Текст книги "Murder To Go"

Автор книги: Megan Stine

Соавторы: William H. Stine
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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 7 страниц)

10
Just Us Chickens

Bounce. Bounce. Bounce. In the warm morning sunshine, Pete dribbled around Jupe and made a break for the basketball hoop above his garage door. He went up for a back-handed lay-up and all 190 pounds of him stuffed the ball through the net.

“Come on, Jupe,” Pete said, passing the basketball back to him. “Are you playing?”

“I keep thinking about last night and that chicken,” Jupe said.

“You’re telling me,” Pete said, coming up to Jupe. “Yuck – it’s enough to give us nightmares for a week. That’s why you’ve got to get some exercise. It’ll take your mind off having to wash all that blood off your shoes.”

Jupe gagged, remembering the horrible sight of the headless chicken, dripping blood and veins. While he was trying to catch his breath, Pete knocked the ball out of his hands and went in for another lay-up.

“Let’s not relive the moment,” Jupe said with a shudder. “The question is, who sent it? Who wants us to stay away from Big Barney? It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing Big Barney would do himself. He’s giving us other signals – inviting us to come closer, to get involved with his business.”

“Jupe,” Pete said seriously, “you’ll figure it out. You always do. I have faith.”

Jupe smiled at his friend and quickly stole the ball from him. Jupe threw a long, arching shot toward the basket – and missed by a mile.

“You’re getting closer,” Pete said. “You’re definitely in the same state.”

Bob’s car horn beeped in the driveway and he hopped out as soon as the VW chugged to a stop.

“Morning, guys,” Bob said. “Seen the paper, Jupe?” He tossed Jupe the morning edition. “Check out the front page of the business section.”

Pete tossed Bob the basketball and they shot a few while Jupe read the news story.

“This is extremely timely,” Jupe said a few minutes later. “Michael Argenti has intensified his efforts to acquire the Chicken Coop restaurants. Hmmm. I’ve got to make a phone call.” He disappeared into Pete’s house. Five minutes later he came out, wearing the famous Jupiter Jones I-told-you-so smile.

“Who’d you call?” asked Pete.

“Michael Argenti,” Jupe said. “I thought it was time that we checked him out. After all, it’s possible that he won’t succeed in buying the Chicken Coop restaurants. In which case, he might settle for merely ruining Big Barney’s business by poisoning his food.”

“What’d Argenti say about that?” asked Pete.

“I didn’t talk to him,” said Jupe. “His secretary said he was out of town today. And do you know where?”

“No, but you’d better know or this is a really dumb conversation,” Pete said.

“Petaluma,” Jupe announced. “Just north of San Francisco. It’s where Big Barney has his chicken farms.”

In less than an hour Jupe and Pete were climbing aboard a commuter plane to San Francisco. They had phoned Juliet and gotten her to agree to pay all their expenses in this investigation – although she didn’t realize that they were also investigating her father. Bob stayed behind because he had some heavy-duty responsibilities at the talent agency. One band was scheduled to play at two different weddings that day, and Bob was supposed to make sure that the band didn’t get too drunk to make it to the second wedding reception on time.

At San Francisco International Airport, Pete and Jupe rented a car and drove an hour north to Petaluma. They had no trouble finding Big Barney’s ranch. It was well marked and well known to everyone in town.

The ranch itself looked more like an automobile factory than a chicken farm. There were two huge cinder block buildings, each two stories high and about as long as a football field. Surrounding them was a chain-link fence.

Pete and Jupe stood outside the fence for a moment and stared. Maybe because it was Saturday, no one was around. So the guys opened the gate and walked fifty yards to the first building. A quick check to see if anyone was watching – then they sneaked inside.

They couldn’t believe their eyes – or their ears. Inside they saw not hundreds of chickens, but hundreds of thousands of them in a well-lighted space. The noise was incredible. Light poured in through a green-house-style glass roof, but air conditioning kept the temperature down.

Jupe and Pete grabbed two Chicken Coop visors that were hanging on a peg by the doorway. They put them on so they’d look like employees and started to snoop around.

