Killing Grounds by Dana Stabenow Read Free Book Online

next to him and repeated the news. Tim spotted Kate and hustled over. "Kate! Have you heard?"
    "No, what?"
    Tim saw Lamar and paused, but only infinitesimally. "Denton Harvey, that prick, is sticking it to us again! He's dropping the price on reds to fifty cents a pound!"
    Kate set her mug down. Across the table Lamar beamed. "Gotta love that guy."
    Fortunately for his continued survival, his comment went unnoticed. "We're not even a week into fishing," Jerry Nicolo said hotly. "It's not like the market is saturated."
    "Fucking farmed salmon are gonna put us all outta business," a loud voice said from across the room. "Norwegians, Scots, even the fucking Canucks are getting into it."
    "No way."
    "It's a fact. They got fish farms in B.C. now. I hear pretty soon the Japanese are gonna be starting some up."
    "It's that fucking spill," Dewey Dineen said morosely. "Nobody wants to buy Alaskan salmon anymore."
    "It's that goddam Harvey again. This time I say we shoot the bastard and use him for halibut bait!"
    "Don't blame Harvey," another man said, "blame the goddam Japs. Hiroshi Limited's the major stockholder in Whitfield."
    "So you want to fly to Tokyo, Dick?" someone else said. "Maybe take the matter up with Hiroshi-san personally?"
    A stocky man sitting at the counter turned on his stool and surveyed the room, mug in hand. His jeans and plaid shirt weren't any different from what anyone else was wearing, but they were too clean, and the jeans might even have been ironed. "I'll beat Harvey's price a penny a pound."
    His words were not greeted with loud hosannas; the drop in price had been too substantial for a penny a pound to make too much difference.
    "Delivered to the dock in Cordova," he added, drained his mug and walked out.
    "Who was that?" Kate said.
    "Joe Durrell," Lamar said. "Independent fish buyer from Anchorage. Middleman for restaurants from Anchorage all the way down to San Diego. First buyer in when the first king hits the Kanuyaq, first buyer out when the last red goes up. He's not interested in anything else."
    "Looks like he's going into wholesale," Kate said.
    "He does that sometimes. Never by much, just by a cent or two, and there's always a couple of fishermen pissed off enough to sell to him instead."
    "What's he do with the salmon?"
    Lamar shrugged. "He's a middleman for the gourmet fish processing industry. Probably a lot of folks with more money than sense willing to pay top dollar for the first king up the Kanuyaq."
    "But they won't be," Kate said, adding, at his look, "the fish he buys after today. They won't be the first fish up."
    Lamar smiled kindly at her. "That's why they call it marketing, Kate."
    Kate sat back in the booth. "Right. My mistake."
    The shock of Tim's news was giving way to indignation. Four out of five of the men in the room had boat and insurance payments due in September. Three out of five of them would lose their impellers at least once during the summer, two of the five would snag a drifting log, known colloquially as a deadhead, in their gearor a monster halibut, Kate thoughtand rip it beyond repair, and at least one of the five would have trusted his rebuilt engine one season too many, break down and miss out on the remainder of the fishing season altogether. They all went head to head with the IRS every year of their working lives, which bureaucracy failed repeatedly to understand why fishermen had difficulty in making quarterly tax payments on arbitrarily set dates that had nothing whatever to do with when fish were or were not in the Sound.
    And now, with the prospect of the first good run in five years, the price per pound was dropping almost before they'd had a chance to get their nets wet. It wasn't five minutes after Tim had burst into the room that the word "Strike!" was hanging in the air.
    A brunette shorter than Kate whose brown uniform was belted around her petite body with as much style as a burlap sack came in the door and spotted Lamar. She waded through the