The River Killers

by Bruce Burrows

  “I happen to be very attracted to your incidental attributes.” I got up and kissed her. She kissed me back.

  “Some attributes are more incidental than others. Does the uniform attract you?”

  “Take it off and I’ll see how I feel.”

  “You feel aroused.” She turned back to the stove. “I don’t want to burn the omelet. Why don’t you make the toast?”

  By the time I had made ten pieces of toast, the omelet was ready, so I called the others to the table. We ate quickly, even though there was no need, and when we were finished, I told Fergie it was his turn to do the dishes.

  “What do you mean, it’s my turn?”

  “I did them last. It’s your turn after me.”

  “We haven’t been together on a boat for eight years. Are you telling me you remember who did the dishes last?”

  “I wrote it in my diary.”

  “Even so, this is a different boat. Different rotation. Law of the sea.”

  “Rotation is invoked by the last doer of the dishes. Chapter twenty-three.”

  “All right, but I get the last piece of toast.”

  Christine grinned. “Some things never change. It’s nice to know you can count on a certain amount of consistency, even if it’s only childishness.”

  Mark went back to the wheelhouse and the engine roared into life. Christine and I went to pull the hook, and then we had a quick conference in the wheelhouse. “Let’s take a look in behind those islands. That’s where I’d be if I was a sockeye.”

  “If you spend too much time in the West Van lab, you might be.”

  The boat moved slowly forward as Mark kept his eye on the sounder. There was a string of three or four islands in the outer bay, and two more on the inner southeast shore. In between the two sets of islands, we found the fish. Mark stared at the sounder. “It looks deep enough for a set. Let me sound it out for a couple of minutes.”

  We went out on deck to get everything ready. I told Louise to stand on the upper deck behind the wheelhouse so she’d get a good view. Professionals in action, I told her.

  We checked the myriad of things that needed to be checked so that the complex activity of launching and recovering a quarter mile of net could be achieved without disaster, and then assumed our positions. I would run the drum in Billy’s absence, Fergie would run the skiff, and Christine was at her old post on the deck winch. Mark poked his head out the back door and yelled some last-minute instructions. “There’s a lot of fish and we only need a few. I’m going to do a quick circle set so Fergie won’t have to tow much.”

  He gunned the engine and the boat sped up. I felt the familiar butterflies signaling my rising excitement. I gave a thumbs-up to Fergie standing in the skiff and Christine by the winch and then Louise behind the wheelhouse. The horn sounded and Christine let the skiff line go. The net started to peel off the stern and I watched the line of corks as Mark started to draw a big white circle in the water. When the net was almost completely off, Mark poked his head out again. “Don’t even use the tow hook. Just start drumming slowly when the last cork hits the water.”

  As the last cork dribbled over the stern, I placed the second roller in the spooling gear and draped the towline between the two rollers. Fergie had towed his end of the net back to the boat. He passed the end of the tow-off line to Christine who wrapped it onto the deck winch. Fergie had jumped back onboard, and he released the blondie before dragging the purse line sternward where he fed it into the pursing block. Christine started pursing and I started drumming. I certainly wasn’t an artiste of the caliber that Billy had been, but I knew the basic moves. While Christine and I were performing our parts in the dance, Fergie swung the boom to port and hooked up the hairpin.

  Mark joined us on deck and stood beside Fergie and me next to the drum. “This is completely ass backwards. I’m trying to catch as few fish as possible.” Then he looked at me. “Hey, do we need a permit for this?”

  “I can issue a scientific permit,” I said, wondering if I could.

  “Rings coming up!”

  I ran the spoolers over to my side and stopped the drum. The purse line pulled tight. “Whoa!” Fergie rammed the hairpin into the neatly bunched brass rings. “Goin’ up!” Christine raised the hairpin to a convenient height, pulled the deck winch out of gear, and I started drumming again. Soon there were only six rings left and I slowed the drum. When there were only two rings left, Mark grabbed them and Christine lowered the hairpin while Fergie ran to untie the end line. Mark stooped and carefully passed his two rings around the horn, even though we weren’t really concerned with losing fish, and Fergie did the same with the end line. I stopped the drum and Mark pulled out one of the spoolers so the fish wouldn’t be squished passing between them.

