Chapter 7
Chapter 7
So far, our heroes had a few things figured out. They knew that Madkat and Rex Shard were only passing around the counterfeit money, and they were in cahoots with somebody else. They knew that Dublin, Michaels, and Jerky were telling the truth because they were only trying to buy out Jenkins and change the warehouse to one that distributed vodka instead of healthier fruit-based juices so that they could satisfy their otherwise impossible-to-please parents, all of which had a vodka business each, locked into a three-way rivalry that was bound to erupt into a second cold war of sorts if it got out of control.
Further research from the Enforcers confirmed all three sets of parents had a history of trying to kill one another in order to get a monopoly on the vodka business, even though the reality was that all three were doomed to go out of business because, as Lenny rightfully pointed out, “Nobody drinks vodka these days because nobody likes the smell of it.”
“What I can’t figure out is if their heads are just screwed on backwards,” T-Bone had said to Razor, “or if they made a deal with the devil.”
“What do you mean, T-Bone?”
“In their minds, is it possible that they genuinely believe that if their sons do as they ask and buy Jenkins out, it would somehow miraculously turn the business around?”
“I don’t know. I’m amazed they haven’t forced anybody to drink it. They fight for a worthless cause.”
“Especially in this day and age where people know more about the dangers of drugs and alcohol than they used to. Let’s hope they keep making the good choices.”
“Affirmative!”
When our heroes got back to the warehouse, Jenkins was outside the front doors waiting for them. “Oh, thanks for getting here so fast!” he said.
“What’s the problem, Mr. Jenkins?” Fred asked.
“One of my staff came across another of those cardboard boxes. Two, actually. The same counterfeit money is only in one of the boxes.”
“What’s in the other one?”
“Vodka!”
“Vodka?!” everybody exclaimed in unison, including Scooby, who gulped immediately afterwards.
“So, the same smugglers bringing in the counterfeit money are also bringing in vodka?” Razor continued.
“Possibly so that I’ll be tempted to try it, get hooked on it, and ultimately let one of those gentlemen buy me out,” Jenkins winced. “I’m not willing to drink that stuff.”
“Don’t drink it. You’ll regret it if you do, especially if you were to drive afterwards.”
“Exactly.”
“Have you been able to get any sort of glimpse as to what the culprit looks like?” Felina asked.
“No, I haven’t.” Jenkins shook his head. “But, I did overhear them say how angry they were at their sons for not doing what they were told to do, which was to buy me out. Does that mean their parents are the criminals doing the counterfeiting?”
“That we’re trying to verify,” Razor replied, “but I actually have a hunch that this is what is happening.”
“There is one thing you should know, though,” T-Bone spoke up. “We have the trio here in person to help us solve the case, and they were caving into pressure from their parents to buy you out. They didn’t want to invest in vodka. They’d rather invest in the sports they like. What we can’t figure out is if the counterfeit cash having sports themes on it is strictly a coincidence, or if there’s a purpose for this.”
Dublin, Michaels, and Jerky were brought into the warehouse to speak with Jenkins while the heroes continued to look for the culprits. The trio confessed to him that this was the case and that Dublin had enough money to buy and improve his favorite golf course, while Michaels and Jerky were looking at property to build a new 16-lane bowling alley, but without any alcohol. Instead, their parents, who were fighting with one another over which vodka company was to have the monopoly in the city, were pressuring them into buying out Jenkins and continuing the vodka business. But, nobody knew why; the only why they were getting from their parents was them preaching, “You are doing this because I said so, and that’s final!”
“So, they hover over you like helicopters and do all they can to prevent you from making your own decisions even at however old you both are now?” Jenkins asked. “Amazing!”
“I hope your parents weren’t like that,” Dublin sighed.
“No, they weren’t. They weren’t business owners like I am, but it was my choice to do this, and they supported me upon discovering the business I was going into was fruit juice. We’re expanding to soda pop as well, but it’s still fruit-based. I always did like me a grape soda.”
“I prefer orange,” said Jerky, “but I’m with you. This stuff is better than vodka.”
Suddenly, alarms went off, and the place had to be put on lock-down “You three follow me to my main office; it doubles as a panic room,” Jenkins called as the trio ran to the office.
“Why the lock-down?” Michaels asked.
