Maverick Mania

  Maverick Mania

  Maverick Mania

  Sigmund Brouwer

  Orca Sports

  Copyright © 2008 Sigmund Brouwer

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopying, recording or by any information storage

  and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission

  in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Brouwer, Sigmund, 1959-

  Maverick mania / written by Sigmund Brouwer.

  (Orca sports)

  ISBN 978-1-55469-047-3

  I. Title. II. Series.

  PS8553.R68467M4 2008 jC813’.54 C2008-903023-0

  Summary: The disappearance of his soccer team’s leading scorer

  during the championship finals leads sixteen-year-old Matt

  to investigate and entangles him in a possible kidnapping.

  First published in the United States, 2008

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2008928554

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing

  programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada

  through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the

  Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through

  the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover design by Bruce Collins

  Cover photography by Getty Images

  Author photo by Bill Bilsley

  Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 5626, Stn. B

  Victoria, BC Canada

  V8R 6S4

  Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 468

  Custer, WA USA

  98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Printed on 100% PCW recycled paper.

  0100908 • 4321

  chapter one

  Fourteen minutes into the first half of our soccer game, a big blond-haired woman interrupted play. Wearing a loose Nike track-suit, she ran from the stands onto the field, screaming and waving her arms above her head.

  She was being chased by a man with a shaved head who wore a white T-shirt, a red Scottish kilt and hiking boots. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, there was the fact that I knew the man.

  He was my dad. And he was trying to yell something over the woman’s screaming.

  I sighed, spun around and kicked the ball out-of-bounds to stop the play. It probably wouldn’t have mattered. Nobody on the field was thinking soccer anymore, not even the referee. He didn’t even bother to blow his whistle. He just stared at the screaming woman.

  As for her, she ran like a blind cat with its tail on fire. One of the players from Almont High—our opponent—was a little slow getting out of her way. I think he simply couldn’t believe his eyes. It wasn’t until she hit him with a beefy shoulder that he knew it was for real. She sent him tumbling like a bowling pin. Everyone else suddenly decided it was a good idea to make plenty of room for her.

  Trouble was, she didn’t run in a straight line.

  I once saw something like it on a televised rodeo. A bull lumbered around in all directions and ran at the rodeo clowns, who were trying to distract it from the fallen cowboy. Just like the bull, this running, screaming woman with flailing arms seemed to aim at the players, who dodged and ducked in different directions so she wouldn’t run them over.

  And behind her, my dad kept chasing and yelling, with his Scottish kilt flapping around his knees. There were about two hundred fans watching this game, and they were on their feet screaming too, so it was hard to hear my dad.

  The big blond woman in the Nike track-suit stampeded toward my side of the field. As she got closer to me, so did my dad.

  I finally heard what he was yelling.

  “It’s only Larry!” he shouted. “It’s only Larry! Slow down! It’s only Larry!”

  She didn’t listen to him. She rumbled past me like a freight train as players wisely scattered.

  “Hi, Matt,” Dad said, slowing down as he got near me. “Keep up the great work.”

  “Sure, Dad,” I said. Dad’s left eye was red and puffy. I didn’t get a chance to ask him about it before he picked up speed again.

  “Uh-oh. Watch out!” he yelled.

  I followed his eyes. The woman had turned around and was headed right back at us, still screaming and waving her arms.

  I dove one way. Dad dove another way.

  She brushed between us and kept on running, arms in the air, high-pitched voice hollering. On my knees, I watched as Dad got up and began to chase her again.

  “It’s only Larry!” he shouted at her broad back. “It’s only Larry!”

  I shook my head sadly. This was just another day in the Carr family.

  Let me explain my family this way: Dad has a zoo. Mom calls the police at least every ten minutes. My sister surfs in her bedroom. And I’m a sweeper.

  But I’m the normal one. Sweeper is the position I play on the Thurber High School soccer team here in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. The way I explain it to people who don’t know much about soccer is that I’m like a free safety in football. Our team plays a 4-3-3 formation, with four defenders, three midfielders and three forwards. I’m the fourth defender, the last guy between the other team and our goalie.

  Other things about me: I’m sixteen. My brown hair is not too long, not too short. I don’t have a pierced nose or eyebrow or lip. I’m not tall. I’m not short. I wear the kind of clothes that make me look like part of a crowd. I make everybody call me Matt, but my real name is Teague, which is Celtic and means “man of poetry.” Just so you get a picture of what I’ve had to put up with my entire life, there is not a single Celtic person in either my mom’s or my dad’s entire family history; they just liked the name because it was different. I don’t like different. My goal in life, besides playing in the national championship game, is to be normal—unlike the rest of my family.

  Mom is a dispatcher for the local police. She’s the one who takes incoming calls and radios the messages to the officers in their cars. She applied for the job because she has always dreamed of being a detective, and she’s a mystery freak. One entire room of our house is filled with stacks of mystery books. She admits that at forty years old—I know she’s lying by three years—she might be too old to become a detective. But she says a person should never stop dreaming. Right now, working as a police dispatcher is the closest thing she can find to reaching her dream.

