Flush - Carl Hiaasen [10]
Her mentioning Jasper Jr. reminded me of what my dad said about Shelly and Dusty Muleman, about how she’d gotten so fed up with him that she’d moved out. I decided to find out if she still felt that way.
“Didn’t you used to work on the Coral Queen?” I asked.
“For almost three years,” said Shelly.
“Was it a fun job?”
She rolled her eyes. “Tending bar? Oh yeah, it was a barrel of laughs. Very glamorous, too. Come on now, what’re you drivin’ at?”
“Nothing. I swear.”
“There you go again, Noah.”
Shelly was sharp when it came to sniffing out fibs, so I just came out and asked her: “Did you ever hear about anything crooked going on with that boat?”
“Crooked how?” she asked.
“Like dumping sewer water into the basin.”
She laughed in a way that sounded hard and bitter. “Sweetie,” she said, “the only sewage I ever saw was the human kind. That’s what you call the ‘downside’ of my job.”
“Oh.”
“This has somethin’ to do with your old man, doesn’t it? About him sinkin’ Dusty’s boat?”
“Maybe.” It sounded silly as soon as I said it. “Maybe” almost always means “yes.”
“Okay, let’s hear the whole story.” Shelly cocked her head and cupped one of her ears, which had, like, five silver rings in it. “Come on, Noah,” she said, “I’m listening.”
There was no way I wasn’t going to cave in and blab everything. She was a pro at shaking the truth out of guys who were a lot bigger and tougher than I was.
But then Lice Peeking came to the rescue. He stopped snoring, flopped over on his back, and opened one bleary red eye.
Shelly thumped him with both heels and said, “Get up, you sorry sack of beans, before I park that slimy aquarium on your head.” I didn’t wait around to see if she was serious.
FOUR
The next morning the lawyer stopped by our house. Mr. Shine looked about a thousand years old, but Mom said he knew his way around the courthouse. She had hired him twice before to get my father out of trouble.
Mr. Shine put his briefcase on the kitchen table and sat down. He looked mopey and gray, and his eyelids drooped. Abbey said he reminded her of Eeyore from Winnie-the-Pooh.
My mother made a pot of coffee and began dropping hints that Abbey and I should leave them alone. Abbey grabbed a bagel out of the toaster and ran off to play on the computer. I got my spinning rod from the garage and biked up to the drawbridge at Snake Creek.
The police won’t let you fish from the top of the bridge because of the traffic, but you can go down underneath and cast from the sandbags, in the shade. Sometimes homeless people sleep under the bridges, but they usually don’t bother anybody. The last time I’d been to Snake Creek, some woman in an army jacket had made a campsite high on the bank, under the concrete braces. She’d even started a small fire, burning the wood slats from a broken stone-crab trap. I gave her a nice mangrove snapper that I caught, and she had it cleaned and cooking over the flames in five minutes flat. She said it was the best meal she’d eaten in a year. The next day Abbey and I went back with some homemade bread and a pound of fresh Gulf shrimp, but the lady was gone. I never even got her name.
On the day Mom was meeting with Mr. Shine, nobody was under the bridge when I got there. The tide was running in from the ocean, and schools of finger mullet were holding in the still water behind the pilings. Every so often they’d start jumping, trying to escape some bigger fish that was prowling for lunch. I started casting a white bucktail and in no time jumped a baby tarpon that wasn’t even ten pounds. Then I hooked something heavy, probably a snook, that ran out a hundred feet and broke the line.
As I was tying on another jig, I heard an outboard engine—it was a johnboat, maybe twelve feet long, motoring along Snake Creek. Two people were in the boat, and as it drew closer I recognized them as Jasper Jr. and an older kid named Bull.
They spotted me right away. I probably should have taken off, but I was really enjoying myself, fishing under that bridge.