6~
"Idiots," the voice growled from the cell phone's speaker. "You told me that the kids were being led in the wrong direction with their investigation."
"Yes, they are," "Dick" sighed in his phone, as he sat in the van's driver's seat. He called soon after Daisy had her fun with Marcie, and wanted some advice on how to proceed with this little snag in the operation.
"Then why did Daisy Mayhem attack the girl?" the voice asked in a hiss.
"Dick" didn't know how long he didn't answer, his mind was too occupied with what the voice said. He left that little detail out of his report to protect Daisy.
"How did you know-"
The voice cut him off. "I have my sources."
Daisy, seated in the front passenger seat, heard everything through the phone, and wanted her say.
"Look here," Daisy called out to the phone. "ya don't have ta yell down his neck fer sumthin' I done did! I fergot thuh plan, dat's all. It's so durn complicated-like. It's my fault, if ya wanna yell at sumbody, not his!"
"Dick" put his hand on her shoulder, understandingly, to calm her.
"We agreed that it was the best course of action, since she saw Daisy," "Dick" admitted, seeing that there was no sense in lying to someone who already knew so much of what was happening, so closely.
"She wouldn't have seen your girlfriend, at all, if Miss Split Ends hadn't attacked her in the first place," the voice countered back. "Just another mess I'll have to clean up."
"Dick" saw Daisy bristle from the corner of his eye. He brought up a hand to calm her down. He already had enough on his plate.
"No," he told the voice. "We'll clean this mess up, ourselves."
"How?"
"I'll answer that question with a question," "Dick" said, glancing knowingly at Daisy. After being together for so many years, she already knew what he wanted, and knew that she was more than capable of giving it to him. "How can there be a mystery, if there's no one around to solve it?"
In a dark, well-appointed hotel room, a man, sitting by a desk, hung up the phone.
In the shadows, he thought. He was getting close to his goal. To have his so-called "partners" trip him up before he reached the finish line was unacceptable.
"You were right," the man said from his desk, in the dimness. "He and the others can't be trusted to serve me without bungling everything in the process. Not to worry, though. I can see that you, my friend, have great foresight."
Stepping into the brighter half of the room, Mumbly stood in front of the desk and snickered sadistically.
"Betraying the others will make you an excellent partner in my most profitable enterprise, yet," the man said, satisfied.
For Marcie, realization came to her in stages.
First, she realized that her head hurt, then, that she was on the floor of her lab, then, that she was bound...well in duct tape, her hands, behind her back, a strip across her mouth, and a band of it, wrapped tightly around her ankles and knees.
Then, she noticed the wide-bottomed flask hanging above her. Tied to its neck was simple sewing thread that supported it and ran through metal eyes that were screwed into the ceiling, and below, to the lab's front door frame.
It looked like a trap to Marcie's increasing awareness, and upon seeing her wrestling opponent playfully pluck the thread running down one side of the doorframe, and then across it, at ankle level, she knew that it was.
Daisy Mayhem bent over by the threshold, testing the tautness of her tripwire, when she noticed Marcie stirring on the floor.
"Oh, yor awake, den, Sleepy Bones?" Daisy asked mockingly. "Thuh ol' Sowbelly Sleeper hold gets 'em ev'ry time, but I new ya'd wake up soon 'nuff."
Marcie ignored her and kept glancing nervously at the hanging flask.
"Oh, ya see da bottle up dere, huh?" Daisy asked again. "Ya got a right ta be worryin' 'bout dat, girly. I've been itchin' ta try a trap like dis one here."
Satisfied that the trap was set up correctly, Daisy walked back inside, leaned against a counter, and gestured to the laboratory glassware around her, while she gloated at Marcie.
"I takes it from all dese contrapshuns and so forth, dat ya like to mess 'round wit chemicals. Well, shoot, so do I! Guess I takes after Daddy Mayhem, thuh bes' durn 'shiner in all o' Whooten Holler. Anywho, whutcha got dere is whutcha call fulminate o' Mercury."
