Crystal Blue (Buck Reilly Adventure Series Book 3) by John Cunningham (novels for beginners txt) 📕

here to help the Adoption AID people with their show on Jost Van Dyke.”

“Ha!” Bramble cried. “Assuaging years of guilt with charity work? That’s funny, Reilly, almost Dickensian. Now you’re just another broken-down has-been cluttering up my islands with get-rich-again schemes. I‘m so sick of you people. Americans and Down-islanders make a fortune hauling drugs while arms merchants peddle stolen guns to thugs and gangs that litter our shores with innocent victims. Pathetic.” He paused, the sneer on his face as vitriolic as I remembered it, if not worse. “And now you’re a charter pilot and salvage hunter! Here to help a charity try to change the world—”

“What are you doing to find John Thedford? Why are you wasting your time with me when you should have every available man out looking for him?”

“We’re looking for the actor—”

“And never mind about Thedford?”

Bramble held his stare, but there was something different in his eyes. A flicker.

“I want to call my attorney!”

He laughed. “You got the money for an attorney?”

“What am I being charged with!”

“Now who be da King, huh?”

“I did nothing but help Stanley Ober—”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about him.”

“The Adoption AID people need me—”

“They’re the reason you’re here.” He reached for the door.

I sprang up from the bed as he slammed the door shut.

“What am I being charged with, you miserable piece of shit!”

I paced the cell so fast I was practically running in circles, jumped over the toilet, screamed at the top of my lungs. I knew none of it was any use, but I was boiling mad and seething with frustration—jailed, kept from doing my job, no resources to fight back.

Finally I slumped against the back wall, where I slid down to the concrete floor. I sat with my head low and listened to the sounds that came through the window. I heard laughter and imagined Bramble leaving the building for home, thoroughly pleased with himself. I sat there for what seemed an hour.

“Charles Reilly, you in there?”

I jumped up. “Who is that out there?”

“Zachary,” the voice said. “Zachary Ober.”

Zachary Ober? What the—

“My father was Stanley Ober, the man who sold you the fake information about the Indian treasure.”

Oh sweet Jesus, now what?

“I NEED YOU TO help me find the treasure,” Zachary said.

“There was no treasure. Your father sold me a bogus map then got himself killed, which is—” I started to say it was why I was back here in jail, but Bramble said I had Adoption AID to thank. Why?

“My father was an immoral man,” Zachary said. “He said if you sell something once, you’ll eat a fine meal, but if you sell things again and again, you’ll eat abundantly.” He sighed. “I’m sorry for what you’ve been through, King Charles—”

“Forget King Charles, call me Buck if you don’t mind. I’m broke, stuck in a piss-coated jail cell, and nobody even knows where I am. I’m more like a jester than a king.”

I laid my head against the cold stone below the window.

“We can help each other—”

“How can you help me? Are you a magistrate?”

“I drive an ambulance, but I—”

For some reason his answer set me to laughing. I slid back down the wall again and sat on the floor.

“I’d pretend to be sick so you could rescue me, but Bramble wouldn’t give a shit.”

“When I heard on the scanner you were arrested, I came right over. It’s a sign, I’m certain. You can help me find the treasure.”

“Not if I can’t get out of here. And I told you, there is no treasure.”

He was quiet for a moment. I wondered if he believed me.

“Why’d you get arrested, anyway?”

“That’s a damned good question, Zach.”

Silence followed. Street noises, cackling birds, bleating goats, distant voices filled the void. I jumped up.

“You still out there, Zachary?”

“I’m here, um, Buck.”

“Listen, if you make a call for me, we can talk. Will you do that?”

He was quiet so long I thought he’d left.

“Buck, I believe you could help—”

“You get me out of here and I’ll listen to whatever you want to say. I can’t promise I’ll be able to help you, but I promise I’ll try. Okay?”

He agreed and I repeated the number I now had memorized. He didn’t have a pen, but after three tries he could repeat it back to me. He promised to call when he got home.

“I’ll be waiting for you when you’re released,” he said.

“Last time I was here for a month, so don’t hold your breath.”

A crack of thunder was followed by what sounded like a torrent of rain. Zach must have fled, as he no longer responded to my calls. Along with the rain came the fetid smell of manure. The goats I’d heard earlier grazed in a field behind the jail, and I remembered from my last stay that every time it rained the stench of goat feces lasted until the heat of the sun evaporated the moisture.

Night brought vivid dreams that woke me in a sweat, grateful I couldn’t remember them. The sound of the rain had ceased, the smell of dung worse than I remembered. In fact, it smelled as if the goats had been throwing up booze.

I rolled over and realized why.

A drunk was passed out on the floor near my bunk. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t waked up when they threw him in here. A pool of vomit circled his head, and had I not heard him breathing heavily I might have thought he’d drowned in his puke. He faced away from me, so all I could see were rows of untended dreadlocks spread out like snakes from Medusa’s scalp.

I curled back into a ball, closed my eyes, and next thing I knew it was dawn.

When I glanced at the floor, the drunk was gone—

“Good morning,” a voice said.

I leapt to my feet to find the man who’d been passed out on the floor standing by the window.

“Sorry if I woke you,” he said. “I been trying to wash