The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 5

by Roy MacGregor

  The Stars set up their torpedo, and Brody Prince, who had excellent speed, broke hard over centre, slamming his stick on the ice for a pass. The passer hit him perfectly at the Panthers’ blueline, sending Brody Prince on a clear breakaway.

  He came in fast, dropped the puck into his skate blades, then chipped it back up quickly onto his stick, fooling the goalie entirely, and flicked the puck into a wide-open side of the net.

  “Hot dog!” Nish called out.

  “You’re one to talk!” shouted back Sam.

  “He’s a jerk!” muttered Nish.

  “We think he’s kind of cute!” giggled Sarah, sitting beside Sam.

  The Hollywood Stars’ parents were on their feet, cheering wildly. In the centre of the crowd, Troy Prince pumped his fist five times into the air to signal the 5-0 lead.

  Travis looked away, then looked back again.

  A rubber glove?

  The Owls were still talking about the Hollywood Stars back at the hotel when Muck announced bedtime. Even Muck seemed disheartened by what he had seen. If the Hollywood Stars could crush the Panthers 7-1 – Jeremy Billings scoring a late goal for Portland on a solo rush – what would they do to the Owls? The Owls and Panthers, after all, had proved to be almost equal in all the times they had met before.

  But it went deeper than that. Muck could handle losing. In fact, he never seemed upset by a loss and always spoke well of the teams that had beaten them. He clearly didn’t like what they had seen at the rink that day. Muck – who still wore his old junior gloves and jackets, whose track pants were the subject of endless jokes and even several fundraising attempts by the team to replace them – was repulsed by the richness of the Stars, the display of wealth that included the bus, the track suits, the headphones.

  And he had thought the tactics being used by the team were hardly in keeping with good hockey. Muck not only despised the trap as being bad for the game, he hated it when coaches had so much control. Hockey, he believed, was about creativity and desire, the team providing the base and the organization, but the players providing the skills. He wished the National Hockey League would give the game back to the players. He did not like to see NHL tactics come down to the peewee level. If the fun was taken out of the game, he wanted nothing to do with it.

  The Owls players were similarly unimpressed with the style of play they had seen. But they had to admit there was considerable skill on the Stars’ side, particularly when it came to Brody Prince, the team captain and key centre.

  Even so, all the boys on the team thought he was a show-off and a jerk.

  All the girls thought he was cute.

  They were just heading off up to their rooms when Mr. Dillinger came in through the revolving doors, his cheeks flushed from the cold. He seemed in shock.

  Muck, already at the elevator, turned and looked at Mr. Dillinger, waiting for him to speak.

  Mr. Dillinger seemed at a loss for words. “There’s been … an incident,” he said finally.

  “What?” Muck asked.

  Mr. Dillinger swallowed. “A player is missing.”

  “Which team?”

  “Hollywood … It’s the kid, the Prince kid.”

  “Brody Prince?” Sarah half shrieked.

  Mr. Dillinger nodded. “After the game,” he said, his words not coming smoothly, “he left the dressing room for the bus and never made it.”

  “Wasn’t anyone with him?”

  “He’s the only player missing.”

  “What about his bodyguard?” Fahd asked.

  Mr. Dillinger looked stunned.

  “He’s apparently missing too.”

  7

  The heart had gone out of Nish’s gross-out Olympics.

  He tried to hold the third event, The Slurp, but Sarah, who was supposed to be the Owls’ competitor in the event, said she already felt like throwing up; pulling pantyhose over her head before trying to slurp up a bowl of purple Jell-O would be the same thing as deliberately sticking a finger down her throat.

  Nish wisely cancelled the games “until further notice.” No one felt like screaming and laughing and acting silly the way they did for the Fly on the Wall and the Snot Shot. It just didn’t seem right, under the circumstances.

  The circumstances were these: Brody Prince was missing and presumed kidnapped. The bodyguard was missing and presumed to be part of the kidnap plot. Beyond that, little was known.