Marcie shivered in fear when she heard the chemical's name. Daisy saw that shiver, and gave one of her own, in murderous delight.
"Oh, ya herd o' dat b'fore! Well, dat's good. Don't wantcha goin' ta Saint Peter wit'out ya knowin' whut done ya in," Daisy told her with an easy smile. "But, yor one o' dose brainy types, so I suppose dere's no reason ta tell yew, of all people, whut's gonna happen, if, say, one o' your kinfolk, was to walk in here and break dat line runin' 'cross yor door."
She stood and walked back towards the door.
"It's a durn shame dat ya won't be 'round when we gets our own TV show," she said slyly. "But, who knows? Meybe dey gots TV in Heaven. I hear dey gots great recepshun up dere!"
Cackling at her own dark joke, Daisy Mayhem took her leave of the booby-trapped lab.
The moment the door closed, Marcie went to work.
The thought of her father looking for her and opening the door to the lab, gave her the impetus of a lioness, as she angled her body on the floor and awkwardly rolled towards the cabinet that held her sink.
When she reached the cabinet's base, she rolled to her side, resting on her upper arm and elbow. She then slowly extended her legs, shaping her body into a V, and then, with precious little leverage and with great difficulty, rocked back and forth from her elbow to her buttocks, harder and harder, until she had built up enough momentum to rock upright into a sitting position.
Marcie leaned against the cabinet and wearily sighed. The first stage of getting out of this death trap was almost compete. If she could get free before anyone came to the door, everything was copasetic.
A sound from one of the open lab windows made Marcie's heart freeze. Footsteps in the grass.
Approaching footsteps...
Winslow's?
"Mmm! MMMmmm!" Marcie moaned in warning.
"Marcie? Is that you, in there?" came Jason's voice from outside.
Why was he here? She couldn't understand how he knew where she lived, and fretted that his first visit to her house would be his last.
"MMmm! MMmm! MMMmm!"
Even though she knew that he couldn't possibly make heads or tails of her frantic moaning, she, in good conscience, had to try.
Marcie could hear Jason walking closer to the door. Nothing was stopping him. But maybe she could.
The lab's door swung open from the inside, but Daisy rigged the tripwire to run low across the doorway from the outside. If she could somehow stand up, she could hop over to the door, and buttress up against it, keeping him from pushing it open.
Slapping her feet flat on the floor, she bent her knees, pushed into the traction of her shoes' soles, and leaned her back against the cabinet's door, inching her way up by clumsy increments, and hoping closer to the cabinet.
Then it happened. She finally stood tall against the sink, still bound, but now able to move more freely. The doorknob started to twitch and turn.
Marcie gave another moan, more frantic than before, praying that something would take Jason's attention away from entering, but that seemed so unlikely now. Her death and his was imminent.
All she could do was frown under her gag and think about the things she would never get to do now. Go to college, invent Super Helium and be rich, tell her father good-bye, find and tell her mother, hello again.
Tell Velma that she loved her...
The door swung open and Jason's foot stepped in, snapping the tripwire and releasing the tension of the thread. Marcie looked up to see the flask drop, and then she closed her eyes, not wanting to see the terrible impact and flash.
In the darkness of her closed eyes, Marcie's brain counted away the seconds that soon became too long for a heavy flask to fall.
She timidly opened her eyes again, to see the flask hanging down to the level of her face, swaying and twisting slowly from the sudden cessation of its descent.
Despite the close call, Marcie's heart was hammering. If the thread had broken when it stopped...
Looking over to the door, she saw Jason standing in the threshold with a perplexed look in his bespectacled eyes. Below, one of his feet standing on the broken thread, holding the flask up, for now.
"MMmmmm!" she moaned.
Jason, misinterpreting, leaned into stepping through the threshold. "Why are you taped up like that, Marcie? You want me to come in?"
"MMMMMmmMMMM!" Marcie screamed into her gag.
