The Big Both Ways
Page 36
The sun hung behind thin and ragged clouds. Across the bay, Miles saw a raven watching him, sitting all by itself, shrugging and ruffling its feathers in the wind. Lonely, Miles thought. Lonely for the irascible soul of the outboard engine.
The light at the head of the bay was silver grey now above the dark green sea. Beyond the few islands to the west lay only the Gulf and distant Kamchatka in Asia. To the east, mountains rose up two thousand feet on both sides of the inlet and eased back against the more fractured and eroded slopes of the outer coast. Here the sky widened, and the wind freshened. Here the swells were larger, and the breeze carried the smell of waves broken apart on the shore. As he ran up and over the smooth swells coming in off the coast, Miles passed through occasional warm pools of air; they carried the scent of cedar trees from the outer islands.
Just ahead, gulls circled a tight ring of water, and Miles began to slow the motor. He saw dark squalls rolling in toward the coast from the north, but to the south, clouds floated almost white, threaded with blue. The gulls were diving on some tiny silver fish. Herring, Miles guessed, although he couldn’t see them clearly enough to tell for sure.
He quickly rigged his salmon pole and lowered the throttle on the skiff’s engine as far as it would go. He picked up a green hoochie, a small plastic squid surrounding a hook that danced behind the twisting motion of a silver flasher. Miles watched the progress of the dark squalls to the north; he didn’t want to be caught in the rain. He let the flasher drag out perhaps thirty-five feet behind him, snapped his line onto a downrigger with a small cannonball attached to a wire cable pulled by a hand crank, and adjusted his reel’s drag, keeping his thumb on the spool of monofilament line. He lowered the cannonball to sixty feet beneath the boat, played out the line from his reel; the tip of his pole bent over from the weight of the rigging.
Miles put his rod into the pole holder and navigated a course through the circle of feeding birds. If a fish didn’t bite, he would move, change depths, change gear. For now, though, he let out a long breath, eased back against the plastic seat bolted onto the hard wooden bench built into the skiff.
Miles loved this kind of slow fishing. Since returning to Cold Storage, he had rediscovered his respect for the uneventful life.
Miles had served in the first Gulf War. All it had left him with was an almost unquenchable thirst and a sliver of metal in his shoulder. There had been a photograph of him in a national news magazine, the one to which the trooper had referred. The image of Miles helping another bleeding man into a helicopter had spun its way around the world. The image meant nothing to him now. He could not, nor did he want to, recognize himself in the photo.
Miles’s father had been a good fisherman who had disappeared off the coast in a storm while Miles was a small boy. But he didn’t dwell on grief. He had been satisfied with where he was. Even as a fatherless boy, Miles had loved the little cabin on the water and the thousands of acres of ancient forest just up the hill. In this he was like his old Uncle Slip, who had loved every unchanging stone and tree of the place. Though Slippery Wilson was good with tools and hard work, he was uninterested in catching fish, and Miles was beginning to think he might have inherited some of the old man’s bad luck.
Somewhere near his skiff, a loud exhalation of breath woke Miles from his thoughts. Miles fussed with the drag on his reel. First he tightened it, and then he loosened it back up. He unscrewed the top of his water jug and drank about half of it down.
He heard the loud breath again and scanned the waves. The western sky glowed with a pink haze above the wavering line of the horizon; the view of the outer coast was blocked by islands, their humps glowing with silver and tipped with red as the sun washed over the curve of the ocean.
Underneath his boat, a cloud of silver fish roiled in the green. He could hear them boiling up on the surface. He reached over and turned off the motor. The sea was thick with herring pushing their quicksilver bodies into the air and slapping them down on the surface. The air smelled cold, oily. Down below, he could see large slices of silver shoot under his hull.
Miles, twitching with energy, lifted his pole from the holder. The drag was rolling, and he tightened it down slowly. A large salmon leaped into the air a hundred feet from the boat, a rail of pure lightning coming up out of the darkness of the water. Miles pulled back hard, felt a sudden and heavy jerk; his fish was gone.
The water was quiet. The cloud of silver had moved on. But he heard the breath again, and he held tightly to the side of his skiff, half expecting to be nudged by an orca whale chasing the school of fish.
He looked in all directions, even peering into the sky, until he caught sight of a sea lion some twenty feet behind him, its head steady above the water, seemingly impervious to the motion of the waves. Its eyes glowed milky brown with sympathy and from its mouth drooped a king salmon, graceful as flowing mercury.
“Goddamn it!” Miles shouted.
The sea lion looked at him for a long moment, shook itself, huffed a short breath, then dove under the waves.
“You son of a bitch!” Miles yelled out over the cowling of the outboard to the ripple of water left on the surface. “Bring me back that fish.”
But the sea lion was gone, and Miles was left with the food in his freezer. Muttering about bad luck, he tied off the loose end of his line, lay his pole down on the floor of the boat, and jerked on the starter cord. No response. He pulled again. Silence.
He shouldn’t have been swearing. Miles knew that. And now he knew he might as well get used to the idea of sitting out in the bay for a long time. He would sit and take some deep breaths, try to get his mind right so he could coax the soul of the cranky machine back into the boat.
