Thicker Than Blood - the Complete Andrew Z. Thomas Trilogy - Blake Crouch [278]
She took several photographs of the tattered pelican.
"Look at its wing," she said. "I’ll bet it can’t fly anymore."
"It wants food," Steve said. "Should I give him a piece of jerky?"
"Jerky?" She sighed with immeasurable annoyance. "It would choke him."
"No, I don’t think it would—"
"Fine, Steve. You want to kill this sweet old bird, go right ahead. I’m walking to the end of the pier."
Footsteps clanked toward them. They both turned and watched a tall frail man painfully ascend five steps to the dock. When he reached the top, he stopped and leaned against the railing to catch his breath.
"Sir, you all right?" Kim asked.
"Yeah, I’m just old as shit," he said, grinning. "But I’ll make it." The man took a deep breath and said, "Whew. Glad I caught you two. You here to take the boat over to Portsmouth with me?"
"We sure are," Steve said. "You the gentleman I spoke with on the phone this morning?"
"Well, I don’t know about the gentleman part. What was your name again, young man?"
"Steve."
Steve reached forward and shook the man’s hand.
"And this is my wife, Kim."
The old man nodded to the young woman and said, "A pleasure. My name’s Charlie Tatum. I’ll be taking y’all over to Portsmouth today."
"Excellent," Steve said.
"Here’s the thing. See my boat up there?"
He pointed to the thirty foot Island Hopper moored to a rotting beam, where a man with a bushy white beard was busy padding up water on the vinyl seats from last night’s thunderstorm.
"That’s my brother, Wally, and he’s fixin’ to take that motor apart. Old net got caught in the blades when we was coming back into the harbor our last trip out."
A family of four strolled by, headed for the end of the dock.
"Yeah, Wally’s gonna have to turn those folks down, but look I’m running a ferry from our dock on the sound out to Portsmouth. There’s two more spots if y’all want to go."
"Steve, maybe we should just—"
"Absolutely."
That family sat down on a bench at the end of the dock. Wally said something to them, inaudible from this distance.
"Well, if you’ll come with me, I’ve got my truck here, and we’ll get going. We’ve got another couple signed up, too, and since it’s just the four of you, we should be able to make a nice long day of it."
They followed the old man to his truck—a rusted, dinged relic of a vehicle that seemed to have as much a chance of starting up as its owner did of running a marathon.
Kim sat in the front seat, her husband in the back. As the truck cranked and gargled out onto Silver Lake Drive, she gazed down to the end of the dock, wondering why that family of four was boarding a boat with a busted motor.
# # #
Steve climbed out of the back of the truck and followed his wife and Charlie Tatum through a disheveled front yard of waist-high weeds, around the side of a large and crumbling stone house. From the backyard, the sound stretched out before them, unstirred to the point of appearing frozen in the mounting, windless heat.
The three of them strode down the gentle slope of weeds toward the water’s edge. A decaying dock reached out from the bank, and there were people milling about at the end.
Steve caught up with Kim. Because they were the same height, he put his arm around her waist and they stepped together onto the rickety dock. Charlie led them to the end, pointing out the boards that might not bear their weight.
A twenty-four foot Scout lounged in the calm water, and an exceptionally pale man with long black hair manned its cockpit. Steve nodded to him. The man looked away, set the Yamaha outboard gurgling.
Charlie offered Kim his gnarled hand. She took it and stepped down into the boat. Steve followed, and then the old man untied the rope from a gray timber and hopped with surprising spryness onto the deck that reeked faintly of mildew and the discarded sunspoiled viscera of fish.
Steve glanced at the couple who were already seated on