5~

Bucky, the deputy who worked closest to Sheriff Stone, picked up the phone that rang on his desk, later that afternoon.

"Hello, Crystal Cove Police. Deputy Buchanan, speaking."

"Hi, there," said the distaff voice on the other end. "I'm going to be a teen driver soon, and I'm probably going to be in a lot of accidents. Where do I go when my car gets impounded by you guys?"

"Well, normally we'd bring it to our police impound lot," explained Bucky. "But with the Wacky Racers in town, Sheriff Stone had their cars brought over to Fortner's Impound while he questioned them."

"Are their cars still there?" asked the voice.

"No, they got them back when they were released. The only car that's still there is the Crimson Haybaler."

"Thanks," Marcie said, and then hung up.

"Wait. Who is this?" Bucky asked, when the conversation ended abruptly. He knew something just happened that he should have been on top of, but he found himself thoroughly confused.

"What just happened?"

Under the fluorescent lighting, amidst the shelves of machined parts, wiring, tools, electronic components, lubricants, and cast-off junk, Jason sat on his stool, and peered over the magnifying lamp, studying the tortured remnants of the car parts spread all over the work table.

He carefully took apart surviving housings and casings to see if there were any labels, stamps, or stenciling that would make identifying the components easier.

Like Marcie's lab, his family's workshop was a sturdy facility set up in the backyard, however, the projects that came out of here were mechanical and electronic in nature.

Jason had separated the smaller parts that were twisted by the explosion, and focused on the relatively larger pieces, of which, three were dominant.

"Why does this look familiar?" he mused, when he set aside a fist-sized motor, connected to the twisted end of what was left of a hinged metal arm.

He then looked at the other object, flat, boxy, and burned, with rainbow-colored wiring, melted at the ends, trailing out.

He brought the lamp in close to the edge of what looked like a label, or very thin metal plaque. The partial words "M recei," on top of the other partial words "Ode mod," were all that survived and all he could make out.

Putting that down, he picked up the last piece and studied it. There was a large lens at one end of it, dark and cracked, and the body of the device was ripped in half, the other end, lost.

"Well, it's a camera. That wasn't too hard to figure out," he surmised. "Wonder what it was doing in the car."

Looking inside, he examined the guts that remained. Narrow, half-melted motherboards and wiring, plastic and metal linkages, up front, rigged to small, self-lubricating motors.

"Looks like the servos made it, at least," Jason mused again. And then he froze.

"Servo!" he yelled aloud. "That's what the motor is, but to what? No, it's too big for windshield wipers. Heck, the Mean Machine has no wipers. And what does it all have to do "M recei. Ode mod?" What is that, a foreign language?" Then a though hit him. "Wait a minute."

He went back to the second thing in his investigation, the boxy, wired object.

Looking once more at the strange words on the plaque, he took his thumbnail and scrapped softly along the words, until he could see the words "receiver" on top, and "Pulse code," below.

"So, that's what it is!" Jason crowed. "It's either an FM, or an AM radio receiver with pulse code modulation!

The lights went out, and the workshop was in sudden darkness.

His cheer went away as he fumbled around the worktable, feeling for the emergency flashlight that hung off a hook above the table.

"Man, why do we always have electrical problems whenever one of us uses the workshop?" he groused. "I bet Edison or Tesla didn't have troubles like this."

Remembering where the light was hung, Jason reached for the wall above the table, just as light bloomed from behind him.

"Thanks, Mom," he sighed relievedly, as Dick Dastardly's ghost rose from the darkness of the floor. "Don't worry, I'll check the fuse box."

The ghost's menacing laughter boomed in the small building, and Jason spun to face the spirit, goggle-eyed.

"Where are the parts to my car?" Dick asked in a wail, blocking Jason's path to the doorway. "Who keeps me from my rest?"

"Not again," Jason sobbed, as he backed against the table.

"No! My car is not complete!" he yelled.

For the first time since running into the apparition, Jason didn't display abject terror in its presence. Confusion had taken its place.

"Huh? What about your car?"

"My parts are missing!" the Racer cried out. "I cannot rest without them! WHERE ARE THE REST?"

Jason almost laughed with enlightenment. He heard every word back at SmartyMart, verbatim.

"Antarctica?" he said, experimentally. Then he waited a beat.

"Where is Marcie Fleach?"