“I think it’s an intruder alert. However, the police are already here, alongside those two cats in the red and blue costumes.”
“What about those kids and their dog?”
“They’re actually helping the police because they were the ones who discovered the problem in the first place. It all began late at night when they’d smuggle gray cardboard boxes, but they all had the fake money in them. Now, it’s gotten worse because they’re adding their vodka bottles in there in order to tempt me.”
“Zoinks!” Shaggy shouted when the alarms began to sound.
“Uh-oh! Red alert!” Scooby exclaimed.
“Intruder alert. Intruder alert. Facility lock-down in progress,” a female voice-over kept repeating over the intercoms.
“Wonder if that’s the culprit we’re after?” Velma wondered aloud.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Felina commented. “I do remember Mr. Jenkins telling me that he installed a few hidden cameras, but they weren’t able to get good shots of the criminals. He did this, though, because the smugglers were also disabling the security systems.”
“I get it,” said Velma. “Then he grew impatient with the act because he didn’t want you or the press to jump to conclusions and assume he was the smuggler. That explains why he was hostile towards us the first day he met us. At least we know he’s a nice man now.”
“Like, yeah, but that still doesn’t explain George Washington dressed as a basketball player,” Shaggy put in.
“I’m sure we’ll find out what the reason for that was when we catch them.”
“Yeah, if we catch them.”
After what seemed like forever, the gang managed to finally come across the crooks they were looking for, but there were only two crooks, not six. They were making efforts to disguise themselves as hooded people without a face, but since they didn’t have anybody to help them, they couldn’t figure out how to trap the heroes inside their hideout since they did proclaim, “You know our secret! Now you shall pay with your lives!”
“Zoinks!” Shaggy exclaimed. “They do want to kill us!”
“That doesn’t fit any of the criteria we had,” Lenny spoke up. “Dublin said his parents would hire a gunman to kill him, not kill him themselves!”
“If that’s who it is, maybe they changed their mind,” Fred suggested.
“Either way, we have to find a way to stop them.”
The group decided to split up and cover more sections of the warehouse, since they had discovered it had a secret basement that Jenkins originally didn’t have in there. Shaggy and Scooby, having the dumb luck they had, always seemed to run into the hooded people while the SWAT Kats alongside Callie (since she was with them) took a different corridor than the one Felina and her fellow cops took alongside Lenny, only to run into each other again when they came across a different room. Fred, Velma, and Daphne took another corridor, only for two of them to realize the third one was missing.
“Daphne? Daphne? She’s gone!” Velma exclaimed.
“Wouldn’t you know it?” Fred groaned. “Danger-prone Daphne must have fallen through a trapdoor or something. Or she somehow got kidnapped by the hooded people.”
“What is this room? And, who’s grunting?” Felina asked when everybody (sans Scooby and Shaggy) got back together again.
“That sounds like Daphne,” Velma suggested after she listened to the grunting. “We are sorry, but she has a history of being danger-prone; she’s always falling through trap doors, or tripping over something, or getting kidnapped.”
“Is she cursed?” T-Bone asked.
“No; I think she’s just unlucky sometimes. But, what happens to her could happen to anybody.”
In Jenkins’s office/panic room, he used the controls to switch between his security cameras as well as use the intercoms to communicate with our heroes once he was able to find out what was happening. He watched as the heroes entered the room from which came the grunting. Felina took off the paper bag that was on top of the victim’s head as Lenny untied the ropes.
“It is Daphne!” Velma announced.
“Boy, am I glad to see you!” Daphne replied as she stood up to stretch for a bit and shook her wrists painfully. “I was just about to get a really bad cramp.”
“What happened?” Fred asked.
“One moment, I was with you. The next moment, I was here. I think somebody pushed me down here and intended to lock me in the room forever so that I would suffocate to death. I think they thought we had already discovered their secret room, but this is the secret room!”
Indeed, the heroes had entered the room the culprits didn’t want them to see: it had a bunch of printing presses and packs of brand new dollar bills in 1’s, 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s. And, just as before, the money had sporting themes on it. Lenny turned on one of the light switches to reveal that this was the case after Daphne made her exclamation.
T-Bone used one of the communication systems his fellow SWAT Kat had invented in order to speak to Jenkins over the intercoms since the hidden cameras were allowing him to see all the different rooms. “Are you guys seeing this?” he asked.
