Free Running on Empty by Franklin W. Dixon Page B

someone fencing the parts for him. Even crooks keep tabs to make sure their thieving friends don't steal from them."
    Frank wasn't listening. He was staring at the large dusty spot. Something about the shape looked familiar. He closed his eyes and tried to remember where he had seen that shape before.
    Frank's face lit up in a smile.
    "What is it?" Joe asked.
    "Remember last spring when Aunt Gertrude made us clean everything in our rooms?"
    "What about it?"
    Frank ignored the impatience in Joe's voice and traced the outline of the rectangle. "You know how clean I keep my desk, especially the area around my computer. After Aunt Gertrude insisted I take everything off my desk, I found that dust had gathered under my computer."
    "So what?" Joe said.
    "It looked just like this," Frank replied, continuing to trace the dusty rectangle.
    "Then there is a record!" Joe was suddenly excited. "But where's the computer?"
    "Someone must have tipped Smith about the raid, and he took the computer with him."
    "He could have just burned the floppy discs," Joe said.
    "Smith doesn't seem to be the type who would bother with floppy discs. My guess is that he had a hard drive "He still could have erased the hard drive's memory."
    "If you had thousands of dollars of inventory on a hard drive, would you dump it all?" Frank didn't wait for Joe to answer. "It's easier to carry the computer out and start all over someplace else."
    "Didn't you say that Paradise Salvage used a computer to track down car parts?" Joe asked.
    Frank picked up the phone bill and flipped it open. He smiled again. The phone bill recorded hundreds of dollars' worth of computer modem charges from Smith's garage to a rural number outside of Southport. Frank picked up the phone and dialed the number.
    The other end rang several times.
    "Come on, come on," Frank grumbled.
    "Hello," a man's sleepy voice finally said.
    Then the garage was filled with a grating noise. The uproar drowned out the man's voice. Frank slammed the phone into its cradle.
    "The garage door." Joe's whisper was barely audible above the clamor. He turned off the light.
    He cracked the door just enough so he and Frank could peer across the warehouse floor.
    A thin man stood silhouetted against the large opening, the dull yellow of a lone streetlight casting the man's shadow the entire length of the warehouse.
    The garage door reached the top and stopped. The renewed silence was deadly.
    The thin man lifted what appeared to be a five-gallon can. He poured liquid from it on the wooden crates and stacks of tires. He tossed the rest on the fifty-gallon drums of toxic solvent and pressurized oxygen-acetylene tanks.
    Once the can was emptied, he tossed it toward the back of the warehouse. The can bounced and spun and slid until it hit the office door with a thud.
    Vapors from the can burned Joe's eyes and throat.
    The man lit a match, the flame's yellowish glow illuminating the pinched features of Snake, his face twisted in a triumphant smile.
    Snake tossed the match to the floor. An eerie whoosh! filled the garage, and Snake disappeared behind a wall of angry thick flames.
    In two seconds the flames fanned out through the warehouse, lapping up the gasoline in a feverish gorge, engulfing the wooden crates, tires, fifty-gallon drums, and welding tanks.
    The crunching of the flames was joined by a loud grating as the garage door began its descent - trapping Frank and Joe inside a giant, monstrous furnace!

Chapter 13
    Frank and Joe bolted toward the closing garage door. The inferno cut them off from the doorway and the windows around the garage. Flames and heat chased them back to the office.
    Joe flipped on his penlight. "No windows here!" he said, coughing.
    Smoke was filling the small office space. The Hardys fell to the floor, where the air was fresher.
    The white paint on the plywood walls turned brown, then cracked and bubbled and smoked. The plywood itself began to pop as it reached its ignition point, finally