The boy threw his hands up to protect his face. He was spinning away when all the air seemed to be sucked from the sky. Then a blinding flash shattered the tree canopy above. After a sizzling boom, a ball of fire and palm fronds rained down as if a bomb had gone off.
“Lightning never strikes the same person twice,” Grandpa Futch had promised.
You’re wrong, the boy thought in the confusing seconds that followed. He’d been knocked to the ground. A smoky stench burned his eyes—but this time it was different. His skin wasn’t on fire. And he could breathe without having to fight for air.
On shaky legs, Luke got up. He double-checked his body parts to confirm he was okay. From the shadows came the crashing sounds of someone running away. He was confused until he figured it out—the bearded man, frightened after nearly being hit by lightning, was retreating downhill.
The boy was sure of it when the shark poacher called from somewhere near the water, “Come here, dummy. Get back in the boat. Come on, load up—I ain’t getting killed on your account.”
A brief warbling whistle was the man’s final attempt to call a dog that had obeyed his every command. Heavy, splashing footsteps, then the long silence of an electric motor confirmed it. The bearded man, in his broken airboat, was leaving.
Luke stared straight ahead.
Beneath a litter of palm fronds, the pit bull lay on its side, motionless in the clearing.
The boy rushed to the dog. He scooped the weight and warmth of its body into his arms. The animal remained a limp, dense weight. Smoke curled from a burn mark on the dog’s neck. Lightning had seared away a patch of hair and left an elaborate forked scar.
The scar resembled what Luke saw every morning in the mirror before he put on a shirt—or hid beneath a pair of gloves.
At his feet lay the tagging pole he’d made from a lightning-shattered tree. The dog had fallen on the thing. The pole’s glossy amber wood smoldered. Its steel point flickered with remnants of an intense electrical blast.
Luke focused on the dog. “Hey, girl … hey, wake up,” he urged. He shook the pit bull and pulled her close so that his cheek was against the dog’s muscular head. “You’ll be okay … Come on—you can’t be dead!”
That was a silly thing to say to an animal that wasn’t breathing.
“Hey,” the boy pleaded, “don’t leave me.” He loosened the dog’s heavy steel-studded collar. “Open your eyes and take a breath.”
That, too, was a childish hope. Animals zapped by lightning do not awaken to take a last breath.
The pit bull suddenly seemed light, not heavy, when Luke walked away cradling the dog in his arms. It was as surprising as the stillness that accompanied the two of them down the mound, through the mangroves.
“Thank god!” Maribel said when she saw the boy. “Hurry up. I finally talked to Hannah on the radio. She’s on her way. Where’s the man with the beard? Is he still chasing us?”
The girl sounded frantic but calmed when Luke responded with a slow shake of his head.
The sisters had already cut the anchor rope free from the propeller. The rental boat’s motor fired immediately when Maribel turned the key.
“What happened to this poor thing?” Sabina demanded. Luke had handed her the dog’s body before climbing aboard.
“Lightning,” he said.
“Lightning—that’s all?” The girl reacted as if it were no big deal. “Let me hold him on the way back.”
“She’s a female pit bull, not a male,” Luke corrected the girl.
“Okay, then I’ll hold her. Is she dead?”
“She’s not breathing. What do you think?” The boy felt numb as he looked down at the dog lying in Sabina’s lap.
He had been crying—crying for the first time since his mother’s funeral. But that was okay. In the dim late-afternoon light, rain would keep it a secret between just him and his two trusted friends.
“That shark poacher’s nothing but a coward,” the boy said. They had cleared the mangroves at idle speed. He was standing shoulder to shoulder with Maribel. “The jerk ran away, went off and left his dog—didn’t care if she was buried or not.” He glanced toward the smoky distance where the airboat was making slow progress toward the fishing trawler. “We’ve got nothing to worry about now.”
The shark poacher does, Maribel thought. But she said, “Let him run. He won’t get far. You were right about the radio. It works fine now. Why don’t you call Hannah again and tell her what happened? It’ll save her a trip. Yes, please call her. She can wait at the marina for the police.”
“As if that stupid detective will believe anything we say,” Sabina grumbled. Her necklace of blue and yellow beads were now around the dog’s neck. The girl sniffed, leaned closer, and whispered something into the stillness of the pit bull’s pointed ear.
Maribel managed a wise half smile. She touched a pocket of her shorts to make sure the waterproof camera was safe, then placed her hand on the throttle.
“The police will believe us this time,” she said. Then she ordered her crew to “Hold on!”
The young captain steered their boat toward home.
TWENTY-THREE
THE PRICE OF FAME, AND A STOLEN DOG
Sabina was in a foul mood despite all the good things that had happened in the week since they had survived the storm and the shark poacher’s attack.
At the request of a reporter, she had written a new poem. That’s why she was upset. She’d been struggling to translate the poem into English before a Tampa Bay television crew arrived. Now she was running out of time.
How can they expect me to write beautifully in only twenty minutes? the girl fumed.
In truth, the reporters didn’t care if she wrote beautifully. They only pretended to enjoy poems by the “fearless child poet” who had helped bust the largest ring of shark poachers in Florida.