Without another word, Jason scoped up a ratchet wrench, and flung it hard at the spirit of Dick Dastardly.

The wrench deflected off of the Racer's midsection, instead of passing through it, with a metallic thunk.

The ghost started the wail it gave when it charged Jason in the store, but now it resembled a croak of defeat, as the shade wavered, flickered, and finally winked out of existence, bringing back the deep dark.

Jason breathed easier. "That was weird, with a capital weird!" he sighed, fumbling forward for the doorway.

The door opened, releasing sunlight into the workshop.

Jason shielded his eyes from the sudden glare, and when he recovered, he looked to find a Drone hovering quietly, inches from his nose.

With a gasp, he leaped backwards and fell on his corpulent rump.

His mother stepped in from the backyard, looking down on her son, wondering why he was so jumpy lately.

"Jason, why are you playing with your souvenir Dick Dastardly Drone in the dark?"

Jason worked his way off the floor, and then reached out for the flying machine to turn it off. He saw a panel in the back. Reaching for a flathead screwdriver from the table, he soon pried the panel free, saw a fat button marked Off, and pressed it. The propeller slowed to a stop, and the inert Drone fell into his arms.

"Sorry, Mom. It's been a really crazy day," he said while he examined the "souvenir" more closely.

"Why was the Drone in here?" he asked. "I had it in my room."

"Well, it was covered up in that sheet and looked like a small animal sleeping under there, so I put in the workshop, where it would do no harm," she explained.

Her son rolled his eyes at that. Scaring him to death, and it was doing no harm.

"Thanks, Mom," said Jason.

"Your welcome, Sweetie," said Mrs. Wyatt. "Now, hurry up with what you're doing, so you can go and do your homework. Sundial is not the kind of place for slackers, y'know?"

Jason was confused. "Sundial?"

"Oh, I forgot to tell you. That man from Sundial called you again. Uh, Doctor...Spring, that's it. He wanted to talk to you. I think he might be interested in you for a future spot in that think tank," she said, walking back to the house. "I wonder if they have a summer internship?"

Alone again, Jason held the Drone in his hands, grateful that this part of the mystery was solved, at least.

"I gotta tell Marcie about this." he said to himself. "Right after I change underwear."

The chain-link fence surrounding Fortner's Impound, one of only two privately owned lots in town, developed a wide hole near a camera-blind side of the lot, courtesy of one of Marcie's acid vials.

Sporting an old domino mask from an erstwhile Halloween, Marcie was confidant that any camera that saw her moving in the lot, would not get a clear shot of her for identification.

Keeping low, she cruised like a shark between the lanes of econo-boxes, junkers, and the odd SUV, searching for one car in particular. One that would stick out anywhere, but an aeronautical museum.

Marcie stuck her head out from the middle of one lane and heard something that gave her pause.

Sleeping under the front bumper of the car that started the line up of cars on the right side of the lane she emerged from, was a large, lean dog. Curled up and dreaming, the guard dog kicked out absently, occasionally, threatening to wake himself up.

Marcie eased back into the shelter of the lane, then reached into her wool jacket to check if she had everything she needed for this venture.

Thin, green vials of acid, a penlight, a magnifying lens, Discourager capsules, a small ball of twine, a small roll of duct tape, a Swiss Army knife, a pair of tweezers, a thin, pointed metal probe that looked like a dental scrapping tool, and a plastic storage bag filled with tiny storage baggies for evidence collection.

All there, she thought, although, I might have done better to check before I came here.

Quietly, she backtracked her way out from between the cars and mentally plotted a new course through the lot.

Then, she spotted red from the edge of her vision. She turned to see what looked like an old bi-plane sitting in a rusty, weed-carpeted corner of the lot.

Creeping towards it, Marcie sighed in relief that she found the Crimson Haybaler without too much difficulty.

Wasting no time, she went to the front of the vehicle, carefully undoing the latches that held the Haybaler's hood closed, and then, with slow care, she opened the hood.

Marcie gave a moment to admire the complexity of the powerful motor block. It was as much a hybrid of technology as the rest of the aerocar. Jason would have been impressed.

She put her musings aside, and leaned into the depths of the Haybaler, penlight in hand.

Ignoring any and all hardware that was bolted, welded, or glued, Marcie concentrated her search only on components that were wired to the car in any way. Everything looked suspect. The battery, the motors to the windshield wipers, the air conditioning, every electronic device, even the horn was checked under her inquisitive eyes, as she parted conduits and blazed a trail deeper in that electrical jungle.

