September 23, 2000 (Noon)

       “NO!” Mandy’s voice rang out as the knife lowered and Joe twisted enough for the knife to slide along the outside edge of a rib.  He still would have screamed if he had the air for it.  The man picked him up and tossed him at Mandy; they both fell to the ground, tangled against each other.  Joe let out a startled cry as he pulled himself free of Mandy and he lunged forward to try and capture the bad guy.  The guy kicked him back again and then ran for the front door.  Joe heard an engine revving outside as he picked himself up off the floor again.  He made another dive forward, eager to catch the man who had been tormenting him. 

       “Joe, watch out!” Mandy screamed and Joe pulled up short just in time to avoid another knife blow by his assailant.  The man glowered at her, kicked Joe again and raced out the door.  Joe sat gasping for air, the wind knocked out of him and Mandy came to kneel beside him.  She gasped when she saw the cut in his side and ran to the bathroom for a first aid kit. 

       “Mandy? Joe?” Frank said from the top of the stairs.  He came down them using the handrail but stood there, concerned and curious, his head cocked slightly to one side as if listening for sounds of trouble. 

       “Our friend was just here,” Joe said to his brother as Mandy came back with the first aid kit and knelt again beside her brother.  She gingerly pulled Joe’s shirt up and they both grimaced when they saw the wound.  It was shallow due to the impact with Joe’s rib, but unpleasant looking.  “Go ahead, Mandy, it can’t hurt worse than it does already.”

       “It can,” Mandy warned him as she pulled out the bottle of peroxide that their Aunt Gertrude insisted on for all open wounds.  Joe remembered many a scrape that had peroxide applied to it and while it wasn’t as bad as alcohol, Joe winced in memory again.  So it would sting a little.  “Just take a deep breath, Joe, I’ll be done with this as fast as I can.  I need to clean it off so I can see if I should take you to get stitched.”

       “I’m not going to the hospital again, Mandy,” Joe mumbled to her. 

       “Did he say anything else to you, Joe?” Frank asked while he worked his way toward the couch and sat down in it.  “Give you any indication just why it was he was attacking you yet again?”

       “He just said that his warnings have gone unheeded and that he was going to kill me to get you guys off his back,” Joe said and winced when Mandy dabbed a cotton ball with peroxide and ran it along the wound.  “I told him that there was no way you would stop looking for him if he killed me and he said he’d kill the rest of you too, that no one was stopping him or getting in his way.”

       “This all makes no sense,” Frank said, frowning.  “I mean, all you did to begin with was stop an attack on a girl.  What in the world would that have to do with…”

       His voice trailed off for a moment in thought and then he shook his head, saying out loud.  “No, that won’t work.  He could get her anywhere.”

       “Get who anywhere?” Joe asked as he concentrated on Mandy’s face instead of his brother’s.  His twin had such a fixed look of concentration on her face that he found it rather amusing to watch.  She dabbed another cotton ball with peroxide and applied that to his cut as well.  The second time didn’t sting as the first time did.  He realized a moment later that Frank hadn’t answered him and he looked back up at his brother.  Frank still had that look of concentration on his face.

       “Frank?” Joe prodded him, hoping to break him out of his revelry.  “Get who anywhere?”

       “I was just thinking,” Frank said.  “That this all started when you stopped an attack on Anna Phillips.  So what if this isn’t about the Governor, the exhibition center or the football field?  What if this is really about Anna?  But what made no sense is why would they come after you if they were after her.  If they can break into your dorm room in the middle of the night with no one catching them, or him, they could just as easily break into Anna’s.  Or, for that matter, they could just as easily grab her off the sidewalk when none of us were around.”

       “So that leads us right back to square one.  With nothing,” Joe said as Mandy pulled out a roll of bandages and applied one to Joe’s cut.  She pulled out another roll of adhesive tape and began to cut off strips with a small pair of scissors in the first aid kit.  “Unless you’ve come up with another idea that fits the pattern that we’ve had so far?”

       Frank frowned again and tapped his fingers on his cheek, indicating that he was in even deeper thought than he had been before.  Joe turned his attention back to Mandy, allowing his brother to think things through on his own and Mandy finished taping down the bandage.

       “It’s pretty much already stopped bleeding,” Mandy said.  “So I don’t think you need to see a doctor.  They just gave you a tetanus shot, right?”

       Joe nodded.  “Yeah, and that was no fun.  Hurt almost more than my feet.”

       “Just so none of the rest of you is hurt,” Mandy smiled.  “Here, see if you can get up.”