Jason stopped his action and leaned back into his previous standing position, his foot never leaving the thread.
"What?" he asked, dismayed.
Marcie nodded to the flask that hung like the Sword of Damocles. Then she broadly nodded to below him.
Confused, Jason looked at the flask, and then down to his foot on the thread. He didn't know what was going on, but the connection between the two concerned him.
"Is it bad?"
Marcie vigorously nodded.
"The flask is bad?"
Another nod.
"And you don't want it to fall?"
She nodded again, grateful that the severity of the moment had finally dawned on him.
"Wh-What do I do? I can't walk in and untie you. If I lift my foot, that flask falls." Then an idea hit him. "Wait! Can you hop over here?"
Marcie twisted into position, jumping as far away, per hop, as she could from the deadly bottle.
When she stopped in front of Jason, he wasted no time. He reached over and tore the tape of her mouth in a single, painful move.
"Yeow!" Marcie yelled. "You did that on purpose!"
"No, I didn't," Jason defended. "But just be glad I showed up, and not someone like your dad."
Any complaints she might have had brewing, died quickly, instead of, she realized, her. The entire bloodline of the Crystal Cove Fleaches could have been snuffed out that night. She felt death starting to fade from behind her shoulder, just then.
Marcie bowed her head in honest gratitude. "You're right, Jason. Thank you."
Jason began to beam. "Wow! Thanks from "Bossy Marcie," twice in one night? I almost feel like playing the lottery," he joked. "Just kidding. You're welcome. Oh, and about what happened at my house? Truce, okay?"
Marcie, in spite of the death trap she still stood in, smiled. "Truce. Now, let me deal with that flask, so we can solve this mystery."
"Okay, let's get you outta this."
Marcie turned around, allowing Jason to find the end of the tape wrapped around her wrists, and unravel it.
Hands finally freed, she hoped away from the doorway, sat down, and went to work, unrolling the binds from her knees, and then finally, her ankles.
"What are you going to do with that flask?" he asked.
Marcie walked over to the hanging bottle and gently held the bottom of it. "I'm gonna do to this flask, what everyone does to me after a date. Let it down, easy. Okay, you can step off it, now."
Keeping his eyes on Marcie securely holding the flask, Jason took weight off of his foot and slowly lifted it off the thread, as though he was removing it from a defeated land mine.
Marcie eased the bottle on the counter by the sink, but wasn't planning on pouring the contents down the drain, which would have been dangerous, since she could see that there was a large concentration of pale brown powder filling the bottom of the glass. Whoever that hillbilly woman was, she was a busy, if not psychotic, little bee.
Instead, she changed her mind, and took the flask off the counter, gently placing it into an old safe that sat in a far corner of the room, that she used to store hazardous chemicals in. With a thankful sigh, she spun the tumbler dial.
"Is it...over?" Jason asked quietly.
"It's over," she confirmed. "Why did you come over tonight, Jason. I thought you didn't know where I lived."
GPS tracker app on my cell phone," he said. "And I came because I saw something on that Drone's hard drive that you're not gonna believe. I brought it with me, so we can check it out."
"Does it have anything to do with Dick Dastardly?" Marcie asked. "I'm fairly certain that all of this points to him, somehow."
"Yeah! How did you know?"
"Well, they are his Drones, after all," said Marcie. "We're getting close, Jason. Tonight proves it."
"Close to getting killed, is more like it," Jason fretted under his breath from the threshold. "Anyway, what was in that flask?"
"Hg(CNO)2. Mercury fulminate," Marcie said, simply, staring at the flimsy thread that held their lives just then. "If that had hit the floor, it would have put us in orbit."
Hearing a thud, she turned to see Jason, fainted dead away, in the threshold.
"Go home, Marlene," Sheriff Stone sighed upon seeing her in his office the following day.
"It's Marcie," Marcie corrected. "and I need to see the video tape footage from the hotel where the Wacky Racers are staying."
