But Dirk Bowman ignored Nancy. Instead, he caught the maintenance man with his left hand, and, swinging his right arm up from somewhere around his knees, crashed his fist squarely into the man’s jaw. Lila’s boy gasped, sank to his knees, then pitched forward onto his face. He wouldn’t be chasing anybody for quite a while.
Stunned, Nancy looked at Dirk, who was rubbing his knuckles and grinning at her. “I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time,” he said.
“Who are you?” Nancy asked warily. “How did you get away? And what happened to my friends?”
“Your friends helped me get away,” Dirk told her. “And they’re safe. They’re waiting for us right now, in the launch we stole. Now come on,” he said, reaching for her hand, “let’s get going. I’d love to take a nice romantic stroll in the moonlight, but we just don’t have time.”
Nancy pulled her hand away. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me who you are.”
“I’m a police detective,” Dirk said calmly. “I’ve been working undercover for two months, trying to get enough evidence against Lila to stop her operation for good.” He started walking again. “Why don’t you walk behind me?” he suggested, grinning at her over his shoulder. “If you think I’m leading you into a trap, you can always jump me again, the way you did on the Rosita.”
Nancy didn’t think she had enough energy left to jump anybody. She really wanted to believe Dirk, but she was still suspicious of him, so she followed his advice and stayed about five feet behind him. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were when we first met?” she called out.
“I couldn’t risk it,” he said. “If my cover had been blown, there would have been no way to stop Lila. Besides, the lady would probably have killed me.”
“But you knew what was going on,” Nancy reminded him. “Wasn’t that enough evidence?”
“We suspected, we didn’t know for sure. We needed witnesses,” he explained. “And even after I started working for Lila, it was a long time before she trusted me with her little secret. In fact,” he said with a laugh, “you and your friends were my first assignment.”
“Me and my friends?” Nancy asked. “What about before that? What about my windsurfing accident? You didn’t have anything to do with that?”
“Nope. My guess is that one of Lila’s boys saw us together and reported it to her, and she told him to take care of you,” Dirk said. “She still didn’t trust me then. But I put on a pretty convincing act, and finally she decided I was okay.”
“So tonight, when you came down to the hold, you were supposed to kill us, right?” Nancy asked.
“Right.” Dirk stopped and turned, looking at Nancy. “I wasn’t going to follow Lila’s orders, of course. But Bess never gave me a chance to tell you that, and when I came to, you’d already taken off for the island. How did you get here, anyway?”
“I swam!” Quickly Nancy told him everything that had happened since she’d escaped from the Rosita.
As Dirk listened his eyes lit up in admiration, and when she finished he gave a low whistle. “You’re really something, Detective.” He held out his hand, and Nancy shook it.
“But just think,” he went on, his eyes twinkling mischievously, “if you hadn’t knocked me out, you could have saved yourself that swim.”
Nancy started to argue, but when she caught the look in his eyes, she found herself laughing instead. He grabbed her other hand, and the two of them began running together.
Soon they were back in the trees, and it wasn’t long before Nancy heard the distant strains of rock music and laughter from the party to nowhere. Halfway back to the shore, Dirk started heading to the right. “The launch is around a curve in the beach,” he told Nancy. “We’ll use the trees for cover.”
“How did you get it there without anyone hearing the motor?” Nancy asked.
“Kim navigated and the rest of us paddled,” Dirk replied with a laugh. “We made a great team. The only thing we really had to worry about was Lila spotting us from the Rosita. But I guess she was too busy making sure you were brought back to notice us.”