The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 3 Page 6

  It didn’t matter that Travis couldn’t figure it out. It was enough to know that the men were after the camera, and he had the camera.

  Should he leave it? Just drop it, and let them have it if they could find it here?

  No, he couldn’t do that. He had a responsibility. If the camera was that important to them, it must be important to the police as well.

  Travis tightened his grip on the camera and edged along a little farther.

  There were sounds behind him–something rubbing along the wall!

  What was it he was supposed to look for in the tunnel?

  A key? The Key to Enlightenment?

  Travis reached out, praying. He reached out–and then felt it.

  A hand. A strong hand–tightening about his arm!

  A thousand pigeons seemed to take off in his chest.

  He felt himself being yanked back, hard.

  “This way!”

  Travis was choking. That voice! It wasn’t Muck or Mr. Dillinger or any of the Owls!

  Travis couldn’t even scream. With the strong hand drawing him along, he slipped and tripped and slid toward the far end of the pitch black tunnel. He was being dragged away.

  But the hand didn’t hurt him.

  There was a sound: wood rubbing on wood, and then something giving.

  The light hit him, a thousand flashbulbs in his eyes, a shot right to the head that sent him reeling back, almost falling.

  The hand still held him.

  “You’re okay now,” the voice said.

  Travis looked but couldn’t see. His eyes were overwhelmed with the light. He held his hands over them, and when he looked through the cracks of his fingers, he saw a familiar toothless grin.

  Mr. Imoo!

  Mr. Imoo had saved Travis–BUT FROM WHAT? His fear of dark enclosed spaces? Of getting lost forever underneath the temple? What if Eyebrows had simply wanted to get even for Nish’s snowball? But if that was the case, why would he bring another guy along with him? Another mean-looking guy.

  Mr. Imoo had only noticed that Travis had headed into the tunnel and was seeming to take a very long time coming out the other end. He hadn’t gone down to rescue Travis from any murderers or anything, just to show him the way out. Visitors often panicked and froze in the tunnel, apparently.

  “It happens,” said Mr. Imoo. “Don’t worry about it.”

  But Travis couldn’t stop worrying. What was going on? Had he been right–was it the camera they wanted? And if so, what was in the camera that was so important to them that they’d break into the Owls’ residence and then chase Travis into a sacred temple?

  When they got back to the Olympic Village, Travis got Sarah and Nish to sit down with him and go through the video cassette. There was the waiter, and it certainly looked like Eyebrows. And there he was again at the ski hill. And there was Nish tossing his snowball.

  “It’s me he wants,” Nish said, almost bragging.

  “But why break into our rooms?” Travis asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he meant to play a trick on me but couldn’t figure out which bed was mine.”

  “That hardly takes a rocket scientist to figure out,” countered Sarah. “Just look for the unmade one with all the clothes dumped on the floor.”

  “Well, what then?” shot back Nish. “You tell us.”

  Sarah shook her head. “I don’t know. There’s something to this, though. Travis is right.”

  Several times they went over the tape. A waiter. Two men unloading a snowmobile and a sled. No poison. No explosives. Nothing.

  “I still think we should show it to the police,” said Travis.

  “Show what?” Nish asked. “There’s nothing there.”

  Travis sighed. He and his friends were missing something, he was certain, but he didn’t know what.

  “We better get going,” said Sarah. “We’ve got a game at two.”

  This time the Screech Owls were up against the Matsumoto Sharks, a much better team than the Sapporo Mighty Ducks. Big Hat was almost filled for the match, and the sound when the Sharks came out onto the ice was almost as loud as if an NHL team had arrived. No one booed, however, when the Owls came out after them. The Owls’ parents cheered from one corner, where they were all sitting together with their Screech Owls banners and Canadian flags, and the rest of the packed rink applauded, politely, as if the Owls had come to Nagano for a spelling bee instead of a hockey tournament.

  The Sharks passed well and weren’t afraid of shooting. There was no sense here of older sempai or younger koohai players. And the goalie, from what the Owls could gather during warm-up, was excellent, with a lightning-fast glove hand.

