I HAD BEEN READING a lot of detective novels. Dad likes to read books about World War II. Betsy reads a lot of “English literature,” as she calls it. Mom reads short stories, and Pete reads picture books. I had been reading so many detective books I began to think I was a detective myself.

“Hey, Dad, can I find anything for you?”

“A new job,” he said, turning a page. I wasn’t that good. He had gone through five jobs in five years.

“What about you, Mom?”

“I lost an earring,” she said, without looking up.

I went right to work. First, I searched where she said she’d last seen it. Nothing. So then I followed a hunch. Mom has glasses, but she doesn’t wear them. She doesn’t like the heavy way they feel on her nose. So when she vacuums around the house she picks up things she can’t see. Once she vacuumed part of my stamp collection off my desk. So I checked the vacuum-cleaner bag and, sure enough, found the earring, twenty-eight cents, and the tiny silver key to Betsy’s diary.

When I asked Betsy if I could find something for her, she said, “You should go find something worth doing.”

“I need money,” I whispered in her ear. “How much would you pay for the key to your diary?”

“I’ll murder you in your sleep,” she said. But I didn’t care if she wanted to kill me. My days as a detective were numbered. I had rabies.

Four days earlier, I had been bitten by a dog. I’d left my Raleigh bike outside the library, and when I came out, a boy about my age and a big black dog were standing next to it. Dad had bought me the Raleigh three years ago for Christmas. It was red with chrome fenders, a chrome headlight and bell, and a basket on either side of the rear wheel. It was an expensive English bike and Dad had bought it back when we had money. But now there wasn’t any extra money to afford “special things,” as Mom put it. I had never seen another bike like it, and a lot of people stopped to admire it.

As I lifted the kickstand with my foot the dog began to growl. I swung my leg over the seat and the dog jumped at me and bit me on the ankle. I jerked my leg back and lost my balance. I fell over sideways, with the bike crashing down on top of me. I had a stack of books in my backpack and they dug into my ribs when I hit the sidewalk. The dog lunged at my face.

“Hold him back,” I shouted, but the boy didn’t move to call off the dog. He looked directly into my eyes and did nothing.

“Get it away from me,” I yelled. He turned and walked away. “Hey! Come back here,” I hollered. Maybe it’s not his dog, I thought. The dog went back down to my ankle. I tried to crawl farther under the bike to protect myself. But it clamped its teeth on my leg and tried to drag me away. It wanted to bury me like a bone in its back yard. I yanked my leg back and kicked it in the face. Suddenly, it lost interest in me and ran after the boy as if nothing had ever happened. I saw the boy pet the dog on the head and then reach into his pocket and toss him a biscuit.

I stood up and walked my bike around the building. I wasn’t hurt and my bike was okay, but I was mad. I rolled down my sock and looked at the two bites. They weren’t bleeding, but the skin was broken in three places. I knew a kid who’d been bitten by a raccoon and had to have forty rabies shots in his stomach. Every afternoon for a month the school nurse came into the classroom and escorted him down the hall to the clinic. A half hour later he staggered back to his seat as if he’d been punched in the belly. The teacher let him rest his head on her stuffed Piglet.

One day, she asked us a math question and he raised his hand. “You must be feeling better,” she remarked. He threw up on her shoes.

I didn’t want forty shots in the stomach with a needle as thick and long as a pencil. But in case I got rabies, I needed to know where the dog lived. If I started foaming at the mouth and biting everyone I could tell Dad who to sue.

So I’d followed the boy up the street. I didn’t want to get close because I was afraid the dog might bite me again. After five blocks, he turned onto Cactus Street and went into a small wooden house at number 1227.

•

“Five dollars for the diary key,” I said to Betsy.

“Two,” she replied. I followed her to her room. She closed the door and grabbed me around the neck. “Give it to me, you jerk.”

“I’ll bite you,” I managed to say. “I have rabies.”

She let me go. “You’re gross! Now, give it to me.”

“A dollar,” I said. She gave me a quarter. I gave her the key. She kicked me in the leg and I dropped to the floor.

“They shoot people with rabies,” she growled. “I hope I get to pull the trigger.”