Then, behind a loose curtain of wiring, her light shined on something she hadn't seen before. A light gray metal box nestled far against the clutch and its scattershield.

Marcie reached for the device, going so far in, that her rear end was all that was visible and stuck in the air, while the rest of her squeezed and angled downward among the parts.

With her penlight held in her teeth, she gripped and pulled at the boxy object, shimmying it out of its hiding place. It finally came out, trailing wiring from its lower side.

Grunting, she bore her uncomfortable position to check the device from side to side. In tiny lettering on a small label, it proclaimed that it was, indeed, a transmitter.

Marcie sighed in frustration. If this was just a run-of-the-mill radio component, then where was the incriminating part? Where was the detonator that did the dirty deed? She began to ease the part back where she found it.

Maybe the police already took it out, as evidence, she thought glumly. If that were so, then it would be next to impossible for her to check it out for clues.

Her mind feebly tried to come up with alternative plans to find evidence that would exonerate the Red Max, when she spotted something on the boxy object that she found odd.

Running along the sides, close to the top of the component, Marcie could see a thin seam. At first, she thought it was from where the top of the transmitter was capped to the rest of the device by the manufacturer.

But, upon taking it out again, and inspecting it closer, she noticed that the top wasn't the exact same shade of gray as the rest of the part. It was slightly darker.

Grunting some more, she wiggled for some more comfort as she turned the device over in her hands, studying the seam. It didn't look clean, like it could have been, if the top had been machined into place.

Risking a fall into the engine assembly, Marcie reached into her inner jacket pocket for the magnifying glass.

Peering through it, she finally saw it. Along the seam, in random spaces, were hard, clear blisters. As if something had oozed from the tight space of the seam, then dried.

Setting the device aside, Marcie slid back out of the Haybaler, took out her metal probe, and one of her evidence baggies. Then, she took a deep breath, and dove back into the Haybaler's engine again.

Pulling the device out again, she propped it on a nearby car part, took the probe, and, while she held the baggie open, underneath, with her other hand, carefully scrapped around the seam, making sure to get a fair amount of the suspicious material into the baggie, along with some of the blisters, as well.

Then she backed herself out of the engine space, pocketed the evidence, straightened her clothes until satisfied, and turned to meet Dick Dastardly's ghost, balefully hovering above her.

Dick let out a sneering laugh, and Marcie waved her hands at him to keep quiet.

"Shhh! What are you trying to do? Wake up the dogs?" Marcie angrily hissed at him.

"You mean like this one?" Dick asked, pointing down, self-satisfied.

Marcie didn't even need to look down when she heard the low-frequency growl of the muscular, dark brown guard dog, slowly padding towards her, drool raining down from the exposed teeth.

Keeping her eyes on the beast, Marcie backed away slowly, making no quick or big arm movements to set the animal off.

She forced herself to remember the route she took to look for the Haybaler when she entered the lot, not daring to turn her head to navigate her way back to the hole she made in the fence, for fear that the head turn might be construed by the dog as sudden action on her part, leading to a fatal action on his.

And all the while, the ghost chuckled and floated, following along, while the dog stalked the retreating girl into the deadly range of the now-awake dog she avoided earlier, who stood, salivating, in front of the hole in the fence.

Marcie heard the growl of the dog behind her and froze, fear and desperation caressing her heart, icily.

Dick halted his slow procession with an air of satisfaction, when he saw Marcie caught between her possible killers.

He rose higher in the evening sky, laughing ever louder, and before he flew off into the distance, he crowed malevolently, "Now, you'll pay!"

"I wonder how Dad's gonna react when he finds out his only daughter was found in a dirty impound lot, mauled to death by dogs?" she asked to herself, in an effort to calm down, while she watched Dick depart. "I don't think he'd take it too well."

Slowly, she reached into her inside jacket pockets to look for her Discourager capsules, ready-to-break spheres filled with a pressurized combination of capsaicin, and artificially produced mercaptans, the active ingredient in skunk odor, that she would use to discourage pursuit and effect an escape.

She suddenly felt doubly discouraged, however, to find only one of the spheres in her pocket.

She took it out with a sigh, and rolled it in her fingers, thinking hard of a way to get past the dogs. Meanwhile, the dog in front of her kept advancing, driving her closer to his partner.

