Kid vs. Squid (3 page)

“Yeah,” I said, going on to describe my hot-foot pursuit.

Trudy stopped at the rail overlooking the beach. I stood beside her. The tide was out, leaving the broad, debris-strewn beach exposed.

“This is a very curious case of breaking and entering,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Not the typical burglar profile for Los Huesos. And taking something of little or no value? It doesn't make sense. Unless,” Trudy added, turning to face me, “the
What-Is-It??
does have value. You say you lost her on the beach?”

“Yeah, in the rocks. Why are you so interested in the break-in?”

“I'm a busybody,” she said, all business.

She took off down a rickety set of wooden steps to the beach and moved briskly over rocks and sand. Limping on my sore foot, I struggled to keep up, navigating around piles of kelp until I caught up with her at the bird-poop-splattered rocks where I'd lost the girl-thief. Shallow waves smacked against them, even at low tide. Between two of the largest rocks was a narrow, half-submerged tunnel opening.

“Ready to get wet?” Trudy asked.

“What, you want to go in?”

She looked at me, eyes wide in disbelief. “You
don't
? The thief stole something from your own uncle.”

“
Great
-uncle. And like I said, he didn't even call the cops. Besides, all she made off with was some nasty piece of junk. One less thing for me to dust.”

I thought she'd argue with me, but she just shrugged.

“Okay, Thatcher. Nice meeting you. Maybe I'll see you later.” With that, she removed her shoes and stowed them in her backpack before splashing into the foamy seawater.

If she'd said it angrily, or snottily, I probably
would have let her go. But she didn't seem to care one way or the other if I went with her, as if none of this really concerned me, as if I was a bystander, free to involve myself in the mystery of the
What-Is-It??
heist or not.

I thought back to the jellyfish boys. They'd asked if I was flotsam.

Somehow, I'd become involved in
something
.

I took off my shoes, rolled up my jeans, and stepped into the churning, cold water. When I looked down I couldn't see my feet. I thought about stingrays. Did they even have stingrays in this part of the world? I remembered hearing the best way to treat a stingray sting was to pee on it, but I couldn't remember if that meant you were supposed to pee on the stingray or on where you got stung. You know you're having a bad summer vacation when you're trying to remember if you should pee on yourself.

We paused at the tunnel opening in the rocks. Water soaked me up to my waist.

“I can't see anything,” I said. “It's too dark.”

“Got it covered,” Trudy said, taking a flashlight from her backpack.

This wasn't just any flashlight. Black steel with
a textured barrel, it was a serious instrument. She switched it on and a sharp white beam lit the tunnel.

“C'mon,” she said.

I sloshed after her through the entrance. The ceiling of jagged rock dipped so low we had to bend over double to avoid scraping our heads. Mussels lined the walls, like thousands of crusty blackbird beaks. The moist air reeked of fish.

The tunnel veered right and continued on, farther than I'd hoped, stretching beyond the reach of Trudy's flashlight.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” I asked her. “The girl's secret thief headquarters?”

“Indications,” Trudy said. “Signs.”

A wave came in and pushed seawater into my face. I wondered how many unanswered postcards it would take for my parents to learn I'd drowned. With brine draining from my nose, I kept going.

The tunnel ended in a slit between two rocks, just wide enough for Trudy and me to squeeze through one at a time. We came out in a cove surrounded by sandstone cliffs. On a lip of sand before us, a boat the size of a convenience store lay on its side. It might have been white once, but now it was mottled with rust and green algae.

“So would you call that a boat or a ship?” I asked Trudy.

“I'd call it awfully suspicious. Those cliffs are too steep and crumbly to climb, and anyone who tries to swim out of this cove is asking to get dashed against the rocks. Conclusion: there's a good chance our thief is hiding inside.”

I thought there was a good chance Trudy was the weirdest person I'd met in Los Huesos so far. And that included Griswald and the BMX guys.

On the other hand, there was a chance she was right, and if I wasn't going to have a bikini-girls kind of summer, I'd need some kind of adventure to make up for it.

