“So what now?” Abbey asked.

A dark bluish slick surrounded the boat, and the men in the Coast Guard inflatable were laying out yellow floating bumpers, to keep the oil and grease from spreading. By sinking the Coral Queen, my father himself had managed to make quite a mess.

I said, “Dad asked me to help him.”

Abbey made a face. “Help him what-break out of jail?”

“Get serious.”

“Then what, Noah? Tell me.”

I knew she wasn't going to like it. “He wants me to help him nail Dusty Muleman,” I said.

A long silence followed, so I figured Abbey was thinking up something snarky to say. But it turned out that she wasn't.

“I didn't give Dad an answer yet,” I said.

“I already know your answer,” said my sister.

“His heart's in the right place, Abbey. It really is.”

“It's not his heart I'm worried about, it's his brain,” she said. “You'd better be careful, Noah.”

“Are you going to tell Mom?”

“I haven't decided.” She gave me a sideways look that told me she probably wouldn't.

Like I said, my sister's all right.

TWO

Lucky for us, it was summertime and school was out. That meant that Abbey and I didn't have to face all the other kids at once. It's a pretty small town and news gets around fast, so by now it was no secret that our father was in the slammer for sinking Dusty Muleman's casino boat. Everybody would be talking about it.

The kid I most didn't want to see was Jasper Muleman Jr., who was Dusty's son. He was a well-known jerk, which I partly blamed on the fact that his parents had named him Jasper. That would be enough to make anybody mean and mad at the world.

Unfortunately, he was at the marina the next morning when I stopped by to see the salvage crew float the Coral Queen. Scuba divers were feeding fat black hoses into the sunken half of the boat, though I couldn't tell if they were pumping water out or pumping air in.