       Joe allowed her to help him get to his feet, using her hand for leverage and he stood a little shakily, but all right.  He went to sit down in one of the recliners and leaned the chair back a little.  Frank was still staring out into space, deep in concentration on the problem.  Finally, Frank sat back and looked in Joe’s general direction.

       “I think I know what we need to do next,” Frank said with a gratified smile.  “This all really started with those gang members you stopped.  We’ve been trying to find the man behind them but maybe we should try to find one of them instead.  Do you remember any markings from them?  Or colors?  We might be able to find out from Con which gang it is, in that case.”

       “Let me think a minute,” Joe said.  “All right, here’s what I remember.  They did have colors, blue and gray, which I didn’t really think gray was a gang color but they definitely had gray.  And I remember a small patch, like an airplane?  Or an oddly shaped bird of some kind.”

       “That’s enough to work with,” Frank said.  “Let me call Con and I’ll see if he knows anything about the gang.  We get a name and a location for the gang, we can hopefully find the guy they’re working with and get a better handle on just what they’re up to.  And we need someone to go around to all of the places that you and Connor followed that guy and take a close look around.  I want to make sure he didn’t leave any nasty surprises behind. 

       “And we need to take extra precautions,” Frank continued.  “While you’re still here, Joe, make sure the alarm system is armed and stays armed.  You might want to talk to mom and dad about changing the security codes for the system, in case this guy has figured out what the current codes are.  Mandy, I want you and Samantha and Vanessa to stay in the same room at the dorm.  See if Elizabeth will stay with Kaitlyn for a few days and have the other girls come to your room.  Keep a chair or something in front of your door so no one can get by it without being heard.  And… wait a minute… Joe? Where’s your bodyguard?  Dad said he was hiring one.”

       “Dad changed his mind,” Joe said.  “Or, rather, he changed his mind after I told him there was no way I was going to put up with some goon following me around everywhere I go.  We’ll never get to the bottom of this if we scare off whoever’s after me.  Or us.”

       “You could use one,” Frank told him. 

       “So could you,” Joe retorted in return.  “Point is, neither of us wants one.”

       “All right boys!” Mandy exclaimed.  “Settle!”

       “All right, back to basics,” Frank said a moment later.  “Mandy?  Door blocking?”

       “Both doors,” Mandy said.  “We have suites, so we share our bathroom with the girls next door.  We’ll have to block off the bathroom door too.  But do you really think we need to go to all of those precautions?  He hasn’t come after any of us.”

       “Better safe than sorry,” Frank said as he rubbed at his eyes and leaned his head back on the back of the sofa.  “I’d rather catch this guy without someone getting killed.”

       “All right,” Mandy said with a shrug.  “If that’s what you want.”

       “Why is there blood in the kitchen?” Laura Hardy came through the door from the kitchen to ask her children and saw Mandy cleaning up the first aid kit.  “Did someone have an accident?”

       “Uh, no,” Joe confessed.  “My friend came to pay me another visit.   We’re all right, though, Mom, I just have a scratch.”

       Joe watched the color drain from his mother’s face and she dropped the bag of groceries she was carrying.  Mandy got up almost immediately and went to her mother as their father came through the door.

       “I’m all right, mom, I promise,” Joe told his mother again as he got up and went over to her.  “It really is just a scratch, Mandy got it all cleaned up.  Nobody was seriously hurt or anything.  I don’t even need to go to the doctor.”

       He told his father and mother what had happened while they had been gone.  Fenton frowned as he listened but nodded when Frank told him what they planned.

       “It seems he’ll come after you whether or not you do anything,” Fenton said.  “Or whether or not you know anything.  Just take those precautions, Frank and Mandy.  I’ll make sure the alarm is always on here, just remember to code in the number when you come home.”

‘      Laura took a look at Joe’s wound and agreed that it wasn’t anything to be worried about, it was not bleeding any longer and Mandy had done a good job cleaning it.  She sighed and shook her head as she picked up the bag of groceries she dropped and reached over to take Frank’s hand.

       “Help me with the rest of the groceries, Frank,” she said to her son.  “We stopped at the hospital and got you a new cane, as well, so try not to lose this one.”

       She led Frank out of the room and Mandy went into the kitchen to start putting the groceries away. 

