Free The Ghostwriter Secret by Mac Barnett

nose.
    Air. Steve pressed his legs hard against the bottom and shot upward, bursting from the surface of the water like a breaching whale. He saw Dana a few feet away, doing some awkward kicking stroke with his hands behind his back.
    Steve took a deep breath in through his nose, atthe same time sucking in water from the towel in his mouth. The key was not to panic. The water stung his throat.
Just stay calm and don’t panic.
He sank back down in the water.
    Again to the bottom and back to the top. This time Steve turned and looked up at the balcony from which he’d just jumped. It was empty. A breath and back downward. When Steve sank, he sank fast. Any kind of swimming would be impossible with this backpack. Steve pushed off from the bottom, breathed in deeply, and disappeared underwater again. Up and down, up and down, like he would do when he was a little kid, when he didn’t know how to swim and got stranded in the deep end. Slowly, with every trip to the surface, Steve moved closer to the steps on the other side of the pool. Ten feet. Eight feet. At five feet the water was just an inch or two above his head. By four feet he was walking, coughing against the towel in his mouth. He dragged himself out of the pool. Dana was out already, lying flat on his back.
    Soaked, fatigued, with hand towels in their mouths, the two boys lay in the sun, the warm cement radiating pleasantly on their backs.
    But not for long.
    There was a loud crack that Steve instantly recognized as a gun firing. He turned his head and lookedat Dana (Steve’s heart now beating loud and fast) and saw that Dana was all right—wide-eyed but all right. And now Steve looked up at the block of rooms that lined the pool, and, sure enough, there was the doorman on the balcony with what had to be a pistol in his hand. There was another shot, and Steve heard it ricochet off a metal deck chair. He turned back to his best friend, and the two of them knew what they had to do. They scrambled to their feet, took a running start, and jumped back into the pool.

CHAPTER XXV
DANGER FROM ABOVE
    T HREE MINUTES AGO , in this very same pool, Steve had been desperate to get his head above water. Now all he wanted to do was get to the bottom and stay there. He blew all the air in his lungs out through his nose and drifted down to the pool’s smooth floor. Eyes open and burning, he watched Dana come to rest on a spot nearby. They wriggled their way across the pool’s bottom to the edge closest to the building, for cover.
    When he was a little kid and taking swim lessons, Steve didn’t have a great breaststroke or butterfly, but he was able to stay underwater longer than any kidin the class. Although it was a lot harder to stay submerged when you were already exhausted and a man was shooting from somewhere twenty feet above your head. It had only been a few seconds, and already Steve wanted air.
    One terrible thing about being shot at underwater is being able to see the bullets travel toward you. They came screaming through the pool, swirling streams of little white bubbles trailing behind them. These bullets were coming close. A shot—two feet away, maximum. Steve’s ears popped, and his chest heaved. A shot, this one even closer. Steve’s lungs felt like they were turning inside out. Nearby, Dana sat with his back against the edge of the pool, his black hair swaying to and fro like seaweed. Another shot. Steve’s eyeballs felt ready to burst.
    And then nothing. Silence. Stillness. Steve’s first thought was that it was a trap. His second was that, trap or not, he needed air. He unfurled his legs, kicked off from the bottom, and, as carefully as he could, poked the top half of his head above water. Air rushed through his nostrils and filled his chest. There were no gunshots. There was a police siren, loud and getting louder. The cops must have scared those crooks away. Dana came up next to him. They made their way out of the