Chapter 3169 3181 [Mermaid's Revenge]
After breaking out of the water, the dim light around him became bright again. Hattori Heiji felt the sea breeze and looked at several familiar people on the shore. His pounding heart calmed down a little.
He took another deep breath, dived back into the water, and looked again in the direction where he had seen the mermaid. However, this time, the place was empty and there was no one there.
"…I must have seen it wrong."
After a brief moment of confusion, Hattori Heiji nodded slightly and came to a categorical conclusion: "How could there be someone in the water? There is no such thing as a monster with a human head and a fish body in the world. This is not scientific - it must be the refraction of light under the water, the shapes of various debris, and the swaying water plants that made me hallucinate."
Putting aside all distracting thoughts, he looked in that direction twice more, then he calmed himself down, held Conan's watch in his mouth as a searchlight, and continued to look for what he was looking for.
After diving forward for a while along the steep seabed, Hattori Heiji's eyes stopped - what appeared before him was a heavy anchor embedded in the seabed.
He was about to take a closer look, but at this moment, a torrent suddenly rushed from the side and swept him out rapidly.
…
With a loud crash.
Hattori Heiji broke through the water.
After taking a few deep breaths, he came to his senses and looked down at the water suspiciously: He didn't know if it was an illusion, but when he was swept by the rapids and couldn't open his eyes, he always felt as if something slapped him mercilessly and pushed him back to the surface of the water.
"... Could it be that a large piece of water grass that was also swept away by the rapids happened to hit me when it passed by?"
He touched his back which was sore from being slapped, and looked left and right but could not see anything unusual.
"Hattori!" Everyone on the shore trotted over. Suzuki Sonoko waved at him from afar, interrupting his thoughts. "You swam too fast. You appeared over there in the blink of an eye. But there's a saying that those who drown are those who can swim. You'd better get up quickly and stop swimming around!"
Hattori Heiji's eye twitched: "You really don't have a single nice word to say. And what do you mean by swimming fast? Even a world champion can't swim this fast - I was clearly washed here by the water!"
Although he said so, he wiped his face, hesitated for a moment, and finally gave up exploring and swam back to the shore.
He climbed up the bank and put on the clothes he had just dropped from the program director. At this time, Mao Lilan remembered what he had just said and realized belatedly: "You also know that there are rapids in the water?"
"Of course. Didn't the deputy captain just say that he came to this island to catch horse mackerel?" Hattori Heiji pointed to the middle-aged man next to him:
"Horse mackerel is a migratory fish that likes to swim in rapids. And on the entire island, only this part of the sea has the most seagulls. They should be guarding here to catch fish. So it seems that there is probably a rapid below."
Jiang Xia's voice came from the side: "I noticed that Miss Pingliang has not boarded the boat yet. Do you think she might have had an accident while diving here, so you are anxious to come to find her?"
"Right...Jiang Xia?!" Hattori Heiji instinctively shuddered, "Didn't you go and move the corpse?"
Jiang Xia pointed at the two boatmen who were carrying the corpse nearby and said, "We have been carrying it all the time, but unfortunately we can't walk as fast as you can swim. But then again, even if there are clues to the murder down there, it's too dangerous for you to do this."
Hattori Heiji snorted guiltily: "Of course the sooner the case is solved the better."
"That's right." Conan was also startled by Hattori Heiji's sudden dive. Seeing his Osaka classmate safely out of the water, he couldn't help but say sarcastically, "Hattori-san just wants to redress the victim as soon as possible - he's not trying to defeat Jiang Xia-san tomorrow, so he's desperately collecting all possible clues."
Hattori Heiji: "..." Which side are you on, kid? Didn't we just form a joint front to resist Jiangxia?
The two detectives exchanged glances.
Next to him, the program director finally regained his sanity. He looked at the setting sun and shuddered in the sea breeze. “We’ll discuss the details of the case when we get back. We haven’t set up a temporary base station yet. There’s no signal on this island. We have to go back to town and call the police first.”
The deputy captain, who had been looking out to sea, suddenly asked, "How do we get back?"
"How do you get back?" The program director was puzzled. "Of course, we go back by boat."
When the word "boat" was mentioned, everyone was startled and then realized something belatedly.
——Hattori Heiji was rushed a long distance, and after the others caught up with him, they were no longer directly opposite the pier, but diagonally to the side.
From this position, one can clearly see the pier extending far out. But there is nothing at the end of the pier - the ship that brought them here has disappeared.
Curacao: “…” The ship is gone and there is no signal, so now this is an isolated island?
She felt that she should panic here, but soon this excellent intelligence officer discovered that she had no such emotions at all.
——To be exact, the moment she stepped onto the island and discovered that there was no signal here, she had already unconsciously anticipated the current situation.
"The only discrepancy is that I thought the ship would suddenly explode and turn into a firework, announcing the official opening of the desert island survival in a high-profile manner... but in fact, the ship disappeared quietly."
"But that's true. This place is not too far from the town. If there really is an explosion big enough to destroy the ship, it will definitely be discovered on the shore. By then, the desert island survival will end just as it began."
"Also, since this isn't too far from town, even if something does happen, I can swim all the way back."
Thinking of the distance between the two sides, Curacao calmed down a little. She pushed up the plain glasses on her nose and continued to hide herself in a low-key manner, trying her best to be a spectator.
"This...where is our boat?" Suzuki Sonoko, who was standing next to her, did not think as much as she did.
The innocent high school girl's mind went blank. After several seconds, she stared blankly at the empty space and guessed, "The captain is not here either. Did he hear about the murder and get so scared that he drove away?"
"That's not right." The male sailor with shoulder-length hair frowned. "When a murder suddenly happened nearby, a normal person would try to stay among the crowd. Why would he escape by boat alone? Unless..."
An idea suddenly occurred to him: "Unless that captain is the murderer who killed Pingliang!"
(End of this chapter)
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