Riley pushed open the gate. He and Mongo stepped into the no trespassing zone. Then Riley closed the gate and slipped the lock back through the fencing so he could reattach it on the other side.
“Um, Riley?” said Mongo. “Why are you locking us in?”
“We many not be the only ones checking out the creek this morning.”
Mongo hefted up his baseball bat.
“Come on.” Riley led the way through the brambles to the creek bank. Once again, they were staring down at dozens of floating fish carcasses.
“This way,” said Riley, splashing into the shallow water. “It’s only about six inches deep. We’ll walk the creek upstream.”
Mongo waded in after him.
There were clumps of dead fish ringing both their legs. The creek water had a scummy fish-oil slick oozing across its surface.
“This is so gross,” said Mongo
“Just don’t look down.”
“I can feel dead fish bumping into me. They’re cold and slimy—like floating slabs of snot.”
“Okay, okay,” said Riley, slogging toward the far shoreline. “We’ll take the land route.”
“Thank you!” said Mongo.
They hauled themselves out of the stream. Riley touched his Bluetooth earpiece and said, “Call Jamal.”
The voice-activated dialing system engaged with a dial tone followed by string of bleeps and bloops.
“That you, Riley Mack?”
“Yeah. You and Jake got us on the map?”
“Ten-four, Eleanor. You should head upstream maybe twenty feet. When you come to where it bends a little, hike up the hill through the trees. That’ll take you to the golf course.”
Riley heard a clicking noise in his ear. “Hang on, Jamal. I have another call.”
Riley was about to tap his earpiece again when Mongo raised his bat.
“Somebody’s comin’!” he whispered.
“Take cover!” Riley whispered back.
“What’s going on?” asked Jamal.
“We have guests.” Riley and Mongo ducked behind a patch of berry bushes.
The second call clicked in Riley’s ear again.
He’d have to let it roll over to voice mail.
“Riley?” said Jamal. “What’s going on, man? Who’s out there with you two?”
Riley answered as quietly as he could.
“Gavin Brown.”
23
RILEY WAS CROUCHING IN THE bushes, eyeballing Gavin Brown and his buddies through a hole in the thorny branches.
“I could take them all out,” said Mongo, dragging his bat closer.
“Shhh,” said Riley, because he wanted to hear what Gavin and his goons were grousing about.
“Ten dollars an hour isn’t enough to pick up dead fish,” he heard one of the high school guys moan.
“Well, if we don’t do what he tells us to, my father will arrest us all for those other things he knows we did.”
Riley, of course, recognized Gavin. His flat flounder face was one of a kind. Well, among humans. The dead creatures floating in the creek all had Gavin’s beady eyes, smooshed-in nose, and puckered lips. Gavin, who used to terrorize all the younger kids at Fairview Middle School until Riley intervened, was a big ox. His friends were even bigger and oxier. There were six of them, sloshing through the creek.
“It’s too hot to work,” complained one of the thugs.
“The sun makes the fish smell even worse,” added another.
“Do we have to do this now?” whined a third. “Mortal Death Kombat Three opens today.”
“No way,” said the main complainer.
“Totally,” replied the movie buff. “Plus, if you go to the very first show, you get a free Mortal Death Kombat drinking cup and squiggle straw!”
“This sucks! I have been waiting, like, all year to catch that flick!”
“Well, when’s the first screening?” asked Gavin.
“In an hour, man,” said the movie maniac.
“Then let’s go!” said Gavin.
“Really?”
“Hey, my dad just said we had to come back again on account of the rain last night. He didn’t say when we had to come back!”
“How about tomorrow?”
“Sounds good to me!”
The six goons whooped, high-fived, and hightailed it back to the dirt road and took off.
“Okay,” said Riley. “They’re gone for the day. Jamal? You still there?”
“Yeah.”
“I need to check my voice mail. The caller ID shows it was Ms. Kaminski beeping in. Meanwhile, you guys should hit everybody’s garages and backyard storage sheds. Round up as many ice chests as you can.”
“Are we putting together a picnic?”
