The Case of the Dirty Bird (3 page)

Dunc waved a piece of paper and turned away from the desk in his room. He was still wearing the headset for the Walkman, and he took it off.

Amos was sound asleep in the corner of Dunc’s bed. He’d been asleep since midnight when he decided the worst thing in the world was probably a parrot.

He opened his eyes, one at a time, thankful that the dream was gone. He’d dreamt he was in a large cage and an enormous parrot had been coming toward him. “What time is it?”

Dunc looked at his watch. “Just after eight o’clock. We barely have time for breakfast.”

“Before what?”

“We have to go back to the pet store. I have to listen to him one more time to see if I missed anything. You know, I think he’s kind of like living history—that bird knows things about what happened.”

Amos closed his eyes. “I slept with my shoes on. My feet are like prunes. I’m going back to sleep. You can’t go to a pet store with feet like prunes.”

But Dunc was up and out of the room before Amos had finished.

He lay with his eyes closed, but it was no use. Sleep didn’t come back, and he knew he would have to go. He stood up and walked on his prunelike feet out the door and downstairs.

Dunc was in the kitchen. He had shredded wheat in a bowl and was pouring hot water on it. Then he drained the hot water off, added milk and sugar, and sat down to eat.

Amos shuddered. “Don’t you have any Fruit Slams?”

“In the cabinet.”

Amos nodded and took them down. Cereal shaped like fruit. They were for kids, but he’d always had them and still liked them.

He sat to eat.

“You look awful,” Dunc said, looking up with his mouth full.

“Thank you. I was worried that I might look too good—you know, make you look bad.”

“I was just trying to help. You might want to throw some water on your hair before we go. It’s all over to one side. You look like Carey Sander’s springer spaniel when it gets wet.”

“If you don’t be quiet, I’m going to kill you.”

“Just trying to help.”

“Well, stop.”

“We have to go to the pet store,” Dunc said. “One more time.”

“You said that. Something about having to listen to that stupid bird again.”

“I have a list of clues now, but I’m not sure it’s complete.” Dunc finished his cereal. “And besides, they don’t mean anything to me.”

Amos paused, his mouth full of Fruit Slams. “Clues—aren’t clues supposed to mean something?”

“Well. I think they will, but right now they don’t. I’m sure it will come to me.”

He put his bowl in the sink and headed for the door. “We’ll take bikes.”

“I don’t have my bike here, remember?”

“No problem—you can take my sister’s. She’s visiting my aunt for two days.”

He was gone, and Amos hurried to catch up. “But your sister has one of those little bikes.”

“So what? It’s got two wheels and a set of handlebars, doesn’t it?”

“It’s got training wheels.”

“Well then, you won’t fall. Come on.”

“All I can say is, there’d better be a lot of gold in this.”

Dunc was already down the street, pedaling slowly, and Amos took Dunc’s sister’s bike out of the garage. It was purple and
had streamers stuck in the end of each handlebar and a little bell that rang with a thumb button.

He paused for a moment, thought of walking to the mall, then shrugged. It was so early, he wouldn’t see anybody anyway. Anybody he knew would still be in bed. He jumped on the bike and started to pedal. His knees seemed to come up alongside his ears, and the bike wobbled a bit.

At the corner he turned to follow Dunc, heard a small giggle, and looked up to see Melissa riding by with a girl named Kathryn Welben.

It was there and gone, over so fast that she had vanished around the corner before he could do more than smile stupidly as she went by. He drifted to a stop.

I should have said I was testing it for Dunc’s sister, he thought, wishing he could die. No, I should have said I was on a mission in disguise for the CIA and the bike was part of my cover. No, I should have said the bike was part of some alien’s body and I was trapped on it by a force field. No, I
should have said Dunc forced me to ride it.…

“Are you coming or not?” Dunc had come back and was sitting facing him, one foot on the ground, on a normal bike looking normal.

“I just saw Melissa,” Amos said. “She met me and I was riding this—this thing.”

“So?”

“So she’ll never call now.”

“Sure she will.” Dunc turned to go again.

“She will?”

“Of course—haven’t you ever heard of curiosity? She’s going to wonder why you were out in the morning riding a kiddie bike around.”

He turned and was gone, and Amos started after him and smiled and thought, heck, maybe he’s right.

Maybe I should get a Smurf scooter.

“Here’s the list of clues.”

Amos and Dunc were back in Dunc’s room. He’d fired up his computer and typed the clues onto the screen in capital letters.

“Look for the union label?” Amos studied it. “I know that—how do I know that?”

“I thought it might have something to do
with the Civil War,” Dunc said. “He kind of sang it—‘Look for the union label.’ Like that. Like a song.”

“Oh. Now I remember. That’s a commercial to buy union products. You know, to look for the label when you buy.”

Dunc erased it from the screen. “All right. Now let’s look.”

“That’s it?” Amos asked. “For all those hours?”

Dunc nodded. “Not much, is it? But we have the list of owners too—or at least the ones the store owner knew about.”

The owner of the pet store had been there when they went back and proved to be nicer than they thought he would be. He let them listen to the parrot again—Amos waited until he was out of hearing before he
used the code words—and had given them a copy of the list of owners.

“It goes back a long way. There’s one woman who had the parrot for forty-five years.” Dunc read from the list.