"Okay, Marcie, here's your dilemma," she pondered aloud, nervously, fighting against the encroaching terror she felt. "You have a killer dog behind you, and another, in front of you, and knowing that you might run into dogs tonight, you only brought one Discourager capsule with you. What do you do?"

The dog behind her snarled and began to walk to her, the two pack hunters closing the distance, eager to tear into her.

"This," she said, closing her eyes.

She held her breath, palmed the capsule in her hand, and then threw it down hard on the ground, by her feet, shattering the sphere open.

Marcie disappeared in a widening cloud of the worst smelling chemicals she had ever concocted.

Later on, in the night, passersby in the neighborhood wondered why the two dogs in Old Man Fortner's lot kept howling and whining in marked discomfort...

The spectroscope s monitor flickered and gave a noticeable hum, an indicator of its advance age, but it quieted once Marcie gave it a sharp rap with her knuckles.

She raised the test tube she had been working with, observantly, softly swirling the clear liquid inside, to mix it and see its reaction.

When it ready, she stopped mixing.

Admitting a drop of the chemical into the spectroscope, she waited while the elderly machine broke down the substance into its constituent components.

In a few minutes, a graph flickered on the screen. What she saw surprised her.

Ethyl-2-cyanoacrylate...

"Super Glue?" she said to herself in amazement. Then, her cell phone chimed.

"Hello?"

"Marcie?" Jason's voice asked from his side. "I tried to call you earlier. Why didn't you pick up?"

"I was in the shower. What's up?"

"I figured it out!" he told her. "I know what the parts are."

Marcie congratulated herself for successfully trusting the task to him. "What are they?" she asked.

"Well," Jason began. "I sorted out the least pertinent ones from the pile, and chose three components that really sang to me, y'know?"

Marcie could feel the long-windedness come on. "Jason? Facts only, please."

"Sorry about that. A blown-out servo, a torn half of a camera, and a radio receiver."

Marcie raised a troubled eyebrow. "Regular cars had servos and radios. So do racing cars, but their radios would be for communication. If the camera was mounted to shoot exteriors for the show, when it raced, those parts could be standard for the Double Zero.

"But they weren't!" Jason said quickly. "This radio receiver had a pulse width modulator built in, and was wired to the servo, which means that it was getting signals from outside the car to control it. You won't believe this, Marcie, but someone rigged the Mean Machine to be a giant radio controlled car!"

Marcie, now raised a hopeful eyebrow. "And you said one of the parts was a camera."

"Yeah."

"If it was blown forward of the blast, it might've been mounted in the front of the car, somewhere. That way, the controller could see ahead of the car when he drove it," she conjectured.

"Well, that's not all," Jason said. "Remember that Drone I was keeping in my room? Well, a little while ago, I was visited by the Ghost of Racers Present."

That bit of news sidetracked Marcie. And after she had just escaped him, herself...

"Dick came at you, again?"

Jason gave a cocky chuckle. "Yeah, but this time, I showed him who's boss."

"What did you do?"

"I threw a wrench at him!" the boy said, proudly. "It didn't go through him, it just bounced off, and when all was said and done, it turned out that he was my Drone!"

Marcie shook her head, incredulously. A major break in the case. Tonight was full of surprises. "Are you sure, Jason?"

"Sure, I'm sure. I checked it out, and it didn't look the same as the ones Dick used in the Nevada race, because this one had a projector with a sweet, high definition, 360-degree, lens reflection system. Top of the line. I'm talking-"

"Jason!" Marcie yelled, reminding him of the need to be succinct. She wondered if people felt that way about her, sometimes.

Of course not, she thought, dismissing such a foolish notion from her mind.

"Oh, yeah," Jason said, sheepishly, then continued. "Well, the point is that that ghost is a fake! It's just an image projected around one of these modified Drones, being flown by remote control. Probably by the same someone who was controlling the Mean Machine. So...do we take what we have to the police, now?"

Marcie didn't answer for several seconds. She was deep in thought about what was the next move to make.

She tilted her head in the direction of the lab's front door. A sound from the backyard was heard. Then she said, "Not yet. Now, we follow up. I'm working on a lead on my end. Examine the Drone for more clues."

If she was worried that Jason would have balked at having to continue to help her in her investigation, she was surprised again to find that he was already way ahead of her.