  My sister, Leontine, is fourteen and skinny with bony hips. She wears black everything and actually likes her name and tells everyone it means “brave as a lion.” Leontine is an Internet junkie. She surfs the web every possible minute from the souped-up computer in her bedroom. And she has orange-and-purple spiked hair.

  Mom, who still wears hippie clothes from the 1970s, and Dad, who shaved his head because he was losing his hair anyway, both keep telling me that it’s what’s inside a person that matters. I agree with them in one way—Leontine is a great sister. But in another way, I wish my family could be more like everyone else’s. When we walk into church together every Sunday—late, of course—I would love it if just once people didn’t whisper among themselves as we passed them.

  And Dad? He’s a sixth-grade science teacher. His students think he’s cool—partly because of the earring he wears, partly because he’s not afraid of what people think about him. (He plays the bagpipes and wears a kilt when he feels like it, and he isn’t even Scottish.) But mostly they think he’s c
ool because he’s a great guy who respects his students; he never treats them like little kids.

  There’s one other reason they like him: his classroom zoo. He’s got parrots, a possum and two iguanas in cages; budgies that fly around while he teaches; and a bunch of piranhas in an aquarium.

  What Dad is most proud of, though, is his three-year-old boa constrictor. The snake is six feet long, and Dad says it will someday grow to as long as twenty-five feet. Everyone in the school likes the snake.

  Well, everybody except for Freddy, the school janitor. Freddy is terrified of snakes.Even though the boa constrictor lives in a glass cage, Freddy will not step into Dad’s classroom to clean unless Dad has taken the snake away.

  So, every Friday after school, Dad puts the boa constrictor in a gym bag and takes him out of the classroom for a few hours. This gives Freddy the chance to do his janitor duties.

  It was Friday afternoon and, with the final bell, the beginning of spring break. It was also the first day of a weeklong high school soccer tournament. Dad stopped by on his way home from school to watch my team’s first game. He must have taken the gym bag containing the boa constrictor into the stands with him.

  Did I mention yet that the snake’s name is Larry?

  chapter two

  “I thought for sure that Larry would sleep through the game,” Dad said that night at the supper table. “He’s only active when he’s hungry, and we fed him a mouse on Wednesday. A big mouse too. It must have taken Larry about an hour to swallow it.

  “I’ll never cease to be amazed,” he continued, “by how Larry eats. He always positions the mouse headfirst, so it looks like the mouse is diving into his mouth. Then he swallows, slowly. The last thing you see is the mouse’s little tail disappearing—the kids really get into watching that. Then it—”

  “Dad?” I said. We were eating spaghetti with meatballs, long strands of spaghetti that slurped down like mouse tails. I didn’t need to be reminded of what I had seen plenty of times. After Larry managed to gulp the mouse whole, the mouse’s body slowly moved down the inside of the snake like a tennis ball. Or like a big meatball.

  “Yes, Matt?” Dad’s left eye was swollen nearly closed. A great big shiner was already starting to show.

  “Nothing,” I said. He wouldn’t understand why I wasn’t hungry anymore. I pushed my plate aside.

  “Not going to finish?” Leontine asked me.

  She didn’t wait for my answer before she grabbed my plate.

  “Finish your story,” Mom told Dad. “And explain your eye.”

  Our dining room faces the front of the house. Most of Lake Havasu City is built on the side of a low desert mountain that overlooks a valley. Past that you can see a desert mountain range. At the bottom of the valley is Lake Havasu, long and skinny. It runs down the valley for nearly thirty miles. From the table, we had a great view of the reds and browns of the opposite mountains and the incredibly clear desert sky as it began to turn purple with the approach of evening.

  I concentrated on the view. I didn’t want to remember the rest of the story. What I hadn’t seen I’d already heard as Dad drove me home from the game.

  “Well,” Dad said, grinning. Low sunlight from the setting sun bounced off his bald head. “It’s probably more Matt’s fault than mine.”

  “What!” I said. “My fault?”

  Mom smiled back at Dad. Sometimes it makes me sick how often they give each other goo-goo eyes. Mom’s still pretty, I guess. She has long black hair, deep brown eyes and high cheekbones. Her family is from Mexico. My folks met while Dad was going to college in Los Angeles. I got my dark looks from Mom; Leontine got her looks from Dad’s side, the family that came from Norway a couple of generations ago.

  “Sure,” Dad answered me. “Your fault.”

  He explained to Mom and Leontine. “Matt was playing such great soccer that I forgot all about Larry, who wasn’t as asleep as I thought. Next thing I knew, I saw Larry exploring the loose folds of this woman’s sweat jacket.”

  “She was a big woman,” I explained, unable to resist. “Just huge. With a really big tracksuit. Lots of folds.”

  “The woman was sitting in the stands below you, right?” Leontine said, sucking in a strand of spaghetti like a disappearing mouse tail.

  “Exactly,” Dad answered. “Larry nosed under the bottom edge of her jacket, so I thought I’d better grab him before he went any farther. I lifted the back of her jacket just as Larry touched her back. She thought it was me. After all, I was leaning down and reaching toward her.”

