Killing Grounds by Dana Stabenow Read Free Book Online Page A

incipient mob to their table. Strong men gave way at her approach, probably due to the sour smell of vomit that emanated from her in a miasmic cloud. It reached the booth well :n advance of the trooper herself.
    Lamar looked her over, taking in the stained front of her uniform shirt, and said with more severity than Kate had thought him capable of, "Becky, I told you, you go up to count rish, not watch the trees. Leave the flying to the pilot and you'll be fine."
    An expression of nausea crossed Becky's face, and she swallowed hard.
    "So what's the story?" Lamar said.
    She fished a slip of paper out of her pocket. "We're over," she said, handing it to him.
    Some of the stain had soaked through the pocket. Lamar touched only corners of the paper with the tips of his fingers, and held it as far away as he could and still read it. He nodded. "Way over. Okay then, put out the word. We're open Wednesday, six to six."
    He handed the paper back, and Becky folded it and stowed it carefully in the same pocket as before. Kate wondered if it would become part of the official record of this fishing period. She also wondered how many official records were marked with the puke of fledgling fish hawks, trying to reconcile their stomachs with a profession that kept them in the air in a small plane for half of their working lives. It was one way to weed out the faint of heart.
    Lamar's words were overheard, and on any other day it would have been enough to move the subject off Denton Harvey, the price drop and the incipient strike. Not today.
    Lamar was aware of it. "For what it's worth," he said, and adjusted the flat brim of his round-crowned hat just so over his eyes in a gesture worthy of Chopper Jim. "Be seeing you, Kate."
    She watched him thread his way through the crowd, babycakes face stiffened into as much of an expression of authority as he was capable of with those cheeks, his diminutive sidekick trailing along behind like a limp, smelly tail.
Chapter 4
    Kate rescued o patient Mutt from the sidewalk outside and walked back down to the boat harbor. The only other person she saw was one lone fisherman squatting on his hatch cover, needle and twine in hand, mending his gear.
    The harbor, on the other hand, was as full of boats as Kate had ever seen it, possibly because there was a whole float of pleasure craft, sloops, Liberty Bayliners and Boston whalers, all with improbable names like Windrover and My Retirement and Happy Hour, crowding out honest working boats with honest names, names of mothers and wives and sweethearts and daughters and recently even a few sons. The pleasure craft ran slip rentals through the roof, and their owners usually came down only once a year to fish in the Kanuyaq River Silver Salmon Derby. Kate curled her lip at them and moved on.
    The next row was a distinct improvement, where twenty-five and thirty-foot bowpickers and drifters lined up gunnel to gunnel. Seiners with flying bridges and crow's nests and masts with booms cocked just so nosed into the next row of slips in a lordly line. They seemed a little bit longer, their paint jobs just a little bit whiter, than the drifters. If seiners had noses, they would have been just a little bit elevated, all the better to look down upon their less elegantand less profitablecounterparts.
    At the floats closest to the entrance of the harbor she found the crabbers, massive craft a hundred feet in length and more, deep-draft vessels with cold storage for the shellfish and hot showers for the crew, the closest a fishing fleet got to a luxury liner.
    Kate reached the end of the slip. Dwarfed between Derek Limmer's Largane and Max Jones's Asgard was a boat with a wooden hull eighty feet in length, similar in design to Old Sam's Freya, with a high bow, a round stern and a cabin set aft of amidships. Unlike Old Sam's meticulously cared-for craft, this old bucket's sides were peeling black paint, the metal bulwark topping the gunnel in the bow was rusted through, and to