  “I should be playing the point,” Nish said to Travis during the warm-up. “We’re going to need my shot.”

  Travis nodded. Nish might be right. But Muck still had him playing backup goal, so Travis didn’t think there was any chance Nish would get into this game. If the Owls were going to win, they’d need Jenny in net all the way.

  Muck started Andy’s line, just to surprise the Sharks. Andy’s line checked wonderfully, but they were slow compared to Sarah’s line, and when Muck called for a change on the fly, it seemed to catch the Sharks off guard.

  Dmitri leapt over the boards and took off for the far side of the rink, looping fast just as Sarah picked up a loose puck and rattled it hard off the boards so it flew ahead of Dmitri and beat him over the red line. No icing–and Dmitri was almost free.

  Travis joined the rush. There was one defender back, and he didn’t seem sure what to do: chase Dmitri or block the potential pass.

  Dmitri solved his opponent’s dilemma by cutting right across the ice, straight at the backpedalling defenceman. The defender went for Dmitri, and Dmitri let him catch him, but he left the puck behind in a perfect drop pass.

  Travis read the play perfectly, and picked up the sitting puck to burst in on goal. A head fake, a dipped shoulder, and the Sharks’ goaltender went down.

  Travis backhanded the puck high and hard–right off the crossbar!

  The ring of metal was followed by a huge gasp throughout Big Hat. The goal light went on by mistake, but the players knew Travis hadn’t scored.

  The defenceman who’d been fooled picked up the puck and backhanded it high, nearly hitting the clock.

  The puck slapped down past centre, and was scooped up by a Sharks forward in full flight. A clear breakaway!

  Jenny came wiggling out to cut off the angle. The forward faked a slapshot, delayed while Jenny committed to blocking the shot, and then held on until he had swept farther around her, lofting an easy wristshot into the empty net.

  Travis came off and looked down the bench toward Nish. His friend had his goalie glove over his face, afraid to look for fear Muck might be signalling him to go in.

  “Defence stays back,” Muck said calmly. “That doesn’t happen again, understand?”

  Everyone understood. There would be no more breakaways.

  Little Simon Milliken got the Owls moving later in the period when he cut off a cross-blueline pass and broke up centre, a Sharks defenceman chasing frantically.

  Simon waited until the last moment, and instead of shooting, dropped the puck back between the chasing defenceman’s legs, perfectly on Liz’s stick.

  The play caught the Sharks’ goaltender off guard. He’d counted on Simon going to his backhand, leaving the far side of his net open.

  Liz fired the puck hard and true, the net bulging as a huge cheer went up from the little Canadian section.

  Heading into the third period, the score was tied 3–3 when Sarah took matters into her own hands. First, she set Travis up for an easy tap-in on a beautiful end-to-end rush. Then she sent Dmitri in on a breakaway, and he did his usual one fake and roofed a backhand. Then Sarah herself scored into the empty Sharks net in the final minute.

  Owls 6, Sharks 3. But it had been a lot closer than it looked. They had won, yes, but no one felt good about how they had played. The Screech
Owls had looked sloppy on defence, and defence was an area of the game in which they all took enormous pride.

  “We play like that against Lake Placid,” Muck said in the dressing room, “and we won’t have a chance.”

  Muck and Mr. Dillinger had scouted the Lake Placid Olympians when they’d played the night before. A strong team with excellent skaters and one tremendous playmaker, the Olympians, Muck figured, would be as strong an opposition as the Owls had ever faced.

  “We play like that again, and we won’t have a chance,” Muck repeated.

  No one said a word. Travis knew that Muck was looking around the room. He could sense that Muck had looked at Jenny and wondered if the Owls would be in better shape if Jeremy were with them. He knew that Muck had looked, as well, at Nish and wondered if perhaps they shouldn’t have Nish and his big shot playing out instead of sitting on the bench in goaltending gear he barely knew how to put on.