Stone tapped a thick finger on the top of his desk, his patience waning quickly.
"I have to prepare a security detail to guard those fender-freaks at the Convention Center, today," Stone grumbled. "You are wasting your time on this, Melody, and the only thing worse than that, is wasting mine."
"Please, Sheriff! This mystery is almost solved, I know it. I just need to see the tape to confirm my suspicions. What's it going to hurt? If I'm wrong, you can laugh in my face, as you kick me out of the station. If I'm right about this, you'll look like a hero." Marcie noticed that she didn't say that he would actually be a hero, but then, neither did he. "It's a win-win scenario."
Kicking her out of his station was already appealing to him in ways he only began to fathom, and laughing in her face while that happened, for all of her vexations to him, was just too lovely. Humoring her was such a pittance to pay...
"Alright!" Stone groused. "Just to get you out of my hair, and put this nonsense to bed, once and for all, I'll let you see the video tape, just so you can see what I already saw. A guilty man."
Turning in his chair, he looked to Bucky, who was filing folders in a file cabinet, nearby.
"Bucky, get the hotel parking lot footage from Evidence and put it in the Scanalyzer," Stone ordered him.
"Yes, sir, Sheriff!" said the deputy with his usual perk. He left them, and then returned with a labeled videotape box. The three of them, then left for the analyzer room.
Inside, Bucky pulled the tape free from the box and inserted it into the slot of a large, squarish device that resembled an industrial sized VCR, that sat underneath a color television.
He then took a seat behind a desk that had a specialized keyboard with a miniature joystick built into the side, next to an unused headset. Cables ran from the back of the keyboard to the back of the video analyzer device.
"If whatever you think is on this tape, the police Scanalyzer should find it," the sheriff scoffed. "But, I doubt it."
Bucky hit the power button, and the TV screen glowed into resolution, showing them a black and white image of a parking lot, shot from overhead, looking down on the two rows of Racers' cars, and illuminated with the spotty lighting of widely spaced, flickering, outdoor lamps.
"There! There's our perp," Bucky announced upon seeing a shadowy, strangely large-headed figure slowly entering the lot.
"Is it me," Marcie said, perplexed. "or does your perp have a Mohawk?" She was shushed by the sheriff for her trouble.
The towering Creepy Coupe and the first row of parked cars cast heavy-to-slight shadows across the row of cars behind them, and the figure was strategically keeping himself as much in the shadows among the rear cars as he could.
Because the camera was situated behind the person, and at a high vantage point, no one in the room could make out a face. It made Marcie wonder how Stone could have thought such iffy evidence could be enough for an arrest. Then, she realized who made the arrest.
The figure, then made a move across the large, rear parked Convert-a-Car, a shadow jumped by it, and then the figure skipped into the darkness behind the forward parked colossus of the Army Surplus Special, stopped for another moment in its shade, then headed in a stroll towards the Mean Machine, his face still obscured, but his head, now normal sized.
Although the face was purposely angled away from sight, the camera could easily make out in the murky light, a man wearing a scarf, gloves, uniform jacket, jodhpurs and boots.
"See that?" Marcie asked, satisfied. "The man is wearing jodhpurs. Riding pants. The Red Max doesn't wear them.
Overhearing from the holding cell room, Max's voice unexpectedly called out, "Actually, Marcie, I vear them all der time."
Marcie followed Stone as he entered to the cell room. Max stood next to the bars, and lifted the lower end of his flight jacket, revealing the loose upper ends his blood-red jodhpurs.
Stone glanced at a chagrined Fleach, then returned to the video analysis room. "You're skating on thin ice, Missy."
"Wait, Sheriff!" Marcie pleaded. "I'm telling you we're missing something."
She looked at the freeze-framed image of the man and his outfit on the screen. It felt like it taunted her. Telling her that the answer was actually there, but she wouldn't be able to convince the skeptics in time.
One last play.
She stepped over to Bucky, and asked, "May I?"
