Kickoff to Danger Read online

  Callie decided to stay in the van. “Sweat and liniment isn’t my favorite perfume,” she said.

  Frank started to get out. Overhead, he noticed that the sign for the Seneca game was being taken down.

  “Sic transit gloria mundi,” he murmured.

  “What?” Callie said.

  “It’s Latin—about the glories of the world passing away.” He pointed at the sign. “The Seneca game was the biggest thing in town a week ago. Now it’s history.”

  He went inside and walked along the side of the gym to reach the locker room. Frank started to push in the door…and paused.

  It was quiet in there. Too quiet, as the old-time cowboy heroes would say. Usually, the guys would be cracking jokes or talking about practice.

  Frank heard nothing at first. Then all at once he heard a grunt, followed by a metallic crash.

  He pushed the door open quickly and stepped inside. The guys on the football team, most of them half-dressed, stood staring at Joe Hardy’s locker.

  Joe had one of Wendell Logan’s arms twisted in a painful hold. The rest of the big linebacker seemed to be jammed into Joe’s locker.

  “What’s going on out there?” Coach Devlin’s voice came from his office. Joe dropped Logan’s arm as the coach came around the lockers.

  “See, Wendell,” Joe said. “I said you’d never be able to fit in there.”

  The coach’s expression was dubious as Logan shakily extracted himself from the locker. He didn’t say anything, though.

  Joe looked over at Frank. “Oh, and here’s my ride.”

  He quickly tossed his stuff into his gym bag. “See you, guys. Wendell…Terry.”

  Frank held the door as Joe breezed out.

  Joe turned to his older brother with a grin. “You know that move you taught me? The one where you catch the guy’s wrist when he throws a punch and use that to twist his arm?”

  Frank nodded. He’d practiced that martial-arts move many times.

  “Well, it worked. And it looks really impressive when the guy is much bigger than you are.”

  “I especially liked the touch where you got Wendell to play Sardines in your locker,” Frank said. “I guess he was trying to discourage you from asking any questions?”

  “More likely, Terry Golden was behind the discouraging.” Joe suddenly smiled. “He doesn’t know me very well, does he?”

  “Did you get anywhere with your questions?” Frank asked.

  Joe’s smile slipped. “I managed to shake Walinovski up a little. Parisi and Engels may be involved. Other than that—” He shook his head. “Eddie Taplinger warned me. Ask questions, and the team will stonewall.”

  “Pretty much like Dan Freeman and his bunch.” Frank growled in frustration. “We need something to pry a few stones out of these walls of silence.”

  “At least the debate team hasn’t taken a swing at you,” Joe pointed out.

  “No, but I’ve got a hard drive on the critical list back home.” Frank told Joe about the emailed threat and what happened afterward.

  “Grave digging, huh?” Joe grinned, trying a joke. “Pretty messy business, when you come right down to it. You’re not hip deep in dirt, you’re six feet under.”

  Frank laughed as they walked through the gym. “Yeah, it’s a business where you get in under the ground floor.”

  “I can dig it,” Joe said, trying to top his brother.

  Frank stopped abruptly, halfway through the gym. “With a shovel . . .” he said in an odd voice.

  Joe looked a little concerned. “You feeling all right, Frank?”

  Then he smacked himself on the forehead. “I guess that was kind of tasteless, considering how Biff wound up in the hospital.”

  Frank shook his head. “Think back to the moment we found Chet and Biff. What was wrong with that picture?”

  Joe frowned, picturing the scene in the dark. “Biff was on the floor, for one thing. Okay, okay,” he said, responding to his brother’s look. “Chet had a black eye.”

  “Which was explained later,” Frank said. “Logan clocked him one.”

  “There were book bags all over the place.”

  Frank nodded. “Also explained later. The Golden Boys grabbed them, and Biff was trying to get them back.”

  Joe was running out of things to describe in the scene. “Chet had the shovel in his hands,” he finally said.

  “And was there anything weird about the shovel?” Frank asked.