  But Muck could hardly change things now. If he did anything with Nish, Jenny would think that Muck didn’t have enough faith in her, which would only make her more nervous. He had to stick with Jenny, and was forced, also, to leave Nish where he was.

  “If Lake Placid wins tonight, it’s going to be them and us in the final,” Muck said, finally. “Do you think you’re ready for it?”

  No one spoke. Travis knew, as captain, he had to say something.

  “We can do it,” he said.

  “We’ll win,” said Sarah.

  “Good,” said Muck. “That’s what I want to hear.”

  But did he believe it? Travis wondered.

  More important, did the Owls believe it?

  Travis had never known Nish to take his studies so seriously. Every morning, when the Screech Owls didn’t have a game or a practice, Nish was off with Mr. Imoo, either at the Zenkoji Temple or at a special dojo near the Olympic Village where Mr. Imoo trained several students in the strange art of the Indonesian “force shield.”

  Nish seemed filled with wisdom, even if he couldn’t yet curve spoons or, for that matter, even convince one of Sarah’s hairpins to bend a bit when he tickled it one day at lunch. Other students, Nish claimed, could break bricks and boards with their foreheads.

  “There’s a master in Indonesia,” he said, “who can pick a bullet out of the air.”

  “A shot bullet?” Fahd asked.

  Nish looked at Fahd as if he were an idiot. Everyone else looked at Nish as if he were making it up.

  But Travis had to give his old friend credit. Nish was applying himself to this newfound interest much more than Nish had ever worked on math or science or English. Mr. Imoo seemed to understand Nish perfectly. He was even starting to make jokes about Nish stinking up the dojo.

  Nish didn’t mind. He was going to master this. Before the trip was out, he was determined to find his own force shield.

  The Screech Owls had one more practice at Big Hat before the championship weekend. Muck ran some drills and had the Owls practise tip-ins on Jenny at one end and on Nish at the other. He had his reasons.

  “Lake Placid made the final easily,” Muck told them later in the dressing room. “They are an excellent team. They know how to get traffic in front of the net, and they know how to get point shots on the net for tip-ins and rebounds. That’s why we were working on the same thing ourselves today. I want to get our goalies comfortable with what they’ll be facing.”

  Muck finished talking, but he didn’t look finished. He walked around the room and cleared his throat a couple of times. No one said a word. Even Nish sat quietly, his goalie mask still on top of his head.

  “Mr. Dillinger will talk to you now,” he said.

  Muck walked toward the dressing room and held the door open for Mr. Dillinger to come in. Mr. Dillinger looked worried. He was rubbing his hands together.

  “I’ve just met with the Nagano police,” said Mr. Dillinger.

  “Any word on the break-ins?” Fahd asked.

  “No,” Mr. Dillinger said, shaking his head.

  “More blowfish?” Fahd asked.

  Mr. Dillinger shook his head again.

  “The avalanche,” he said. “They’ve found some evidence that it was set off deliberately. They found dynamite blasting caps up the hill.”

  Travis snapped back, striking his head lightly on the wall behind him. Dynamite! So that was why the avalanche had started with such a bang. It was an explosion!

  “What for?” Andy asked with a slight tremor in his voice. “Were they trying to kill us?”

  “The police don’t know,” said Mr. Dillinger. “But they want us to be very careful from here on out. They don’t know if there’s any connection between the break-ins and the avalanche–maybe even the murder of the mayor–but they’re afraid to take anything for granted. From now on, we stay together in groups of at least three, all right? And we stick to the Village and the hockey rink.”

  He looked around the room, his big eyes pleading for understanding. Mr. Dillinger looked very hurt. This was hardly the way the trip to Japan had been planned to go.

  Travis had never heard the phone ring in his room before. It caught him by surprise. He’d been brushing his teeth, and Nish had been sitting, cross-legged, on his bed, his eyes closed, deep in concentration.

  It took a moment for Travis to locate it. There was a desk against one wall and the telephone was on the floor beside it, covered by several sweaty T-shirts belonging to Nish.