“Harley Crane had it from 1865 to 1890. That’s twenty-five years.”

Amos was reading over his shoulder. “The problem is that it doesn’t say if any of them were pirates.”

“Well, it wouldn’t, would it?” Dunc snorted. “You think they’d admit it? They used to hang those guys from the yardarm or something. Who’d want to admit he was a pirate and get hung from a yardarm? You have to detect a little.” He ran his finger down the list. “See? Here’s one in 1848—his name is George Bonney. That sounds sort of piraty, doesn’t it?”

Amos shrugged. “I would have thought Pegleg Pete or One-eyed Ned. Something like that.”

“Look at this—Bonney lived down by the waterfront on the river. It says he owned a tavern. I mean, that looks promising, doesn’t it?”

“What else does it say about him?”

Dunc shook his head. “Nothing. Just the date and that he was a tavern owner along the river. He owned a place called The Devil’s Hammer. Come on now, that’s perfect, isn’t it?” Dunc stood up, closed one eye. “Arrgh, me hearties, let’s go down to The Devil’s Hammer for a cup of grog.”

Amos shook his head. “I think you’re stretching it. All you have is a disgusting bird that goes to the bathroom all the time and likes to hear people say things written on the sides of buses and some guy who owned a bar, and now you’re imagining pirates and gold and buried treasure.”

“Well, I know it’s not scientific, but we’ve got to follow our hunches. This is a hunch.”

“Remember the time we followed your hunch and talked the police into arresting a tractor salesman from South Dakota?”

“That was different. He matched the description of one of those check forgers in the post office pictures perfectly.”

“No, he didn’t. He had both ears and the guy in the picture had half an ear gone, and
it was wrong to tell the police you’d seen him breaking into a car.”

“Well?”

“Well nothing.”

“What if I’d been right? He was only in jail overnight, and I did apologize, didn’t I? Besides, this is different. All we have to do is find a tunnel along the river, and we’re halfway home.”

“Oh—is that all? How do you figure to do that?”

“Simple. We head down to the waterfront and start looking for something that seems to be a tunnel.”

He was out the door and gone—as usual—before Amos could point out that the waterfront along the river was one of those places you didn’t go.

Amos started to follow and stopped at the door. “Don’t they have rats down there as big as rhinos?” he called.

But Dunc was already out of hearing.

“How hard can it be to find a tunnel?” Amos said, mimicking Dunc’s voice. “It’s just a big hole, right?”

They had been down by the river for an hour, and Amos was ready to leave. “I saw a rat, over there, by that guy sleeping with his head under a trash bin. At least, I think he was sleeping. Maybe he was dead.”

“He wasn’t dead,” Dunc said. “They pick them up if they die.”

“Oh, good. Now I don’t have to worry.”

“And it wasn’t a rat. It was a cat.”

“It had a long hairless tail.”

“It was a cat with a long hairless tail.”

“And a pointed nose.”

“And a pointed nose.”

“I still think it was a rat.”

They were on their bikes—Amos now had his own—and they rode slowly. The river was a gray muck on their left along a scabby dock, and to their right was a row of old buildings nearly half a mile long. Many of them were abandoned, with windows broken out or boarded over with plywood.

“Lots of words painted on the buildings,” Amos noted professionally. “If we have to talk to the parrot again.”

Dunc rode silently, looking at the buildings.

“What are we looking for?” Amos asked.

“I don’t know. I’m kind of hoping it will show itself to me.”

But it didn’t. They rode the full length of the waterfront until the road trailed off into thick brush and swamp. Dunc turned around and looked back. “It’s there. Something is there. I can just feel it.”

He started back and Amos followed, looking at the buildings carefully as Dunc
did, with absolutely no idea of what to look for.

A tunnel.

A treasure.

Something with paces.

They rode the full length again until they were starting up the street that left the waterfront and went back into the city. It was by now late afternoon, and Dunc turned his bike again.

“I don’t think we should go back again,” Amos said. “Some of those people are starting to notice us. I think even the guy with his head under the trash bin looked at me on that second run.”

“I just know we’re missing something. It’s there—we’ve got to go back.”

“Before we do this, I want you to think about it. You’re risking our lives over something a dirty bird told you.”

Dunc thought for a moment. “All right—I thought about it. Let’s go.”

They went down the row one more time, pausing in front of each old building, riding fast past a tavern called The Blue Marble,
and when they got to the dead end and saw nothing, even Dunc admitted defeat.

“All right. You win. Let’s go home and forget it.”

And on the way back Amos found it.

They weren’t even riding slow. In fact, Amos was pedaling about as fast as he’d ever pedaled because just as they passed The Blue Marble, a man came through the window end over end. He hit the ground and lay still.

Just after The Blue Marble, Amos saw it.

He didn’t say anything and kept riding, following Dunc, who had gone to a lower gear and increased his cadence, and they were at the end of the waterfront street where it curved up into the city when Amos couldn’t stand it any longer.

“All right. Let’s stop.”

Dunc slowed, squeezed the brakes, stopped. “What’s the matter?”

Amos looked at the sky. “I know I’m going to hate myself for this—I saw something.”

“What?”

“I’m not sure. But on a board on a building
two doors down from The Blue Marble, just after they threw that guy through the window—I thought I saw something drawn there, or painted. It was old and really faint.”