I thought I’d go to the library and check out more detective novels. Our school was too cheap to have its own library. A Broward County Book Mobile arrived every Friday and class by class we took turns checking out books. But they didn’t have many detective novels. Mostly they had smelly old books that had other people’s names or library seals stamped on the title page. There were a lot of books on subjects like canning vegetables and how to get soup stains out of silk ties. I hate having to read books that other people think are junk. “Something is better than nothing,” said Mrs. Marshall when I complained. But reading junk books is the same as having to eat someone else’s leftovers.

Instead of going straight to the library, I rode my bike over to a field of thick bushes across the road from Gus’s Gas Station. I was always curious about Gus’s Gas Station because there were no other stations in Fort Lauderdale named after a person. We had fancy Exxon and Chevron and Texaco stations, but there was only one greasy station named after Gus. In the detective books, the most clever criminals always had their hideouts in fake businesses. I had been spying on Gus from across the road, trying to catch him and his gang doing criminal things like stuffing bodies into oil drums so they could dump them out in the ocean. Maybe they were secret agents and the giant gas tank under the station was a spy headquarters and the light pole was a radio antenna.

Whenever I was riding with Dad, I asked him to stop and buy gas at Gus’s. But he wouldn’t.

“He sells cheap gas,” Dad said. “People say he puts water in it.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s bad enough,” Dad replied.

As I crouched behind a bush and watched, nothing unusual happened at Gus’s except for the normal stuff that would happen at any gas station. People pulled up in their cars and Gus hobbled out of his office and put gas in their tanks and washed their windshields. I didn’t see anything like secret signals, or secret doors, or wanted criminals hiding behind all the used tires in his garage. He didn’t even go near a water hose, or drink a glass of water. Between customers he just sat in his office and peeled an apple with a knife big enough to amputate my leg.

I got back on my bike and rode down Federal Highway. I passed by the parking lot at King’s Department Store. A carnival had set up in the parking lot. “Live a little,” I said to myself. “You’ll soon be a goner.” I parked the bike and ran to buy a ticket to the WILD ROCKET. A sign said it was the most powerful ride in the world. It was built like a cigar, with a seat in a little cage on each end. An axle ran through the middle of the cigar, and when the ROCKET spun around, it went about a hundred miles an hour. There was another sign that read: “Warning! This ride is not safe for people with heart problems.” It didn’t say anything about rabies.

I climbed into my cockpit and put on my seat belt. I made sure my shoelaces were tied so my shoes wouldn’t come off during the ride and hit me in the head. Suddenly, the engine started and I grabbed the handlebar. In a minute I couldn’t even keep my eyes open and I screamed bloody murder. Then I felt like I passed out.

When the ride stopped, a carnival worker opened my cage and unlocked my seat belt. He gave me a hand and helped me down. The world was still spinning at a hundred miles per hour. When my feet hit the ground, I stumbled forward and fell. My blood felt like Coca-Cola when you shake it up. I crawled and staggered around the parking lot until I found a light pole to lean against. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. It was all foamy. The first sign of rabies. It was starting. My leg began to throb.

To hell with the library, I thought. I’ve got to save myself. I turned onto Cactus Street and pedaled as hard as I could. I needed to see the dog. Because if it was still alive and not foaming at the mouth, I’d live. But as I sped by I didn’t see the dog. Instead, I saw that the front door was wide open and an old beat-up couch was out on the sidewalk, along with a few cardboard boxes of junk. It all looked suspicious to me.

There were no curtains on the windows and suddenly it struck me that they had moved. “Oh, crap,” I said. They probably knew their dog had rabies and that I was infected and so they had to get out of town before I died and they were arrested for murder. I slowed down and circled back to the house. Even though I was afraid of the dog I stopped in their front yard and got off my bike. I walked up to the open door and knocked on it. “Hello?” I shouted. “Anybody home?” If anyone answered, I planned to ask if my friend Frankie Pagoda lived there. But there was no answer.

“Anybody home?” I yelled again. There was no answer. My ankle began to throb. Soon I’d be foaming at the mouth, running on my hands and feet, and biting the neighbors. Finally I’d be tracked down and captured by police dogs, but it would be too late to save me. I’d be shot and buried in a pet cemetery.

