Flush - Carl Hiaasen [67]
“Me too,” said Abbey, scooting to my side.
Dad left the decision to Mom, who drilled us with one of her I’m-not-kidding stares. “You’ve got exactly one hour,” she said. “Not a minute more.”
We dashed for our bikes, Abbey calling over her shoulder, “Grandpa Bobby, you’d better be here when we get back!”
My mother and father honestly care about each other, but they argue about plenty of stuff. Sometimes it seems silly to me and Abbey, but other times it’s really heavy. For instance, Mom was ninety-nine percent serious about divorcing Dad if he didn’t come home from jail and get his act together. I totally understood why she felt like that, and at the same time I could see the point he was trying to make by sinking the Coral Queen.
But even when my parents are fighting, they don’t actually fight. It’s only sharp words back and forth; no fists or blunt objects.
Unfortunately, some people really get carried away—as my sister and I were reminded when we showed up at Shelly’s trailer.
She was sitting on the steps, gazing off into the distance. She wore black jeans, a gray Gap T-shirt, and a blue trucker’s cap turned backward.
In one hand was a sweaty bottle of beer, and in the other hand was a rake. Some of the tines were snapped off, and others were bent at sharp angles. It wasn’t the sort of damage caused by normal, everyday gardening.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Love is a strange deal, I swear,” she said. “You wanna come in? It’s a awful mess, I’ll be honest.”
“We’ll help you clean up,” Abbey offered.
“What kind of mess?” I asked.
“Like nothin’ you ever saw before,” Shelly said. “Think you can handle it?”
After seeing the condition of the rake, I wasn’t so sure. To stall I asked her what had happened on the Coral Queen after I’d jumped overboard.
She laughed. “Nobody heard a thing because the band was so loud. Everybody just kept drinkin’ and gamblin’. The customers who saw you run past, they figured you belonged to one of the crew.”
“What about that nasty old lady who tried to break into the bathroom?”
“Oh, her? Free stack of chips and she was back at the blackjack table, happy as a clam,” Shelly reported. “Speaking of bathrooms, I had to make, like, seven trips before I got rid of all that purple goo. Every time I’d get settled nice and cozy, somebody’d start bangin’ on the door, sayin’ they couldn’t wait. My wrist hurts from flushin’ so much.”
“But our plan worked!” Abbey piped eagerly. “Did you hear the helicopter fly over? That was the Coast Guard—we saw ‘em taking video of the stain in the water.”
“No kidding?” Shelly looked pleased. She stood up, spinning the rake like a cheerleader’s baton.
“Did Dusty say anything after the casino closed?” I asked.
“Naw, he was a total basket case,” Shelly said. “There was some big fight on the docks, and Luno got his butt seriously whipped, is what I heard. One of the bouncers drove him to the hospital and then the cops showed up, asking what happened but by then Dusty’d already split. The crew didn’t know any different, so they waited until all the people were gone and pumped the holding tank straight into the basin, same as usual.”
I told Shelly she’d done a great job. “Thanks for emptying that liquor crate so I had a place to hide, and for sneaking me into the ladies’ head, and most of all for risking your neck to help us out….”
“Yeah, you did awesome,” said Abbey. “But what about Dusty’s secret spy at the Coast Guard station? How’d you fix it so he wasn’t around this morning when Noah called in about the Coral Queen?”
Shelly propped the rake on one shoulder, like a rifle. “Come on in,” she said to us. “But, like I said, it’s not a pretty picture.”
She wasn’t kidding. Inside the trailer it looked like a small bomb had exploded—broken lamps, overturned furniture, dents and holes in the fake-wood paneling.
Two rumpled men lay facedown—one on the gross shag carpet, one on the gross moldy sofa. We couldn’t see their faces, so it was hard to tell if they were dead or alive. The one on the floor was sopping wet and striped green with slime