Mean High Tide (Thorn Series Book 3)

by James W. Hall

  Thorn set his beer down. Tried to find words, but failed.

  She lifted her eyes to his.

  "This isn't a criticism, Thorn. