The Wooden Nickel (30 page)

“Only law out here is us. We let them get away with this, they’ll be handing this ledge down to their fucking kids.”

He tries to reach Howard and Danny Thurston. “
Gloria T,
this is
Wooden Nickel.
You on here, Howard?”

Howard comes back,
CAN’T HEAR YOU, LUCKY, YOUR TRANSMISSION’S BREAKING UP
.

He looks at the radio and there’s a film of blue smoke coming out of it like someone’s smoking a cigarette in there. He rips
the mike cord out of its socket and yells into it, “Fuck you, Clyde, ninety-four dollars to fix this sucker and it works for
five minutes.” He throws the mike towards the
Bad Pussy,
which is calmly setting a string of traps maybe a hundred yards away. It whirls around and lands in the waves. “Fucking lobsters
can fix it better than your old man.”

“Old
ex.
”

One of Lucky’s green-and-orange buoys bobs off the
Bad Pussy
’s port side so close it’s almost up against her hull. “Dumb cunt’s setting them right on top of me. Steer over there.”

As soon as the
Bad Pussy
baits her zebra-stripe and sets it down right next to his orange-and-green, Ronette shows up there with the
Wooden Nickel.
Lucky hauls the single trap on his buoy and takes out a nice two-pounder. He cleans the crabs and starfish out, baits it
and drops it back. The
Bad Pussy
is working a couple hundred feet to the west, the
Darth Vader
close in behind her but not working traps, just waiting in reserve.

At that point the Coast Guard lady comes on his radio, which can’t transmit anymore but it can hear.
VESSELS ENGAGED IN TERRITORIAL DISPUTE, PLEASE GIVE YOUR LOCATION
.

He sees the orange-bearded guy pick up the microphone over in the
Darth Vader. WE ARE FOUR MILES SOUTHEAST OF THREE WITCH LEDGE.

THANK YOU, CAPTAIN, WE’LL HAVE A VESSEL ON STATION ETA THREE P.M.

Ronette looks startled. “That ain’t where we are.”

True enough, the
Darth Vader
gave the Coast Guard a position twenty-five miles away. Anyone would have done the same. “Ain’t government business, Ronette.
It’s them and us.”

He reaches down and gaffs the zebra-stripe buoy they’ve just set down and slices the warp off below the toggle. Over in the
Darth Vader
the orange-bearded brother leaves the wheel and aims a rifle right at them. “Down in the cuddy,” Lucky orders Ronette.

“What the hell, Lucky, I ain’t scared.”

“Ain’t you I’m thinking about.”

She takes one step down the companionway and stops by the engine box with just her head out above the hatch. In the face of
that son of a bitch with his raised rifle barrel he steams over to the next zebra-stripe buoy and slows to gaff it. Right
as he’s bringing the toggle up to catch it on the drum, a shot breaks the safety-glass wind-shield over Ronette’s head and
a split second later the bang comes in, cunt hair’s difference between impact and noise. Fucking bullets are faster than sound.
Another shot, then the radar makes a couple of loud clicks like a sewing machine and the screen goes blank, just the raster
line wheeling around. He can’t see the radome up over the wheelhouse but they must have knocked it out. He pumps the lever
on the .300 Savage and aims through the two-power scope sight to put a shot through the
Darth Vader
’s windshield from the stern.

Boom.

He got the shot off steady but a wave lifted him just as he fired, so it probably went over. Didn’t kill anyone, anyway: the
orange-bearded captain comes to the transom and flips that missing finger at him, a fist with a one-inch stump on it. If he
wants to get the point across he ought to use the other hand.