“I see it, but I don’t believe it,” came Jenkins’s voice over the intercoms. “They weren’t necessarily smuggling it, per se; they hid the whole thing in plain sight, right underneath my business! No wonder you three were pressured into buying me out.”
“It seems to me,” said Jerky, “that if we had bought you out as our parents said, and one of our sets of parents is the pair of criminals the police are chasing, then they could potentially frame us for something they were doing. In this case, it’s spreading the phony money.”
“That still doesn’t explain the sporting themes on the cash,” Michaels put in.
“No, it doesn’t,” Jenkins added, “but at least it’s all starting to make sense.”
About a minute later, Shaggy and Scooby suddenly burst into the room with a pair of angry guard dogs chasing after them. There was another door to the room, but it was locked. The guard dogs took every chance they got to attempt to bite Shaggy and Scooby, but they always missed.
“What did you do to anger them?” Felina asked Shaggy.
“Like, we were trying to run from the hooded people when we ran into their secret cafeteria,” Shaggy replied. “Not the main cafeteria in this warehouse, but a different one down here.”
“And, the dogs were there?”
“They were asleep, but they woke up when we entered the door. They must have thought it was their owners and that it was lunchtime.”
“You didn’t try to steal any food, did you?” Fred snapped. “You and your appetites!”
“Like, no. Well, more like, yes and no. We didn’t bother to eat anything because the hooded people, like, chased us all the way in and out. Scooby tripped over one of the chairs.”
“Sorry!” Scooby apologized.
“And, a bunch of bones fell out of one of the cabinets once he bumped into it. We threw bones to the dogs to keep them busy, but they kept chasing us at the commands of the hooded people.”
“And, the dogs chased you into this room?” Felina continued.
“Yes, ma’am!”
After taking a few photos of the counterfeiting room and all its features so that the press could get an accurate story in the papers and for the broadcasts of Kat’s Eye News that featured star reporter Ann Gora, the group continued their search for the hooded people. It felt like they were getting nowhere fast, but the hooded people were popping up in various places in order to lead our heroes on a wild goose chase. They clearly had it all thought out in sequence, given the order of their places they were popping out of, but then one of them accidentally popped up in the same place he did before, breaking the sequence.
The pair’s guard dogs also continued to chase Shaggy and Scooby, but then one of the dogs tripped over the same switch Daphne had tripped over earlier, which had been hidden from view before. Now that all the lights were on, they could clearly see what was going on, and Daphne announced, “That’s it. That’s what I tripped over.” This is because a net had fallen over the dog, and soon, extra robotic parts had appeared, trapping the dog in the same way it had trapped Daphne. One final hand popped out as a secret door opened, and it pushed the dog into a chute.
“So, that’s how you got in the counterfeiting room, yes?” Lenny asked Daphne.
“Yes, sir; that’s how it happened,” Daphne replied. “That blue switch over must have been what I tripped over to trigger it.”
“Let’s try,” said Razor. “I’ll use this juggling ball I kept as part of our investigation of Madkat being in the amusement park in order to try it.” He rolled the ball towards the blue switch, and upon hitting the switch, the ball suffered the same fate the dog did.
Then the gang had to get out of the way since the hooded duo were still chasing Shaggy and Scooby, but the Great Dane, having spotted the trap, got the idea to lead the duo to the trap after doing a round of “Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah!” and waving his paws over his head while making silly noises as if to say, “You can’t catch me!”
The duo’s hopes were to get Scooby into the trap, but instead, they ended up in the trap. The gang went back to the counterfeiting room, where the trap was now showing one extra detail it wasn’t showing when Daphne was in the trap: lethal ammunition in the form of military weaponry!
“Must have been stolen from a surplus store or something, huh?” Shaggy suggested.
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” said Felina. “This is all weaponry the Enforcers use on a regular basis from when my uncle was in charge. We weren’t robbed recently.”
“What if you were robbed prior to that?” Fred asked.
“If we were, I didn’t know about it.”
“Neither did I,” Lenny admitted, shrugging his shoulders. “But, let’s disable the trap. Let’s not have anybody get killed.”
The gang got to work on disabling the trap according to Lenny’s deductions, but waited until later for the big reveal. They also tried to cover their ears since the crooks started shouting out profanities at 90 miles per hour.
