The Chocolate Pirate Plot

by JoAnna Carl

  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.”

  Chapter 24

  Police 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.”

  Had Max set up this whole plot? Had he organized the pirates, used them over the whole summer to entertain and lull Warner Pier’s boating community into complacency? Because now it was obvious that the whole pirate stunt, the boardings that had amused us all summer, were a plan to kidnap Marco Spear.

  “Max.” I murmured the word.

  Immediately the sedan began to bounce again, and water began to splash over the swim platform. My head twisted toward the sound so quickly that my neck nearly unscrewed.

  “Max!” This time I screamed the word.

  Max Morgan had climbed over the swim platform and was in the boat with Jeremy, Aunt Nettie, and me.

  And he still had his pistol.

  “Okay!” His voice wasn’t loud, but its tone was as cold as that spring-fed lake water. “Forget that creep there on the floor, and get this boat under way.”

  “No!” I yelled it. Maybe someone—Joe, Hogan, Jerry—would hear me. “Max, I can’t operate this boat.”

  “You were running it earlier.”

  “I can’t get it out of the lake! The channel is too tricky! I’ll run aground.”

  “I know the channel! You start the motor!”

  “No! I can’t!”

  Max pointed his pistol at Aunt Nettie’s head. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

  I got to my feet, moving as slowly as I could.

  Max spoke again. “Move!”

  I backed down the aisle, toward the controls. “You’ll have to untie the mooring line.”

  “Your sweet little aunt can do it!” He poked her with the pistol.

  Aunt Nettie got up and went to the side of the boat. Obediently, she began to unwind the mooring line from its stanchion. I felt for the key, hoping that Joe had taken it out and put it in his pocket. But no, it was in the ignition, waiting. I realized that had been a vain hope. After all, Joe hadn’t had his pants on when he turned the motor off. But maybe . . . I pulled the key out, juggled it around, and dropped it on the floor of the boat. “I’ve dropped the key!”

  “Bitch! Find it! And use it!”

  I fumbled on the floor. There was no way to claim I couldn’t find the key; it was attached to a key chain with a large fish-shaped charm on it, the kind that floats. All boat keys should have one of those, so the key won’t sink if you drop them overboard.

  Max moved closer to me, still spewing swearwords. At that moment the sedan began to buck again. I’d learned what that meant—someone was climbing in.

  Max knew what it meant, too. He whirled toward the back of the boat.

  No one was there. Aunt Nettie was standing on the deck with one hand behind her back, looking as innocent as a sweet little old lady can.

  “Get that motor going!” Max turned back toward me.

  As he rotated around, Aunt Nettie pulled that wonderful short oar from behind her, swung it like a baseball bat, and aimed for the fences. She hit Max right between the shoulder blades with the edge of the oar.

  The next moments were really confusing. Max fell forward, landing with his chin on the back of one of the sedan’s seats and popping his neck back. Then he rolled over onto his side. The trigger of his pistol clicked, but it didn’t go off.

  I jumped on top of him, straddled his chest, and put one of my knees on each of his arms. He’d have to throw me off before he could go anywhere.

  Joe, naked and covered with waterweeds, came over the side of the boat. He tried to grab Max, but Max was lying in the aisle with me on top of him. All Joe could touch were Max’s feet. He began to tug at him, trying to slide Max toward the deck. Since he had to pull me along as well—all my weight was on Max—this proved to be a pretty hard job.

  Aunt Nettie yelled for help.

  Hogan and Jerry ran down the dock. Sirens grew louder until they became deafening. I saw lights—whirling blue lights and brilliant white headlights. They looked beautiful. They meant more law enforcement was there.

  They looked even more beautiful when Hogan and Jerry Cherry found Marco Spear, still drugged and sleeping peacefully, in one of the derelict camp cabins. It had been fixed up quite comfortably, they said. Obviously the kidnappers were ready to hold Marco for a week or more.

  Aunt Nettie, of course, was the heroine of the whole thing, and her picture ran on the front pages of—apparently—every newspaper in the United States. She and Hogan gave a press conference the next day, hoping to calm things down. She posed h
olding the oar. But it was useless. Finally, she and Hogan took off before dawn in a borrowed car and went to Arizona, where they hid out at the home of Hogan’s niece.

  After they disappeared, the press turned their attention to Joe and me. We borrowed his mom’s car, left Aunt Nettie’s chief assistant in charge of TenHuis Chocolade, and went down to Texas to see my dad in Prairie Creek. Prairie Creek people are closemouthed with strangers. And strangers stand out because there are so few of them.

  In a week things had calmed down, and we were all able to come home.

  Jeremy was the other hero. He was in a Holland hospital for quite a while, but doctors promised he would recover fully. Marco was kept overnight in the same hospital, and I’m happy to say that before he left the next morning, Marco not only went to visit Jeremy, but promised to help him get a job in Hollywood. One photographer was allowed in, so they had their picture taken together. The caption was “High school teammate saves kidnapped movie star.”

  Plus, the studio came up with a reward for Jeremy. So Jeremy came out okay, though he required four pints of blood that first night. The bullet had hit an important artery, but no vital organs.

  As his mutterings in the boat had revealed, Jeremy had been enticed into the pirate business by Max, who told him it was all to be a joke. When Jeremy and Hal realized a real crime was planned, Hal was afraid to go to the police, partly because of his earlier involvement in the big Viking prank in Chicago. Hal tried to contact Joe, but Max found out what he was up to. Max shot him, then forced Jeremy to help dump his friend’s body. Jeremy managed to dump him near Beech Tree Public Access Area so his body could be found. When Jeremy tried to fake his own death so he could get away from the plot, Max figured out where he was hiding and forced him to continue. Jeremy had been kept at Camp Sail-Along, with Jack McGrath in charge. Jeremy had pretended to be cooperating, but on the one occasion he slipped away from Jack in Warner Pier—late at night—he wrote that odd warning note and stuck it in the door of TenHuis Chocolade. Because Hal knew Joe, Jeremy had felt that Joe could be trusted to help him. Both Hal and Jeremy had been afraid of facing criminal charges because of their involvement with Max’s plot.