I limped over to the boxes of junk on the front lawn and began to search through them. I needed their names, and if I was lucky, I’d get their new address so I could find out if their dog was infected. The boxes were mostly filled with broken stuff: a chipped plate, a used toothbrush, old shoes, ripped shirts, an old Halloween mask of Spider-Man, and a broken thermos bottle. But there were a few old letters. I shoved them into my backpack. I felt really guilty going through someone’s garbage, especially in the middle of the day. Real detectives always did this stuff at night when no one was looking. Plus, I knew I’d have to hide all the stuff from my mom because she really disliked “snoops and sneaks,” and if she caught me, she’d probably turn me in to the police.

“Hey, kid,” a man hollered from next door.

I jumped up and spun around. “What?”

“Why are you going through their trash?” he asked. He was big. Maybe an off-duty cop.

“I’m looking for used books,” I replied. “For our school library.”

“Don’t you know there’s a hurricane heading our way?” He took a couple steps toward me.

“No,” I said and trotted over to my bike.

“Well, you better get a move-on. That hurricane should hit the shore in a few hours.”

“Thanks,” I said.

The wind had already picked up. I hopped on my bike and flew down the street. During hurricane season it was pretty normal to have a lot of warnings. Just about everyone kept a hurricane-tracking map in their house and charted the movement of the latest hurricane, so they’d know if it was heading our way. But the hurricanes were unpredictable and would veer off in all directions. Nobody knew if it was really going to hit until it was actually on top of us. The best part about hurricanes was that we were always being let out of school early to go help our parents, who had gotten out of work early, to tape up the windows and tie down everything around the house that could easily be blown away.

By the time I rode up our driveway, Dad was nailing sheets of plywood over the floor-to-ceiling windows in the Florida room.

“Where’ve you been?” he yelled. The words seemed to blow up over his head and away. I parked my bike in the carport and went to help him. I couldn’t tell him I was spying on a dog who gave me rabies. And I didn’t want to tell him I was at the carnival having fun while he was working his butt off. “I was spying on Gus,” I yelled back and held up one end of the plywood.

“What were you bothering him for?”

“You said he puts water in his gas tanks, and I wanted to catch him.”

“You knucklehead,” he said. “He wouldn’t do it in broad daylight. He’d wait until it was dark.”

“Well, I thought with the hurricane coming on, he might try something.”

“Well, think about doing the right thing and sticking around the house when you’re needed,” he said. He pounded another nail through the plywood and stopped yelling.

While Dad and I finished the windows, Mom and Betsy took care of the other hurricane-emergency procedures we were taught on television. They filled plastic jugs with drinking water, turned up the refrigerator to get it real cold because the electricity always goes off, put candles and matches in all the rooms, and checked the batteries in the flashlights and radios. Dad had Pete put the rake and hose and lawn tools in the utility room. I got the aluminum ladder for Dad and held it as he climbed up to the roof to remove the television antenna. When he came down, he said to me, “Make sure you put your bike in the utility room so it doesn’t blow around.”

“In a minute,” I said. I put the ladder away, then set up some weather experiments. In science class we saw a movie on the weird power of hurricanes and tornadoes. It showed how high winds had driven plastic drinking straws through trees. I thought that was pretty cool so I went into the kitchen and got some straws. I stripped the paper off and set them out on a tree stump. I aimed them for our plywood shutters, thinking that if I was lucky they would stick in the wood like darts. Next, I had an army man with a plastic parachute. I took a marker and wrote my name and telephone number and “Reward offered for return” on the parachute, then threw it on top of the carport so it might get a flying start when the winds picked up. My last experiment was sort of dangerous but I did it anyway. Dad had some steel rods in the utility room. I took one out and sunk it into the ground by the edge of the canal. It stuck out about two feet above the ground. I was hoping it would conduct lightning and melt. When I passed through the front yard, Dad was snipping the coconuts out of the palm trees with a long tree clipper.

“I’ve seen these things fly through the air like cannonballs,” he yelled.