  Joe shook his head. “You got me there.”

  “Think for a moment,” Frank said. “Close your eyes and try to remember what you saw.”

  Joe tried. Then he opened his eyes and shrugged. “It was a shovel.”

  “But it was missing something,” Frank insisted.

  Joe tried to visualize the tool again. “It had a handle and a big, square tip. Probably used to shovel coal into the old furnace.”

  “Which meant it was probably lying around for years,” Frank said. “Remember how it was down there? Anything in that basement would get dirty and dusty pretty fast.”

  “Including us,” Joe had to admit. Then he saw what Frank was getting at. “But that shovel wasn’t dirty.”

  “And it had only one set of fingerprints on it,” Frank put in. “Kind of odd for a tool that must have been used a lot.”

  Joe’s voice became eager. “But not so odd if somebody had cleaned up the thing.”

  “Which had to have happened before Chet got his prints on it,” Frank finished triumphantly. “And there’s only one reason I can think of to wipe a shovel clean.”

  “Someone wanted to get rid of his fingerprints,” Joe agreed. “The same person who used the shovel on poor Biff.”

  He began to get really excited. “Hey, we’ve got to talk to the Mortons. This is proof that Chet didn’t do it.”

  “I was thinking of trying it on Con Riley,” Frank said. “It might open a whole new avenue of investigation for them.”

  Joe punched the air. “Let’s do it!”

  Together, they moved to the exit. Frank was surprised at how dark it had grown since he’d gone in.

  The open door threw a shaft of light on to the van. In the front seat, Callie looked up from the book she was reading and waved.

  “You didn’t tell me Callie was coming along,” Joe said.

  “Yeah, well, we’ll drop her at her house before we go and talk with Con.” Frank walked out to the parking lot.

  He glanced around to check out the sunset. It was mainly blocked by the bulk of the school. But he could make out a few streaks of glowing purplish red behind the scaffolding for the Seneca sign.

  A quick movement on the scaffolding caught his eye—a head, ducking down!

  Frank couldn’t make out any features. The head was silhouetted against the dying sunlight.

  Frank lost interest until he saw the piece of lumber come flying down.

  He got ready to dodge, then realized the two-by-four would miss him by yards.

  It wasn’t aimed at him.

  The big, heavy piece of wood was aimed at the van—and Callie!

  11 Big Break

  Joe Hardy followed his brother’s horrified gaze. Instantly, he realized where the piece of lumber was going to land.

  “Callie!” both boys called out at almost the same time.

  She won’t see that thing coming down, Frank thought. Not till it’s too late.

  “Callie!” Frank yelled, now frantic. “Move!”

  Callie bailed from her seat and flew into the back of the van.

  At the same second, the whole van shuddered as the two-by-four smashed through its windshield. A webwork of cracks spread through the glass around the quivering board. Then the whole windshield sagged in, separating into about a million pieces.

  Frank ran forward, shouting Callie’s name.

  Joe whipped around, keeping an eye on the roofline of the building. If anyone sent more surprises flying down, he’d be ready to give warning.

  A moment l
ater the van’s engine roared to life.

  “I’m pulling back to the far end of the lot,” Frank called through the now-open windshield.

  “Good idea,” Joe said. Nobody would be able to throw stuff that far.

  Joe walked backward away from the school building, still watching for any movement from the roof above.

  Nothing. Whoever had tossed that beam must have hit and run.

  Still backing up, Joe reached the parking lot fence. Then he went to catch up with Frank and Callie in the van. He looked through the space where the windshield had been.

  Frank knelt by the backseat, his arm around Callie. Although she seemed pretty shaken up, she still managed a joke. “Chased by a car. Now attacked by a board. I tell you, Hardy. Dating you is never boring.”

  While Frank and Callie talked quietly, Joe checked out the damage. There were a lot of rounded glass pellets scattered across the front seats.

