Flush

TWENTY-ONE

The detective wouldn't tell us anything more, but Shelly filled us in by phone later. It was a wild story.

Dusty Muleman had invited all the local big shots and politicians to the grand reopening of the casino boat. They all showed up, too, since Shelly was pouring free drinks. There were fireworks, a lobster buffet, and calypso music from the steel-drum band. The party rocked on until two in the morning. Afterward it took Shelly forty-five minutes to clean up the bar, and she was one of the last to leave the boat.

The first explosion took place shortly after three A.M., and within half an hour the Coral Queen was on fire from bow to stern. The new watchman, Luno's replacement, nearly fried when a falling cinder ignited the ticket shed, where he was phoning for help. The watchman made a frantic attempt to douse the flames with a dock hose, then ran from the marina.

By the time the fire engines got there, the gambling boat was a floating torch. By the time Dusty Muleman got there, it had burned to the waterline-seventy-three feet of smoldering ash and melted poker chips. Naturally, he believed that my father was the culprit. Knowing what Dad thought of Dusty, the sheriff didn't need much convincing.

Even Abbey felt the circumstances were suspicious.

“You think he might've had something to do with this?” she asked me in private. “Maybe he paid somebody to go burn the boat.”

“Paid them with what?”

“How about with the thousand bucks he got from the sanctuary?”

“No way, Abbey,” I said. “Absolutely impossible.”

But she'd gotten me worried. What if Dad had flipped out again? Blown another gasket. Flown off the handle.

So when we were alone, I asked him.

“I won't tell a soul if you were involved,” I said. It was a promise I wasn't sure I could keep.

“Noah, it wasn't me. I swear on a stack of Bibles.” He solemnly raised his right arm, cast and all. He was so intense that it startled me.

“I had nothing to do with torching the Coral Queen,” he said. “Please believe me-and please tell Abbey to believe me, too.”

And, in the end, we did.

Because my father had never lied to us about something serious. Whenever he screwed up, he admitted it right away. He always took the blame, the responsibility-and the punishment. Why would he change now?

Mr. Shine, our lawyer, was at the house when the detective and two deputies returned that afternoon with a search warrant. They snooped around for a long time, but they couldn't find anything that connected Dad to the boat arson.

Lieutenant Shucker was visibly disappointed. “I ought to lock you up anyhow,” he said to Dad. “It's crystal clear what happened-you had the motive, you had the opportunity…”

“Without evidence you've got no case,” said Mr. Shine, looking less mopey than usual. “I would kindly advise you to stop bothering my client.”

“Evidence?” the detective scoffed. “You want evidence? Just look at the brand-new casts on his hands-obviously he burned himself while he was lighting the fire.”

Dad angrily clacked his plaster paws together. “What a load of bull!”

“We'll see about that. I'll be back tomorrow with another warrant, Mr. Underwood, and a doctor to saw off those casts. If your fingers are barbecued, you're goin' straight to the slammer.”

“But what about the fist holes in our doors?” Abbey protested. “That proves he's telling the truth.”

“Nice try,” Lieutenant Shucker said sarcastically, “but you could do the same thing with a tire iron.” Then he stood up to leave.

My mother had been sitting on the sofa, not saying a word. I figured she was just depressed, thinking about Dad returning to jail and how he might never get his captain's license and how our quiet, seminormal life was a total mess again. That's what I was thinking anyway.

But it turned out that Mom wasn't depressed at all. She was merely waiting for the right moment to drop a little stink bomb on the snotty detective.

“Here, Lieutenant,” she said pleasantly, “you might want to take a look at this.”

She handed a computerized printout to Lieutenant Shucker, who studied it suspiciously.

“It's the bill from the emergency room,” Mom said.

“Yeah, Mrs. Underwood, I can read.”

“From when my husband was admitted for severe injuries to both his hands.”

The detective frowned impatiently. “So? What's your point?”

My mother is truly awesome in situations like that. Nothing fazes her. She stood beside Lieutenant Shucker and calmly pointed to a line of type on the computer receipt.

“He was treated for fractures, not burns. It says so right here, Lieutenant.” Mom smiled. “That's my first point.”

The detective grunted.

“My second point,” Mom went on, “concerns the precise time my husband arrived at the hospital. See? It was 11:33 in the morning. Yesterday morning, Lieutenant.”

“Oh.”

“Approximately sixteen hours before Mr. Muleman's boat was set on fire.”