Sabina had done enough interviews in the last few days to know the truth. All they really wanted her to do was smile, look into a camera, and answer their confusing questions in only a sentence or two—and please stop asking reporters if a makeup kit could be provided.
Reporters were always in a hurry. They were always on something called a deadline. It was such a mean-sounding word that the girl had gone to the trouble of finding it in an English dictionary. The first definition she found was boring: the latest time by which a project must be completed. The second definition, however, revealed the true meanness of the word. Deadline: a line around a prison beyond which prisoners are liable to be shot.
Shot?
No wonder reporters didn’t care about beautiful things such as proper makeup or the music of words on paper.
Sabina’s temper had gotten the best of her on two occasions. What was the use of being famous if she couldn’t share the story of their shark team in verse? But when she’d read a poem in Spanish to a reporter from Orlando and a blog columnist from New York, they had only smiled in puzzlement and nodded politely.
Why? Because they hadn’t understood a single line!
Sabina was alone in her room, sitting with her diary open. On the nightstand, a candle from the shop in Havana flickered. It was a bright, warm day in June, yet the candle was necessary, as the women in white had taught her. Candlelight helped set the proper mood for writing poetry. But the time, according to her almost-new iPhone, was nearly four o’clock. She had only fifteen minutes until the crew from Tampa arrived!
Impossible, the girl thought. The world would be a happier place if everyone spoke Spanish and people weren’t afraid of being shot because of deadlines.
The girl was tempted to give up. She’d spent an hour trying to find the perfect last word for the final line of her poem, and she had failed. It had to rhyme with the English word complicated. She had found several words that fit—skated, dated, overrated—yet none carried the deeper meaning of what she wanted to say.
No wonder poets often die lonely and alone, she thought. In her case, penniless and in jail, too—if, a
week ago, that stubborn detective hadn’t agreed to view Maribel’s video of the shark poacher’s airboat attack.
Scowling, the girl fidgeted and chewed at the eraser on her pencil. She doodled a picture that resembled a shark fin. She checked her iPhone for the thousandth time, hoping to receive her first text message.
Disappointment—again.
She was reaching for the dictionary when her room rocked with the wake of a slow passing boat. This was a good excuse to get up and part the curtains. Outside, in the harbor, Captain Hannah was at the wheel of her fancy little charter boat. Seated in front, next to the curly-haired retriever, was Luke. He wore fishing shorts and a handsome blue T-shirt with gold lettering—but no gloves.
Typical, Sabina thought. The TV reporters will be so impressed by his lightning tattoos, they won’t have time to hear a stupid poem I can’t finish anyway.
Instantly the girl scolded herself for being unfair. Luke didn’t care about publicity. He hated the attention they had received since, four days earlier, the bearded man and members of his gang were seen in handcuffs on national TV.
And there was another more important reason. It had to do with a promise that Luke, Maribel, and Sabina had made that night, after the storm—and a secret they now all shared.
Remembering that secret caused the girl to think back. Slowly her frown was replaced by the smile of a writer who had stumbled onto a good idea.
Luke unknowingly might have provided the last two words in the poem she’d been laboring to finish.
Or had he?
The girl hunched over her diary. She scribbled and erased, scribbled and erased some more, until she was finally satisfied. Then, in a whisper, she reread what she’d written, to see if her words touched a poetic chord.
An Ode to Truth
Instead of thanking the farm boy
For solving the bearded man’s plot
The detective proved he doesn’t know squat
A nice man, true, who thought me a liar
Even after lightning nearly set us on fire
If the detective had spent more days afloat
He might have known, “The poachers use airboats!”
Instead, for him, the problem was too complicated
Until the mystery was solved by … Sharks Incorporated
Yes. It was the perfect ending to a poem that was broodingly musical in Spanish. But it was also pretty good in the language Americans call English.
Sabina closed her diary. She ignored the stupid mirror in the hall and hurried out to greet a large white van from Tampa Bay 10 News.
* * *
Maribel had already decided to let her sister do most of the talking to the news crew. Good captains, after all, put the happiness of their crew before their own. She didn’t mind. It would be fun answering questions from stylish folding chairs on a portable stage where a camera with wheels zoomed in and out.
Before the interview started, the reporter—a woman named Jay-Cee—encouraged onlookers to come closer and form an audience. Dozens of people soon made a semicircle around the stage. The number increased when the Everglades Sea Camp bus parked and discharged a bunch of teenage passengers.
On the stage to Maribel’s left was a TV monitor. The screen showed what viewers would see: Sabina and herself with Dinkins Bay in the background.
When some of the campers began chanting “We want Luke … we want Luke,” the camera zoomed in to show the only empty chair on stage.
“Think we should wait a little longer?” Jay-Cee asked the girls. She was pleased by the audience’s reaction. “Sounds to me like your missing teammate has a lot fans. I bet they’d love to hear what he has to say. Should we wait?”
Sabina glanced toward the shed, where, she suspected, the farm boy was hiding. “Not if you’re on deadline, that’s for sure,” the girl responded. “Or unless you brought lights—it’ll be dark in an hour or two.” Her voice boomed through the microphone that was pinned to her blouse.