“No. A bucket brigade. I’ll be back after I check my messages.”
Riley thumbed a few digits on his smartphone. Punched in his voice mail ID.
“Hello, Riley, this is Ms. Kaminski. As we suspected, there are seriously elevated amounts of nitrogen in the water sample you took from Mrs. Montgomery’s fishpond. I’d look for any heavy lawn fertilizing, either in their yard or the neighbors’.
“Ron also said he found other trace elements, including large quantities of cyanuric acid, which is sometimes used in bleaches, disinfectants, and herbicides. So, again, I think we’re looking for somebody using lots of lawn-care chemicals. Hope this helps. Oh, and thanks for the gift certificate you dropped off at school this morning. I’ve never eaten at the Quilted Dove but everybody says it’s the best restaurant in town.”
Riley shrugged. The Dove was okay. If you were a grown-up and liked stuff like striped bass tartare and couscous instead of pizza and fries.
“Anyway, good luck tracking down the source of your pollution! So long.”
Riley disconnected the call.
“Come on,” Riley said to Mongo. “We need to head upstream and uphill.”
They followed the creek until they reached the bend Jamal had mentioned. Using trees for handholds, they hauled themselves up a very steep hill. They were approaching the edge of the forest when Riley’s earpiece buzzed again.
“This is Riley. Talk to me.”
“Hey, it’s Jake.”
“Where’s Jamal?”
“With Briana. Looking for ice chests.”
“What’s up?”
“I’m tracking you on the topo map. You should be approaching the fairway behind the country club.”
Riley and Mongo stepped out of the trees into the high grass fringing the golf course, what golfers called “the rough.” The woods they had hiked through were littered with tiny white balls.
“There should be a knoll of some kind to your left,” said Jake.
“Yeah. The fairway slopes up to a little pond . . .”
“A water hazard,” said Jake.
“Exactly. And above that, there’s a plateau with a flag planted in it. It’s the putting green for the ninth hole.”
“Okay,” said Jake, “that plateau corresponds to the drainage divide. Surface runoff from everything downhill of it flows through the forest to the creek and then down to Schuyler’s Pond.”
“Hang on,” said Riley. “Somebody’s coming again.” He motioned for Mongo to slip back into the darkness under the trees.
“Who is it?” asked Jake.
“It sounds like heavy equipment,” Riley reported. “Probably part of the landscaping crew.”
“No,” said Mongo, from his vantage point behind a pine. “It’s a farmer.”
A man dressed in bright green coveralls was circling the ninth hole green on a small lawn tractor. Behind the canopied seat and big rear tires Riley saw what looked like a fertilizer spreader; a mechanical spinner for slinging out chemicals—probably pellets of nitrogen-rich fertilizer and pesticides to make the golf course’s new grass look so unbelievably lush and green.
“We’ve got our guy,” said Riley. “Tell everybody to put on their swim shoes. We need to head back to the
creek tonight and pick up a few fish.”
“How come?” asked Mongo.
“Operation Water Hazard is about to become Operation Stink Bomb.”
24
THAT NIGHT, AROUND 9:30, RILEY, Mongo, Jamal, and Jake hiked up the dark dirt road to the locked gate.
Briana wasn’t with the fish-gathering crew. She was totally panicking about the Saturday night talent finals and needed to rehearse her rapping-granny act.
“Whoo,” said Jamal when he caught his first whiff of dead fish. “I believe we have just discovered the real reason Briana could not join us tonight: I suspect Eau de Fishsticks is not her favorite brand of perfume.”
“All right, you guys,” said Riley, as he swung the beam of his flashlight back and forth across the black surface of the water. Bloated white bellies were everywhere. Dead fish were floating downstream like Styrofoam burger boxes on a rafting trip. “Scoop up as many fish as you can. Load them into the ice chests.”
Each member of the crew carried a cooler and his own version of a fishnet; Jake trawled with a tennis racket, Jamal skimmed the water with his mother’s spaghetti strainer, Riley used a lacrosse stick, and Mongo trapped dead fish in the webbing of his first-baseman’s glove.