  Mark peered over the stern. “There’s a couple hundred,” he said.

  I lowered the stern ramp until the roller was almost in the water and then went ahead on the drum. A neat little bag of flopping fish came over the stern, and I raised the ramp and stopped the drum. Fergie and Mark pulled slack through the end rings. I went ahead on the drum again, and the neat little bag of fish spilled onto the stern.

  “Come and look at this,” I shouted to Louise. Almost immediately, we spotted two Frankenfish, then three more, and then too many. Some of the fish were normal, at least in outward appearance. But the deformed specimens, writhing on deck, made my stomach heave. I looked at my shipmates and they all displayed expressions of distaste, like they were watching unusually offensive porn.

  I was in a quandary. I wanted to save the Igors and maybe a dozen of the normal-looking fish. But what to do with the rest? Throw them overboard? Alive or dead? When I voiced these questions, Mark was unequivocal. “We can freeze a few of these but I don’t want the rest on my boat. And if they’re mutants, they shouldn’t go back into the ocean alive.”

  “Okay, let’s save the obvious mutants and a dozen normal-looking ones to autopsy.” The “autopsy” consisted of slitting open the bellies to check the gonads. Christine and Fergie and I grimaced as we handled the misshapen mutants. Their flesh was soft and repellent, but we willed ourselves into a clinical detachment.

  We quickly discovered two things. All the “normal” fish were males and they all carried radio tags, little cylinders the size of a vitamin pill. It now seemed prudent to open up the deformed fish. They weren’t Igors, they were Igoresses, and they were radio-tagged as well.

  Fergie shook his head. “Wow, all females are mutants. Who knew?”

  Christine kicked bloody water at him. “You may want to re-phrase that slightly.”

  “We need to take a good look at the islands,” Louise said to Mark. “Can you cruise around them real close to the shore.”

  “It’s too shallow. But we can use the skiff.”

  Christine offered to tag and bag our specimens, so Louise and I climbed into the skiff. As we cruised toward the innermost of the islands, I asked what we were looking for.

  “Clues.”

  “Oh.”

  We slowly circumnavigated all of the islands in Morehouse Bay. Every one was heavily vegitized, so we looked for openings in the underbrush, anything that resembled a trail. We saw nothing that would indicate the hand of man had ever set foot on any of the islands.

  I did take the opportunity, when we were out of sight of the Coastal Provider, to snuggle with the local law enforcement. Much more than the quick grope of my previous amours, it was a searching embrace that left us flushed and yearning. It was with some reluctance that we headed back.

  When we got alongside the big boat, I spread my hands wide and shrugged. I threw Fergie the skiff line, and he threw it over the drum to Christine, who put it on the winch and pulled the skiff up tight to the stern of the Coastal Provider. Louise and I climbed aboard and looked enquiringly at Mark. He checked his watch. “It’s ten-thirty. We can be in Lagoon Bay by four. It’ll still be light enough to look around.”

  Mark went up to the wheelhouse and
the Coastal Provider began moving out of the bay. He headed northeast up Return Channel, so he could turn south down Johnson Channel on the way to Lagoon Bay. Sometimes you had to head in one direction so you could make progress in the opposite direction.

  Our mood lightened when we were joined by a small group of harbor porpoises. They shot toward us like torpedoes, then turned and ran with the boat, surfing in the bow wave. I took Louise out to the bow so she could lean over and look at them. We could almost touch them. They were such amazing creatures, zooming through the water with no discernible movement of their bodies. They could have been jet-propelled, and they were having such fun! If ignorance is bliss then oblivion must be golden rapture. And the porpi were completely oblivious, to our concerns at least. I felt jealous but Louise was entranced. Soon they grew bored with us and shot off on some other adventure. Louise took my hand and we went back into the warmth of the wheelhouse.