  He picked it up. But what should he say? “Hello”? Or “Moshi moshi”?

  “Hel-lo,” he said, uncertain.

  “Travis–that you?”

  “Yeah…Data?”

  “It’s me. Nish there?”

  Travis looked over at his roommate, still seemingly deep in a trance.

  “I think so.”

  “Good. Get down here. Quick!”

  Travis had no idea what had Data so worked up, but it was clear from his voice that he was very, very excited about something.

  “C’mon,” Travis said to Nish. “That was Data. He needs us.”

  Nish made no sign of moving.

  “Hey!” Travis yelled. Nish’s eyes popped open. He was back in the real world.

  “What’s up?”

  “Data needs us–let’s go!”

  To get to Data’s ground-floor apartment, they had to cut across the courtyard and through the tent where the teams ate their meals. They picked up Sarah and Jenny along the way.

  “We’re supposed to be in groups of three or more,” Travis explained. “Data needs us.”

  The four Screech Owls found Data’s door unlocked when they got there. They let themselves in.

  Data was in his wheelchair. He had a small television on top of the desk and a tiny video cassette recorder beside it.

  “The man at the desk sent this to me with some movies to watch,” Data explained. “But I set it up to see what our tape looked like so far.”

  He had the tape paused at the point where Nish threw the snowball at Eyebrows.

  “Did you check for explosives?” Nish asked. “I bet it was Eyebrows who started the avalanche.”

  “It might have been,” said Data. “But there’s nothing there. See for yourself.”

  Data ran the footage of the men pulling up in the Toyota 4x4 and unloading the snowmobile and sled. The Owls pulled up chairs or sat on the edge of Data’s bed and went over it carefully several times, but there was nothing remarkable. Whatever was in the sled was out of sight. It could have been dynamite; it could just as easily have been blankets or shovels. No way would the video ever convince the police that Eyebrows had started the avalanche.

  “There’s nothing there, see?”

  “We see,” said Sarah. “But you found something, didn’t you, Data?”

  Data looked at her and nodded.

  He seemed a little frightened.

  “I want you to watch this.”

  Data rewound the tape, then stopped it and pressed “play” to see where he was. It was the banque
t, near the end.

  “Here’s where Eyebrows runs me over!” announced Nish.

  “It’s before that,” said Data, pushing the “rewind” button again.

  When he had found the right spot, Data turned to the four friends. “I’ll just play it straight,” he said. “You tell me if you see anything.”

  The four leaned closer to the television and Data pushed “play.”

  The picture cleared. It was the beginning of the banquet. They saw the teams heading for their places. There were shots of the Screech Owls sitting down.

  The camera then scanned the head table, just as Muck and the others were taking their places.

  Sho Fujiwara, the man in charge of Japanese hockey, was reaching out an arm toward Muck. He was pulling him over, smiling and gesturing for Muck to sit.

  Data hit “pause.”

  “See anything?” he asked.

  “Muck and Sho,” said Jenny. “They sat together, remember?”

  “What about it?” asked Nish. “I saw nothing.”

  “I’m going to run it again,” said Data.

  The machine whirred back, clicked, then started again at just the right place.

  Sho Fujiwara was standing at the table. He saw Muck and called him over. They seemed like old pals, happy to be together. It made sense for them to sit side by side.

  As Muck stepped up onto the raised platform and headed toward his new friend, Sho deftly switched a couple of the place cards showing who should sit where.

  Data stopped the machine.

  “See?” he asked.

  “He changed the seating plan so Muck could sit beside him,” Travis said. “Big deal.”

  “Your point?” asked Sarah.

  “Watch again,” said Data. “You can read the place cards if you look closely.”

  He played the same sequence again. Sho called Muck over. Sho switched the seating around.

  Data stopped the machine.

  “The mayor was not sitting where he was supposed to.”

  Again he played the sequence.

  Data was right! To get Muck beside him, Sho had to switch the names around on the head table. Muck had ended up beside him, but the mayor had bumped Mr. Ikura over one place.