Flush - Carl Hiaasen [54]
Inside the ladies’ restroom.
So I did. The two of us could barely fit.
“Where’s the stuff?” she whispered.
I patted Abbey’s backpack. The day before, Shelly and I had divided the stash of food coloring: seventeen bottles for me, seventeen for her.
“You got the sign?” I asked.
She smiled and held it up for me to see: a square piece of cardboard on which she had printed in capital letters with a jet-black marker: OUT OF ORDER.
“Guaranteed privacy,” she assured me.
“But what about you?” I was worried that she wouldn’t have a safe place to flush her supply of the dye.
“There’s another Mermaids’ john up front. I’ll use that one for my potty breaks.”
“But what if somebody’s already in there?” I asked.
“Then I’ll crash the Mermen’s.”
“The men’s room? You serious?”
Shelly shrugged. “Hey, who’s gonna stop me?”
She had a point. “I gotta get back to the bar,” she said. “Billy Babcock’s waitin’ on me all moony-eyed. Poor sap thinks he’s in love.” She gave my shoulder a friendly tweak. “Good luck, young Underwood.”
“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 rest-room.
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,