Bucky glance over to Stone. "Sheriff?"
Stone decided to give Miss Fleach all the rope she'd ever need to hang herself. He shrugged and nodded his approval.
"Let her have a go at it. It's not like it changes anything," he said.
Bucky stood up and let her take his place at the keyboard, but she didn't rest her fingers on any of the keys, instead, she picked up the headset, plugged its cord into the back of the keyboard, and slipped the rig over her head.
"Could you turn the lights off, please?" she asked to Bucky, who complied.
In the dim room, Marcie concentrated on the screen.
"Rewind twelve seconds. Stop." she said into the headset's mic. The tape counter rapidly ticked backwards, and the tape rewound until it stopped on the figure moving behind the shadow of the Creepy Coupe.
"Play. Move in and enhance."
A white, square outline surrounded the image of the man, and then expanded him on screen. He was silhouetted against the darker cloak of the belfry's shade. His freakishly large head and face were severely indistinct, but the top of it looked like he was sporting the outline of a proud Mohawk.
She waited until the figure prepared to move across the Convert-a-Car. When he did, she told the Scanalyzer, "Pause and track seventy-five percent."
The figure froze mid-run just before he reached the high-tech vehicle, then he began to proceed with his jog in the dimness at extreme slow-motion.
Bronson scratched his head in both amazement and perplexity at Marcie's seeming mastery of the device.
"How do you know how to do that?" he asked, before Marcie shushed him for his trouble.
She kept her eyes glued, not on the man running a frame at a time, but on the white and chrome front half of the Convert-a-Car, shining brilliantly in the sparse lighting of the lot.
"There!" Marcie yelled, then ordered the device, "Pause and enhance!"
The man was frozen again, this time, caught in front of the Convert-a-Car by a sliver of lamplight peeking past the Compact Pussycat's umbrella, from up ahead. A sharp shadow stretched across Professor Pending's racer, creating a tall, yet crisp silhouette of the man's odd head against its bright surface.
"Grid." A white-lined, 12x8 square grid superimposed itself over the screen.
"Enhance eleven by four." The image on screen moved to the eleven by fourth square space and brought up the shadow to its maximum sharpness. Whoever the figure was, based on the shadow, it looked like he was wearing a bell on his head.
"Okay, gimme a hard copy," Marcie ordered the machine. From a thin slot on the face of the Scanalyzer, a high definition photograph of the shadow slid out for all to see.
Bucky turned the lights back on, as Marcie stood up and took the photo from the machine, holding it up to Stone.
"Look at the photo, Sheriff," she said. "Look at the shape of the shadow's head. That's not human. He's wearing some kind of helmet."
Stone shrugged at it. "So what? So does the Max guy."
"Max wears a flight helmet," Marcie pointed out. "This one is way too big to be that, and it's the wrong shape."
She put the picture down on a desk and, finding a piece of paper and a pen, drew the helmet-like shape on it. Then, she went back to Max's cell.
"Max, have you ever seen this helmet before?" she asked, passing the drawing through the bars to him.
Max peered at it, trying to remember. Then, he brightened with found memory.
"Ja! I haff seen this before."
Stone, joining Marcie in the cell room, skeptically asked, "Yeah? Where?"
"It is a German Dragoon Officer's Helmet," the combat ace explained. "but I haff definitely seen some dunderhead wearing this before. He is not German, and I don't think he is an officer, but I hear that he is a genius vhen it comes to his schemes backfiring."
Marcie hazarded a wild guess. "Does this "genius" hang around a surprising strong, barefoot, Appalachian woman who has a pet pig?
"Ja. I haff seen them together, sometimes."
Marcie nodded in understanding and gave a grim smile, then turned to Bronson. "Sheriff, I think this case is going to be wrapped up very shortly, but I need you to do something for me."
"Like what, Mindy?" Stone asked suspiciously.
Marcie raised a finger to begin her count her of favors. "First, learn my name. It's Marcie, and second, I need your phone number."