Episode 8: Ahoy, Mateys!
This one starts with Duncan having a weird dream about Meg. She’s saying she still loves him and asks why he’s moved on so easily with Veronica. Veronica shows up (dressed a lot sexier than usual, in a see through bondage shirt) and gags Meg, telling Duncan to smarten up and slapping him around. He wakes up and hears Veronica talking to Logan about the so-called witness who say him stab Felix on the bridge. Veronica tracked the guy (a
plastic surgeon named Tom Griffith) to a cigar store that’s a front for drug dealing, so Logan wonders if he could be dealing prescription drugs there. Duncan considers reading the letter he found in Meg’s room last episode, but decides to put it away instead. Veronica checks a database and finds out Griffith has a reprimand for unauthorized off-site medical practices with a guy named Danny Boyd.
The next day at school, some rich punk asks Weevil about some cocaine he’s supposed to have paid for. Weevil says his gang doesn’t deal in coke, but 
this snotty punk insists he paid a PCH biker for some coke. At Keith’s office, he’s visited by Carlos and Maria Oliveres, whose son Marcos died in the bus crash. They’re being harassed by someone who breaks into their house and leaves toy buses lying around. Whoever it is also sprays Marcos’s cologne around, turns Marcos’s pictures around in the frames, and even leaves cobbled-together messages from Marcos on their voicemail. Carlos says he knows who’s doing it, he just needs proof.
Veronica and Logan go to see Danny Boyd and Veronica tells Logan to wait in the car. She tells Boyd she’s thinking about getting plastic surgery from Dr. Griffith and wants to know about the reprimand in his file. Boyd is a real
class act … a beer-swilling ne’er-do-well who doesn’t care if Veronica is 18 or not and thinks she doesn’t need surgery “except for the obvious”. He offers to show her what Griffith did for him and leads her around the corner and down an alley to a shithole bar called the River Styx. Veronica knows the bar is the hangout of the Fighting Fitzpatricks, Neptune’s version of the Westies.
Boyd shows her a big bloodstain on the pool table and a scar across his gut. He says he got stabbed and Dr. Griffith patched him up. Their conversation attracts the attention of Liam Fitzpatrick (the head gangster) and when 
Veronica gives him her cover story, a girl playing pool busts her. The girl goes to Neptune High and when she tells Liam who Veronica really is, he wants to know why she’s so interested in Griffith. Veronica tazes Boyd and tries to run, but Liam grabs her and slams her on the pool table, choking her. He brings over a tattoo needle and threatens to give her a permanent face tattoo if she doesn’t talk. Before he can start, Logan comes in claiming to be on the phone with 911, calling in a huge bar fight. Liam says it’ll take a couple minutes for the cops to show up, so he’ll see how much damage he can do to Veronica in the meantime. Logan pulls a gun and Liam backs off, letting Logan and Veronica leave.
Later, Veronica breaks down crying, then freaks out on Logan for carrying a gun. He says he got it from Dick’s dad and it’s not even loaded. Veronica says if he’s that worried, maybe he should just leave town, but he reminds
her he’s got an ankle monitor on while he’s out on bail, so he really can’t go too far. At the office, Keith notices something’s wrong, but Veronica doesn’t tell him what. He tells her about Marcos Oliveres’s parents being harassed and mentions the trouble started right after they filed a negligence suit against the school district. Keith says stuff like this is usually personal, not part of some big conspiracy, and asks her to check around school for anything she can find about Marcos.
She does ask around, but nobody seems to know anything about Marcos; he was basically a non-entity at school. Later, she gets an email from someone 
saying Marcos was okay, kinda shy but nice once you got to know him. The anonymous informant says they’d tell her more, but they have a jealous boyfriend who knew they had a thing for Marcos. Meanwhile, Keith found an mp3 player taped under Mrs. Oliveres’s car seat that was set to play Marcos’s voice over the radio. After haranguing a tech support person, he finds out the player was registered to Neptune School District, so he asks Veronica to check things out.
At school, Veronica talks to Vice Principal Clemmons, who passes the buck to Principal Moorehead. He says he feels for the Oliveres family, but if they win their lawsuit it’ll gut the school budget and all kinds of programs will
have to be canceled. When she mentions the mp3 player, he denies any knowledge of it and says all future questions should go the school’s lawyers. Veronica asks Mac to help her with the voice recording and Mac immediately recognizes Marcos as Captain Krunk, one half (along with Imitation Crab) of a pirate radio show where two guys talk shit about the school and the students therein. Mac says that explains why nobody would talk about Marcos … everyone was afraid of pissing him off because he’d rip into them on the air.