In the office/panic room, Jenkins and the others watched them but also tried to tune out the profanities.
“I don’t allow my employees to use such language, just so you all know,” he said.
“And, we don’t swear either,” said Michaels, “but I feel bad for those kids.”
“I do, too. I was talking with them earlier, and they said many of the mysteries they’ve solved had a bunch of crooks pretending to be ghosts, goblins, or whatever, but they never had problems with people who were potty mouths. Only recently in this day and age are they dealing with actual ghosts and spirits, and this includes Madkat, as well as the fact the people they apprehend have potty mouths.”
“Do you think it’s the fact they’re uneducated?”
“Not necessarily. I think it’s just the fact they’re filled with hate. If somebody’s parents take extreme measures to force their kids to make a living using the exact same occupation they have, that’s a hate crime to me. But, that’s just me.”
“Why raise your kids to be criminals, though?”
“I don’t know.”
Later, back on the surface, as other Enforcers arrived to arrest the criminals, Felina had Velma and Daphne pull the hoods off in front of Jenkins and the others. It was Dublin who let out the first gasp.
“Mom! Dad! It is you!” he winced.
“So, you were the counterfeiters!” Daphne exclaimed.
“You {BLEEP} {BLEEP}!” the dad exclaimed, aiming his insults at Dublin. “I SHOULD HAVE HAD YOU EXECUTED A LONG TIME AGO; YOU NEVER LISTEN TO YOUR PARENTS!”
“Even though he’s obeying the laws by disobeying you?” T-Bone asked, still puzzled over the whole thing.
“THAT’S NONE OF YOUR {BLEEP} BUSINESS!” the mom argued. “HE WAS TOLD TO KEEP OUR FAMILY BUSINESS GOING BECAUSE WE SAID SO, AND THAT’S FINAL!”
“No, it isn’t!” Lenny protested. “And, don’t use that language in front of these kids!”
“Please make it stop!” Scooby begged.
“YOU DON’T TELL US WHAT TO SAY!” the dad screamed back.
“You do realize you’re talking to police officers, don’t you?” Felina attempted to interject, remaining calm. She silently thought to herself, “I wonder how my uncle would have handled this one?”
“WHO CARES WHO THE {BLEEP} WE ARE TALKING TO? HE DISOBEYED US BECAUSE HE DIDN’T DO WHAT HE SHOULD HAVE DONE! HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BUY OUT THIS {BLEEP} COMPANY AND EXPAND OUR SALES OF VODKA SO THAT WE CAN BREAK ALL RECORDS AND OWN THIS TOWN!”
“Uh, news flash,” Lenny interrupted. “Nobody in this town drinks vodka! Nobody likes the smell of it!”
“And, nobody in this town combines it with orange juice to form a screwdriver either,” Jenkins added.
“Besides,” Dublin added, finally getting the courage to confront his parents, “you just wanted me to be a carbon copy of you! And, by being a carbon copy, I would continue to crank out these counterfeits as well as potentially murder other people. Morty and Jack are my best friends! I can’t kill my best friends! I can’t kill anybody!”
“SOME {BLEEP} SON YOU TURNED OUT TO BE! YOU UNGRATEFUL {BLEEP}!”
“All right; that’s enough!” Razor interjected, pointing one of his weapons at the parents.
“One more swear word out of you,” Felina echoed, “and the Enforcers will see to it personally that you have your vocal cords surgically removed so that you will never speak again! Take them away!”
“Yes, ma’am!” the other officers replied with a salute. The last thing anybody heard from the parents was them groaning to themselves the familiar groan that said, “And, we’d be in the trillions if it hadn’t been for those {BLEEP} kids and their {BLEEP} dog!”
“What did I do?” Scooby asked after finally uncovering his ears.
“You’re the big hero of the day, Scooby!” Felina announced with a smile.
“I am?” Scooby exclaimed, giving a big grin himself.
“Sure you are, Scooby!” Fred replied. “Ultimately, it was you who captured Madkat and Rex Shard, and now you got the Dublins and their guard dogs!”
“You’re A-OK with us, Scooby!” Razor added. “T-Bone and I salute you!”
The duo did so, and Scooby returned the salute with his tail, cheering his name. “Scooby-Doo!”
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