All the excitement was great. Ever since I had read about the adventures of the Swiss Family Robinson, I wanted our family to be like them. My greatest wish come true would have our family carried away by a huge tidal wave and washed up on a deserted island where we had to build our own house in the trees and grow our own food and ride wild horses and educate one another.

“Did you put your bike away?” Dad asked.

“I forgot,” I said.

“Well, go toss these coconuts in the canal, and then put it away like I told you.”

“Okay,” I said and loaded up my arms.

After I had thrown the coconuts into the water, Mom called to me. “Hurry up and get inside,” she yelled. “I want you to take a shower before I fill the tub with water.”

When I was undressing I reexamined my dog bite. The teeth marks were still red and swollen, and when I touched them, they throbbed. Rabies, I thought. I should tell Mom and Dad right now so they still have time to take me to the hospital. But what if it’s not rabies? What if we dash to the hospital and the doctor says it’s just a simple dog bite and then the hurricane gets worse and we are stuck at the hospital? Everyone will hate me for being a big baby. Dad will roll his eyes. Mom will try to be nice. Betsy will treat me like a moron, and Pete will laugh until he falls over. I decided not to tell them. It was a chance I’d have to take.

I went into my bedroom and locked the door. I turned my crummy radio on to the hurricane-watch station and began to go through the letters I had found at Cactus Street. I was in luck. Their names were Mrs. Cleo Stone and Jimmy Stone. There didn’t seem to be a Mr. Stone. I had an old electric bill, a postcard sent to Jimmy from someone named Harry, a bill-collection notice for late rent, a contest application, a church-picnic notice, and a telephone bill.

I wrote their old phone number on a scrap of paper and went into Mom and Dad’s bedroom. They were in the living room watching the hurricane report on the one television station we could still get. I dialed the number and got what I’d hoped for. A tape-recorded message from the phone company announced: “The number you have reached has been changed to 723-4423.”

I quickly rehearsed my thoughts and dialed the new number.

“Hello,” answered a boy.

“Is this Jimmy Stone?” I asked in an adult voice.

“Yes.”

“This is the dog pound,” I said. “We’re calling to make sure your dog is properly locked up during the hurricane.”

“Have you seen my dog?” he asked excitedly. “He ran away and we’ve been searching for him everywhere.” Then he yelled away from the phone, “Hey, Mom. It’s the dog pound looking for Peanut.”

“Give me the phone,” a woman said.

I hung up. Then I ran back to my room and peeled off my sock. My ankle was pounding. The bruises looked dark and infected. I squeezed around a puncture and some watery pus dribbled out. I’m a dead man, I thought. Jimmy Stone’s dog had gone mad and run away.

I removed my diary from under my mattress. I unlocked it and wrote: “My Last Will and Testament. Everything I own goes to Pete.” I signed my name to make it official. Then I spit on the page. Under it I wrote, “This is what killed me!”

All evening long we sat in the living room and watched disaster movies on television. First we watched Key Largo, where a hurricane wipes out a hotel in the Florida Keys. That was followed by The Poseidon Adventure, which showed an ocean liner flipped over by a tidal wave. Then Earthquake came on and we watched a city crumble and burn. All the disaster scenes seemed real because of the hurricane winds howling around our house and the rain beating against the plywood shutters. I thought up a movie where a boy gets rabies and bites everyone in the whole town and infects them and then they begin to spread out across the entire country and the President has to call out the army to shoot all the rabid fiends. But the rabid people chew up the army and the President has to decide to drop the atomic bomb on the dog people. It could be the end of civilization.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Mom said, running her hand over my head. “Don’t worry, the house won’t blow away.”

“I’m fine,” I replied. I had only two choices now. I could just go find a safe place to die, or I could get forty shots in my stomach and throw up every day. I’d rather die.

We were watching King Kong when the electricity went off.

“Okay, the party’s over,” said Dad. “Time for bed.”

Pete had already fallen asleep, and Mom carried him up the hallway to his room. I was tired and fell asleep right away. I slept through the rest of the hurricane and didn’t wake up until Dad pushed open my bedroom door and yelled at me. “Jack! Get up this instant!” Even before I opened my eyes I knew he was furious. What did I do? Did I bite everyone in my sleep? My heart was pounding.