Maribel waited for the laughter to die down. She, too, wore a mic, so she spoke softly. “Luke has to meet with a police detective this afternoon,” she explained. “He asked me to apologize. It was sort of a last-minute thing.”
This would have been more accurate if Maribel had admitted something else: It would have taken a tractor to drag the boy onto the stage now that the Sea Campers had arrived.
“Meeting with police. That’s interesting,” the reporter said. She made a rolling motion with her hand to signal the camera operators. Red lights atop the cameras blinked on before she asked Maribel, “Would you mind repeating what you just said about Luke? We’re taping now.”
Maribel did.
“Hmm … Luke’s not here because he’s meeting privately with a police detective.” Jay-Cee smiled. “That’s very interesting. Do you think it might have something to do with the fifty-thousand-dollar reward offered by Ocean Environmental? Wouldn’t that be great? After all, who deserves it more than the kids who busted the biggest shark-poaching ring in the state?”
The audience applauded while the Sea Campers stomped and whistled.
Jay-Cee was energized by their enthusiasm. “What do you think, Maribel? I was told that it’s up to the police to decide who gets the reward. Maybe Luke will have some good news for you”—she motioned to the covey of Sea Campers in the front row—“and his many fans.”
“Maybe,” Maribel said.
“I sure hope so,” Sabina chimed in agreeably.
But the truth about Luke’s meeting with Detective Miller, as both sisters knew, had to remain a secret.
The boy had been accused of lying about a missing pit bull that had been struck and killed by lightning.
Now the bearded man was demanding that the police either find the dog or charge Luke with theft. Maybe even arrest him.
* * *
When the Everglades Sea Camp bus was gone and the TV cameras were done, Luke slapped his thigh and shared a silent command with Pete, the curly-haired retriever: Heel.
The dog trotted at his side until the boy pointed and urged, Swim.
Pete galloped toward the dock, scattering gulls and terns. He vaulted high into the air, crashed down with a splash, and resurfaced, spouting water from his nose.
The boy was surprised to find Maribel waiting for him on the steps to the laboratory.
“You’re just in time,” she said. “Detective Miller went to get something out of his car. My mother gave him permission to speak to us, and Hannah did, too. Luke … where have you been?”
“Cripes, you mean he’s still here? He’s mad about me being late, I suppose.” Luke, who was seldom late, had intentionally tried to avoid this meeting, and the Tampa 10 TV News. “How’d it go?”
“The interview? Fine,” Maribel said. “Don’t worry about that now. He isn’t mad, just concerned. The shark poacher hates us. That’s probably why he’s causing all this trouble about the dog. But the police can’t take sides. They have a job to do. Luke”—the girl looked into his eyes—“the detective said he needs more proof that what we said is true. I think he came here because he wants to help.”
“Came to arrest me, more likely,” Luke scowled. His attention moved from the dock to the lab. The biologist and his seaplane had yet to return. “Where’s Sabina?”
“Still with the TV crew from Tampa,” Maribel said. “She wrote a new poem. The reporter didn’t want to hear it, but the poor woman finally gave in. You know how pushy my sister can be. Anyway … I thought it was best if I come here alone. I was surprised to find the detective still waiting for you.”
Luke looked toward the path to the parking lot. “Probably went to his car to get handcuffs, you think?
“No,” the girl said gently. “He said he has something he wants us to see. Me too, I guess. But he wanted you to be here.”
Maribel hesitated, then did something that, for her, was bold. She stood and, before the boy could pull away, gave him a reassuring hug. “We’re all in this together,” sh
e said. “Sabina and I talked about it. We aren’t going to let you take the blame for something we all did. Besides, I was in charge of the boat that night.”
“Blame for what? We told the truth.” Luke said this in a flat tone without emotion. But the way he looked into Maribel’s dark, bright eyes communicated a secret they shared. “The pit bull got struck by lightning. She stopped breathing, and we did our best to save her. And that jerk didn’t even come back to bury her.” The boy turned away, adding, “I suppose now he wants to dig up her grave, huh? The police believed us—until today. I wonder what happened?”
The girl started to respond, then whispered, “Quiet. Here he comes.”
The bulky silhouette of the detective came down the path toward them.
TWENTY-FOUR
FORTUNE AND A SPIKED COLLAR
When the detective returned from his car, he handed Maribel and Luke the front page from the island newspaper.
“This won’t be out until tomorrow,” the detective said, “so I had the editor slip me a couple of copies. I thought you might like to have them framed. What do you think? I picked them up on the way here.”
Luke, who had been expecting handcuffs, looked over Maribel’s shoulder. Together, they read the headline at the top of the page:
Police Credit Kids for Busting International Fin Ring
Detective Apologizes, says $50,000 Reward on Its Way
Maribel felt a little dizzy. She knew the reward was a possibility but hadn’t allowed herself to think about it.
Luke looked up at the detective “You apologized? Why? We’re not mad at you.”
“You should be,” the detective said. “Especially Maribel and her little sister. I was so sure you kids were … well, exaggerating. I felt like an idiot when I finally saw the video you shot. That took a heck of a lot of courage, young lady. Quick thinking, too.”
Fins Page 18