  Data, of course, had all the latest news. When he wasn’t sitting around the hotel lobby waiting for the latest edition of the Salt Lake City Star to be delivered to the lobby gift shop, he was surfing the Internet for all the Web sites, from CNN to USA Today. None of them, however, had as much detailed coverage as the local daily:

  ROCK CHILD MISSING AND PRESUMED KIDNAPPED

  By Randolph J. Saxon, Star Staff

  The child of entertainment superstar Troy Prince, missing since Wednesday evening, is now presumed to have been kidnapped and held for ransom, Utah State Police have confirmed.

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been called in to take over the case of 13-year-old Brody Prince’s mysterious disappearance.

  The young son of the rock and movie mogul and Isabella Val d’Or, the former supermodel, went missing following a hockey game in the Peewee Olympics currently under way at venues in Salt Lake City, Ogden, and Park City.

  Following a match between Prince’s Hollywood Stars and the Portland Panthers held Wednesday in Park City, Troy Prince disappeared from the hotel where the Hollywood team, which is heavily financed by his parents, was staying.

  Also missing is Taras Zimbalist, 32, a bodyguard hired last summer by the Prince family specifically to watch over their only child.

  A police source has told the Star that Zimbalist is presumed by the FBI to be part of the kidnap plot, though the FBI has refused all comment on the case.

  Troy Prince, known for his eccentricities as well as his hits, was estimated by Fortune magazine earlier this spring to be worth in excess of $2 billion.

  Less than a day later, the paper had advanced the story considerably, leaving no doubt as to the motive behind the disappearance.

  KIDNAP VICTIM PRESUMED SPIRITED OUT OF STATE

  By Randolph J. Saxon, Star Staff

  Brody Prince, the 13-year-old child of entertainment superstar Troy Prince, was flown out of Utah following his kidnapping, according to police sources.

  The Star has learned that kidnappers had an intricate plan in place following Wednesday’s abduction of the young hockey player in Park City.

  Primary suspect Taras Zimbalist, 32, the boy’s bodyguard, is also said to have left the state via the same route, leading police to speculate that the kidnapping was planned by experts and carried out by several persons, including Zimbalist.

  Witnesses have apparently told police they sighted a long black limousine hurrying from the Park City arena site shortly after the game ended between the Hollywood Stars and the Portland Panthers.

  Both teams were competing in the Peewee Olympics and Prince failed to make the Hollywood team bus following his team’s victory over the Portland squad.

  According to Star sources, the limousine was seen traveling at speeds in excess of 100 mph on the route out to the county airport on the outskirts of Park City.

  One witness, police say, reported sounds of a large helicopter taking off at around the time the limousine would have reached the small airfield.

  Police checks of other Utah airports suggest no mysterious helicopter landings that night, leading police to presume the helicopter headed for Nevada, perhaps Las Vegas.

  The investigation is now shifting to other states.

  No ransom note has been received so far, police sources say.

  The Prince family has made no public comment since the boy went missing.

  The speculation was wild. The Mob was involved, one commentator said on CNN. One man being interviewed went so far as to suggest that the boy had engineered his own disappearance to get aw
ay from his mad father.

  Background checks of Zimbalist found that he was working with false identification and references, and was, in fact, Lawrence “Big Larry” Prado, who had previously served time in federal prison for counterfeiting and assault.

  The world media was flooding into Park City, taking up the few remaining empty hotel rooms and bringing huge satellite trucks up into the mountains to report live on location about the case.

  The arrival of the satellite trucks and the television cameras brought Troy Prince and Isabella Val d’Or out of the seclusion of their luxury hotel. They appeared on the front steps of the Park City police station before a swarm of television cameras and microphones, and Troy Prince made an impassioned plea to the kidnappers to let his son go.