“Get out here!” he hollered. What kind of trouble was I in? I ran down the hall and out the front door. Dad was lying on his back, half under his truck, trying to pull something out from around the back axle. I stood by his feet as he wrestled with a bunch of tangled pipes. Then suddenly he got it free and pushed it toward me. It was my Raleigh bike, all twisted up like a pretzel.

“Didn’t I tell you to put your bike away!” he shouted.

I started to cry.

“Well?” he asked. “I’m waiting.”

“You did.”

“Now look at it,” he said. “It’s ruined. You just don’t listen to me. How do you expect to learn anything if you don’t listen?”

I looked down at the bike. Every inch of it was bent. It must have blown under the truck, and when he pulled out of the carport, it got curled up under the wheels.

“How do you expect to get good things if you can’t take care of them?” Dad continued. “You know we don’t have money to burn.” I knew this speech and it made me sad for everyone in our family. We just didn’t have the money we once had. When Dad’s good watch stopped running, he’d bought a cheap Timex. We’d bought a used black-and-white television when our color set gave out. We didn’t even have a car of our own. Dad had the company truck, which I’d just about ruined.

“I’m sorry,” I said to him.

“I’m sorry, too,” he said, but he was still mad. He got in the truck and drove off.

I guess I don’t need a bike anyway, I thought. I’ll be dead soon.

I got dressed and started to work around the house like the madman I was. I picked up all the fallen tree limbs, cut them up with a hatchet, and piled them by the side of the road for the garbage truck. I raked the lawn and swept the sidewalk and driveway. I wanted to take down the plywood shutters and have the house in perfect shape for Dad’s return, but Mom said they were too heavy. “What else can I do, then?” I asked her.

“If you’re all caught up,” she said, “you’re free until your dad gets home.”

“Okay.” I ran around to the back of the house and checked on my experiments. I couldn’t find the plastic drinking straws anywhere. I found my parachute soldier tangled up in a bush by the side of the house, and lightning had not struck the steel rod by the canal. I pulled it out and put it back in the utility room. That’s when I saw Pete’s new bike and got an idea.

I went into the house and knocked on his bedroom door. “Pete,” I whispered.

“Yes,” he said.

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Yeah, what?” he asked.

“I have something important to tell you.” I slipped into his room and locked the door behind me. “Cross your heart you won’t tell.”

“Cross my heart,” he repeated.

“Then look at this.” I kicked off my tennis shoe and rolled down my sock. The bite marks were still red and puffy. “I got bit by a dog last week and now I have rabies,” I said. “And I think I’m going to die.”

Immediately, he started to cry.

“Don’t cry,” I whispered. “I think you can save me.”

“How?” he asked, sniffing and wiping his nose.

“Loan me your bike. I think I know where the dog lives who bit me. If I can find it, then I’ll know for sure if I have rabies.” It was a new birthday bike and I knew he didn’t want to loan it to me. Especially after he saw what happened to my bike. But I was desperate. “Am I foaming at the mouth yet?” I asked him. I smacked my lips together and let some drool run out of the corner of my mouth and onto my chin.

He looked at me with fear. “I don’t think so,” he said shakily. “You’re only drooling.”

“That’s the first sign,” I moaned. “Just make sure I don’t bite you.” I rolled my sock back up and put on my shoe. “Will you loan it to me? As you can see, it’s a matter of life or death.”

“Okay,” he said. “But don’t tell Dad.”

“I’ll be back before he comes home from work,” I said.

I had a theory. I had read a book called The Incredible Journey, which was about a family who had moved across the country without their pets and the story was about how the pets had to track them three thousand miles to find them. I figured that the dog may have gotten confused by the move and returned to the old house.

