fifteen seconds after I saw that inflatable headed after us—I'd rather not remember those moments, but I can't forget them.

Then Hogan yelled again. “Get down!” I ducked, but I looked at him at the same time, and I realized something important.

We had guns, too.

Hogan was a lawman. He routinely carried a gun.

Hogan pulled out his pistol. He knelt and aimed at the inflatable. Then he fired. Nothing happened. Then he fired again. And their spotlight went out.

One moment I was completely blind because of the glare of the spotlight. The next I couldn't see a thing because the bright light had gone out.

The noise of the boats was terrific. The sedan was still racing across the lake, its motor as loud as it ever gets, and the inflatable was coming after us, its outboard twice as loud as ours.

Hogan was still kneeling in the stern. He took another shot. For a moment nothing happened. Then Hogan fired again.

And the inflatable began to go nuts. It swung around crazily.

Hogan fired off another shot.

Suddenly the inflatable was farther from us. A shot rang out from its direction, but it didn't seem to come anyplace near us.

I could see two men on board. They moved to the left side of the craft, then to the right.

Finally, one of them seemed to remember the motor. He turned it off, and the whole chase grew a lot more silent. Then one of the guys dived overboard, over on the side farthest from us. The second man kept moving back and forth. I had the feeling that he was wringing his hands, trying to decide what to do.

Meanwhile, the inflatable was losing air rapidly. The right side was growing as limp as a sail on a becalmed boat.

Then the whole thing flipped over.

Hogan yelled at Joe, telling him to stop, but Joe had apparently seen what was going on, and he'd already cut the sedan's motor to idle. He walked back to the deck and stood beside Hogan.

He looked pretty ridiculous, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer briefs, soaking wet and quite revealing, and a jacket that said POLICE on the back.

“I'm tempted to let them drown,” he said, “but I guess we'd better try to pull 'em out.”

P
olice chiefs are handy guys to have around in emergencies. Not only did Hogan have a gun; he had a radio. Plus, he'd already stationed Patrolman Jerry Cherry of the Warner Pier PD on McIntosh Road, outside the entrance to Camp Sail-Along. Jerry heard the shots, then got a radio call from Hogan, so he had driven into the camp and was waiting at the long dock when we got there. The Warner County Sheriff's Department, the Michigan State Police, and the Warner Pier Paramedics were on the way.

We pulled one man from the lake. As I'd suspected, it was Jack McGrath. He didn't appear to be hurt by his dunking, but he was noticeably glad to be picked up. It seemed he wasn't much of a swimmer.

The other man—the one who'd jumped out of the inflatable dinghy early—had disappeared. I feared that they'd be dragging the lake for him. We ran the spotlight over the water, but we saw no sign of him. Jack wouldn't say who he was.

Hogan produced handcuffs—his stock of equipment never seemed to end—and attached Jack McGrath to the sedan's anchor. Then he held a gun on him while Aunt Nettie and I continued to do what we could in the line of first aid for the man who had been shot, and Joe guided the sedan to the Camp Sail-Along dock, which was the closest place where an ambulance could meet us. Lights were flashing on at the houses across the lake, but as yet no one who lived over there had come roaring across in a boat. Something about all the shots that had been fired had probably discouraged the peaceful Lake o' the Winds community from coming to find out the reason for all the roaring boat motors. Hogan said the county 9-1-1 operator was getting lots of calls.

The wounded man, as I'd been assuming, said he was the long-lost Jeremy. I felt quite relieved to learn that he was still alive.

The Camp Sail-Along dock sat in a forest of waterweeds, but Joe sidled up to it. As soon as he tied up, Hogan and Jerry marched Jack McGrath ashore and locked him in Jerry's patrol car.

Joe aimed the sedan's spotlight toward Aunt Nettie and me and our patient, away from the shore, so that we had some light. He picked up his good khaki slacks, which had been kicked into the corner of the deck, stepped out onto the dock, and walked away into the darkness. I assumed he planned to take his wet undershorts off and put the khakis on without shocking Aunt Nettie. Actually, he could have done this on the boat and she wouldn't have turned a hair, but men can be modest at the oddest times.

Aunt Nettie and I continued to kneel beside the wounded Jeremy. We could already hear sirens in the distance.

I leaned close to Jeremy. “The ambulance will be here in a minute,” I said.

He gave a painful sigh. “Thanks. As long as that bastard doesn't get away.”

“Jack McGrath? He's locked in the patrol car.”

“Jack? He doesn't matter. It's the old bastard I want. The one who got me into this.”

Jeremy seemed to drift off into semiconsciousness at that point, leaving me to figure out what he'd been talking about. “The old bastard?” Who could he mean?

When Hogan, Joe, and I had been figuring out whodunit, we'd assigned roles to Jeremy, to Hal, and to Jill. I still felt sure that they were the three pirates who'd boarded the sedan back on Midsummer's Eve. Then we had decided that Jack McGrath was the other person involved in the boardings. He hadn't been a pirate, but he'd been needed to run the hideout at Camp Sail-Along, and he'd helped lift the magic chest holding Marco Spear off the yacht.

Now I counted noses and realized that there had been a fifth person in the kidnapping gang.

This was the person who had been in the inflatable with Jack McGrath when Hogan shot it out of the water.

We'd all seen the second person go overboard. But who was he?

Could it have been Jill?

I closed my eyes and pictured the inflatable as the air poured out of one side of it. No, I felt sure that the person who had dived overboard had been a man.

So, who had it been?

I checked Joe's shirt, the pad I was holding against Jeremy's back. All I knew to do was apply pressure, and that improvised pad was getting completely soaked.

I muttered. “Where's that ambulance?”

Jeremy opened his eyes. “He promised big,” he said. “He had the contacts. But it was just a plot to get Hal and me into it. We even found Jack for him. Then he killed Hal.”

His eyes closed; then they opened. “Do you have any water?”

“I'm afraid you shouldn't have any, Jeremy. They'll be giving you an IV pretty quick.”

“I really am thirsty. A whole pitcher of that sangria sure would be good.” He seemed to drift off.

Pitcher. Someone else had mentioned drinks that came in a pitcher. Someone who hadn't been on the yacht and therefore hadn't had a chance to drink any.

Max. In the Dock Street Pizza Place he'd mentioned hors d'oeuvres and pitchers of drinks.

Was that a coincidence?

My heart began to pound.

Max Morgan had to be the other pirate. I was sure of it. It hadn't been Jack who replaced Hal as the lead pirate, the one who did stunts and yelled out “Yo-ho-ho!” Jack couldn't have handled the dramatic gestures the pirate made on board the yacht that night.

The new leader of the pirates had been Max Morgan, disguised with a lot of fake beard, hair, and eyebrows, plus a fat belly. A fat belly like the one Max had worn when he played Falstaff.

“The old bastard.” That described him accurately. Plus, Max was a longtime theater pro. To young people like Jeremy or Jill, he would appear to have “contacts.”