Pocket-47 (A Nicholas Colt Thriller) (8 page)

“Oh! I think I got one.” Her rod bent, and she started reeling feverishly.

“Wait a minute,” I said.

She didn’t have a fish. She had snagged onto a log or something. I took her rod and gave the line some slack, hoping to free the hook. No dice. I had to break the line.

“Now what?” Brittney said.

“Now I teach you how to tie a new hook on the end of the line.”

“This is hard.”

“No it’s not. It’s fun. See that tackle box? That’s called being prepared. If we came out here with just one hook, we’d be screwed now, huh? What about Kent Clark? He ever try anything?”

“Oh, hell no. He’s old. Like forty-something, I think. Plus, he’s married.”

“That doesn’t stop some people.”

“He was always a perfect gentleman.”

“All right. Ready to go out on the boat?” I said.

We walked to the dock and shoved off. Brittney insisted she was a good swimmer, but I made her wear a life jacket anyway. I started the engine and motored toward the east side of the lake, to some breaklines where I’d had some luck previously. The water was calm and glassy.

Thursday, or any weekday, was a good day to fish. On weekends, the ski boats and Jet Skis and party barges pretty much ruined any angling action. If I were King of the World, I would do away with all gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles, anything that ran on fossil fuels. We would have sailboats, rowboats, and bicycles.
Anything that made more noise than an acoustic guitar would be outlawed. Rule #12 from Nicholas Colt’s
Philosophy of Life:
you’re never going to be King of the World, so just deal with the bullshit best you can.

Brittney faced the bow, her long blonde ponytail blowing in the wind. I slowed down, cut the engine, dropped a concrete anchor from the stern, and instructed Brittney to do the same on her end. The boat didn’t have a live well, but I had a good-sized basket on board in case we caught a few.

“Cast toward the shore,” I said. “Then reel it in slowly.”

Brittney got a hit on her second cast. She shrieked. A good-sized largemouth surfaced and jumped about ten feet from the boat.

“Let him run with it a little,” I said. “Use your drag like I showed you.”

A few minutes later she had him reeled in close to the boat and I reached out and snagged him with a long-handled net.

“Wow. That’s a beautiful fish,” I said. I hung him on a scale from my tackle box. He weighed nearly five pounds.

“You’re right,” Brittney said. “This is fun.”

“You want to take him off the hook?”

“Maybe you better.”

“You need to learn how.”

“I’ll watch. Next time, I’ll do it myself.”

I gently brushed back the dorsal fin, wrestled the hook from his bottom lip.

“Should we keep him, or throw him back?” I said.

“Why would we want to keep him?”

“To eat, silly.”

“Oh, no. I don’t want to kill him. He’s so powerful. And beautiful.”

I lowered him back to the water. He flopped, swam away.

We fished for about two more hours, until it started to get dark. Brittney caught one more, and I didn’t catch any. Beginner’s luck. She released the second fish all by herself.

When we got back to my camper, Brittney asked me what was for supper.

“We could have had those two big fish you caught,” I said.

“Is that what you do? Eat the ones you catch?”

“Sometimes.”

“Don’t you think that’s cruel?”

I thought about that for a minute. “I would never kill anything just for the sake of killing it,” I said. “But survival depends on death. Where do you think those strips of bacon you ate this morning came from?”

“I’m thinking seriously about becoming a vegetarian. How do you feel about stem cell research?” Brittney said.

“What?” I couldn’t figure how her mind worked sometimes.

“You said survival depends on death. Isn’t that the same thing? They use tissue from potentially viable embryos and fetuses, thinking they might be able to cure certain diseases someday.”

“I don’t know much about it,” I said. “I guess I would say the life of a human is inherently more valuable than the life of an animal.”

“That’s egotistical. Let’s forget about animals for a minute. Do you believe in the concept of sacrificing one for the good of many?”