“Yeah, I can do the math,” the detective grumbled.

“Which means my husband couldn't possibly have been the arsonist,” Mom said, “unless you'd care to demonstrate how a person with all ten fingers sealed in hard plaster would go about striking a match.”

Lieutenant Shucker's big round chest seemed to deflate. Mom led him to the front door, the two deputies skulking close behind. “Goodbye now,” she called after them, “and good luck solving your case.”

We waited at the window until they drove away. Then Abbey started whooping, and we all slapped high fives-me, my sister, Mom, Mr. Shine, even Dad with his lumpy five-pound casts.

“Donna, that was amazing,” he said. “Truly amazing.”

“Better than amazing!” Abbey crowed. “It was outrageous!”

“No, incredible!” I hollered. “Amazingly, outrageously incredible!”

Mom blushed. “We'll see,” she said. “We'll just have to wait and see.”

But Lieutenant Shucker never came back.

And later, when we learned who actually burned down the Coral Queen, we congratulated my mother all over again. Dusty Muleman had gotten exactly what he'd deserved, just as she had predicted.

Luckily, Dad's anger-control counselor took pity on him and didn't mention his broken hands in her letter to the judge. Instead, the counselor stated that Mr. Paine Underwood had made “significant though sometimes painful progress” in managing his temper, and that he presented “no immediate threat to himself, his family, or the innocent public.”

Whether he's still a threat to innocent doors remains to be seen.

By coincidence the Coast Guard sent Dad his captain's license on the same day that the fire investigators released their findings about the Coral Queen.

The story took up the entire front page of the Island Examiner, including photographs of Dusty Muleman and the burned boat. There was no photo of Jasper Jr., which was a shame since he was the star of the arson report.

Dusty's first mistake had been allowing Jasper Jr. and Bull to hang out aboard the Coral Queen on the night of the grand reopening. Dusty's second mistake had been losing track of those two nitwits while he celebrated.

By the time the party had ended, Dusty wasn't thinking too clearly. He staggered from the boat, assuming that his son had already gone home.

He was wrong. Jasper Jr. and Bull had decided to throw a party of their own in one of the storage holds. They had snuck off with a handful of Dusty's prized Cuban cigars and a twelve-pack of beer that they'd swiped from behind Shelly's bar.

Unfortunately for them, the place they'd chosen for their smoking experiment was the same one where Dusty Muleman had stored several surplus boxes of fireworks. Being the leader in all things stupid, it was Jasper Jr. who lit the first cigar, inhaled deeply, gagged violently, and spit the thing twenty feet across the room… where it landed in an open crate of bottle rockets, which soon began to ignite, one after the other.

Before long, flames were shooting all over the place. The two party boys were lucky to get out alive.

Jasper Jr. was coughing so hard from the cigar that he was useless, so Bull threw him over his shoulder and ran through the smoke and sparks toward an open deck. They landed in the water at the same instant the Coral Queen's fuel tank blew up.

When questioned a few days later, Jasper Jr. and Bull denied knowing how the fire started. However, arson investigators couldn't help but notice that both kids had scorched eyebrows and singed earlobes. Jasper Jr. wasted no time blaming the boat disaster on his best buddy, the guy who'd saved his life. At that point Bull wisely terminated the friendship and offered a detailed statement to the fire department.

The fact that his own son had burned down the Coral Queen was not the worst news that Dusty Muleman would receive. The worst news was that the crime-scene technicians had found something unusual in the charred rubble of the casino boat-a fireproof, waterproof lockbox that was packed with cash.

“More than one hundred thousand dollars,” according to Miles Umlatt's article in the Island Examiner, “all of it in fifty- and one-hundred-dollar denominations.”

Dad's theory was that Dusty had been skimming from the profits of the gambling operation, a crime of great interest to the Internal Revenue Service-and also to the Miccosukee Indians who were supposed to be Dusty's partners.

Fed up with all the rotten publicity, the Miccosukees announced that they intended to sue Dusty for embezzlement, and evict what was left of the Coral Queen from their “tribal grounds,” meaning the marina. Dusty's casino scam was scuttled for good.

“What goes around comes around,” Mom remarked after seeing the headlines.

Abbey and I are finally starting to believe it.

A tropical wave blew through the Keys on the Saturday before Labor Day. We were all hanging around the house, waiting for the rain to quit, when the mail arrived.

