Марк Брендел - The Mystery of the Kidnapped Whale

“Get in.” A final tug at his hair and Jupe found himself stumbling forward into a dark room. The door closed behind him. The lights went on.

Jupe could see at once why the huge man standing over him had seemed to have no face when he looked at him by the bandstand. He was wearing a nylon stocking pulled down over it. It made a blur of his eyes and nose and mouth.

If Jupe had ever seen this man before, he wouldn’t know it. He wouldn’t recognize him if he ever saw him again.

The man looked even bigger and burlier in the light. It might be fat, not muscle, under the Windbreaker he was wearing, but he had the chest and arms of a giant.

Jupe glanced quickly around the room. A few wooden chairs, a rickety table with a phone on it, tattered curtains over the windows. No newspapers or magazines. No pictures on the walls. Jupe figured that the man hadn’t been living there long.

“In there,” the giant told him. He pronounced it “they-er.”

He pushed Jupe toward an open door at the end of the room. He shoved him through it, then slammed and locked the door on him.

Jupe was in the dark again. Groping around, he soon discovered he was in a very small place, obviously a closet.

“Hullo.”

He could hear the man’s voice from the room beyond. He must be talking on the phone. Jupe leaned against the door, listening.

“Hullo,” he heard the man say again. “I’d like to speak to Miss Constance Carmel.”

There was a brief silence, then the man’s voice went on.

“I thought you’d like to know, Miss Carmel, that your young friend, Jupiter Jones, is by way of being my prisoner.”

There was another pause.

“Yes, to put it bluntly, Miss Carmel, I have kidnapped him.”

Another pause.

“I’m not asking for any ransom money. I just wanted you to know that if you do not return that little way-ull to the ocean at once and give up your plans to continue the search for your father’s boat —”

This time the pause was very brief.

“Then you will never see your young friend Mr. Jones again. Not alive, any-way-er.”

Jupe heard the man hang up.

The Three Investigators had found themselves in a number of difficult — even dangerous — situations in the course of solving their many cases. They had been menaced by sharks. They had been bound hand and foot in the cellar of a haunted house. But this seemed to Jupe the worst spot he had ever been in. Because he knew the man in the next room meant it.

Jupe had announced to Bob and Pete that there were three possible suspects who might have disconnected the brakes on Constance’s pickup truck. Oscar Slater and Paul Donner were two of them. The third suspect Jupiter had had in mind was the mysterious caller who had offered them a hundred dollars to free Fluke.

“To find that lost way-ull and return it to the ocean.”

What he was really hiring them to do was to make sure Oscar Slater couldn’t use Fluke to find Captain Carmel’s boat. He didn’t want that wreck found. He didn’t want whatever was on board to be recovered.

And if he had been prepared to kill Constance and the Investigators once — what was to stop him from carrying out his threat against Jupiter now?

Jupe knelt by the door and pulled out his Swiss knife. If he could force the lock…

The man was certainly big, enormous. But he was also fat. Not stocky the way Jupe was. He was covered in flab. Jupe had felt the softness of his arms and chest.

If Jupe could take him by surprise…

He slipped the blade of his knife into the lock.

He worked as silently as he could. He could hear the man walking up and down on the wooden floor of the next room. He tried to time every movement of the blade to the creak of the floorboards.

And then, all at once, there was no longer any need for cautious silence. Jupe heard a rending crack. It sounded like wood splintering. Had the man fallen through the floor?

He snapped back the bolt of the lock and threw open the door.

At the same instant, as he rushed into the room, the front door splintered and burst open.

In the sudden light it seemed to Jupe that the room was full of hurtling bodies. Pete was diving through the air in a flying tackle. The big man was falling backward. Bob was racing forward from the open doorway.

A moment later the Three Investigators had coordinated their movements and were acting together like a well-trained team. Before the huge man in the Windbreaker could struggle to his feet, Jupe and Pete were out the door, across the porch, and on the sidewalk. Bob was close behind them.

“Ramble and scramble!” Jupe shouted.

It was a prearranged signal they had used several times before. It meant the Investigators should all take off in different directions.

“Your bike’s right there,” Bob yelled to Jupe as he jumped onto his own bike and Pete vaulted onto his.

By the time Jupe’s kidnapper reached the porch, the three boys were almost out of sight, pedaling furiously away, rambling and scrambling off into the darkness.

“We were a bit confused at first,” Bob admitted. “When we found your bicycle by the bandstand, we knew something was wrong. And there weren’t any chalk marks leading out of the park.”

Jupe nodded. “I’m glad I called and told you where I was going,” he said.

It was early the next morning. The Three Investigators had met at a small rocky cove. They were wearing their swimsuits.

Jupe had phoned Constance as soon as he got home the night before and told her he was okay. He was no longer being held captive. They could go ahead with their plans to search for the sunken boat. They were waiting for her now.

“It was Bob who finally figured it out,” Pete explained. “When we found a patch of oil on the street with one of your chalk marks near it, Bob guessed some old jalopy had been parked there and you’d been driven off in it.”

“Yeah, but it was Pete who discovered another oil stain a hundred yards farther on,” Bob put in. “And after that it was easy. All we had to do was follow the stains until we saw that old limousine in the driveway of the house.”

He looked up. A tow truck was backing slowly down the dirt road that led to the cove. In the back of the truck, carefully packed between layers of wet foam rubber, was Fluke. His eyes were closed and he looked comfortable and content.

The truck backed across the narrow strip of beach until it was standing up to its rear axle in the ocean. Constance had picked this sheltered cove because the slope of the shore was unusually steep. Only a few yards out from the beach the water was deep enough for Fluke to swim in.

Constance and her Mexican friend climbed down from the cab. She was wearing a wet suit, and scuba goggles were dangling from her neck. She walked around to the back of the truck and, leaning over in the water, patted Fluke.

Pete could see now that beneath Fluke’s body a heavy canvas sling had been laid on top of the foam rubber. Working together, Pete and the young Mexican drew the flaps of the sling together and attached them to the dangling hook of the crane.

While they were doing this, Constance stroked Fluke’s head and told him not to worry.

The whale didn’t look the least bit worried. He opened his eyes and wagged his tail as the crane lifted him up out of the back of the truck. Then, heaving together, the three boys managed to swing him out over the water.

The young Mexican, working the winch, lowered the whale carefully into the ocean. Fluke was still helpless inside the sling, but he didn’t try to struggle. He lay quite still until Pete unfastened the hook. The canvas sling unfolded. Fluke glided out of it and swam a few yards out to sea.