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Screw it, I thought, closing my eyes. I didn’t ask for this. Besides, I had just proved I was useless at this kind of thing. I couldn’t even find Roscoe. I was just not thinking like a cop anymore, and in a way that would have seemed lazy and cowardly a year ago, that seemed to me to justify turning down Roscoe, refusing to go back to my old world, refusing to look at all the memories of my old life again.
I was not the guy I used to be. I hated Los Angeles and everything I could remember about it. I knew that going back there would bring back all the things I had worked so hard to forget. I could not go back there. I couldn’t.
“Wake up, mate!” bellowed Nicky, standing about four inches from my ear. I didn’t quite hit the ceiling. “Grub’s on! Hop to!” And he was racing back to the kitchen with a manic cackle, a trail of rice already catapulting from his mouth. I wiped a few grains from my ear and followed him.
“Oh, fishy fishy fish,” he beamed at me as I finally made it to the table. He cut the fish and served two-thirds to himself, one-third to me, slopping it onto plates already heaped with rice and a vegetable medley containing broccoli, green beans, carrots and mushrooms, all boiled into submission. “Dig in, Billy. Go on, laddie. Eat up, go go go,” he said, mouth already stuffed with two forkfuls of rice, one of veggie, and one of fish. I dodged a flying broccoli flower and sat.
“Well, Billy,” he beamed at me. A grain of rice hit my forehead. “Life is worth living after all, eh?”
He waggled an eyebrow, and then his face disappeared into the plate. He wouldn’t have seen or heard me if I disagreed, so I didn’t. I ate my fish.
Chapter Six
The next three weeks went by without any real incident. The thought of Roscoe slipped into my mind a few times. I’d bat at it and it would go away again. It just didn’t seem to be anything to think about. There wasn’t much point, anyway; I felt very bad for Roscoe because I’d been there, been through the hell of losing a child. But he’d counted on that, hoped I’d have an empathetic response, and that made his visit a little too cold-blooded and calculated for me. I was having enough trouble right where I was, doing nothing more complicated than going fishing. I didn’t need to get back into the big game again.
I’d made a halfhearted try at running Roscoe down at the airport the morning after my dinner with Nicky. Fighting a foul little beer hangover—which Nicky never seemed to get, no matter how much he drank—I had pedaled over to the airport and looked around. But either Roscoe had gone out sometime the night before or he was still lying low somewhere.
Of course, they don’t tell you much at the airlines. The overly made-up woman at the American Eagle counter was just barely willing to admit that they had a flight to Miami, and under threat of torture she finally conceded that it was possible for someone to make a connection there for Los Angeles. But that was it. Since it was more than I expected I wasn’t all that disappointed. I figured Roscoe had flown out last night, after crapping out with me. I went home to an unwanted day off, feeling almost virtuous about my inability to track down any information at all.
It was August and it was hot. Business always slacked off in the heat of the summer, so much that most of the fishing guides left town. There were fewer charters, but there were even fewer captains around, so things evened out. I was averaging two or three charters a week and that kept me busy enough so I didn’t have to think too much about anything. In fact, for a fishing guide just starting out, two or three charters a week is pretty good. I was tucking away a little money, building up a small reputation, and settling back into forgetting all about everything west of the Marquesas.
That second week in August I had four charters. It was a new record and I might have celebrated, except I didn’t really feel like it, and anyway the fourth charter probably didn’t count since it was only ninety minutes long. It was a record in its own way. It was the closest I had ever come to cutting up a customer and using him for chum.
The day started badly and got worse faster than the Florida weather. My charter, a pudgy, chinless guy from Manhattan named Pete, had showed up an hour late without apology. When we took off in my skiff the sun was already up. The tarpon had been hitting in the Marquesas for the last two weeks, but it was too late to go there now. By the time we made the thirty-mile trip the morning feed would be over and we’d have several hours of hot, dull work before the action picked up again. So I headed for Woman Key, which is much closer and has some pretty decent flats if you hit the tide right.
It’s about a half-hour ride from the dock. Twenty minutes out Pete leaned back at me and signaled urgently. I throttled back and leaned forward to hear him better. Almost immediately I wished I hadn’t.
“I don’t pay for transit time, do I?” he asked aggressively. “Because I’m not going to.”
I was still fairly new at this. I had to believe I hadn’t heard him right. “What’s that?”
“Tra-vel time,” he said, drawing it out so even an idiot like me would understand. “Twenty-two minutes so far. I’m paying four hundred fifty bucks for a boat ride? I don’t think so.”
“It’s a package, not an hourly rate,” I said, showing him three teeth. “But if you’d rather fish right here, we can do that. Of course, then you’re not getting your money’s worth out of the guide, are you?”
He looked over the side of the boat. We were still in the Lakes, a series of flats and pools that run from Key West Harbor down to Ballast Key. At the moment we were idling over a stretch of unhealthy-looking weeds.
“They got fish here?” Pete demanded.
I shrugged. “Some grunts. A few eagle rays. Maybe a turtle.”
“So where are we going? I want a tarpon.”
I nodded at him like he had just made sense. “That’s where we’re going. To where the tarpon are.”
He looked over the side again. An old Clorox bottle floated past. “Uh-huh. How far is it?”
“Another ten or fifteen minutes,” I told him.
“So let’s go,” he said with authority, and turned back to face front again.
I pushed the throttle forward without saying anything. By the time we got to the flats on the south side of Woman Key, Pete was already fidgeting and looking at his watch. This is usually a bad sign.
Fishing, the way I do it, takes some patience. I like to fish proactively, like deer hunting. That means you stalk the fish carefully, because you have studied them and you know their habits and their hangouts. You pole up quietly, spot them, and cast directly, carefully, to the place the fish will be just after your bait gets there: not too close or you spook them, not too far away or they go right by.
I had just finished explaining that the faint ripple one hundred yards away meant the tarpon were coming in and we had been poling quietly towards them for less than a minute when Pe
te muttered, “Oh, hell,” and whipped a very clumsy cast straight ahead.