Veronica notices a four-week gap in the show’s broadcasts and Mac says they went on hiatus and when the show came back, Krunk was gone and it was just Crab. She stopped listening because the show sucked without 
Krunk. Veronica asks if they can trace the signal and Mac says yes, but she’ll need some fancy tech gadgets. Veronica listens to some of the old broadcasts and realizes Krunk and Crab talked shit about everyone at school, so maybe someone found out who he was and decided to shut him up for good. Meanwhile, Logan’s getting worried about going to jail if she can’t prove Dr. Griffith is lying. Veronica talks to Weevil and gives him shit for cozying up to the Fitzpatricks. She mentions the witness in Logan’s case is a Fitzpatrick puppet, so obviously they’re doing the bikers a favour. She wonders what favour Weevil’s doing them in return.
That night, Veronica and Mac use direction finders (or RF trackers or something) to home in on the signal of Imitation Crab’s radio show. Meanwhile, Weevil gathers the bikers to ask if anyone’s been selling coke or getting close to the Fitzpatricks behind his back. Nobody says anything, so he tells them to take off and talks to Thumper, his lieutenant. Weevil asks if
Thumper saw the guy who called the cops the night Felix was killed and Thumper admits he lied when he told Weevil he was there. Thumper admits that after Weevil got knocked out and they kicked the shit out of Logan, Felix told everyone to take off except Bootsy and Hector. Later on, Bootsy and Hector told him that Felix was taking Logan’s keys from his pocket when Logan stabbed him. Before they could do anything, a semi showed up on the bridge so they took off. Weevil isn’t happy that Thumper lied and says he’s going to find out what really happened, no matter what it takes.
Veronica and Mac track the radio signal and are surprised to learn it’s coming from Vice Principal Clemmons house. Veronica implies that Mac has the hots for Vincent (Clemmons’s son), so he lets them in. (He seems rather 
impressed that they’re there to see Vincent … I guess he doesn’t get a lot of female company.) Vincent is sequestered in his room but the girls push their way in and discover his radio set-up. He admits to being Imitation Crab but denies having anything to do with the Oliveres problems, saying his father would kill him if he knew he was bad-mouthing the school constantly. Vincent says the reason the show went on hiatus for four weeks (which was before the bus crash) was because Marcos’s parents sent him off to camp and when he got back, he was acting really weird and didn’t want to do the show anymore.
At the office, Carlos refuses to listen to Keith’s ideas about someone seeking revenge for the radio show, or about the summer camp angle. Carlos is convinced the school is behind the harassment, but Keith says they need concrete proof. He offers to stake out the Oliveres house tonight, since they’ll be out bowling. Veronica checks the Oliveres credit cards and finds
out the “summer camp” they sent Marcos to was one of those places where they try to browbeat gay kids into being straight. At the Oliveres house, Keith catches a guy who comes in to raid the fridge, but he turns out to be a neighbour who hides his beer there so his wife won’t know how much he drinks. Keith lets him go and notices another school bus, this time in the fish tank. He sees a scrap of paper with the alarm code written on it in the garbage; the paper is stationery from the law firm that’s representing the school. Keith notices something else about the fish tank that makes him wonder.
Logan gets jumped by some bikers (in masks) who tie him up in a van and play Russian Roulette, threatening to blow a hole in his hand if he doesn’t tell them (and someone on the other end of a cell phone) what happened to 
Felix. Logan can’t tell them anything because he doesn’t know, so they eventually toss him out in the middle of nowhere and take off. He lifts the phone right before he’s dumped and hits redial once they’re gone. Weevil answers and Logan says he’s going to pay for fucking with him. At school, Veronica asks Vincent about Marcos going to Gay Away camp, but Vincent insists Marcos was straight. He says Marcos almost got his ass kicked by some girl’s jealous boyfriend and Veronica remembers the anonymous email she got.
She runs the old “free tickets” scam to track down the sender. At court, Keith mentions to Carlos that there was fish food in the aquarium and
wonders why the guy who broke in would take time to feed the fish. Obviously Carlos put the last bus in the tank and dropped the smoking gun evidence right where Keith could find it. Keith says he’s sorry he couldn’t catch the guy who’s been harassing them, but if he testifies today he’ll have to tell the truth about Carlos planting the last piece of evidence. He advises Carlos to accept whatever settlement the district offers.
Veronica tracks the “jealous boyfriend” angle to a girl, but it turns out to be her brother Ryan who was sweet on Marcos. Ryan said he figured out Marcos was Captain Krunk and tried to have a relationship with him, but 
Marcos was still trying to figure out his sexuality. Ryan kept pushing him and when Marcos’s parents caught him giving Marcos a shirtless back rub, they sent Marcos to the homophobia camp. Ryan says the only reason Marcos went on the bus trip was to win back his parents’ love by doing “normal” things. Veronica points out how hurtful Ryan’s harassment has been and Ryan says that’s exactly what he was going for. Duncan has another dream about Meg and when he wakes up, he reads the letter. Whatever’s in it freaks the shit out of him.