 

       An hour later, Frank, Joe and Mandy were at the football game between the Bayport University Knights and the Cordon University Bobcats, Frank and Mandy sitting in the front row of the stands with Chet, Kaitlyn, Samantha and Vanessa.   Joe went to sit on the bench with his teammates.  According to Vanessa, Joe cut quite a handsome figure of a rogue as he limped along the track to sit down on a bench placed by the field.  He had his crutches with them and used those mostly to make stepping a little easier.  Frank listened to the mayhem around him of students and fans taking seats around him and talking up until the game started.  The marching band came out on the field a few moments later, but Frank ignored them.

       “Those boys from the other team are huge,” Samantha commented to him after she told them that they were going out onto the field.  Bayport had lost the coin toss so they would be kicking off the ball to the other team.  “I hope our line can stop them.  I wonder where they found so many man-mountains for their offensive line?”

       “Bigger doesn’t mean better,” Chet said.  “In fact, it usually means they’re slower.  There are exceptions to that, but I doubt they’ll be able to keep up with Eric.  GET HIM!”

       That last was obviously in response to something on the field and was echoed by several people in the stands.  Frank found his enthusiasm for football had decreased by quite a bit when he’d lost his eyesight.  Listening to a game just wasn’t as much fun as seeing a game being played.  He had shared Joe’s enthusiasm for watching the game growing up but had not had any desire to play once he got out of high school.  His double major never allowed him the time for an activity that took as much practice time as playing football.

       Chet and Samantha took turns describing to him the plays being made and what individual players, friends of theirs, were doing on the field.  Frank listened to those explanations but found his attention wandered after a few minutes of the game.  He spent a good bit of the time thinking about their current case and the best way for them to find out what was going on and to catch the guy responsible for it all. 

       Something hit him in the back of the head a moment later and he turned, protesting.  Chet had obviously turned to see what had hit Frank, for a moment later he yelled out,

       “Cut it out, Maidlin, you jerk!”

       Frank heard Maidlin’s distinctive laugh and glowered, then turned his attention back to Sam’s descriptions of the current play being run.  Connor passed the ball off to Coonby while Eric ran block.  Coonby, however, missed a hole made by that block and was tackled only a yard later.  Chet yelled at Coonby, as if Coonby could hear him.

       “Joe would have made a touchdown on that one,” Chet muttered after he sat back down.  “Coonby’s going to lose this game for us, the moron!”

       “He’s just a freshman, Chet,” Sam said, mildly.  “Can’t expect him and Eric both to be wonder stars.”

       Frank shook his head and blocked it out again.  He wanted to cheer on his roommate but it was hard to do when he didn’t know what Connor was doing.  Any yelling he did was almost after the fact.

       Something nudged at him from behind a moment later and he fixed a glare on his face as he turned.  Something pushed him forward then and he fell against the rail in front of him.  Frank protested and he felt someone grab his arm and steady him. 

       “A blind man at a ball game, there’s somethin’ ya don’t see ever’ day,” someone said from behind Frank.  He turned again and glared, though they wouldn’t see it through his sunglasses.

       “Oh, grow up,” Samantha said in exasperation to whoever had talked.  “Or do you want me to make comments on how last decade your clothing is, how uncool your hair is and just how generally ugly you are?”

       “Saaaaaaaaaaam,” Frank said through gritted teeth as he clamped a hand on her arm. 

       “Blind man let’s his lady do his fightin’ for him,” the person said and cackled.  “What, can’t speak for yerself, blind man?  You dumb too?”

       “I can speak,” Frank said.  “Please notice that I even speak in complete sentences.  And, in fact, my lady doesn’t have to speak for me but she was doing such a good job of it, I thought I would sit back and admire her for a while.  Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

       Something pushed Frank against the rail in front of him again and he grimaced, grabbed his cane and turned.  A moment later he heard someone else yelling at them, probably the security guards who came to every game. 

       “This ain’t over, blind man,” the thug hissed at Frank and Frank heard him sliding through the crowd.  Frank lowered his cane and turned, sitting down next to Samantha again, angrily. 

       “Creep,” Sam said as she pushed a lock of Frank’s hair out of his face. 

       “No harm, no foul,” Frank said with a shrug as he wrapped an around her shoulders and she laid her head on his shoulder.  She snuggled for a minute, until Chet suddenly burst his feet and yelled out,

       “Oh, no, come on you idiot, learn how to run the stupid ball!  Coonby, you’re a left-footed dork!”

       “A left-footed dork?” Samantha asked Chet when Chet finally sat back down next to her.  “Did you really call him a left-footed dork?”

       “Uh, well, yeah,” Chet said. 

