Trap Line - Carl Hiaasen [1]
“But I do not understand. And I dismiss the distinction as irrelevant.”
“Look. People are not bales or boxes. You can’t heave them over the side when the Coast Guard shows up and turns on the blue light.”
The Colombian slammed the racket against the edge of the coffee table.
“Basta!” he commanded. “I need one man for one run. That is all. We will take precautions to see that there are no questions afterwards.”
“No!” Manolo urged. “This isn’t the Guajira. Key West is a small town where dead people still attract a certain amount of attention.”
The Colombian shrugged. It had been an uneven struggle, and it was over. He reached for the champagne.
“Handle it however you must. Go home and get me a captain. The best one you can find. Persuade him, if necessary.”
“I will try.”
The Colombian smiled, and his new American teeth gleamed like perfect ivory tiles. “You will try, my friend, and you will be successful. You are an honorable man, a valuable man.”
Manolo forced an appreciative sigh.
“It has been a good month for us, no?” the Colombian said brightly. “I’m not even going to count what’s in the briefcase. That is how much I trust you.”
The preposterous lie amused Manolo. The cash, he knew, would be sifting through an electronic counting machine within the hour.
“Call me soon,” the Colombian ordered at the door.
“Of course,” Manolo replied. “Good luck with your backhand.”
In the lobby, he patted his jacket to make sure the airline ticket was in his pocket, then walked out into the suffocating heat to hunt for an air-conditioned taxi.
Chapter 1
THE DIAMOND CUTTER, a forty-three-foot Crusader, Key West-built with an 892 GMC diesel, cleared Stock Island twenty minutes after dawn. Albury, splay-legged at the helm, drank bitter coffee from a chipped white mug. Jimmy ran a rag across the wheelhouse windshield.
“Engine sounds good, Breeze. Real good.”
“After five days’ work, it ought to,” Albury said. The parts alone had set him back a thousand dollars.
“Well, it sounds fine,” Jimmy insisted. “Gonna be a good day.”
“I hope so. Anybody needs a good day, it’s us. Won’t be long until the end of the month.”
Jimmy laughed through the new gold beard that dwelt like peach down on his sunburned face. Reflexively, Albury turned the Diamond Cutter to the southeast, where the first line of crawfish traps rested on a shelf of coral. He could have found it blindfolded. The fine porcelain sky, the rising white sun, the hot and cool sea hues of the Florida Straits; these were Albury’s birthright. He had first made the trip in another era, with his granddaddy sitting on a sun-bleached whiskey crate steering an old one-lunger with no winch and hardly a wheelhouse. And, since that morning, how many times, in how many boats? And how long since the excitement had died? Too long.
The end of the month. Surely it had not weighed so heavily on his granddaddy, like the massive, unsheddable shell of a loggerhead. Albury could not imagine the old man fretting in his pine cabin, neatly stacking the bills as they piled up like driftwood.
But now, with his boat cutting a clean vector toward the crawfish waters, Breeze Albury mentally riffled the accounts due that awaited him in the sagging trailer that his granddaddy would have rightfully spurned as a chicken coop. Boat payment, dockage, fuel, parts; then there was the rent—pure robbery—car payments, the electric, and, of course, the installment on the TV.
Against these he weighed the account of Albury, William Clifford. This month it came out worse than usual. Fishing had been good, until the engine quit. The parts had taken cash, plus he still owed for the cypress on two hundred new traps.
And spikes. He had promised Ricky a new pair. Pitching was hell on spikes. His mind held the image of Ricky’s arm flashing, the streaking ball a white pea as it flew to the plate, the foot slamming down hard in a balanced follow-through.