He runs seaward again to pull another zebra buoy but before he can get the gaff on it the
Bad Pussy
’s black-bearded sternman buries a rifle bullet right in a hull plank aft of the stem, no .22 either, got to be at least a
.30-30. Ronette says, “They
got
us,” and grabs his leg like it’s a life ring. The
Wooden Nickel
’s inch-and-a-half white cedar is sounder than the day it was cut, it didn’t open up like Lonnie Gross’s pulpy fiberglass,
but still he feels it like it went into his own skin. He puts the crosshairs on the left shoulder of that black-bearded sternman
standing with the rifle in one hand, scratching his balls with the other and smiling like a piano with his missing teeth.
Just like aiming at a deer. His bald head is covered with a Hells Angels bandanna but the ponytail sticks out behind and in
the scope the pit bull tattoo shows on his upper arm. With no one at the helm, they’ve gone beam to the wind so both boats
are in the trough, causing the crosshairs to move up and down on the guy’s body. The swell drives the sights down to the guy’s
knee, then up to the wheelhouse top. He’s standing right in front of the big female captain, who is mostly out of sight behind
his body, and that crazy son of a bitch, with a .300 Savage scoped right in on him, has now got his own gun butt down on the
platform and he’s raising his ball-scratching hand to give Lucky the finger. He doesn’t know who he’s fucking with, it’s not
just Lucas Lunt but his old man Walter and Walter’s old man Merritt Lunt who fished this ledge under a canvas sail. Even so,
Lucky would not pull the trigger on a man for his dead ancestors, or for Kyle either, he’s a lost cause, with his Jap sushi
dealer and his fairy boyfriend, but this other one that’s already popping the buttons of Ronette Hannaford’s shorts, he’ll
be a chip off the old block. He’s still in the larval stage now, but one day he’ll be a lobsterman and he’s going to need
this ledge.

So thinking of someone he can’t even picture in his mind, he waits for the upswell to pull the crosshairs right under that
fucking finger, then he shoots.

The deer rifle kicks his arm back so he can’t see where it hit. The sound of it throws Ronette’s head down into the companionway,
but she comes up yelling, “Jesus, Lucky, what’d you aim at?”

Though he truly wishes the black-bearded guy’s body would be jerking like a mackerel on the cockpit floor, he is still standing.
He has dropped his gun and gone over beside the female captain at the helm. Lucky tries to see what’s going on through the
two-power scope but it’s too weak and he can’t hold it steady. “Give me them binoculars.”

He missed the black-bearded bastard’s finger and hit the woman. She’s standing with a bloodstain on her sweatshirt, he can
see that, then the black-bearded guy sits her down on the rail to take a look. The
Darth Vader
comes up close beside the
Bad Pussy
while the black-bearded sternman leads her below. There’s no one visible for a while, then he comes up and takes the helm.
They’ve still got a line on the pot hauler. The sternman slices the warp off the winch drum with a knife, so it must be serious.
He watches the line clear his wheel, then he puts her in gear and jams it, the stern dips and they steam due south for Shag
Island under full throttle, with the
Darth Vader
hammer down and following close behind.

Ronette’s back in the companionway now, saying, “Lucky, what did you do?”

“I winged her.”

“You shot a human being?”

“Depends how you want to define it.”

“You don’t believe in nothing, do you?”

“I believe them son of a whores are off the territory. Now we got work to do. Let’s finish slicing off their christly traps.”

By now the two Goldwings, black and white, have disappeared into the summer haze around Nigh Shag. He heads for another zebra-stripe
buoy and gaffs it up onto the hydraulic winch and cuts the line. She’s standing beside him at the pot hauler but she’s not
helping, just bitching about something over the power takeoff noise.

“It’s gone too far, Lucky. It ain’t funny anymore. What if something happens to her?”

“She’s built like a fucking buffalo. Just grazed the blubber, ain’t going to hurt her none.”

Just then an official-looking dogshit-colored boat comes steaming from the eastward. Arriving just a wee bit late, the State
Marine Patrol slows up and hits the blue flashing strobe. He empties the chamber on both guns, dumps the spent shells over
the side and sticks the guns in the life jacket locker, then lights a cigarette to cover the gunpowder smell.

The radio clicks on:
WOODEN NICKEL, THIS IS ENFORCER. HEY LUCAS LUNT, THAT YOU? WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON OUT HERE?

He steps to the middle of the cockpit, points to the antenna and throws his hands out, palms up, to signal his transmitter’s
out. In a minute they’re alongside, two guys in olive uniforms, one old, one young, and he knows them both. Ryan Beal is an
Orphan Point native, Wilfred Beal’s brother, he was playing cop and arresting kids when he was nine years old, whole family
of righteous dickheads.

Ryan Beal yells, “Hey Lucas, your radio out?”

“It listens. It don’t talk.”

“You ought to take a lesson from that thing. Har har.” Ryan says to the kid, “Looks like we might have a violation here.”