       Samantha burst out laughing and she buried her head for a moment in Frank’s chest, shaking her head all the while.  He chuckled as well and settled back again, determined to enjoy the game or die trying.  He liked football before, he was determined to still like football.  He settled back on the bench and listened to the sounds around him again.  The cheering of the home team was infectious.  Frank chuckled as he listened to Samantha boo the other team because of a penalty.  He never knew she got so into football until now.  Of course, until now, Frank had once been one of the team trainers and had not had the opportunity to sit with her in a game.  He sort of enjoyed being a semi-spectator, especially if it meant learning more about his girlfriend.  There were fringe benefits everywhere!

 

       Joe sat on a bench on the sidelines with the Bayport Knights football team, as he gazed out as the defense went to work, trying to stop the other team from getting any points.  Six men stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the line, the other five were ranged out behind him, waiting for any receivers or tight ends to break through the line.  Joe rubbed his hands briskly together, the brisk breeze blowing past him chilled him thoroughly.  He had entirely too many reminders of his jaunt through the woods, even among the pillars of the Bayport Knights Football team. 

       Joe did like to watch football, though it had nothing on actually playing the game.  When he had the ball and ran for the end zone, it beat a lot of other feelings in the world, especially when the crowd cheered him on.  He glared at Coonby again when his replacement actually looked up at him once and Coonby looked back down again, a flush of red in his cheeks.  Coonby tried hard, but Coonby just didn’t think when he was on the field.  He got too carried away with the game and had zip in the way of focus.  Those things would not only lose ball games but it could get a person killed.

       Maybe a few more five man tackles will pound that into his brain, Joe thought grimly.

       Joe looked behind him and past where Connor was going over play options with the offensive coordinator, Coach Kapson, to the stands.  BU did not quite warrant a full-fledged stadium, so the seats wrapped only about ten feet around the end zone on either side, leaving the end zone completely free of any seating.  The stands were filled, however, not only with students and faculty but citizens of Bayport and the surrounding area.  Coming to a football game was a good way for many of them to pass the time.

       Joe paused in his looking to rub his hands together and blow on them.  He should have worn his gloves today; he hadn’t planned on the weather being so brisk.  The scent carried over the smell of hotdogs and that made Joe’s stomach growl in anticipation of that night’s party.  He saw Frank and Vanessa in the stands and waved to Vanessa who saw and blew a kiss back to him.  He grinned and caught it, then slapped it on his cheek.  He turned away from her and continued viewing other spectators, some of them friends of his. 

       His gaze stopped suddenly about halfway up the stands and he ducked slightly behind one of the other football players to peer over his shoulder.  He couldn’t see the man’s eyes from here, but he had the same build as the man who had been attacking him.  The man ducked down one of the ramps and Joe swallowed.  What would he be doing at the football game?  It had to just be a coincidence.

       Joe turned back to the football game as the offense ran out onto the field.  The full back was in this round instead of the tight end; less chance of Coonby messing up if he wasn’t on the field.  Joe was going to have to spend a few hours over the next two weeks drilling Coonby until Coonby couldn’t walk.  If there were more of these situations where Joe couldn’t play, Joe wasn’t going to have it be because Coonby panicked on the field.

Joe pushed his hair from his face and grimaced when he brushed a sensitive bruise on his cheek.

       “Hey, Joe, nice bruise!” Dwayne “Cougar” Kapelski, the Bayport Knights main defensive tackle, gave Joe a healthy swat on the backside as he admired the handiwork done on Joe’s face by his unknown assailant.  Joe glowered at Kapelski and knocked him playfully up beside the head.  “Nice miss of that block earlier, too.  Coach is going to ream you a new one for that.”

       “Hey, that kid is fast, man!” Kapelski protested.  “Believe me, I gave it my best.  Coach will appreciate that.”

       Joe chuckled and shook his head.  “You’re one brave man, Kapelski.  I hope there’s enough left of you when Coach is done for me to say ‘I told you so.’”

       “Never happen!” Kapelski grinned and sauntered off.  Joe laughed and shook his head again, then cheered as Connor made a particularly spectacular pass.

 

       “Hey, Hardy,” Frank felt someone slide into place beside him on the bench and he frowned as he tried to remember the voice.  “It’s me, Carmichael.”

       “Oh, hey, Randy,” Frank said to another of his friends, someone he had met in a computer class last year but saw very little of.  Randy lived off-campus in his own apartment and spent any time he didn’t have classes or labs there.  “Enjoying the game?”