The first thing they found out was that it was very difficult for human beings to move in this building. Besides the countless chickens, there were long red plastic pipes mounted a few inches from the floor – and they were everywhere. The pipes ran the entire length of the building, like long, low hurdles. Pete and Jupe had to step over them to walk around. These were feeding pipes, with small red plastic bowls attached every eighteen inches. There were also water pipes, with small purple nozzles for the birds to drink from. The entire process of chicken raising was automated, which was why no people were around.

The birds were grouped into long sections according to age, from little purple fuzzy chicks up to fat, full grown, bright-plumed birds. Pete and Jupe walked from section to section.

“Why do some of them look so strange?” Pete asked. “Look at that guy – he’s got the weirdest little wings I’ve ever seen.”

“Genetic engineering,” Jupe said. “A process of planned nutrition and selective breeding so that desirable physical and biological traits become dominant. Some are bred so their wings are big and some so they have big breasts to produce a lot of white meat. That’s why that one looks top-heavy, like it’s going to fall over.”

Suddenly Jupe and Pete saw they were not the only humans in the building. Three men had entered and were looking around. They were standing where Jupe and Pete had come in, among the smallest chicks.

“Quick,” Jupe said. “Look busy.”

“There’s nothing to do,” Pete said. “Everything’s done by machine.”

“Then hide!”

Jupe and Pete ducked down behind a partition that separated one breed of chickens from another. It was a low partition, and they could see over the top of it to watch and eavesdrop on the men who had come in. But the chickens were crowding around them, pecking at their legs.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Jupe said, suddenly feeling claustrophobic. “Every time I see the white ones, I remember that package we got last night.”

But just then the three men moved closer to the guys. One of them wore a red plaid shirt and khaki pants. His white cap, with the Chicken Coop emblem on it, said Hank in big red letters. The other two men looked totally out of place. They wore dark blue suits, and one had mirrored aviator sunglasses. He was young, with short dark hair. When he removed his sunglasses, his blue eyes were like the flames of a blowtorch.

Then Jupe heard Hank say, “Anything else I can show you, Mr. Argenti?”

Michael Argenti? This was one conversation Jupe had to hear!

Michael Argenti looked right through Hank and talked only to the other blue-suited man. “I’ve seen enough,” he said in a dissatisfied tone of voice. “Make some notes and write up a memo. I’m going to have to make some real changes around here. I can see that.”

“Yes, Mr. Argenti,” said the eager assistant, digging out a pen and small notebook from his jacket pocket.

Michael Argenti put his mirrored sunglasses back on and looked at Hank. “What’s your output?”

“From hatched egg to slaughter in nine weeks,” Hank said. “We get fifty thousand full grown about every week.”

“Not enough. The population’s got to be doubled,” Michael Argenti said.

The assistant wrote that down.

“Big Barney doesn’t like the birds too crowded,” said Hank.

“This isn’t a rest home for chickens,” said Michael Argenti with a nasty smile. “It’s a factory. The more units we turn out, the more money we make. At Roast Roost we get mature birds in seven weeks. You’re going to have to be that good, too.”

Michael Argenti looked around the plant again, shaking his head. Then he bent down and took a handful of grain out of one of the feeding bowls. Little chicks pecked at it in his open palm. Michael Argenti looked back at Hank. “The feed’s gotta change, too. But I’ll take care of that personally,” he said. “I’ve got something special in mind.”

By that time, the assistant had the door to the outside standing open. Michael Argenti walked through it and climbed into a stretch Mercedes limo without breaking his stride. As the car drove off Jupe read its license plate.

It said PLUCKER-1.

11
Bumper Cars

“Well, Michael Argenti was everything I expected him to be,” Jupe said to Pete as they drove south, heading back toward San Francisco. “A brash, arrogant, ruthless, self-important business animal.”

“Just what I was thinking,” Pete said. “But you left out the word ‘jerk.’ ”

They rode in silence for a while, but around 7:00 p.m., when they were just a few miles outside of the city, Jupe suddenly yelled at Pete, “Pull over”

“What’s wrong?” Pete asked as he steered their small rented car onto the highway off-ramp. Then Pete saw the sign. It was a tall painted chicken with a flashing neon crown, perched on the purple barn roof of a Chicken Coop restaurant. “What happened to a melon a day keeps the pounds away?” Pete asked.

“There have been a number of scientific studies lately which have hypothesized that foods rich in saturated fats may actually be beneficial to people,” Jupe said.

“That’s barn crud and you know it,” Pete said. “But so is your melon diet. So let’s eat!”