  Mark and Fergie and Christine all looked at me as we entered. “A few questions have arisen,” Christine said. “Perhaps you’d like to try to answer them?” I shrugged.

  “Those little pill things we found in the fish? They were radio transmitters?”

  “Yeah, they obviously wanted to track the fish, because they were worried they wouldn’t follow a normal pattern. Or, they were programmed not to follow the normal pattern.”

  “Okay. Second question: why are all the mutants female?”

  “We can only guess, right? It could be an unforeseen consequence of the genetic manipulation. Or maybe it was deliberate because they didn’t want these fish to breed with normal fish.”

  “But even ugly humans reproduce.” Fergie was on thin ice here and I ignored him.

  Mark put his two cents in: “I’m betting the deformities were unintended. They wanted this whole experiment to go unnoticed, not have their fish picked out and scrutinized and brought back to the lab for identification.”

  There seemed to be general agreement on that. I advanced the question that was really bothering me: “Crowley came up here to monitor the experiment. That means he knew the fish would be here, which meant they’d been genetically programmed to stay inshore, on the central coast. Don’t ask me why.”

  The Coastal Provider continued to part the waters, down Johnson Channel and then into Fisher Channel. The beauty of the day reproached us for our imperfections. Louise disappeared down to the galley, and twenty minutes later came back with a tray of sandwiches. We didn’t actually snarl and snap over them, but there were a few hand slaps and exhortations to take just one at a time. They disappeared very quickly.

  Soon we could see Burke Channel opening to the east, and we knew Lagoon Bay was just ahead. Anticipation crackled between us like an electric charge. Mark cut close by Nob Point and did a transect from north to south across the bay. We saw nothing unusual, so he headed for the narrow gap that led into Codville Lagoon. Throttling back to half speed, he watched the sounder closely as the bottom came up to two fathoms and then dropped back down to forty-five. We were in the lagoon.

  If you turned the chart sideways, the lagoon was shaped like a toadstool. It was deeper than most lagoons, with a large island at the eastern side. Mark turned to port, intending to cruise the shoreline. As we neared the island, I could see wisps of smoke drifting up from somewhere near the center and my heart skipped a little. Mark saw the smoke too. “Don’t tell me someone lives here.”

  I touched Louise’s shoulder and pointed at the smoke. I could feel her tense, and I read her thoughts: What if the bad guy was here? Mark continued to cruise the beach, and in doing so circumnavigated the island. We saw no sign of a boat, which lessened the chances that there was someone on the island. When we had followed the shore all the way around to our starting point, Mark put the boat in neutral and waited for instructions.

  I was adamant: “We need to land on the island and find the source of that smoke.”

  Louise was more hesitant: “The book says in situations like this, you call for backup. Mind you, backup a long way away.”

  “If we’d seen a boat, I’d say call for reinforcements,” I said, pressing my case. “But I don’t think there’s anyone there. Besides, there’s five of us.”

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” she said. I could see her thinking carefully. “I’ll get my pistol and two people will come with me to the island, and two will stay here. When we get to the island, one person stays with the skiff, and the other comes with me. Any sound or sign of trouble and the skiff person comes back here. If there’s no radio contact between the land party and the boat after thirty minutes, you guys take off and establish radio contact with Bella Bella ASAP. Ask for help.”

  “I’ll run the skiff, and after I drop you on the island, I’ll stand off a net length or so,” Christine said. “I won’t move back in until I see you, and you give me the okay.”

  “That’s pretty close to a foolproof plan,” I nodded agreement. “I’ll go with Louise.”

  “Foolproof?” Fergie laughed. “Considering the personnel, it better be.”

  “I’ll be right back,” Louise said, heading for the fo’c’s’le. When she returned, she was in uniform, wearing a protective vest with her sidearm on her belt. “Let’s go, guys.”

  We went out to launch the skiff, and five minutes later Christine was steering us toward the island. Louise raised her voice over the sound of the engine.