We splashed through pooled water and peered through a gap in the ship's hull into the dark interior. Trudy shined her flashlight beam inside. I'd expected to see a jumble of nets and boaty things, all tossed about on their sides. But everything had been cleared off and neatly stacked against the interior hull. A set of sandy footprints, smaller than my own, led off deeper into the ship. We were on the right track.

“Come on,” Trudy said, squeezing through the gap into the boat.

The trail of footprints took us through what I guessed was the engine room, filled with pipes and machinery that had to be crawled over or ducked under, or, sometimes, knocked with my head. A lot
of it was green with ocean muck and encrusted with barnacles.

Trudy shoved her flashlight in her pocket and took a disposable camera from her backpack. As I poked the walls with my finger, she snapped off shots.

“Careful where you aim that,” I said, blinking bright spots from my eyes. “What are you doing, anyway?”

“Documenting for later analysis.”

“Documenting for … ?”

“Sorry. Me take pictures so me can look at later. Better?”

“Yes, a little bit. How long do you think the wreck's been here?”

“It shouldn't be here at all,” said Trudy. “A wreck this size ought to be listed in the historical records, and this one isn't.”

“You're a history buff.” I'd heard of such people, but had never met one.

“My mom owns the secondhand bookstore on Main Street. She bought it last year, complete with stock. The old owner left behind boxes of old maps and books about Los Huesos history. I've at least paged through most of them.”

“History buff,” I said again, this time with more conviction.

She peered at the wall with a powerful little
magnifying glass. “History is a weapon that helps me understand Los Huesos. And I will use every weapon in my arsenal.”

I actually liked the way Trudy talked. She reminded me of Batman.

Which I guess made me Robin.

Nobody wants to be Robin.

Just then a hideous growl echoed through the cabin. It was like a force of nature, deep and low and gurgly and unlike any beast I could imagine.

It was my stomach.

“Sorry,” I whispered. “I skipped breakfast.”

Trudy dug in her backpack and handed me a little plastic sandwich bag. It contained a sugar-glazed doughnut. “Eat it before your stomach gives us away.”

I accepted the doughnut and looked upon Trudy with a little bit of awe. I couldn't help but be impressed with her. Even Batman didn't carry doughnuts.

After making the doughnut disappear in three bites, I wiped my sugary fingers on my pants and continued on with Trudy.

The footprints came up to a closed hatch, and now I got nervous. There's something unsettling about opening closed doors without knowing what's on the other side. But that's what we'd come here to do. I bent down and pushed open the hatch cover.

We crawled through into a cramped compartment, barely more than a closet, with a closed door on the other side. Mouthwatering smells of garlic and ginger and hot spices wafted over me. The walls were lined with shelves bearing bags of shrimp chips and flounder jerky, as well as jars containing fish the size of pocket combs, little squids and octopuses, and other, odder, pale creatures that looked as if they'd been dredged up from the same place as the exhibits in Griswald's museum.

“Somebody spends a lot of time here,” Trudy whispered. “Clearly, we've discovered our criminal's secret lair.”

And from the sounds of slurping I could hear coming from the other side of another narrow door, someone was home. I'd had enough skulking about. Through the door I went, and into a small galley with a sink, stove, and cupboards. Sitting at a table, drinking soup from a Thermos cup, was the thief from the night before. The
What-Is-It??
rested at her elbow beside salt and pepper shakers.

“Hey!” I shouted, rushing into the galley. “That's my … thing!” I lunged for the
What-Is-It??
, startling the girl, but she recovered quickly. Grabbing the box and tucking it under her arm, she slid away from the table. The blade of a knife glinted in her hand.

“Back off, land-dweller,” she hissed.

I couldn't place her accent. French? Chinese? Minnesotan? I'm not good with accents. Anyway, I was more focused on her knife.

Trudy flipped open a notebook. She clicked a pen. “Your name, permanent address, and legal guardian, please?”

“Attempt to wrest the head from me and I'll gut you, girl,” snarled the thief.

Trudy wrote something down and said, “You can try.”

The thief only smiled.