"Well, I did take it apart, and I found a hard drive," he told her.

Marcie raised a fist in triumph and honest appreciation of the boy. "That's great, Jason! Access that hard drive, and we might just blow this case wide open!"

Jason actually sounded excited to hear that. "Really? Okay, will do! See ya later!" he said, and then hung up.

She put her phone away.

Remembering her run-in with Dastardly earlier, and the sound she had just heard, Marcie reached for the bat.

Opening the door cautiously, she peeked her head out of the doorway, bat held high. No one was seen in the backyard, so, she tip-toed out of the lab.

From the corner of her eye, she noticed that a patch of the ground was darker by the side of her lab, a ways from the front door.

Looking down, she saw that the turf by the wall was dug up, covering the otherwise, brighter grass.

"This was recent," she said to herself, crouched by the small mound, and feeling the moist earth pinched between her fingers.

As she stood up, Marcie saw a muddy stain on the wall. She would have ignore it, if not for the fact that the stain had a specific shape. A hoof.

"A hoof print?" Marcie pondered. That was curious. Unless someone had a goat in the neighborhood that she wasn't aware of...

Taking out her penlight, Marcie pointed it at the lawn, and saw that the mud had trailed away from the mound, and out in the direction of the path that ran past her house and led out front.

Taking measured steps, she followed the trail out onto the curb in front of the house. It continued down the street, and Marcie held a heated debate inside as to whether she should follow it further, leading her into a trap.

The relative proximity between her house and where the trail might end, made her decide to chance it and proceed.

Thankful that the streetlights provided enough illumination to see, without flashing her light and calling attention to herself, she turned off the penlight.

The mud was thinning, making it harder to track, but enough dirt laid before her that she followed until she finally reached where the specks of earth ended.

Marcie found herself staring a yard or two from the closed rear of a parked gray van.

Creeping as nonchalantly forward as she could, Marcie approached the front passenger window and took a sharp glance at it. No one was there, or in the driver's seat.

She was about to wonder what was in the van that had came from her backyard, when the booming sound of someone walking through the back of the van came forth.

"They know I'm here," she whispered to herself, fearfully.

It was only then, that she realized that the van was parked a fair distance from her home. If she tried to run now, she would be spotted and pursued, possibly caught.

However, if she could communicate to the would-be attackers that she was armed, they might hesitate, or even re-think the attack.

Gulping to keep her throat from drying, she brandished her weapon, and walked over to the rear with great trepidation.

Peeking around the van to see the closed rear van doors, she paused, puzzled. She swore that she heard someone coming out of the vehicle. Now, nothing.

Her curiosity getting the better of her, she stepped over to the doors, pondering what had happened, and by the time she remembered that she wanted to return home, it was too late.

From around the passenger side of the van, a glowing Dick Dastardly walked around to face a shocked Marcie Fleach.

Raising the bat in his direction, Marcie gave her warning, but didn't look at him directly. She looked around the immediate area, as if searching for someone hidden.

"Wherever you are," Marcie called out. "you should know that I know that this is just a Drone."

She waved the bat at Dick. "It's been modified to project an image of this ghost. It's not real."

Behind Marcie, the rear door closest to her swung open fast, and a strong arm reached out and clutched the startled girl's shoulder with such force, that the bat dropped from her hand.

She was pulled into the dark interior of the van, and then the doors slammed closed again. Then, suddenly, the van began to quake with the sounds and motions of hard, brutal struggle, and, strangely enough, pig squeals.

Then the van settled down and grew quiet again.

The doors opened, and Dick regarded the darkness inside the van with a warm smile.

"Was she a problem for you, my dear?" he asked.

A woman's voice with a deep southern drawl was heard coming out of that darkness.

"Whew! She was feisty, but no great shakes. She had nice hair, tho," she said, accompanied by the soft sound of bare feet padding towards the exit.

Those bare feet stepped out of the van, attached to the strong, voluptuous, frizzy-haired body of the female hillbilly, who rotated her right arm to work the kinks out, in satisfaction.

"Nuthin' like a little wrasslin' to put a gal in thuh mood fer sum...mayhem," Daisy Mayhem said with a rapacious grin.

She walked casually over to "Dick", held him close, and they kissed, deep and hard, while in the van, her patch-eyed, pet pig, Sooey, stood watch over a unconscious Marcie Fleach.