  “Let’s cruise all the way around it, before we decide where to land.” Christine nodded and stood on her toes to get a better view as she steered.

  When we got to the other side of the island, we spotted a break in the wall of salal. It might have been a trail. Christine kept going around the island, but we saw nothing else that resembled a trail. When we got back to the break in the salal, Christine headed straight in toward the beach. Twenty feet offshore, she cut the engine. We glided in silently, until there was a crunch as we grounded on gravel. Louise was the first out of the boat. I followed, and then turned and pushed the skiff back out. Christine started the engine and reversed out until she was well off the beach. Louise waved her even farther back. “I want her out of easy gunshot range.” Gunshots? In this Pacific Eden? But I knew the serpent was looming around us and the old rules no longer applied.

  The break in the salal was indeed the start of a trail. We could see that, after about fifty feet, the salal gave way to scrub pine. After that was the unknown.

  “I’ll go first,” Louise said. “You keep about twenty yards back.”

  “I’ve got a better idea.” I realized we were whispering. “I’ll go first. That way, if someone jumps me, you’ll be able to rescue me with guns blazing.”

  “Okay. Go slow. I’ll stay behind enough to be out of sight.”

  I nodded, and crouching, started to bushwhack my way along the ill-defined trail. It was by no means a Parks Canada-approved hiking trail, and I was soon scratched and sweating and swatting away bugs. I clambered over a couple of deadfalls and once took a wrong turn into a salmonberry thicket. But after about two hundred yards of painstaking progress, I could see a lighter area ahead. I emerged into a clearing and whistled in amazement. There had been a building here, more than a building, an installation of some kind, but whatever it was had been reduced to smouldering ashes. Louise was soon beside me and she repeated my whistle.

  “We missed him by twenty-four hours. I’m guessing that’s how long ago this fire was set.” She stepped out into the clearing. “The surrounding trees were just too green to burn; not that it makes much difference. The killer is covering his tracks. I wonder what was here.”

  I examined some familiar metallic shapes. They were blackened but recognizable. “We’ve got two generators here, and that metal latticework; if it was standing up, could have been a radio tower. I think this was the monitoring station.” We began to walk the perimeter of the clearing. On the eastward side, we almost stepped on an electrical cable that snaked into the trees in one direction and back into the center of the burned are
a in the opposite direction. I tried to follow it into the bush, but soon gave up. “We should be able to pick this up where it reaches the beach.”

  We tried to examine what would have been the interior of the building, but it was still too hot. So we stood there and looked around. “Any chance we’ll find useful evidence here?”

  “No fingerprints or DNA evidence,” Louise said, shaking her head. “Nothing biological. I guess that was the intent. But when we sift through the ashes we might come up with something. Not everything is flammable. Where do you think that cable goes?”

  “Let’s go look.”

  When we had retraced our steps back along the trail, and arrived at the beach, we looked to see if we could find the electrical cable. We did. About a hundred yards north of where we’d landed, the cable came out of the bush, ran across the intertidal area, and disappeared into the water. We waved to Christine and she idled in to pick us up. “Well?”

  “There was some kind of monitoring station in there but it looks like the bad guy torched it. He’s cutting his losses and covering his tracks. There’s an electrical cable running into the water. I want to see if it comes out on the mainland beach, over there.”

  Christine aimed the skiff at the spot I’d pointed out: a bay within the lagoon within the main bay. It was about half tide, and a lot of the gravelly beach was exposed. It was there that we discovered the last and the most unexpected of the implausibilities we’d come across that day. The beach was littered with familiar red carcasses: spawned-out sockeye salmon.

  Louise didn’t realize the implications of what we were seeing, but Christine did. Sockeye, like all salmon, are supposed to spawn in fresh-water streams and rivers. In the fall, not the spring.

  “Christ Almighty!” Christine gestured at the carcasses. “Goddamn scientists are breaking the laws of nature.”

  “I’ll let you guys worry about that.” Louise was grim. “I’m more concerned with them breaking the laws of the Criminal Code of Canada.”