Pete parked the car and caught up with Jupe, who was not wasting a second getting into the Chicken Coop restaurant.

Jupe stopped at the doorway, inhaling deeply. “Did you know that the sense of smell is one of the weakest of the five senses?” he told Pete. “After you’ve been in a particular aroma for even a short period of time, you become dulled to it and can’t smell it anymore. That’s why it’s important to savor that first blast of grease when you walk in the door.”

“Give me a break, Jupe. People are waiting behind us to get in,” Pete said.

They walked to the order counter, where a teenage girl in a purple plaid shirt and a khaki skirt stood smiling at them. She wore a white cap that didn’t have a bill. It had a beak. According to the purple writing on her hat, her name was Carly. Carly gave them the official Big Barney greeting.

“Hi there, buddy. Hi there, friend. It’s great to have you back again,” she said. “What’s your order? What’s the scoop? We’ve got it from hen’s teeth to soup. What would you like?”

“I’ll have a six-piece murder to go,” Pete said absently.

“Excuse me?” the girl said.

“Oh – sorry,” Pete said. “Six-piece chicken.”

Then Jupe ordered a full chicken dinner and the two of them found a table by the window. But when they sat down to eat, Pete didn’t touch his food.

“You know,” Pete said, “we’re making a pretty big assumption here. I mean, what if this food – that drumstick you’re about to demolish – is the stuff that’s poisoned?”

“I haven’t forgotten and I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” Jupe said. “But there are times in a man’s life when he just has to take a risk – and this is one of them.” He bit into the drumstick and closed his eyes to savor it.

Pete shrugged his shoulders and picked at his own food.

“The key to this case is Juliet Coop and, quite possibly, her missing briefcase,” Jupe said when he had eaten a few more bites. “Unfortunately, we can’t wait for her amnesia to pass to find a solution. Our poisoner knows we’re on the case, and if he can’t scare us away, he may decide to speed up his plans. So let’s consider what MOM has to say about our three suspects.”

“My mom would say, ‘Don’t get into any more trouble, Pete. You’ve given me enough gray hairs already,’ ” Pete said.

“Not that kind of mom,” Jupe said. “I was referring to that classic formula for all detection: Motive, Opportunity, and Means. Now, as for Big Barney, he certainly has the means and the opportunity to poison his food. He could introduce something into the birds’ diet or inject the birds during processing.”

Pete looked down at the chicken in his hand and dropped it onto his tray.

“But what is Big Barney’s motive?” Jupe went on.

“He’s nuts,” Pete said.

“Is he nuts enough to kill millions of people and injure his own daughter?” Jupe asked.

“I don’t know,” Pete replied. “But who else would send you a chicken with its head cut off?”

“Anybody can buy a chicken. And we can’t forget that Michael Argenti is in the chicken business too,” Jupe said. “There is a man with an irrefutable motive. I’d say he’s determined to either take over Big Barney’s business – or ruin it. If the takeover deal goes through, fine. But if it doesn’t succeed, maybe he’s planning to poison Big Barney’s chickens as some sort of revenge. Maybe his visit to Petaluma today was really a matter of casing the joint to figure out how to poison the feed. That would cover means. And as for opportunity, it seems like anyone has access to Big Barney’s ranches. After all, we walked right in, no questions asked.”

“Okay, how about suspect number three?” said Pete.

“Mr. Sweetness? Your guess is as good as mine. He’s fronting for someone – but who?”

They pondered the suspects as they dumped their trash in a chicken’s mouth garbage can and then headed for the car.

It was dark outside as Jupe and Pete drove into San Francisco. The famous San Francisco fog had already begun to roll in. It hovered like a doughnut around the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, so that the guys could see the tops of the towers and the traffic underneath, but nothing in between.

San Francisco’s seven hills were similarly draped in patches of fog, which left the peaks and valleys clear but clouded up the midsections. Pete thought it was awesome and Jupe tried to analyze the meteorological elements that produced fog every night in the middle of summer.

Then they checked out all of San Francisco’s rock radio stations, spinning the dial, listening for a cut by the Stone Bananas, one of Sax’s new groups. When they were only ten or fifteen miles from the airport, however, Pete began to get nervous. He kept glancing in the rear-view mirror and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

“Take a look behind us, Jupe,” he said. “See a purple Cavalier?”