       “As much as anyone can enjoy a barbarian sport that has men trying to pummel the hell out of each other for enjoyment,” Carmichael said.  “Of course, it’s not to say I’m against that sort of thing on principle, but it is sort of barbaric, don’t you think?  How have you been getting around?  Professor Taggart told me that you lost your sight.  Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I’ve thought about that and I think I might be able to help you with your computer classes.”

       “You can?” Frank asked, instantly curious.  Anything to make sense of computer code he couldn’t see would go over big.  “How?”

       “I’ve been developing a new voice-active software system, one that can both read anything on the screen but have a better understanding of how to navigate through the net, the web and through Windows itself.  I’ve been working on something like it for about the past four years, programming in layers of vocal-coding so that they could use it in a blind school.  I have something else that might help you on down the line, after you learn Braille.  I assume that you don’t know Braille yet, do you?”

       Frank shook his head. 

       “I thought not,” Carmichael told him.  “Well, I originally came up with this because of my sister, I think you met Melissa last year?  She was born blind.  She had a genetic disorder that caused her brain not to pick up any input from her eyes.  Her eyes would otherwise work normally but because the connection was wrong, her brain couldn’t process the information from her eyes.  Well, last year, this neurologist came up with a type of surgery that would allow him to redo that missing connection so, well, Melissa doesn’t need the system anymore.”

       “What does knowing Braille have to do with your system?” Frank asked, curiously.  He couldn’t even begin to understand the connection between two such disparate seeming entities. 

       “Well, two things,” Carmichael said.  “First, I came up with a printer that will print out anything you can find on-line in Braille, instead of printed.  I’ve tested it with Melissa and she says it works great.  You would be able to feel out the codes in Braille.  And if you used a Braille keyboard and had the audio output tell you what, exactly, you’ve typed, you could be sure you’re typing the right coding.  But until then, my audio system is sensitive enough to pick you up plus I can recode part of it so that it recognizes only your voice.”

       “That would be… amazing,” Frank said, honestly.  “I’ve had the hardest time figuring out how I’m going to keep up with my computer work and I really didn’t want to drop out of that part of my major.”

       “Cool,” Carmichael said as he patted Frank on the back.  “I’ll come by your dorm later and we’ll set-up your laptop.  And let me know when you know Braille!  I’d better scoot, Gina’s waiting for me.”

       Frank turned his attention back to Samantha as he thought about what Carmichael said.  If he could learn Braille, well, the boundaries would lessen between what he could do and what he wanted to do.  He looked over at Samantha a moment, another idea on the case forming in his brain.

       “I think we should look more into the revenge angle again,” he said to her.  “I’m starting to think your idea about the threats being a smokescreen might be right.  There was a couple of different times that someone could have killed us instead of scare us.”

       “Well, who?” Samantha asked, her tone curious.  “Someone on that list we got a while back?”

       “It might be,” Frank said.  “And if you were to ask Joe, he’d come up with a way to tie it all to Uncle Derak.  At any rate, it’s an idea, one we should consider.”

       “All right,” Samantha agreed.  “We can talk it over later, right?”

Frank agreed with her and they were quiet as Samantha rested her head on his shoulder for a moment, until, suddenly, she jumped up and yelled,

       “Run, run, come on, run!  Move your feet, Eric!!” the whole crowd erupted around Frank and then Samantha kissed Frank.  “We got a touchdown!”

       “No, really?” Frank grinned up at her.  “I would never have guessed!”

       “Smarty pants,” Samantha wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him again. 

       Frank chuckled again and the crowd cheered again a few minutes later when the extra point was kicked successfully.

       “What does that make the score?” Frank asked.

       “Fourteen to ten, we’re ahead now.  And there’s only two and a half minutes left in the game,” Samantha told him. 

      

       The game finally ended about ten minutes later, after the use of all time-outs on both sides and the clock stopping every time the ball went out of bounds.  Frank took a deep breath, glad the thing was almost over.  Bayport won by the score of 14-10, an upset in almost every sports page.  Frank and his friends worked their way toward the edge of the stands so they could go down on the field to find Joe.

       As Frank was waiting for Chet, Kaitlyn and Vanessa to get down the steps to the field, he felt something shove him, very hard, into the railing near the stadium edge.  He let out a startled cry as he suddenly went flying into the air and he hit the ground below.

The Hardy Boys belong to Simon and Schuster and the Stratemeyer Foundation. I've only borrowed them to play with for a while but I promise to return them whenever I've finished with them.  (I make no promises as to condition, that's entirely up to them).  I promise, I'm only writing for fun and I'm not making a single dime off of this (unless you count personal fulfillment).