Tropical Depression (8 page)

I let my mind drift. I still felt bad about Roscoe. I knew I should have found him. This was my island and I knew pretty well where he might go. But my first two guesses had been bad and I no longer had the energy. I gave up. I never used to give up. Something had changed in me; the thing that used to drive me was no more than a torpid passenger now.

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.

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 Pete muttered, “Oh, hell,” and whipped a very clumsy cast straight ahead.

I was standing directly behind him, on the raised poling platform above the outboard, pushing the boat forward with my guide pole. I had to duck quickly as the crab on his hook whirred past my ear on his back-cast, snatched my hat off coming forward and whipped a good thirty feet ahead. His crab hit the water with a belly-flop smack, which knocked my hat loose from the hook. It went floating off to the right.

“What are you trying to do, Pete?” I said through carefully gritted teeth.

“This is supposed to be good fishing?” he accused. “You said fish. So where’s the fucking fish?”

“Well, the fucking fish were up ahead. If you haven’t terrified them into heading for Cuba with all that splashing, they might still be there.”

“That supposed to be funny?” He glared at me. “How the fuck long am I supposed to wait? While you dick around with the pole like it’s fucking Venice or something.”

“How about if you wait until I tell you, then cast to something we can see? Is that too long?”

He looked sour and savage and turned away. He started to pump his reel furiously. “I’m not paying four hundred fifty bucks for a fucking boat ride,” he grumbled. And since the reel was apparently too slow for him he gave a tremendous, two-handed backward yank on the rod. The tip slapped my ear and smashed onto the poling platform. Even as I turned slightly and watched the small silver loop of the rod tip snap off and roll onto the deck I felt the crab smack into my head just above the other ear.

“Some fucking guide,” said Pete. “Can’t find fish. Can’t even duck in time.” He snorted.

Some people belong on the dock. If they really have to go fishing they should do it standing on the end of a long pier, clutching a $6.98 Flintstones Model Zebco and a plastic bucket, swearing because the water is too far down for them to reach over and wipe the worm goo off their hands. They don’t belong on a flat guide’s skiff, sliding across the shallows on the edge of the great ocean. They don’t even belong on a head boat, where there are more people in range of their half-deadly stupidity.

The problem is, flatfishing from a skiff got popular a few years back, the way fly-fishing got popular. And now all across America there are thousands upon thousands of garages with unused or once-used fly rods hanging next to the golf clubs and the badminton sets.

An increasing number of people have too much money and not enough sense to pound sand, as my grandfather used to say. So they take all that disposable income and spend it on things that looked really good on the cover of their sixty-dollar-a-year coffee-table magazines and then feel cheated when they don’t look as good on them. They have spent their money on The Best, and it was a lot of money, and they think that is supposed to guarantee them a good time.

They think it’s supposed to guarantee that they’ll look just like the modern-day, upper-middle-class Norman Rockwell picture of themselves they have in their heads from the pictures on the coffee table and they feel cheated when it doesn’t work out that way.

Nothing they do is fun, but it’s all expensive so they try to persuade themselves that they really are having fun when they’re not, or the game is rigged against them. They never figure out that a big bank balance is no guarantee of the good life. Somewhere along the way they read the fine print wrong, but they’ve already signed and they’re stuck with the product.

So they end up just like Pete: rich, miserable, and dangerously stupid on a small boat.

I felt the blood trickling down the right side of my head from where the rod tip had slashed my ear. I felt the salt water rolling off a dull ache on the left side where the crab had smacked me at 100 miles per hour.

I stepped off the platform and moved forward to where Pete was sitting, snarling at me. I stared down at him for a moment, reviewing mentally the ways I knew to kill him, quickly or slowly, with my bare hands, or perhaps with the pliers, a few big shark hooks, a little bit of leader wire—I leaned down instead and pulled the rod out of his hands.

“This is a handmade rod,” I told him. “It is worth more than the gold crown on your molars. When we get to the dock you will find an extra hundred and fifty dollars on your bill to cover repairing it.”

“The fuck I will,” he said.

“You are going to start fishing the right way, just like I tell you, or we’re heading back.”

“Fuck that noise, I paid in advance—four hundred fifty dollars, one day’s fishing. Bait the fucking hook.” He started trying to fumble a new rod out of its clamp.

I nodded at him, just like he’d really said something, and took his hand away, placing it in his lap and thinking how fragile the bones in the hand really are. I placed the broken rod back in the teak holder along the side of the boat and stepped back to the platform. I put the pole in its clamps and tied it down. I turned to the control panel and started the engine.

“Hey! Won’t that scare the fish away?”

I nodded at Pete and showed him some teeth. “I owe them that,” I said, and shoved the throttle forward hard.

The acceleration caught Pete by surprise and he slid onto the floor. He scrambled back up onto the seat just as I made a wide turn and stopped to pick my hat out of the water. The stop threw Pete forward and back onto the floor. By the time he got back up again, white-knuckled on the gunwale, we were headed for the dock at full speed.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he screamed at me.

“Going home,” I shouted over the noise of the engine. “Life is too short to spend any more of it with a dumb asshole like you.”

All the abuse and screaming he’d tried before were just a warmup. Now he really hit his stride. I’d never before heard some of the things he said, even in seven years as a cop. Maybe I’d underestimated Pete: some of it was impressive. I made a mental note to pass on some of the really choice ones to Art, who had a connoisseur’s appreciation of good cussing.

But Pete was no artist; he lacked patience and stamina. In a few moments he was winding down, repeating himself, and he finally started to bottom out. “You stupid cock-sucking piece of shit! I paid for a full day! You can’t fucking do this!”

“I’m only charging you for a half-day,” I yelled back over the sound of the motor. “But when you add on the damage to the rod, it comes out the same.”

“You dickhead shitbag butt-sucker!” he screamed.

Flats skiffs are delicate and light. Driving one across a moderate chop at full throttle can be tricky. Unfortunately it takes at least one hand on the wheel at all times, and that put me at a slight disadvantage. So I had to throttle way back again, until the boat was just barely moving forward, before I could lean forward and get my hands on Pete’s shirtfront. I lifted upwards. The boat rocked slightly.

Pete was a fairly large guy, maybe six feet tall and basically skinny, but with a pretty good spare tire around the middle that brought his weight up to around one-ninety. He was also one of those guys who confuses belly size with strength, because he grabbed at my wrists and tried to yank my hands away. But the hands he clamped on mine just gave me better leverage. I pulled up and Pete rose eight inches off the seat. It scared him. He shut up.