Mixed in with the usual heap of bills and catalogs was a funny postcard. The picture side showed a scarlet macaw posed on a mossy branch in a beautiful rain forest. The bird was winking and holding an ancient gold coin in its great curved beak.

The message was addressed in a scraggly thin scrawl to “The Unbelievable Underwoods.”

Dear Paine, Donna, and my two favorite champs,

This is the first postcard I ever wrote, so you should feel honored. I'm attaching 29,000 pesos in stamps, just to make sure it gets all the way to Florida. If it doesn't, you can blame the shrimper who was supposed to mail it for me when he got to port.

Obviously I'm still alive, which is always sunny news from my point of view. Even better, I've got a red-hot lead on the whereabouts of Amanda Rose. With a touch of luck, she and I may be homeward bound by the time you receive this card. On the other hand, I could also be dead, which would seriously mess up my retirement plans.

But don't bet against the family karma!

Love to all, esp. Abbey and Noah

It was signed, “Pop.”

We passed the postcard around, then Abbey took it to her bedroom and taped it to the mirror. She put on her emerald earrings and announced that she wasn't taking them off ever again, even for school. Later that afternoon the sky cleared, the wind died, and the seas slicked off.

“How about it?” I asked my father.

“Yeah, let's go,” he said.

We launched at a motel ramp on the ocean side of the island. Mom, Abbey, and I pushed together to slide the bonefish skiff off the trailer, since Dad's hands were still tender from the fractured bones. The casts had been removed a week earlier, but the doctor had warned him to take it easy. You could see he was in pain.

After loading the cooler and fishing rods, we piled in and headed offshore. The little boat was cramped with all four of us on board, but it was fun having Mom there.

The ocean was like a mirror, which made it hard to see the bottom, even with polarized sunglasses. Dad used a GPS to locate the spot, which we had all to ourselves. In less than two hours we caught three dozen snappers. Most of them were small, but we kept four decent ones for dinner.

“What should we name this place?” Abbey asked.

“How about ‘Dusty's Hole'?” I suggested.

Mom and Dad laughed in approval.

“That's excellent!” Abbey agreed.

I peered over the side of the skiff and squinted against the afternoon glare. I could make out a dark fractured outline on the bottom, the blackened hulk in three large sections.

It was none other than the Coral Queen, dearly departed.

A salvage boat was supposed to have hauled it up to the Miami River and loaded it on a garbage barge. Barely three miles into the journey the wreck had broken up during a thunder squall and gone down in twenty-two feet of water. Already herds of hungry fish had made it their new favorite restaurant.

Dusty's Hole.

“It's poetry,” Dad said.

“More like poetic justice,” said Mom.

The morning weather report had spooked everybody else off the ocean and, except for the lighthouse, the horizon remained empty and endless. There wasn't another boat in sight. I lifted Grandpa Bobby's coin from my chest and turned it back and forth in my fingers, the gold catching the sunlight.

“Where would he be coming from? Which direction?” I asked my father.

“Your grandpa? Probably from the southwest.” He made a sweeping gesture. “Out that way, somewhere.”

“How long will it take him to get here?” Abbey said.

“All depends,” Dad answered quietly.

Mom said, “Hey, I've got an idea, but we'll need to hurry.”

It was a good idea, too.

We reeled in our lines and stowed the rods. I pulled up the anchor while Dad started the engine, and Abbey dug the camera out of her backpack.

The sky was already turning rosy as we raced toward the west side of the islands, where we'd have the best view. Mom's sunglasses blew off under the Indian Key Bridge, but she told Dad to keep going. We didn't have much time.

The bay was even smoother than the ocean-it looked like pale blue silk. We stopped at Bowlegs Cut, drifting out through the markers on a hard falling tide. Frigate birds soared overhead, and a pod of dolphins rolled past us, herding mullet.

In the distance, somewhere beyond the Gulf of Mexico, the sun was dropping through a coppery and cloudless heaven. None of us dared to say a word, everything seemed so crystal-still and perfect.

Dad edged closer to Mom, and she leaned against his shoulder. Abbey was kneeling in the bow, aiming her camera as the last molten slice of light dripped out of sight.

I sat there dangling my feet in the ripples, watching the day fade away. I was hoping that wherever he might be, Grandpa Bobby was enjoying the same sunset.

When the flash of green came, it lasted for only a magical flick of time-so brief and brilliant and beautiful, I was afraid I'd imagined it.

But then I heard my father say, “How amazing was that?”

So excited, he sounded just like a kid.