“I see it,” Jupe said. “What about it?”

“I think he’s following us,” Pete said.

Logic said no. No one knew they had come to San Francisco. It was such a spur of the moment trip. But Pete said yes so strongly. “Okay. Slow down,” Jupe said. “We’ll take a look.”

Pete slowed a little more and the purple car moved up on them, switching to the right lane. Now it was almost even with their back right bumper. Jupe turned to look, but the headlight’s bright beam prevented him from seeing the driver’s face. Jupe rolled down his window. The driver in the purple car rolled down his window and pulled up a little more. Now he and Jupe were side by side, face to face.

Jupe gasped and jerked back away from the window. It was Mr. Sweetness! He was wearing the army camouflage jacket, his arms bulging in the sleeves. His face was somewhat pockmarked and he held his mouth in a frozen half smile, half sneer. Jupe knew immediately that he was staring into the cold eyes of a killer.

“Let’s get out of here!” Jupe shouted.

Pete took his eyes off the road long enough to see exactly what Jupe was shouting about. Mr. Sweetness laughed and suddenly the purple car swerved at them. But Pete stepped on the gas and their rental car jerked ahead.

“He’s not just following us. He’s trying to smear us across the road,” Pete said, taking a quick glance at his mirror.

Mr. Sweetness pulled back into Pete’s lane and stayed directly behind him. Every time Pete slowed down for traffic, the purple Cavalier lunged forward and hit them. Ram! Hard enough to dent the bumper but not hard enough to mash body metal. Ram!

“Take an exit,” Jupe said. “We’ll lose him!”

Pete pulled off the highway quickly, but so did the Cavalier. No matter how fast Pete drove, the Cavalier was always able to keep up. Ram! There didn’t seem to be any choice but to keep on driving. but for how long? Ram!

Both guys realized that being so far away from Rocky Beach had made them feel safe. The idea that no matter where they went, Mr. Sweetness would be there too, had never occurred to them. Now they were racing that reality. alone. in the dark. Ram!

When they reached a remote hillside residential area, Pete turned sharply and aimed the car up a hill. Ram! A sign indicated that they were taking a scenic route up to one of San Francisco’s most famous tourist attractions – Twin Peaks. From the tops of these two mountains, sightseers had a panoramic view of the water, the city lights, and the entire Bay Area.

But as the road curved upward, Pete found that they were driving right into the doughnut of fog ringing the mountains. Ram!

“I’ve never seen fog like this,” Pete said desperately, slowing the car. In fact, it was so thick that they couldn’t see more than a foot in front of their headlights. Ram! For a moment, Pete thought about turning around and going back down the mountain. But there wasn’t room – and they knew Mr. Sweetness wouldn’t allow it. Ram!

Jupe looked nervously out the back. He couldn’t see the Cavalier at all. He couldn’t even see another set of headlights. But he felt it each time Mr. Sweetness rammed into them.

Then, for what seemed like many minutes, nothing happened.

“Do you think he stopped?” Pete asked Jupe in a tense, thin voice.

“I don’t know,” Jupe answered. “I can’t see a thing. Just keep driving.”

Pete gripped the wheel even tighter. They were coming to a curve in the road, and Pete didn’t want his concentration to break. It was almost impossible to see the road right in front of the car, let alone the edge where the ground dropped away sharply.

Suddenly, just as Pete was nearing the sharpest part in the curve, the purple Cavalier appeared out of nowhere, driving on the left side of the two-lane road. He was swerving from side to side, trying to push Pete and Jupe over the edge!

“Watch out! We’re going over!” Jupe shouted.

Pete pulled the wheel to the left, tires squealed, and they felt the car jerk back onto the pavement from the shoulder. Then Pete held his breath and sped forward blindly. No matter how terrifying it was to drive in this fog, it was better than sticking around for another encounter with Mr. Sweetness.

At the top of the hill the fog disappeared. They had driven high enough to be above it.

With his heart pounding, Pete backed into one of the parking spaces in the curved parking lot overlooking the magnificent vista below. His hands shook as he wiped his forehead.

“Now let’s just wait for Mr. Sweetness to show up,” Pete said in a furious, let’s-get-tough tone of voice.

