Trap Line - Carl Hiaasen [5]
Albury ran a half-numb hand across the stubble of his cheek. “That was your shopping trip to Miami.”
“Yeah, I got the name of a doctor up there who does the whole thing in his office one afternoon and you go home the next day.”
“That’s the most sensible way to handle it,” Albury agreed.
“But I got no money.”
“That makes two of us, son.”
Jimmy whined, “What am I gonna do?”
“Let me think on it.”
At the fish house, Jimmy cleaned the boat and hauled the iced crawfish onto the scales. Only about two hundred pounds, a quarter of what it should have been. In disgust, Albury joined a small group of fishermen drinking outside the small commissary. There was a tribal likeness among them: faded baseball caps above lined and sunburned faces, slick white fishermen’s boots, powerful legs and muscled torsos betrayed by bellies swollen from too much beer.
“See you got your eight ninety-two fixed,” said a fisherman named Spider.
“Finally,” Albury said with a grimace that told what it cost.
“Do any good today?”
“Started out real good,” Albury replied, popping a Budweiser. “Then it got real bad. I lost five trap lines way down south.”
“Robbed?”
“Cut.”
The fishermen clustered around to question Albury closer.
“How many traps?” demanded a crawfisherman named Leech.
“More than three hundred. Cut by hand.” Albury’s voice was rising. The agony of the day finally was settling in his stomach.
“We got to find out who,” Leech said.
“Little Eddie,” Spider declared. “Didn’t you get in a fight with him over at the West Key Bar?”
“A year ago,” Albury said. “He wouldn’t have waited a year. Shit, he loaned me some tools last week.”
“Then who?”
“I don’t know.”
The men fell quiet. The mental arithmetic was familiar; three hundred traps at thirty bucks apiece, not to mention the loss in crawfish catch. By the time Albury spoke, each of the men had figured out in dollars how badly he was hit.
“Well, I better go help Jimmy.”
“How you fixed, Breeze?” Spider asked as gently as he could. A couple of the fishermen looked away, pretending to watch another crawfish boat unload three slips away.
Albury said, “I’ll be OK.”
“I got some old traps at the house. Maybe a hundred,” Spider offered. “A couple need slats, but that’s all.”
“Thanks. I might take you up on it.” Albury slapped Spider on the shoulder. He lobbed his empty beer can into a garbage dumpster.
“If you hear anything about this … I’d appreciate it.”
“For sure, bubba,” Leech said. “Somebody’s bound to talk.”
His friends watched Breeze Albury leave in silence. They were Conchs and they were fishermen. They knew how bad off he was, and they understood his dilemma. They knew he would die before he let the bank or the fish house take his boat. You could usually hold them off for a couple months, especially if it was a Conch you owed. Everybody got behind; that was life on the Rock.
How far behind was Albury? his friends wondered. Not one of them could have survived such a catastrophe, to have nearly half your traps cut in one day. Something terrible had happened, and it was only the beginning. The fishermen understood this. They watched Albury clump to the end of the dock, chat quietly with Jimmy, then wind up his perforated old Pontiac.
The headlights snared the brown men in their white boots and glinted off upraised beer cans. Albury decided he had done the prudent thing by not mentioning the phone call of two days before. He honked at the fishermen sitting in the white penumbra. He wondered how many of them had paid everything off. In one bundle. Wearily, he thought: it must feel so damn good to get it off your shoulders. Too bad there was only one way.
Chapter 2
“ANGLER’S HAVEN,” announced the peeling wooden sign above the gravel drive. Only a few clumps of Australian pines and the occasional tang of the sea made the trailer park bearable. Years ago it had been mapped out as an inexpensive colony for winter tourists, but the trailers