Trap Line - Carl Hiaasen [37]
Jimmy and Augie clung nervously to whatever they could, but Albury was placid. He found the squall—it was not big enough to think of as a storm—calming. Not for a moment did he question the Diamond Cutter’s strength, or his own skill. He would not have taken her out on a night like this, but together they had ridden out far worse, Albury and the Diamond Cutter.
The weather brought three blessings. It quieted the Colombians: retching, pathetic bundles, clutching with peasant strength to anything solid. It also ruled out pursuit from the sea. And it allowed Albury to smoke. There was nothing he needed to see except the compass dial, and the jagged streaks of lightning served as eerie purple strobes.
The sole intruder in the wheelhouse then was the radio. If it had been left to Jimmy, the VHF would be off and rock music would be blaring from a tinny portable cassette deck. Augie, Albury suspected, would have steered in silence, as his forebears had.
By habit, Albury left the radio tuned to channel 16, the hailing frequency monitored by the Coast Guard. There had been the normal nighttime banter as the Diamond Cutter approached the Florida coastline, and one boat captain laconically reporting engine trouble, but not much else. Reception was capricious amidst the thunderheads; the radio mostly crackled and spat.
Listening to it with half an ear while he conned the Diamond Cutter to an uncertain homecoming was the worst mistake Breeze Albury made that night. He should have listened to Jimmy’s rock music. Or to silence. For the radio destroyed his pride.
All three men heard the call for help. It was weak, the transmission scored by static, but they heard it.
“Mayday! Mayday! This is the Darlin’ Betty, Whiskey Kilo Alfa Three Six Six. I lost my bilge pump and I’m taking water about two miles east of French Reef. I’ve got three men and a boy aboard … can you read, Coast Guard?”
“That’s a lobster boat,” Jimmy said. “What the hell is he doing out here?”
By law, crawfish boats were not permitted to pull traps after dusk or before dawn. “Maybe he’s just on his way to Miami for engine work,” Augie said, “or maybe he’s out here doin’ what we’re doing.”
Jimmy said, “Breeze, he’s only about ten miles south of us.”
“Mayday, Mayday!” the radio cried.
“I know where he is,” Albury said. Sweat sprouted. His guts churned. The rain fell softer.
“Let’s go,” Augie said.
“Hot damn, a rescue,” said Jimmy. “It’ll be another Vixen, Breeze.”
Albury could have wept for their innocence.
The Vixen. He hadn’t been able to buy a drink on Duval Street for nearly a year after that. What had it been, eight, nine years now? The boat had been still new, still the Peggy, and one morning just to shake her down he had run over to the Dry Tortugas; to fish, to snorkel, and to wander the ruins of old Fort Jefferson.
On the way back the weather had gone to hell in a hurry. Albury had just about decided to run for cover in the Marquesas when the Vixen came on channel 16. A motor ketch, fifty-two feet, a lovely boat she must have been, but when Albury got to her she was dismasted and listing badly, the captain fighting feverishly to free the dinghy and keep the lines around three crying kids and a sick wife. Albury had been lucky to get them all off, and even luckier to get back to Key West. It was not until then that he had discovered the captain he had saved was a United States senator. The clippings were someplace in the trailer, together with the letter of commendation from the Coast Guard. Unless Peg had taken them.
But this was not the Vixen, not a famous stranger but a member of Albury’s own tribe: a Conch fisherman. Albury knew the Darlin’ Betty; it worked out of Marathon. And he knew the captain, a gangling retired Navy CPO named Hawk Trumbull. The boy on board would be his grandson.
And Albury knew there