They hauled cold, clammy carcasses—many without eyeballs anymore—out of the stream and dumped them into their carriers, where they landed with wet, sloppy slaps.
“This is beyond gross,” said Jamal.
“Try breeding true your mout,” said Jake, breathing through his mouth.
“I did,” said Mongo. “But I sucked down too many mosquitoes.”
“Come on you guys,” said Riley, sloshing through the scummy water. “Just a few more.”
“Ry-wee?” said Jake, still holding his nose.
“Yeah?”
“What exact-wee are we going too doo wiff all dese dead fish?”
“Put them where grown-ups will smell ’em and start asking questions.”
“In their mailboxes?” said Mongo.
“No,” said Riley. “We need adults to confront that golf course gardener for us; the guy puttering around on his tractor, pumping out poison to make the greens look so freakishly green.”
“So, what do we do next, Riley Mack?” asked Jamal. “Because I’ve got about ten pounds of pure stinkitude packed in my dad’s cooler here. He’s never, ever going to want to have a backyard barbecue again. The dang fish ooze is soaking straight into the plastic walls. That stench isn’t ever coming out! What’s the plan, man?”
“Simple,” said Riley, squeaking the lid back onto his cooler. “We’re going to give these fish a proper funeral in a much more public body of water. Jake? Is the wind still supposed to come out of the south tomorrow?”
“Hang on.” Jake quickly glanced down at his glowing smartphone. “Correct. No change on my WeatherBug app.”
“Then we go with the water hazard below the ninth hole. The wind will blow across it and send the stench straight up to the country club. When people sit down to breakfast on that outdoor sundeck tomorrow morning, they’ll be directly upwind of a newly polluted pond.”
Riley and Mongo led the way up through the woods to the fringes of the golf course.
“Douse your lights,” whispered Riley.
The guys all turned off their flashlights.
“Follow me.”
Riley trotted out of the rough, onto the fairway, fishy water sloshing in his ice chest the whole way. Some sludge splashed out when the lid flipped up an inch, permanently odorizing his faded black T-shirt. The whole crew was dressed in black tonight. Black jeans. Black T-shirts. Black sneakers. Mongo had even put some of that black gunk football players use under his eyes, which made him look like an enormous raccoon sporting a buzz cut.
“Hunker down,” said Riley, as they headed up the hill toward the water hazard. “Keep low and keep quiet.”
The gang crept across the shag carpet of clipped grass as quietly as cats wearing fuzzy bunny slippers.
Lights were on over in the country club. Riley could hear laughter. Tinkling music.
“Is there a dance or something tonight?” whispered Jake, moving stealthily at Riley’s side.
“I don’t think so. Probably just people eating dinner inside at the restaurant.”
“Hope they’re enjoying their seafood salads,” said Jamal. “Because, I’m sorry Long John Silver’s, I may never eat fish again.”
The foursome reached the lip of a shallow pond.
“Okay. Slip your fish into the water,” said Riley. “Easy. Try not to make too much noise. It’s better if they don’t discover this mess till morning.”
“How come?” asked Jamal.
“When the sun’s up, it’ll be way easier for us to see the grossed-out looks on all their faces!”
25
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER their parents had all left home for work, Riley’s crew piled into Mongo’s golf cart and scooted over to the country club.
They entered the asphalt golf cart path via a nontraditional route: Riley drove the electric buggy straight through a four-foot-wide gap in the country club’s hedgerow boundary that he and Mongo had scouted out the previous day on their bikes.
“There’s the ninth hole,” said Jamal, pointing at a triangular flag flapping in the distance.
“Wind’s still blowing the way we want it to,” added Jake, using the fluttering pennant for a windsock. “Out of the south, heading north.”
“Excellent,” said Riley. “Time for a little off-roading. Hang on everybody.”
He swerved sharply, leaving the narrow paved path for the grass.
“Ri-i-i-ley?” stuttered Briana as the cart bounded over roots, ruts, and rocks. “P-p-p-please! I ha-a-a-ad a bi-i-i-ig bre-e-eak-fast!”