I took Jimmy Stone’s telephone number and a couple of dollars in change I had taped into my diary. My first stop was the grocery store. I went to the pet-food section and picked out a box of dog bones to keep Peanut from chewing on me if I found him. Then I rode to 1227 Cactus Street. Their old house had been kicked around by the hurricane. The windows on the east side were blown in. The door was open, and even from the sidewalk I could see water and glass on the living-room floor. The boxes of trash I had found yesterday were no longer on the front lawn. Everything had blown away. Up and down the street people were clearing debris from their lawns and raking up all the branches and leaves. I looked around to see if there were any interesting disasters. Once, after Hurricane Cleo, I had seen a canoe balanced on the roof of a house, and a tree that had crushed a station wagon. But everything on Cactus Street looked pretty normal, so I had nothing to do but enter the house and look for Peanut. I opened the box of dog bones and walked up the sidewalk. “Here, Peanut,” I called out and tossed a dog bone into the empty living room. It landed with a splash. “Here, Peanut,” I called from the front door and threw another bone. “Come and get it.”

I took a step into the house. Now I am trespassing, I thought, and if I’m bit by a mad dog everyone will say it’s my own fault, especially my dad, who will probably say something like, “Didn’t I tell you never to enter a stranger’s house where a mad dog is hiding?”

The water was an inch deep in the living room. I could feel the same fear run through me that I had felt when the dog bit me. “Here, Peanut,” I said and threw a dog bone down the dark hallway. “Good Peanut,” I called. The first door I reached was on my right. I opened it just a crack and peeked in. It was the bathroom. “Peanut,” I whispered. I slipped a dog bone through the crack. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I saw three more doors. The first one was open. I tiptoed to the edge of the opening and peeked in. “Here, Peanut,” I said. But there was no Peanut. I took a deep breath and tried to walk quietly to the next closed door. My tennis shoes squeaked on the wet floor. I knocked. “Are you in there, Peanut?” I opened the door and threw in a dog bone. He wasn’t there. There was only one more door and it was open. I peeked into the room. “Peanut? Are you in here?” I threw a dog bone in the dark corner of the room. Then something in the room’s closet stirred. My heart jumped. I knew the sound of a dog’s nails clacking on the concrete floor. I wanted to run, but I had to see if it was Peanut and if he was foaming at the mouth. I threw a handful of dog bones at the closet door. He barked. “Peanut, come out,” I shouted. I threw another bone toward the closet. Then I grabbed the door handle and began to back out of the room. “Peanut, come out,” I called. He barked once more, then lunged out of the closet. The floor was wet and he slid in a panic across the room. I screamed and pulled the door shut.

But I had to open it again. I peeked in. “Come here, Peanut,” I said. “It’s okay.” He turned and looked at me. I threw him a dog bone. Even if he jumped at me I had time to yank the door shut before he reached me. He looked at me and barked a few times and I threw him some more dog bones. If he eats, I thought, he isn’t rabid. I knew that sick animals never ate. He barked again, then sniffed at a dog bone and started to chew it. I didn’t see any foam around his mouth. I threw him another bone and he pawed at it while he chewed another. He seemed really hungry. I opened the door and slowly walked toward him. “Good Peanut,” I said. “Good dog.” I held a bone out to him and he took it in his mouth as I pet him on his head and scratched his ears. “You dumb dog,” I said. “You went home to the wrong house.”

I dumped the box of bones on the floor then walked out of the room, closing the door behind me. I didn’t have rabies! I didn’t have to die or go mad or bite my family to death. I ran down the sidewalk and hopped on Pete’s bike. There was a pay telephone at Gus’s Gas Station and I rode over there as fast as I could. The gas station was closed for business. A big sign was propped against the gas pump: CLOSED—WATER IN GAS TANK DUE TO HURRICANE. Dam, I thought. Now I’ll never know if he put the water in himself. I could just hear Dad saying that Gus was using the hurricane as a cover-up now that everyone was wise to him selling watered-down gas.

The pay phone was on the outside of the building. I put in the dime and dialed Jimmy Stone’s number.

“Hello,” he answered.

“Is this Jimmy Stone?” I asked in my adult voice.

“Yes,” he said.

“This is the city dog pound, and we’ve found your dog in the back bedroom at 1227 Cactus Street.”

“Oh, that’s great,” he cried. “Hey, Mom,” he yelled. “They found Peanut at our old house.”

“Let me have the phone,” she said.

Oh no! I slammed down the phone. I stood still for a minute. Then suddenly I shouted, “Case closed!”