Flush - Carl Hiaasen [73]
He nudged the fish back into the water. It kicked its tail and tore off.
“Must be some kind of mystic Underwood karma,” he said. “This looks like the very same spot where I caught that nice mutton with your daddy, gotta be twenty-five, thirty years ago.”
“How big was yours again?” I knew it was either fourteen or fifteen pounds, depending on who was telling the story. I was curious to hear which version Grandpa Bobby was in the mood for.
He said, “Your daddy recalls it as fourteen on the button, and his memory’s likely better than mine.”
“Still a beast.”
“Yeah, but you got your whole life to catch one bigger. You’ll do it, too, there’s no doubt in my mind.”
“Because of the karma?”
“Somethin’ like that,” he said. “You done fishin’?”
“I think so.”
“Me too.”
We put down our rods and sat on the sand. With the change of tide a breeze had kicked up, blowing in from the direction of the lighthouse. We could see two tankers and a cruise ship, all northbound in the Gulf Stream.
Another loggerhead turtle surfaced in the chop off the beach. It was twice as big and crusty as the one I’d seen with Abbey and Shelly. This time, though, I didn’t need to jump in and scare it away.
Today the water looked perfect, the way it was a million years ago, before people started using the ocean as a latrine. Today it was awesomely pure and bright, and totally safe for an old loggerhead to browse the grassy flats. Chow down. Chill out. Take a snooze.
“Don’t be surprised,” Grandpa Bobby said, “if one sunny day you’re swimmin’ here at the beach—or maybe just takin’ a stroll with some girl—when a certain magnificent forty-six-footer comes haulin’ ass over that pearly blue horizon, yours truly up in the tuna tower.”
The thing was, I could picture the moment perfectly in my mind. All I had to do was close my eyes, and there was Robert Lee Underwood streaking across the waves in the Amanda Rose.
“Now, Noah, I’m not tellin’ you to sit around and wait for me. That would be downright pathetic.” He laughed and chucked my arm. “All I’m sayin’ is, don’t be surprised when the day comes.”
“I won’t,” I said. “Not even a little bit.”
TWENTY
The summer ended quietly, and that was fine with me. Rado came back from Colorado with an infected cactus needle in his chin, and Thom came back from North Carolina with spider bites in both armpits. I didn’t have any gross wounds to show off, but I had the story of Operation Royal Flush to tell, which made both my friends wish they’d been here to help.
A few days after school started, a check for a thousand dollars arrived in the mail at our house. The check was made out to my father, who thought it was a mistake. It wasn’t.
The Florida Keys are a national marine sanctuary, which means that the islands are supposedly protected by special laws against pollution, poaching, and other man-made damage. The sanctuary program offers cash rewards to anybody who calls in tips about serious environmental crimes.
Dad’s reward was one thousand dollars.
“But I wasn’t the one who phoned in about the gambling boat,” he told a man at the sanctuary office.
“Then it was somebody using your name and phone number,” the man said. “If I were you, Mr. Underwood, I’d keep the money and forget about it.”
I purposely hadn’t told my father that it was me who called the Coast Guard on Dusty Muleman the morning after we’d flushed the dye. If Dad had known, he would have insisted that me and Abbey keep the reward.
We figured he could use the money to cover some of the damage caused to the casino boat when he sunk it. Dad still had to repay Dusty, even though Dusty had been busted.
So I felt pretty good seeing that check on the kitchen counter. It was a thousand bucks that didn’t have to come out of my father’s pocket.
Before long my sister and I were so caught up with school that neither of us thought much about the Coral Queen, or about what might happen to Dusty Muleman. We just assumed that the government would put him out of business—after all, he’d been caught cold, dumping hundreds of gallons of poop into