Flush - Carl Hiaasen [3]
I locked my bike to a buttonwood tree and walked down to the charter docks, Abbey trailing behind. Two small skiffs and a Coast Guard inflatable were nosing around the Coral Queen. We could hear the men in the skiffs talking about what had to be done to float the boat. It was a major project.
“He’s lost his marbles,” Abbey muttered.
“Who—Dad? No way,” I said.
“Then why did he do it?”
“Because Dusty Muleman has been dumping his holding tank into the water,” I said.
Abbey grimaced. “Yuck. From the toilets?”
“Yep. In the middle of the night, when there’s nobody around.”
“That is so gross.”
“And totally illegal,” I said. “He only does it to save money.”
According to my father, Dusty Muleman was such a pathetic cheapskate that he wouldn’t pay to have the Coral Queen’s sewage hauled away. Instead his crew had standing orders to flush the waste into the basin, which was already murky. The tide later carried most of the filth out to open water.
“But why didn’t Dad just call the Coast Guard?” my sister asked. “Wouldn’t that have been the grown-up thing to do?”
“He told me he tried. He said he called everybody he could think of, but they could never catch Dusty in the act,” I said. “Dad thinks somebody’s tipping him off.”
“Oh, please,” Abbey groaned.
Now she was starting to annoy me.
“When the wind and the current are right, the poop from the gambling boat floats out of the basin and down the shoreline,” I said, “straight to Thunder Beach.”
Abbey made a pukey face. “Ugh. So that’s why they close the park sometimes.”
“You know how many kids go swimming there? What Dusty’s doing can make you real sick at both ends. Hospital-sick, Dad says. So it’s not only disgusting, it’s dangerous.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I didn’t say it was right, Abbey, what Dad did. I’m only telling you why.”
My father hadn’t even tried to get away. After swimming back to the dock, he’d sat down in a folding chair, opened a can of root beer, and watched the Coral Queen go down. He was still there at dawn, sleeping, when the police arrived.
“So what now?” Abbey asked.
A dark bluish slick surrounded the boat, and the men in the Coast Guard inflatable were laying out yellow floating bumpers, to keep the oil and grease from spreading. By sinking the Coral Queen, my father himself had managed to make quite a mess.
I said, “Dad asked me to help him.”
Abbey made a face. “Help him what—break out of jail?”
“Get serious.”
“Then what, Noah? Tell me.”
I knew she wasn’t going to like it. “He wants me to help him nail Dusty Muleman,” I said.
A long silence followed, so I figured Abbey was thinking up something snarky to say. But it turned out that she wasn’t.
“I didn’t give Dad an answer yet,” I said.
“I already know your answer,” said my sister.
“His heart’s in the right place, Abbey. It really is.”
“It’s not his heart I’m worried about, it’s his brain,” she said. “You’d better be careful, Noah.”
“Are you going to tell Mom?”
“I haven’t decided.” She gave me a sideways look that told me she probably wouldn’t.
Like I said, my sister’s all right.
TWO
Lucky for us, it was summertime and school was out. That meant that Abbey and I didn’t have to face all the other kids at once. It’s a pretty small town and news gets around fast, so by now it was no secret that our father was in the slammer for sinking Dusty Muleman’s casino boat. Everybody would be talking about it.
The kid I most didn’t want to see was Jasper Muleman Jr., who was Dusty’s son. He was a well-known jerk, which I partly blamed on the fact that his parents had named him Jasper. That would be enough to make anybody mean and mad at the world.
Unfortunately, he was at the marina the next morning when I stopped by to see the salvage crew float the Coral Queen. Scuba divers were feeding fat black hoses into the sunken half of the boat, though I couldn’t tell if they were pumping water out or pumping air in. I spotted