Under Cover of Daylight by James W. Hall Read Free Book Online

out and come back with two more six-packs. Giving Thorn a look as he came back in.
    So far there’d been only one speaker against the project. A seventy-five-year-old man. First off, he’d told the crowd how old he was and told them not to scream at him when he spoke his mind or else he might have a heart attack right there and his death would be on their hands. Then he started a ramble about how bad the fishing was now compared to forty years ago. How he used to pull ten-pound snappers out of bays and sounds that were dead empty now. About how there was a time you could cast off any part of the coastline from Key Largo to Key West and foul-hook your supper. He could remember when you could drive along the highway and look out at the water, before all the motels and those other things. He tried twice to say “condominium” and gave up.
    It took him fifteen minutes to run dry of memories.
    There was a stir when Kate walked down the aisle to the podium. One of the bandannas said something, and the crowd around him laughed. Thorn went over, took his same seat.
    Kate introduced herself, said she represented a coalition of groups. She aligned her notes on the podium, took off her glasses, and set them on her notes. She glanced over at the posters again and came around in front of the podium.
    Her pale blue eyes seemed twenty years younger than the rest of her. Silver hair back in a bun. She had a boxy but delicate face and had probably been considered a beauty for a few years when she was young. Now, at sixty-five, she was a serene but plain woman.
    “Most of you have made up your minds already,” she said, her voice fuller than Thorn had ever heard it.
    Redbeard called out, “So whyn’t you shut up and go home?”
    Thorn nudged him in the back, and redbeard twisted around and gave Thorn a menacing look.
    Thorn said quietly, “I want to hear this.”
    “Most of you,” she said, “most of you are good people, thoughtful people. You’ve looked at this and you’ve decided. Between wood rats and libraries, we’ll take libraries. We’ll take a broader tax base. Growth. We’re for human beings, not rats.”
    “Damn right!” one of redbeard’s friends called out.
    “I understand that. But I have just one question.” Kate paused and looked back toward Thorn’s section. “When are you going to be ready to draw the line? When will it be that someone will walk into a room like this and say, ‘I’ll trade you a library, I’ll trade you a couple hundred temporary jobs for your last lobster’? Is that when you’ll say no? Not lobsters. We like lobsters. Or make that sailfish. Or put in there grouper, snapper, trout. You name it.”
    “Sheeit,” said redbeard to his cronies. “I’d trade my damn wife for a steady job.”
    Kate said, “This year it’s wood rats. And you say, yes, we’ll part with our wood rats. We’ll take the library. We got bills and taxes, so we’ll take jobs. Next year what’ll it be? And five years from now? What I want, and what a whole lot of people like me want, is for all of us to draw the line here. Right here.”
    Thorn nudged redbeard again as he started making farting noises. His buddies rooting him on. Redbeard didn’t even look back at Thorn. Thorn’s chest tightened. His hands were sweaty.
    “You heard Mr. Grayson call them cute,” Kate said. “I wish to God they were cute. I wish they had big, dewy eyes and a button nose and long whiskers and they had a name that made them sound cuddly. But they don’t. They’re just simple, ordinary rodents, nothing special about them, nothing cute either. The only thing remotely special about them is that there are only a few hundred of them left on earth.
    “Mr. Grayson’s the one that’s cute. He’s coming in here, representing people you’ve never seen, people you won’t ever see ’cause they’re the kind of people who arrive in helicopters. They like this island. They think it’d be nice to live here for a week or two