Blood Relations by Franklin W. Dixon

be coming in. He felt the water lapping at his neck, his cheeks, his nose.
    Then it was lapping at his eyelids, and he forced them open—to find himself staring into the eyes of a calico alley cat whose tongue had been industriously giving Joe's face the once-over. The cat exchanged stares with him a moment, then yawned, curved its spine high into the air, and walked away unhurriedly with its tail straight up for a second. Clearly finding someone unconscious in this alley wasn't anything new to it.
    Joe sat up, the blood pounding in his head. Burning sunlight was streaming into the alley. He recalled a gun lying on the ground and looked for it. It was gone. It took him a minute more to discover that his wallet and keys were gone too, his pockets turned inside out. But it was only when he got to his feet that he realized something else was missing. His brand-new running shoes.
    He looked at the goon lying at his feet and saw the guy was in his socks as well. Someone must have spotted them lying there in the alleyway. They were lucky to have the clothes on their backs. He walked on wobbly legs over to the prone body of his assailant and pulled off the man's ski mask. The face was completely unfamiliar. Probably pure rent - a-thug, he thought.
    By now the shock of waking up battered and robbed was wearing off, and even more painful and important thoughts were popping into Joe's head.
    Dunn and the microfilm were now in the crooks' hands along with Callie.
    Frank had been jumped by a goon and was now missing. Maybe Frank had been captured, but maybe it was even worse than that.
    What really hurt was that right then there was nothing Joe could do to help any of them.
    All he could do was what he had been trying to do when the goon yanked him away from the phone. He had to contact Mrs. Rawley and Greg and Mike and tell them what had happened so they could be ready.
    Gingerly Joe stepped over some broken glass in the alley and out onto the sunlit Sunday-morning street. Battered, shoeless, his jeans and shirt covered with grime, he looked pitiful. In the distance he saw the telephone he had tried to use the night before. To his relief he saw that the receiver had not been torn off in the scuffle the night before. Joe sped up his pace. Just a quick phone call and then.
    "Hello, operator? I want to make a collect call ... " Joe realized he was speaking to dead air. He hung up, then picked up the receiver again and punched 0.
    "No," Joe moaned, slamming the receiver down. Of course, it was one of those new pay-before-you-play phones. Where was he going to get phone money?
    Then he heard a voice that seemed like the answer to his prayers.
    "Hey, fellas, who wants to make an easy quarter?"
    Joe turned in the direction of the voice and saw that it came from a concrete school yard. There, beneath a rusted basketball hoop whose net had long been torn away, a group of teenagers had gathered. One of them, a long stringbean of a guy who looked like he was on his way to a basketball scholarship and an NBA contract, was standing bouncing a basketball.
    As Joe headed toward them, he could hear the tall kid saying derisively, "I thought you guys were sports. Come on, you don't even have to play me one-on-one if you don't want. We can just shoot fouls. First one misses, he loses a quarter. What could be fairer than that?"
    One of the kids around him answered, "Come on, Wes, what do you take us for? We ain't fools. I got better ways to lose my change."
    By now Joe had reached the group.
    "I hear you offer a quarter?" he said.
    Wes's face lit up in a big grin. "My man. Be the easiest quarter you ever made. All you got to do is shoot fouls better than me, and everybody knows I can hardly hold a ball, let alone shoot it."
    As he said this, he flipped the ball over his shoulder in the most casual hook shot Joe had ever seen. It went through the basket without touching the rim, while the crowd of kids broke into loud guffaws.
    Joe shrugged. "What do I