  Joe dug out the brush they used to get snow off the windshield. Now I’m using it to brush up the windshield he thought, sweeping the glass into a garbage bag. Then he went to work getting the glass off the floor.

  He pulled out the floor mats to shake them into the bag. That was when Joe discovered the floor of the van had a good-size dent in front of the passenger seat.

  That must be where the board landed, Joe thought. They were lucky—both the engine and the controls had escaped damage. He decided not to mention the dent until Callie left. It was right where her legs would have been if she hadn’t moved.

  At last Frank came around to get behind the wheel. Joe took the passenger seat. Not surprisingly, Callie decided to stay where she was.

  Frank took side streets and kept the speed down. Even so, Joe had the strange experience of feeling a breeze full in the face as they rolled along. “So this is the wind we’re supposed to be shielded against,” he said. “It’s a little like riding in a convertible.”

  Callie laughed. “A convertible van. There’s an idea.”

  “I’d prefer a normal, boring van if you don’t mind,” Frank told them.

  When they arrived at Callie’s house, Frank walked her to the door.

  “Is she okay?” Joe asked when Frank came back.

  “Except for the death grip she kept on my arm, I’d say yes.” Frank flexed his arm a couple of times, as if he were trying to get the blood flowing again. “Probably end up with a bruise there.” He put the key in the ignition and started the engine. “Where to now? Home or Con Riley?”

  “If you think we can get downtown, let’s talk to Con,” Joe decided.

  They drove in silence for a few minutes, then Joe spoke up. “Maybe we should have taken that email threat a little more seriously. Whoever sent it certainly underlined his point with that two-by-four.”

  But Frank shook his head. “Those were two different things. The threat and computer virus—those were intellectual.” He nodded toward the windshield. “Breaking that was very physical.”

  “So you’re saying the message came from the brainy kids.”

  “Smashing our windshield was a message, too,” Frank said. “A very direct message.”

  “But something more like what you would expect from a jock,” Joe said. He fell silent. “It’s almost as if the jocks and the nerds are working together. But why would the debate kids help the guys who were terrorizing them?”

  Frank shrugged, still keeping his hands on the wheel. “Maybe because they’re still terrorized,” he suggested.

  He frowned for a moment, thinking. “Or try this on for size. As long as what happened to Biff is a big mystery, the football team is getting a lot of attention. Not to mention suspicion. People like Old Beady Eyes and Coach Devlin will be watching.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said, remembering the coach’s locker-room speech. “So Golden and his boys can’t act as they please anymore.”

  “Not without getting into serious trouble,” Frank agreed. “Yeah. That’s probably the last thing Terry Golden wants right now. I bet the college coaches who’ve been checking him out so eagerly have suddenly stopped calling.”

  Joe laughed out loud at that thought. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

  They parked on a side street near police headquarters. Walking into the building, Frank asked for Con Riley. A few minutes later the Hardys stood in front of the police officer’s desk.

  Con gave them a guarded look. “To what do I owe the honor?” he asked.

  Frank grinned. “We’re calling it the mystery of the filth that wasn’t.”

  “Maybe you recall we spent a little while in the school basement,” Joe said. “We ended up covered in coal dust. As a matter of fact, everything down there was covered in coal dust.”

  “Except for the shovel in Chet’s hands,” Frank put in. “It was surprisingly clean.”

  Joe took his turn. “Like somebody wiped it off before Chet picked it up? Somebody who’d already used it?”

  Con glanced around at the other officers working around him. Then he leaned forward. “You make a point,” he said, keeping his voice low. “The same question was raised here. There should have been crud and other fingerprints on that shovel.”

  He shook his head. “On the other hand, the Morton boy was standing over the victim with the blasted thing in his hands. The D.A. was under pressure to charge someone as soon as possible, and I’m afraid Chet was the easy choice.”

  “But—” Joe began.

  “The point you’re making may become important at the trial,” Con went on quietly. “It won’t change the course of our investigation—such as it is.”

  “What’s that mean?” Frank said equally quietly.