12
Unwrapping a Clue

Pete and Jupe sat silently on top of Twin Peaks with the motor running. They were waiting for the purple Cavalier with Mr. Sweetness in it to burst through the fog to the top of the hill. Now that they were out of the fog themselves, and surrounded by a few dozen sightseers who could back them up, Pete felt less frightened and a whole lot more angry. In fact, he was burning mad.

“The guy’s got a lot of nerve,” Pete said, hitting his fist repeatedly on the steering wheel. “I’d like to meet him in a fair fight, I’ll tell you that.” Pete mentally ran through all the karate moves he knew and would use on Mr. Sweetness if he got the chance. “Why doesn’t he show up? What’s he doing on that road, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Jupe said thoughtfully. “There are a lot of possibilities. ”

They waited about thirty minutes and still the Cavalier didn’t show up.

Suddenly Jupe slammed his fist into the dashboard. “We’ve got to get to the airport,” he said.

“But what about Mr. Sweetness?” Pete said.

“He’s not coming,” Jupe said. “He probably turned around and went back down the hill.”

Pete slapped the steering wheel with his palms and put the car in gear.

“Look on the bright side,” Jupe said. “Now at least we know exactly what he looks like.”

Pete drove quickly to the airport and pulled into the Rental Car Returns area. They left the keys in the car, as instructed, and then rushed into the rental office to pay. But just before they got to the office, Pete spun Jupe around by the arm.

“Look!” he said, pointing to a returned car parked near the front.

“A purple Cavalier!” Jupe exclaimed. “But is it the one we’re looking for?”

They walked over and circled the empty car.

“It’s the right license plate,” said Jupe. “Quick! Go into the office and see if he’s still in there, and stall him. If he’s not there, try to find out from the clerks what Mr. Sweetness’s real name is. I’ll be there to help you in a minute.”

As Pete left, Jupe opened the purple car’s passenger door and leaned inside. Was there something in the car that might be a clue? Jupe started searching, meticulously checking the carpeting behind, under, and in front of the seats. He checked the ashtrays and the glove compartment, and even squeezed his hand into the narrow space between the pedals to check under the floor mats. Then he stood up, puffing a little from being bent over for so long.

But it had been worth it. He had found something, something crucial. It didn’t tell him who Mr. Sweetness was. But it told him the next best thing – where he might go to find out. Jupe rushed to the rental office and met Pete coming out.

“What did the clerk say?” asked Jupe.

“Have a nice day,” Pete said.

“About the purple car,” Jupe said impatiently.

“Have a nice day,” Pete repeated. “That’s all it says. It’s a computer.”

“Look what I found,” Jupe said, pulling out a small crumpled piece of paper, shiny foil on one side and plain white on the other.

“A candy wrapper,” Pete said, smoothing it until he could read the name written in silver ink. “Miracle Tastes! It’s like the candy Don Dellasandro handed out at Big Barney’s party!”

“Yes, exactly,” Jupe said. “Free samples of a product not on the market yet. This creates two possibilities. Mr. Sweetness could have been at the party and gotten candy samples as we all did. Or – and this would be considerably more interesting—perhaps Don Dellasandro and Mr. Sweetness are in league together.”

“We’re just a plane ride from finding out,” Pete said. “Let’s go home!”

It was midnight when Jupe returned to the junkyard and too late to do anything except work on his latest electronic project – the lock combination decoder. When he got too tired to tinker with it anymore, he turned off the workshop light and started to lock up.

Just then the phone rang.

“Hello?” Jupe said in the darkness.

“Hello, Jupe, it’s Pete. Kelly wants to talk to you. Tell him, babe.”

Jupe flipped the lights back on.

“Hi, Jupe!” Kelly said with an awful lot of energy. “Well. like. you know, Juliet Coop took me out to lunch today. ” she began.

Jupe could picture Kelly twisting one long brown piece of hair, and he knew this was going to be a long story. He put the call on the speaker phone so he could walk around while he listened.

“. but she doesn’t remember where she was or where her briefcase might be,” Kelly was saying. “But she remembers something about a car behind her that night. but it’s still fuzzy. Anyway, after lunch she gave me a ride home, and it was great. Big Barney just gave her a new Mustang convertible.”