  Dad pointed to his left eye. “She turned around quick and punched me hard.”

  That was about the only part of the story I liked.

  “All that movement scared Larry, and he burrowed deeper into the dark safety under her jacket. I tried to get hold of him, but she thought I was grabbing at her again. So she punched me again. Larry took advantage of the confusion to wrap himself around her waist. She stood up and screamed and knocked me over. That’s when she realized I wasn’t touching her. In a panic, she plowed forward through the people below her. The next thing I knew, she was on the soccer field.”

  “Oh, my,” Mom said.

  “‘Oh, my?’” I echoed. “She disrupted the game for ten minutes. Running around, she nearly knocked out five players. When she saw the snake’s head as it looped up her back and over her shoulder, she fainted. And all you can say is ‘oh, my’?”

  Dad nodded and added, “Not to mention how badly it scared Larry. He threw up all over her. Poor snake.”

  Mom nodded calmly, as though none of this was a big deal. Compared to other times, maybe it wasn’t. Dad’s classroom zoo used to include tarantulas. They escaped—two days before a PTA meeting in the school. They were found...in a teacher’s purse...during the PTA meeting...as the teacher reached inside for peppermints.

  Mom turned to me. “Matt, you haven’t told me how the game went. Did you win?”

  “Tied,” I said. “No score. Even after overtime.”

  “That’s a bigger surprise than hearing about Larry deciding to explore some stranger’s tracksuit,” she said. “Caleb didn’t get even one goal?”

  “Caleb wasn’t there,” I said. Our leading scorer had missed the entire game.

  “Is he sick?” she asked in concern. She knew as well as I did that only a broken leg would keep Caleb Riggins away; he would just as soon stop breathing as miss a soccer game.

  “That’s the weird thing,” I said. “Coach called his house and didn’t get an answer, not even voice mail. I sure hope Caleb shows up for tomorrow’s game. If we don’t win these early games, we may not make the tournament finals.”

  “Coach didn’t even get voice mail?” Mom asked. A familiar crazy gleam showed in her eyes. I called it her Sherlock Holmes gleam. Like the one she wore when we followed a car from a gas station here all the way to Las Vegas, about three hours away. Mom was convinced the girl in the backseat kept waving at us because she had been kidnapped. That might not have been so bad, expect Leontine and I were in the car too, and we needed to get to school.

  “The coach called the Rigginses’ house and didn’t even get voice mail?” she repeated. “Maybe this is something I should look into. You know his mother never leaves the house. Plus, Caleb’s the league’s leading scorer, and you guys were expected to sweep your games. This is a big tournament. Maybe somebody on one of the other teams kidnapped him and his family.”

  I groaned. “Come on, Mom. Caleb just missed one game. Please don’t start anything, all right?”

  “But Matt—”

  “No, Mom. Please. N-O. No.” I let out a deep breath. “I mean, didn’t Dad and Larry do enough damage already?

  “Besides,” I added, “there’s no reason to worry. This is Lake Havasu City. Nothing ever happens here. I’m sure Caleb will be at tomorrow morning’s game.”

  I was, of course, very wrong. About Lake Havasu City. And about Caleb.

  chapter three

  Sa
turday morning, I stood behind the sideline at midfield, holding the ball over my head with both hands. This was a crucial throw-in. We were down by one goal, with only twenty minutes left in the game.

  While losing the game would not knock us out of the tournament, it wouldn’t help our chances. The top eight high school teams in the southwest states—including California and Texas—were here for the round-robin tournament. After every team had played every other team once, the top two would face off in the finals. The winning team would go on to a national tournament, to be televised on ESPN.

  I scanned the field. Our team wore blue jerseys. Theirs wore red. No matter how hard I looked, though, I would not see Caleb Riggins. He had missed this game too.

  I looked for an open blue jersey. It wasn’t easy. Red clogged the middle, taking away a direct attack. Red players danced around, covering our blue.

  I faked a throw, then saw Steve Martindale break loose on the other side of the field.

  Careful, I told myself. Under pressure, it is too easy to make a mistake. I needed to keep both feet on the ground as I threw the ball. It might be routine in practice, but in a tournament, there is no such thing as routine.

  Steve stopped, dashed forward, faked a move to the left, then spun back.

  I was expecting that. Steve’s my closest friend on the team. He’s tall and skinny and has red hair that hangs over his eyes, so he wears a headband when he plays.

  I threw, anticipating where Steve was headed. He didn’t have to break stride as the ball reached him.

  I didn’t just stand and watch, though. I sprinted for an open space just behind him. I knew the ball was coming back to me on a give-and-go.

  It did.

  I trapped it with my right foot.

  I knew I had about a second before a red forward was on me.

  I pretended to mishandle the ball to give him confidence. It worked. He over-committed, hoping to strip me of the ball for a clear shot at our net.

  I could try my next move only because I knew Steve was ready to back me up and cut the red player off if I lost the ball.