  “It means a bunch of high-school kids are giving us the runaround,” Con said in disgust. “We’ve collected a bunch of gossip and wild tales from students who probably weren’t involved. But the ones we suspect were actually down in the basement have apparently gone deaf, dumb, and blind.”

  “Stonewalling,” Joe said.

  Con nodded. “That’s it in a nutshell. The chief wants us to be very careful. After all, we’re dealing with honor students and football heroes.”

  The police officer looked as if he’d bitten into something rotten. “The media will be all over us if we press these kids too hard. But being polite and low-key has gotten us nothing so far. A big, fat zero.”

  “Have you talked to Mr. Sheldrake?” Frank suggested.

  “The school authorities are getting nowhere, too. There are a dozen students. Put the screws to all of them, and it looks excessive. But unless we go that route, none of them will crack.”

  Con shrugged. “Ah, well. If we’re lucky, we may not have to worry about that.”

  “What do you mean?” Frank asked.

  “I probably shouldn’t say this.” Con glanced around again. “But I think I can depend on you two to keep your mouths shut. There’s been some good news from the hospital.”

  “About Biff?” Joe said excitedly.

  “Keep your voice down, son!” Riley hissed.

  He lowered his own voice again. “Discussing the case, the doctors have stopped talking about if Biff will regain consciousness. It’s become when.”

  Joe smiled. “So, sooner or later, you’ll be able to ask Biff what happened.”

  Con nodded. “And when that happens, I expect a lot of people may be changing their stories.”

  Frank looked thoughtful. “So you still may be able to clear this up without taking Chet to court,” he said.

  “Let’s just say I’m not a hundred percent convinced the boy is guilty,” Con replied.

  “We’ve got a little mystery of our own,” Frank said. “Which may happen to tie in with yours.”

  He explained what had happened outside the school.

  Joe stared in surprise. He hadn’t expected Frank to report the incident to the police.

  Con’s face grew red as he listened. “That was a very stupid stunt for someone to pull,” he said angrily. “The Shaw girl could have
been seriously injured.”

  He looked at the boys. “Do you want to make an official complaint?”

  “Would it do much good?” Joe asked. “If you catch somebody—which right now is a big if—they didn’t actually hurt anyone. From what I’ve seen, kids seem to get off pretty lightly when the cases go to court.”

  Con nodded silently, a little embarrassed. “But it might throw a good scare into whoever did it.”

  “Except we only have suspicions about who that was,” Joe said. “Unless you’re going to fingerprint that board—”

  “There’s an idea,” Frank suddenly broke in.

  Joe stared at his brother again. “I was joking!”

  “Well, I think fingerprints and throwing a good scare might work well together.” An evil smile slowly stretched his lips as he leaned toward the police officer.

  “An official complaint probably won’t get us very far. What I’d like, Con,” he said, “is a little unofficial help. If you can give it . . .”

  12 Cracking the Wall

  Joe and Frank rode in the rear of the police cruiser.

  This wasn’t the first time Joe had found himself back there. He never liked it, though. Yes, civilians sometimes wound up in the back of patrol cars—crime victims, observers from the press, important people on inspections.

  The backseat was usually reserved for criminals, though. Joe always got a feeling of being caged whenever he sat here.

  There was also the faint perfume of low-life in the air. Drunks had probably barfed all over this seat.

  Almost unconsciously, Joe found himself rub bing his fingers together. Give me some nice, clean coal dust any day, he thought.

  Sitting in the front seat, Con Riley must have caught Joe’s expression. “I got the cleanest car I could,” he assured the boys. “Believe me. We give these babies a good going-over.”

  The smell of disinfectant was thick when the boys had gotten in, which made Joe wonder what they’d had to clean away.

  Perhaps to take their minds off the smell, Con went into a war story. “Worst stink we ever had in a car happened when I was just starting out. Oh, it was awful—like rotting flesh! My partner and I were going crazy. We cleaned the backseat so much, they had to put a new cover on.”