“Depends on if I’m the one being sacrificed, I guess. There you go talking like The Professor again. What are you, a budding young philosopher or something? I’m going to grill some hot dogs for dinner. I guess you can just have a bun.”

Brittney bit her lip. “Hot dogs sound good.”

We ate outside on the picnic table with a citronella candle a few feet away to ward off mosquitoes. I had a Dos Equis and Brittney had a Coke. We smoked cigarettes afterward and I had another beer.

“Why is there a picture of your wife hanging on the wall?” Brittney asked.

“Obviously because I loved her and I miss her,” I said.

“But doesn’t it make your girlfriend sad when she sees it?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it like that.”

“Sometimes you have to let go of the past and cling to the love you have now.”

“And sometimes, young lady, you have to mind your own business.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes.

“Make you a deal,” I said. “I’ll quit smoking if you quit.”

“I can quit any time I want to. I go days at a time without smoking sometimes. It’s no big deal for me.”

“That means you’re not hooked yet. You should quit now, before it becomes an addiction.”

“Okay. So I’ll quit now.” She dropped her cigarette and smashed it into the sand with her sneaker. She grabbed the Marlboro pack from the picnic table, twisted it, rolled it into a ball, threw it over her shoulder. “There. Now we quit.”

“I didn’t mean right this second,” I said. “Damn, girl. You do have a flare for the dramatic. I’m sure you’ll be a great actress some day.”

“I have a present for you,” she said.

She climbed inside the camper, came back out with her backpack. She unzipped it, reached in, and pulled out a paperback book. I lit my Zippo and read the cover. It was a pocket-sized dictionary and thesaurus.

“So you can improve your vocabulary,” Brittney said.

“Gee, thanks. You think I’m a dummy or something?”

“You didn’t know what ‘conducive to somnolence’ meant.”

“I knew what it meant. It just sounded strange coming from a fifteen-year-old. I have a damn good vocabulary. But thanks anyway for the book. What else do you have in that backpack?”

“Just some things for school. Check this out.” She opened the front pocket and pulled out a silver cylinder about the size of a firecracker. She aimed it, and a tiny red dot appeared on Joe Crawford’s house half a mile across the lagoon. “It’s a laser pointer. Cool, huh?”

“Awesome. Why do you need that for school?”

“It was on the list of supplies for my speech class.” She put the pointer in her pants pocket, reached in the backpack, and pulled out a calculator. She handed it to me. “I have a super power.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“I can tell you the square root of any number. You know, as long as it’s a number
with
a true square root.”

“Sure you can.”

“Try me.”

I multiplied forty-three times forty-three on the calculator. “Okay,” I said, “what’s the square root of one thousand forty-nine?”

“Forty-three,” Brittney said.

“How did you do that?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been able to do it since third grade. It’s like a talent some autistic savants have. It can’t be explained. I’m not autistic. I guess my brain’s just wired funny.”

“Amazing. Okay, now that I taught you how to fish, you have to tell me why you think someone is trying to kill you.”

“First, you have to tell me why you don’t play the guitar anymore,” she said.

“Nope. A deal’s a deal. I taught you how to fish, so—”

“I said
maybe
I would tell you. I’ve decided against it. In fact, it was a lie. I made it up. Just take me back home, to Leitha’s.”

“If it was a lie, why did you run away?”

“Leitha was going to ground me for a whole week. Just because I called her a bitch.”

“And why did you call her that? Because of Mark Toohey, right?”

“I love him. Leitha just doesn’t understand.”

“Toohey’s a scumbag,” I said. “If I take you home, I want you to promise to do what Leitha says. And, I want you to promise to stay away from Mark Toohey.”

“I promise.”

She was full of shit. I didn’t know what to believe, but if she wanted to go home I had no choice other than to take her there. My
twenty-four-hour guardianship paper would expire in a few hours. I called Leitha’s home number, no answer. I tried her cell and she picked up on the third ring.

