The Island of Dragons (Rockpools Book 4) by Gregg Dunnett (best books for 7th graders .txt) 📕

I just sit there, hyper aware of her hand, and what it’s doing.

It’s only a short journey, and Lily pays the fare, then runs lightly up to her front door. She leans in and unlocks it, and we both go inside. It’s quiet inside. For some reason I don’t expect it to be. I expect to see James and Oscar, playing snooker in the billiard room. But when I glance in there, it’s empty, a game half-finished on the green baize.

“You want to do it on the table?” Lily sees me looking, and I’m almost terrified that she thinks I’m serious.

“No!”

“Then come on. Upstairs.”

So instead I follow her. It’s only the second time I’ve been upstairs here, the first time was with Eric, but he wouldn’t let us go into her bedroom, but this time we go straight in, and Lily kicks off her shoes. Then she goes into the bathroom, turns on the light, and seconds later I hear the shower running. Then she reappears. She approaches me slowly. The light still isn’t on in the bedroom, but with the light from the bathroom I can see the painting that James and Lily talked about. The nude one. I can’t remember if it was a Pissarro or a Picasso. But I try to, because it’s like I need something to think about instead of what’s happening. Lily is standing a foot away from me, and then she reaches down and pulls her sweater up, and off over her head. I see her white stomach appear, and then the white of her bra. She pulls her arms clear, and tosses it aside. She breathes, I see how her chest rises and falls as she does so. Then she undoes her jeans, and pushes them down over her hips, until they’re scrunched up on the floor. She steps out of them. Then she turns around, but still looking at me, she walks towards the bathroom and the shower, just wearing her underwear.

“Well Billy? Are you coming in with me?”

And I don’t think I should tell you anymore.

25

Two Months Later

“Billy Wheatley?” The words came both from Special Agent West, and the manager of the Fonchem facility, Claire Watson, who had been listening in from where she sat on the sofa, in the hours after the destruction of the bomb.

Lieutenant Smith, who had just revealed the name the police database had linked to the fingerprint on the broken shard of pressure cooker body frowned, not sure who to turn to next, so it was West who turned to the manager.

“You know that name?”

“Yes – I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be listening in,” she said, getting up. But she continued anyway. “He’s behind this… I guess you’d call it a campaign, against the facility expanding. He runs this website, and puts up posters everywhere. They’re all about some kind of fish thing. They’re called sea-dragons.”

“Sea-dragons? What the hell are they?” Black asked.

“I don’t know exactly. But they’re rare, and he claims they live here in the bay, and the expansion somehow threatens them.”

“So he’s an enviro-nut?”

“I don’t know exactly… I guess…” Watson continued. Then the lieutenant turned to West.

“You know him too?”

She took a moment to answer, and with an apologetic smile to the manager, she pulled Smith and her partner away so they could speak in private.

“Yeah. I do. I used to work for the police, before I joined the Agency. This one time I got sent over here to work on a case of a missing teenager. A girl called Olivia Curran, you don’t remember it?”

“The Curran Case? Sure, I remember it. Biggest case we had here in years.” The Lieutenant screwed up his face, and then realization dawned. “Oh shit. That was you? You ended holed up in a cave with the woman who killed Curran, and Wheatley and his dad?”

“Yeah. That was me. His dad – Sam Wheatley – he got shot, and Billy and I had to swim him out, when the tide came in.” She stopped, and her face was more screwed up than ever. “I got… I got stuck, in the entrance to the cave, and Billy came back to rescue me. He was only eleven. He saved my life.”

“Yeah, I remember the case. I was just a deputy back then.” The Lieutenant paused a second too, thinking. He went on.

“You maybe heard, but Billy Wheatley hasn’t exactly avoided trouble since then. He formed this – detective agency thing, a few years back – started out as kids’ stuff, but he ended up uncovering his high school principal as a murderer. Then just recently, he got mixed up in some drugs gang.”

West stared in amazement. “Jesus. I didn’t know.”

“Oh yeah. He’s well known on the island.”

“And you’re sure it was his fingerprints, on the shards of metal from the explosion?”

“That’s what the database threw up.” They stared at each other.

“How old would he be now?”

The Lieutenant checked on the file on his cell. “Seventeen.”

West’s brow stayed deeply furrowed, calculating. “So he’s… what? He’s still in high school? How’s he gonna be bombing facilities across the whole east coast?”

“I have literally no idea. But that kid, I wouldn’t put it past him to find a way.”

West dropped her head into her hands. “No, there has to be some mistake here.”

“Are you kidding me?” Black interrupted her. “We’ve been hunting this motherfucker for the last ten months, and the first solid piece of evidence we get, you want to excuse it away? Let’s go nail him.”

“I’m not saying… We should talk to him. Of course we should. But this… It can’t be right. He’s a kid.”

“He’s seventeen. You just said so yourself. And the Lieutenant here said he was mixed up in drugs a while back. Come on Jess, you realize every piece of shit we end up busting was once a sweet little kid. With big doe eyes and…”

“Alright.” The sharpness of West’s voice stopped him. “I just think… I think we need to go in cautious