Young Jason Reynolds stares like an owl at Ronette’s outfit, he doesn’t get to see much pussy in his line of work. Not caring
for the smell of cops, she ducks down and comes back in one of Lucky’s oil-skin jackets that covers her like an umbrella tent.
On top of the
Enforcer
’s wheelhouse their blue police strobe keeps flashing, though there’s nobody to see it for miles around.

They put a couple of fenders over and tie up alongside. The afternoon chop sloshes the boats together like a couple of drunks.
Ryan Beal steps aboard, followed by the kid Jason. They’ve both got the brown Marine Patrol uniform, green shirt, dogshit
neckties to match the boat. Ryan’s dead serious as always but the kid looks like he wants to give Ronette the body cavity
search, see if she’s carrying any drugs in there. They’ve both got notebooks and pencils and Ryan is snooping around the boat
like he’s Dennis Franz on a homicide. First thing he sees is the bullet hole in the windshield. He flips his notebook open
and starts writing notes. “Have a little altercation out here?” he says.

“They was setting traps in my space, so we chased them off.”

Jason, a tall skinny kid with a little black mustache and a weird deep voice like a radio announcer, says, “No one owns the
sea.”

Ryan says, “You carrying any weapons aboard?”

“Just a little .300 Savage, to scare the gulls away.”

“Got any other damage? Anyone hurt?” He looks at Ronette, who’s leaned back against the wheel in his big yellow Grundens jacket,
listening. “You all right, miss?”

“Bit shook up is all. Never had bullets pass that close.”

Lucky looks over his shoulder to see what Ryan’s putting in the notebook but he can’t make it out. “They took out the radar
too, that will cost me four or five thousand, windshield will be a couple hundred if I glaze it in myself. Took a bullet in
the hull too. Write that down.”

“You were cutting their traps, huh? That’s a violation. ‘Intentional damage to fishing gear in or out of service.’ Do any
shooting yourself?”

“We put a couple over their heads, after they knocked the radar and windshield out.”

“And they took off.”

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t hit anybody? You didn’t damage the other vessel?”

“Too far to see nothing. Soon as we fired back they took right off.”

Ryan Beal turns to Ronette, who’s lighting one cigarette off the other and leaning on the wheel like she can’t stand up. “What
about you, miss? You’re the waitress at the Blue Claw, aren’t you? You look like an observant person. Did you notice anyone
hurt, any damage to the other vessel?”

Ronette shakes her head silently like she’s deaf and dumb.

Ryan Beal goes on: “We’re asking you cause we heard something on the scanner, somebody hurt out to the island. We was just
wondering if maybe your warning shot might have come in a little low. Seeing as how it’s pretty rough out here.”

“Might of been hard to aim,” the kid Jason adds. “I’d hate like hell having to shoot straight in a chop like this.”

Ryan Beal writes something in his notebook. He says to Lucky, “You still living in your house?”

“Course I’m living in my house. Where the Christ you think I live? You pass it every day going to work.”

“Just wondering. Place got a vacant look. Just so’s we know how to reach you.” He measures the windshield hole with a lobster
gauge, pokes his head below, hops up on the rail to check out the holes in the radar dome, one on each side where the bullet
went clean through. “Let’s go, Jason, let these nice folks get back to fishing. We’ll take a run out to sea, see what the
islanders have to say.”

“Finest kind.”

Ryan Beal turns to him. “One other thing, Lucas. We’re going to have to take your gun.”

“Like hell.”

“You want to see trouble multiplied by ten, you just try hanging on to that thing.”

Ronette goes below for the .300 Savage and comes out holding it at arm’s length, barrel pointing straight up in the air. “That’s
a good girl,” Ryan Beal says. He takes it and hands it over to Jason, who opens the chamber and smells it like a drug-sniffing
beagle. “Been fired,” Jason says.

“Course it’s been fucking fired. It ain’t brand-new.” They don’t ask for any other weapons, so he doesn’t mention the shotgun
still left in the life jacket box.

The cops keep their light flashing and throttle up due south, tearing a path right through a patch of Travis Hammond’s blue-and-white
buoys, probably rip a few of them up, big government wheel wouldn’t even notice them. In five minutes they’re hull down and
halfway to Nigh Shag Ledge.

“You’re going to hear from them guys,” Ronette says. “They was both taking notes like maniacs, and the young guy was drawing
pictures of the windshield and the radar. He was kind of cute too, for a cop.”

“He looks like one of them perverts that would put the cuffs on you before he did anything. Besides, I thought you was already
notched.”