Things were getting a little crazy, what with the snarling and the threats and the knife. I wanted the
What-Is-It??
back, but I wasn't sure a potential head-in-a-box was worth all this.

Hoping to relieve the tension in the room, I cleared my throat and tried to think of a good distracting knock-knock joke.

Then, behind me, someone else coughed. Not Trudy, not the girl-thief. This was a wet, shlurpy cough. “Ah, it's the museum boy and the bookstore girl and Shoal the Flotsam,” a familiar voice said. “Give us the box, or we will kill you.”

The BMX boys weren't wearing their bandannas and sunglasses like they had on the beach, so I saw the white, oozy flesh of their faces. I saw their shiny black eyes, no bigger than dimes. Where their mouths
should have been were puckered seams. It was as if they'd been interrupted while morphing from human to jellyfish.

One of the jellies rushed me, his bare hands the color of snot.

“Don't let them touch you!” Shoal screamed.

Before I could react, she jumped up on the table and used it as a launching pad to hurl herself at the jellies. She howled like a rabid cat, and the jellies ducked and dodged, trying to avoid her slicing knife. The small space became an insane riot of flying fists and elbows and sharp objects. A jelly dove at me, and Shoal was there again, warding him off with slashing motions of her knife.

“Leave the land-dwellers alone,” she said in a commanding voice. Unfortunately, in the crowded confines, her blade was just as much a threat to me as it was to the jelly, and I came within an inch of losing an ear. But at least she was trying to defend me.

I caught a glimpse of Trudy from the corner of my eye. She faced off with the other jelly, brandishing her flashlight like a mighty club. I made a mental note: next time I went poking my nose into danger, I would come better prepared with a weapon of some kind and maybe some batarangs.

I hurried to the drawer by the sink, anxious to get my hands on a steak knife, at least. Grabbing the
first thing available, I spun to face my opponent. He shlurped a laugh. Looking down, I saw that I was trying to threaten him with a potato peeler.

Abandoning the peeler, I found a rolling pin and brought it down on the jelly's head.

“Hey!” he shlobbed. “Ow!”

I bashed him again. He lunged away but then spun back toward me, his white palm coming at my face in an openhanded slap. Shoal was there in a blur, shoving me aside and taking the slap intended for me across her cheek. It didn't seem like that strong of a blow, just a glancing strike, but Shoal dropped as if she'd been smashed by a hammer. She writhed on the ground, struggling for breath, her eyes rolling so far back that all I could see were the whites.

She looked like she was dying.

Still wielding my rolling pin, I moved between Shoal and the jellyfish boy who'd slapped her. “What did you do to her?”

His green white fingers jittered, ink black veins under the skin. “I stung her,” he said.

“And now we're taking the witch's head with us,” said the other jelly. “Try to stop us, and we'll sting you again and again and again. That'll be fun.”

Trudy knelt by Shoal, trying to keep her still as she flailed, clawing at the floor.

I grabbed the
What-Is-It??
and shoved it at the jellies. “Here, take it and get lost.”

One of the jellies snatched it away from me and cradled it in his weird hands. “We'll see you again!” they gurgled, taking off through the hatch.

“Go eat sand!” I shouted to their retreating
footsteps. I wanted to chuck the rolling pin at their heads, but better to get them out of here so we could help Shoal. They could have the stupid head in a box, for all I cared. It seemed to be important to Shoal, but now her life was at stake.

“How is she?” I said, joining Trudy at Shoal's side.

“She's not breathing well, and her lips and tongue are swollen. I think she's in anaphylactic shock.”

Shoal's breaths came in a high, weak whistle.

Back home I had a friend who was allergic to fish, only he didn't know it until Bring a Weird Snack to School Day. He had to be carted away by paramedics after taking a bite from a patty smelt. Anaphylactic shock became the unofficial vocabulary item of the day.

I dug my phone out of my pocket to call 911. There were zero bars. “I'm not getting a signal.”

“I'll try mine,” said Trudy. But she didn't have any better luck than me.

“Maybe getting them wet fritzed them out.”