“Now she says she wants to come home,” I said. “Says she lied about someone trying to kill her.”

“I’m at work right now,” Leitha said. Her voice sounded happy. “I have a short shift tonight. You could—”

“How about I just drop her off in the morning? Eight or nine?” It was a long drive to Leitha’s house, and the beers had made me sleepy. It would be safer to wait until morning, and there was always a chance she might open up with some more information between now and then.

“Great. I’ll fix you guys breakfast. Can I talk to Brittney?”

I handed Brittney the phone.

“I want to come home
tonight,”
Brittney said. She was quiet for a minute while Leitha responded, then hung up without saying goodbye. She tossed my phone on the table. “You can’t hold me prisoner. I’ll hitchhike home if I have to.”

“There’s the road,” I said. She got up and walked away, calling my bluff. I caught up with her and grabbed her arm.

“Let me go, you son of a bitch.”

“What the hell’s your problem?” I said. “I’m responsible for you until I deliver you to Leitha. You understand that?”

“I don’t want to sleep at your girlfriend’s house.”

I hadn’t told her about the little fight Juliet and I had while she was in the shower. I gave her the illusion of victory. “All right,” I said. “We’ll stay here. You can take the bed, I’ll take the couch. Just don’t try to sneak out, okay?”

She calmed down some. “Can we go fishing again in the morning?”

“We’ll see.”

We watched television for a while, and then I made Brittney go to bed. I put on a nicotine patch, sat up and drank a few beers until I fell asleep on the couch, knowing my back would pay the price.

The living room window exploded.

I heard another shot, followed by glass raining on the galley table.

I reached into the storage compartment under the couch, pulled out my .357, and belly-crawled through the curtain partition to the bedroom.

I tapped Brittney on the shoulder.

“Hey. You okay?” I said.

She didn’t answer. I nudged her again.

“Just five more minutes, Leitha,” she said.

She was okay.

I didn’t turn the lights on, in case the shooters were still out there. All I needed was to be a nice silhouette target, a sitting duck for maybe some drunken kids who’d been shooting frogs down by the lake. Did they know they could have killed us?

I padded to the kitchen, peeked through the blinds, saw taillights winding up Lake Barkley Road. The car was an old Chevy station wagon, white, a ’63 or ’64. I grabbed my binoculars, but fog had settled in and I couldn’t make out the numbers on the plates.

I found my car keys and wallet, opened the camper’s hatch and stepped out barefoot onto my yard of damp and uncomfortable pine needles. I took a quick glance at the windows. Totaled.

The old Chevy was out of sight now, probably a mile away. I had to at least get the plate numbers.

I fired up Jimmy, slung a ton of gravel on my way out to Lake Barkley Road.

I switched on the fog lights, not much help. Visibility was about ten feet. I accelerated to sixty, downshifted into the curves, hoped I wouldn’t meet a brick wall in the form of a logging truck or something.

I made it to the blinking red light at the intersection of Lake Barkley Road and State Road 13. I looked both ways, saw nothing but a smoky white veil.

Left or right? State road 13 snakes east and west along the St. John’s River. A left turn would take me through Orangedale, populated only by a few tobacco and soybean farms, strictly rural. A right would take me through Hallows Cove, what we call “town,” and then on up to Jacksonville.

I took a right. I didn’t think I’d seen the old Chevy before, and I had a hunch it probably came down from Jacksonville.

I motored into town, ignoring the 35-mph speed limit, second-gearing it through the red lights. I caught up with the white Chevy Impala station wagon at the intersection of 13 and Cypress, where it had stopped for the red light.

The car was a mammoth relic, an antique from the days when gas was thirty-five cents a gallon. It would have been a nice thing for me to own, to pull my house around with if I ever had the occasion. From the same era and all.

I shook all those irrelevant thoughts and looked down at the license plate: W-H-A-L-E. The
A
was hidden by a mud splatter, but the tag made sense. The Great White Whale.