  The Owls all gathered around the television set in the lobby of their own hotel to watch and listen. As Troy Prince spoke, tears rolled down his cheeks.

  “He’s heartbroken!” Sarah all but wailed as she watched, tears forming in her own eyes.

  “C’mon,” said Nish with even more than his usual sarcasm. “You forget he’s an actor – he can cry at the drop of a hat.”

  Sam threw one of the sofa cushions at him. “You’re pathetic !” she shouted as he scuttled away.

  “I was just saying he’s an actor …,” Nish protested weakly, the colour rising in his cheeks.

  “And the whole thing’s fake?” Sam countered. “I don’t think so. Brody Prince could be lying dead somewhere for all we know.”

  Travis said nothing, but he didn’t think so. No one would want to kill a thirteen-year-old peewee hockey player, no matter how rude he could be or how much better he thought he was than everyone else. But they might want to kidnap him and hold him for ransom. Travis figured Brody Prince was, at this very moment, being held in some well-guarded hotel room in Las Vegas, his captors watching this very same broadcast as they decided how much to ask for and when to ask for it.

  Travis wondered how much it would be.

  A million?

  Ten million?

  A billion dollars?

  He wondered how much his parents would pay to get him back if someone ever kidnapped the captain of the Screech Owls of little Tamarack.

  A hundred dollars?

  Two hundred?

  He wondered how much Nish’s poor mom would give up to get back her little troublemaking darling. Travis giggled to himself.

  A loonie?

  He was instantly ashamed of himself. This was no laughing matter. Even if he didn’t like Brody Prince, he didn’t want anything to happen to him. He didn’t even want to play the Stars – if it came to that – without Brody Prince, even if he was by far their top player.

  Travis wanted him back, and in the lineup – and then he wouldn’t feel so badly about wanting the insufferable Brody Prince to lose.

  8

  Nish seemed depressed. He’d given up, at least temporarily, on the Gross-Out Olympics, and was no longer saying a word about what he planned to bury at centre ice for the gold-medal game at the E Center in Salt Lake City. Nish was, for the first time in his life, quiet and well-mannered and keeping very much to himself. He was even reading a book.

  If Travis hadn’t known better, he’d have suggested to Mr. Dillinger that perhaps Nish needed medical attention.

  All the Owls were down. Sam and Sarah kept bursting into tears whenever they were together and someone started talking about the kidnapping. And not just the Owls, but the other players on other teams seemed to have lost their appetite for what should have been a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Travis had run into Jeremy Billings at the third-floor pop machine and Jeremy said it was the same with the Panthers: everyone was down, everyone had lost heart in the tournament.

  But the games would go on, the organizers insisted. The real Olympics had, over the years, continued through terrorist attack, a bomb, political and financial scandals, and the Peewee Olympics deserved no less.

  Troy Prince released a statement in which the family insisted the tournament should continue, and the Hollywood Stars voted to stay on even without their best player.

  It all made sense to Travis. What else was there to do? Quitting the tournament wasn’t going to force the kidnappers to hand back Brody Prince. Everyone going home wouldn’t mean that the kidnapping had never happened. The best the teams could do was to stay put and wait and see what happened next. Would the kidnappers demand a ransom? Or would the police catch the kidnappers?

  And what would happen to Brody Prince in all of this, Travis wondered. No one thought the young player had been hurt, but there was the distinct possibility that this could still happen. If the police were closing in, the kidnappers might panic. If the Prince family refused to pay, the kidnappers might take revenge.

  Travis tried to imagine how Brody would be feeling. Was he scared? Would he believe his father would pay the ransom? Would he want the police to find out where he was or would he hope they never came close to the kidnappers?

  And where was he? In a Las Vegas hotel? In a cabin high in the mountains? In another country? Was he tied up? Was he being held at gunpoint? Was he being fed and cared for?

  Was he scared?

  It always came back to that. Of course he would be scared, Travis decided. How could he not be?