“You know the one,” Pete interrupted in the background. “The baby with the five-liter V-8 engine and the – ”

“Pete, please,” Kelly said. “Jupe wants to hear this story. So anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. So before she got in the car, she opened the trunk and threw in her purse. Hey, I said to myself, that was weird. So I asked her, ‘What’d you do that for?’ ‘Habit,’ she said. She was riding with the top down once in her old Mustang and someone reached in and grabbed her purse. So do you get the picture, Jupe?”

Jupe’s eyes lit up. The trunk! Juliet’s briefcase might be in her trunk!

“Yes! A brilliant observation, Kelly. You’re learning a lot from me,” Jupe said.

Kelly sort of snorted a laugh.

“Let me talk to Pete,” Jupe said. “Pete, first thing Monday morning, we’re going to the auto salvage yard to check out the trunk of Juliet’s car.”

“Knew you’d say that,” said Pete. “Okay, see ya.”

At 9:00 Monday morning, Pete and Bob showed up in the VW. But Jupe wasn’t quite ready. He picked up the phone and dialed the number of police headquarters. When Chief Reynolds got on the line, Jupe announced he was calling about Juliet Coop’s briefcase.

“A briefcase is news to me,” said the chief.

“Of course, you searched the scene of the accident thoroughly for all personal property,” Jupe said.

“Of course,” the chief answered patiently.

“And the car?” asked Jupe.

“Jupiter, I have uniforms that are older than you are,” said Chief Reynolds. “I know how to do my job. My guys said the car was empty.”

“I was just checking loose ends,” Jupe said.

“Grasping at straws, you mean. You wouldn’t want to put a little wager on this case, would you, Jupiter?” asked Chief Reynolds with a laugh. “Loser buys the winner a Big Barney dinner?”

“Chief, if I lose this one, Big Barney’s chicken may be the last thing you’d want to eat,” Jupe said. “Talk to you later.”

Then Jupe joined his friends and the Three Investigators drove over to the Miller Auto Wreckage Yard. It was the size of two city blocks and surrounded by a tall wooden fence. The far side of the yard was piled high with newly wrecked cars just waiting to be stripped. Scattered elsewhere throughout the lot were piles of various sorts: tires, fenders, cars that were too damaged to be used for parts, and so on. In the left rear corner of the lot there was a huge compactor machine and a 200-foot crane.

Almost as if it had been planned by a television action-adventure show writer, they arrived at the exact moment when Juliet’s little blue Mustang was being lifted into the air by the enormous electromagnet on the end of the crane.

“He’s going to drop it in the masher!” Pete shouted. “It’ll squeeze the metal into a solid block!”

“We’ll never get anything out of the trunk then,” Bob said, breaking into a run.

They ran as fast as they could to the crane, shouting and waving at the crane operator. When they got there, they saw it was Dick Miller, the owner’s son, who had just graduated from Rocky Beach High School a year ago.

He shut down the motor and stepped out on the big yellow painted platform around the operator’s cage. “What’s your problem?” he shouted down to them.

“If that’s Juliet Coop’s car, we’ve got to see it,” Jupe shouted back.

“That’s it, all right,” Dick Miller said. “But it’s past it for spare parts, guys.”

“We only need to inspect it for a minute,” Jupe said.

“Okay, I’ll set it down over there,” Dick Miller said, pointing to a space in the middle of the yard beside a huge pile of trucks.

The Three Investigators nodded and headed for the area where Dick Miller had pointed. As they walked the crane’s engine started up again and the wrecked car, dangling at the end of the flat, round magnet, started moving after them. Jupe looked over his shoulder and saw the car swinging gently back and forth. But then it began to pick up speed, swinging in wider arcs.

“That thing’s gonna really hit hard when it hits the ground,” Pete said. “He’s crazy.”

They moved back out of the way but the car above them followed, swinging dangerously near.

“What’s the joke?” Pete shouted above the roar of the crane’s engine.

“It’s no joke! Look!” Bob shouted.

On the ground at the foot of the crane lay Dick Miller. He was holding his stomach, doubled over in pain. Someone else had climbed up into the crane operator’s booth and was now working the controls. The crane swung the car ten feet above their heads.

“Who’s operating the crane?” Jupe asked.

But there wasn’t time for an answer. Suddenly the crane swung the car toward them, and then the electromagnet let go of Juliet’s car. All 3,000 pounds of mangled metal came falling to the ground.