OTHER TITLES IN THE SOHO CRIME SERIES
Quentin Bates
(Iceland)
Frozen Assets
Cold Comfort
Chilled to the Bone
Cheryl Benard
(Pakistan)
Moghul Buffet
James R. Benn
(World War II Europe)
Billy Boyle
The First Wave
Blood Alone
Evil for Evil
Rag & Bone
A Mortal Terror
Death’s Door
A Blind Goddess
Cara Black
(Paris, France)
Murder in the Marais
Murder in Belleville
Murder in the Sentier
Murder in the Bastille
Murder in Clichy
Murder in Montmartre
Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis
Murder in the Rue de Paradis
Murder in the Latin Quarter
Murder in the Palais Royal
Murder in Passy
Murder at the Lanterne Rouge
Murder Below Montparnasse
Murder in Pigalle
Grace Brophy
(Italy)
The Last Enemy
A Deadly Paradise
Henry Chang
(Chinatown)
Chinatown Beat
Year of the Dog
Red Jade
Death Money
Barbara Cleverly
(England)
The Last Kashmiri Rose
Strange Images of Death
The Blood Royal
Not My Blood
A Spider in the Cup
Gary Corby
(Ancient Greece)
The Pericles Commission
The Ionia Sanction
Sacred Games
The Marathon Conspiracy
Colin Cotterill
(Laos)
The Coroner’s Lunch
Thirty-Three Teeth
Disco for the Departed
Anarchy and Old Dogs
Curse of the Pogo Stick
The Merry Misogynist
Love Songs from a Shallow Grave
Slash and Burn
The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die
Garry
Disher
(Australia)
The Dragon Man
Kittyhawk Down
Snapshot
Chain of Evidence
Blood Moon
Wyatt
Whispering Death
Port Vila Blues
Fallout
Hell to Pay
David Downing
(World War II Germany)
Zoo Station
Silesian Station
Stettin Station
Potsdam Station
Lehrter Station
Masaryk Station
(World War I)
Jack of Spies
Leighton Gage
(Brazil)
Blood of the Wicked
Buried Strangers
Dying Gasp
Every Bitter Thing
A Vine in the Blood
Perfect Hatred
The Ways of Evil Men
Michael Genelin
(Slovakia)
Siren of the Waters
(Michael Genelin cont.)
Dark Dreams
The Magician’s Accomplice
Requiem for a Gypsy
Timothy Hallinan
(Thailand)
The Fear Artist
For the Dead
(Los Angeles)
Crashed
Little Elvises
The Fame Thief
Herbie’s Game
Mick Herron
(England)
Slow Horses
Dead Lions
Adrian Hyland
(Australia)
Moonlight Downs
Gunshot Road
Stan Jones
(Alaska)
White Sky, Black Ice
Shaman Pass
Village of the Ghost Bears
Lene Kaaberbøl & Agnete Friis
(Denmark)
The Boy in the Suitcase
Invisible Murder
Death of a Nightingale
Graeme Kent
(Solomon Islands)
Devil-Devil
One Blood
James Lilliefors
(Global Thrillers)
Viral
The Leviathan Effect
Martin Limón
(South Korea)
Jade Lady Burning
Slicky Boys
Buddha’s Money
The Door to Bitterness
The Wandering Ghost
G.I. Bones
Mr. Kill
(Martin Limón cont.)
The Joy Brigade
Nightmare Range
The Iron Sickle
Peter Lovesey
(Bath, England)
The Last Detective
The Vault
On the Edge
The Reaper
Rough Cider
The False Inspector Dew
Diamond Dust
Diamond Solitaire
The House Sitter
The Summons
Bloodhounds
Upon a Dark Night
The Circle
The Secret Hangman
The Headhunters
Skeleton Hill
Stagestruck
Cop to Corpse
The Tooth Tattoo
The Stone Wife
Jassy Mackenzie
(South Africa)
Random Violence
Stolen Lives
The Fallen
Pale Horses
Seichō Matsumoto
(Japan)
Inspector Imanishi Investigates
James McClure
(South Africa)
The Steam Pig
The Caterpillar Cop
The Gooseberry Fool
Snake
The Sunday Hangman
The Blood of an Englishman
The Artful Egg
The Song Dog
Jan Merete Weiss
(Italy)
These Dark Things
A Few Drops of Blood
Magdalen Nabb
(Italy)
Death of an Englishman
Death of a Dutchman
Death in Springtime
Death in Autumn
The Marshal and the Madwoman
The Marshal and the Murderer
The Marshal’s Own Case
The Marshal Makes His Report
The Marshal at the Villa Torrini
Property of Blood
Some Bitter Taste
The Innocent
Vita Nuova
The Monster of Florence
Fuminori Nakamura
(Japan)
The Thief
Evil and the Mask
Last Winter We Parted
Stuart Neville
(Northern Ireland)
The Ghosts of Belfast
Collusion
Stolen Souls
Ratlines
Eliot Pattison
(Tibet)
Prayer of the Dragon
The Lord of Death
Rebecca Pawel
(1930s Spain)
Death of a Nationalist
Law of Return
The Watcher in the Pine
The Summer Snow
Qiu Xiaolong
(China)
Death of a Red Heroine
A Loyal Character Dancer
When Red is Black
Matt Beynon Rees
(Palestine)
The Collaborator of Bethlehem
A Grave in Gaza
The Samaritan’s Secret
The Fourth Assassin
John Straley
(Alaska)
The Woman Who Married a Bear
The Curious Eat Themselves
The Big Both Ways
Cold Storage, Alaska
Akimitsu Takagi
(Japan)
The Tattoo Murder Case
Honeymoon to Nowhere
The Informer
Helene Tursten
(Sweden)
Detective Inspector Huss
The Torso
The Glass Devil
Night Rounds
The Golden Calf
The Fire Dance
Janwillem van de Wetering
(Holland)
Outsider in Amsterdam
Tumbleweed
The Corpse on the Dike
Death of a Hawker
The Japanese Corpse
The Blond Baboon
The Maine Massacre
The Mind-Murders
The Streetbird
The Rattle-Rat
Hard Rain
Just a Corpse at Twilight
Hollow-Eyed Angel
The Perfidious Parrot
Amsterdam Cops: Collected Stories
Timothy Williams
(Guadeloup)
Another Sun
Return from Nowhere