  Two days after Brody Prince went missing the Owls played the Long Island Selects – winning handily on Sarah’s hat trick and some outstanding goaltending by Jeremy Weathers – and when they came back to the hotel there was a report on CNN that the kidnappers had finally made contact. The ransom they demanded, according to the television network, was several million dollars.

  “Pocket change,” Nish grumbled as he leaned his chin on his fists, carefully watching the report from Salt Lake City.

  “Will they pay it?” Fahd asked.

  “Of course they will,” Sam said. “It’s nothing to a man like Troy Prince.”

  “But should they pay? ” Lars asked. “It’s only an encouragement to other kidnappers, isn’t it?”

  Lars had a point, and the Owls began a long and spirited discussion on kidnapping and ransoms and whether you should give in to criminals like that. The alternative, however, was to endanger the kidnapped person and risk never getting that person back safely.

  It was a difficult question, and no one could come up with a satisfactory answer – the Owls just knew that they all wished Brody Prince would return safely, and soon.

  They were talking this way – Nish and Sam getting louder and louder – when Data suddenly brought the room to a halt by raising his good arm and loudly demanding they all “shush.”

  There was an item on CNN, another report from Salt Lake City. A body had been found outside a municipal dump near the far end of the Great Salt Lake flats.

  Murder was uncommon enough in this state, and particularly unnerving was that it had happened the same week as the kidnapping.

  The normally quiet Salt Lake City was suddenly looking like the crime capital of North America.

  The body had been found by city workers doing a general cleanup of an old gravel pit. So far it had not been identified and police had said there appeared to be “no connection between the discovery of the body and the recent kidnapping of Brody Prince, son of wealthy entertainer Troy Prince.”

  The body, according to police, belonged to an elderly man who had died under “uncertain circumstances.” Foul play was suspected, but police so far had no idea how the man had been killed or why his body had been dumped there.

  CNN had obtained a police artist’s sketch of the elderly victim and the screen suddenly filled with a roughly drawn portrait.

  It was of a very old man. He had long white hair and a very long waxed moustache. All that was missing was the twinkle in his eye.

  “Ebenezer!” Nish shouted.

  No one else had to say a word. They had all recognized the portrait.

  It was, without question, Ebenezer Durk.

  9

  The Owls sl
ept badly that night. Travis ached from a shot he’d taken in the leg when one of the Selects forwards had tipped a point shot from Sam, but it wasn’t that sort of hurt that kept him tossing and turning long into the dark hours. It was a different sort of hurt, almost as if he’d taken the puck in his gut rather than in his calf. A few times, as Travis lay staring out the hotel window into the blue glow of the night sky, he was certain he heard Nish sobbing, but he said nothing, deciding to let Nish deal with his own pain in his own way.

  Their new friend Ebenezer Durk was dead.

  Mr. Dillinger had immediately phoned the police to offer an identification, but by the time his call got through the authorities had already received dozens of others from people in Park City who had recognized Ebenezer’s striking moustache in the artist’s sketch.

  In the morning, the papers were filled with stories about the discovery, as well as with new information on the ransom demand.

  NABBERS WANT $10 MILLION

  By Randolph J. Saxon, Star Staff

  The kidnappers of Brody Prince have made contact with the Prince family, police sources confirmed late last evening following an underworld tip received by the Star.

  According to the Star tipster, the amount sought is $10 million. Neither the police nor a spokesperson for wealthy entertainer Troy Prince, father of the missing peewee hockey player Brody Prince, would confirm the figure.

  Police will say, however, that an e-mail was received at Prince Entertainment headquarters in Hollywood that appears genuine. Whoever wrote the message provided key information that indicated they were indeed connected to Wednesday’s kidnapping following a peewee tournament game in Park City.

  Sources have further told the Star that the money is to be delivered to a secret site in Nevada, adding to speculation that young Prince was immediately whisked from Utah to the neighboring state by helicopter.