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

anyway.”
    “Our hero, out winning votes,” said Sarah. “Doing what he can for the cause.”
    Thorn tried to smile. Through his puffy lips he said, “The social skills are a little rusty. Give me time.”
    Kate said, “Might want to work on keeping the left up, too.”
    As they were getting in, Sarah made a retching noise and hauled up from the floor of the passenger seat a clear plastic bag. Dead rats.
    Kate took it from her hand and held it up so the lights from the parking lot shone on it.
    “Three brown rats,” she said. “One wood rat.”
    She and Sarah looked at each other for a moment. Kate shook her head sadly and got out of the car, walked back across the parking lot, and dropped the bag into the school Dumpster. Sarah and Thorn were quiet. Thorn watched Kate come back across the dewy grass.
    She started the car, and Thorn shifted sideways, resting his legs across the backseat. Sarah glanced back at him as they got under way. She smiled at him, but Thorn saw something in her face, a slight lift in her eyebrows, a flush that made him uneasy, as though his boxing workout had somehow aroused her.
    A mile down the road Kate pulled the pins out of her hair, shaking her head to let the wind work it loose.

5
    K ATE T RUMAN CUT THE THIRTY-TWO-FOOT Chris-Craft to an idle, still coasting forward, following the pathway of moonlight toward the east, out toward the shipping lanes. It’d been over a week since she’d had the boat out with Sarah, longer than she liked to leave the boat out of action, but everything was smooth, engine running without a murmur.
    She took the big Chevy out of gear, watched the depth finder print out the bottom. The graph paper showed 60 feet, a gradual dropping away, then, as the vessel finished its coast, a plunge to 105, 110. The wall. Just east of Conch Reef, seven miles off Key Largo. Stacks of yellowtail, shadows of computer ink on the paper, marshaled just across the precipice, the larger ones halfway down the ledge.
    “They’re here,” to no one.
    She shut the engine off, went forward, and released the anchor. The current was running hard to the northeast. The stern would swing around, and they could lay their chum line right out across the edge of the wall.
    Wary for a while, but after some glass minnows, a little macaroni, some menhaden oil, those fish would devour anything she dropped overboard. She’d seen nights the water had turned yellow with fish.
    She made the anchor line fast. Alone, she might have stayed up on the bow, admiring. Moon still big, flat calm, a splash from flying fish or ballyhoo. Always something going on below the surface. She could use some of those Atlantic negative ions or whatever it was that granted you the peacefulness, the full, deep breath. There seemed to be a name for everything these days. Everything just biology and chemistry or a little trigonometry. Even the tranquilizing ocean, even tracking down the fish, all named, numbered, binaried.
    But tonight she wasn’t alone. Her anglers for the evening, Laurel and Hardy, or what, Gomez and Fernandez? The skinny, sweaty one handled the conversation; the fat one probably a Marielito, six months ashore, whispered. All he did, whisper, whisper. Maybe he’d had to sell his voice box for passage over.
    Both of them in their black, shiny shirts. The Laurel one wearing mirror sunglasses, in case the moon flared up. Rings the size of brass knuckles. Street shoes. A diamond earring, for godsakes. Ten o’clock at night and dressed for the disco. She should have just turned them away at the dock. “You can’t come aboard a fishing boat looking like Al Capone’s nightmares.”
    Those people. Who bought all the black, shiny shirts before the new wave of Cubans arrived? It wasn’t like she had anything going on against Cubans. There’d been Cubans fishing down here, living here all her life. But these new ones. They behaved by some other book.
    The one with English had wanted to go yellowtailing.