“Not m-m-me,” said Jamal. “I had t-t-toast. D-d-dry t-t-toast.”
Riley swung the cart behind a thick stand of trees and eased on the brake.
They were just south of the water hazard, hidden in the shadows of the forest.
“All right,” said Jamal, who had brought along a pair of binoculars, “we already have some interesting action up on the outdoor dining deck.”
“What do you see?” asked Riley.
“Under the second yellow umbrella. Four ladies fanning the air under their noses and examining their plates. Looks like they all went with bagels and lox this morning. I believe they are currently contemplating the freshness of their smoked salmon.”
“Excellent,” said Riley.
“They’re calling for their waiter. Okay. Here he comes. He’s sniffing their food. Now he’s sniffing the air all around him. Looks like he just smelled a skunk fart.”
“Even better,” said Riley, linking his hands behind his head and propping his feet up on the dashboard of the golf cart to savor the moment.
“The elderly couple two umbrellas to the right are sniffing their cereal bowls,” reported Jake, who had brought along his collapsible telescope. “They’re calling for the waiter, too.”
“You guys?” said Mongo. “Here come some golfers.”
“Ah,” said Riley. “Our first foursome of the day.”
“I thought the course wasn’t open till Saturday,” said Briana.
“Not officially,” said Riley. “But maybe these guys just couldn’t wait.”
“Maybe they’re chums of mine,” said Briana, slipping into her Paxton impersonation.
“Another distinct possibility,” said Riley with a laugh.
“Facial expressions indicate the gentlemen have picked up the stench,” reported Jake.
“Big time,” added Jamal. “Duffer in the pink plaid pants looks like he wants to hurl. Of course, I would, too, if I ever wore pants that looked like that.”
“This is fabtastic!” said Briana. “Way to go, Riley!”
“Thanks,” said Riley, sighing contentedly. “I love it when a plan works even better than we planned. Briana?”
“Yeah?”
“Please stan
d by.”
“Will do.” And then she started warming up. “A Tudor who tooted a flute tried to tutor two tooters to toot.”
“Okay,” said Jake, “the gentlemen on the ninth hole are pointing down at the water hazard.”
“They have seen the fish,” said Jamal. “Repeat, they have seen the fish!”
“Awesome,” said Mongo. “This is gonna work, Riley!”
He shrugged casually. “I figured it might.”
“One of the guys is waving his golf club over his head,” reported Jake, “trying to get that waiter’s attention.”
“Another gentleman is using his cell phone to call somebody,” added Jamal. “My guess? The country club or the cops. Maybe both.”
“Well, then,” said Riley, “I guess we should make a phone call, too? Briana: you’re on!”
“Nyes, Riley. But of course.”
Briana switched on the pitch modulator, then pressed the speed dial for Mr. Kleinman’s office at the Environmental Protection Agency.
“Irving?” said Briana when Mr. Kleinman answered. “Nyes, Prescott Paxton here. Hate to bother you, old chap, but something fishy is going on over at my country club.”
Briana broke out the ice-cold juice boxes. Riley tore open a tube of Oreos and passed it around. Jake popped open a bag of popcorn and shared it with Jamal.
Secluded in the shadows of the trees, Riley and his crew had front-row seats for the most entertaining golf-course comedy since Caddyshack.
Within an hour, a crowd of twenty, maybe thirty agitated adults stood around the water hazard, pointing at the dead fish, holding their noses, making stinky-cheese faces, looking for someone to blame.
Sheriff Brown showed up and barked a bunch of orders into a squawking walkie-talkie.
Next to arrive, maybe ten minutes later, was Mr. Kleinman from the EPA. He was toting an aluminum briefcase, which he snapped open to extract some glass tubes and rubber gloves.
Finally, Mr. Paxton arrived.
“This. Is. So. Awesome!” said Briana.
“We saw a wrong and righted it,” said Riley.
“It’s what we do, man,” said Jamal proudly. “It is what we do.”
Now Mr. Paxton was on his cell phone yelling at someone.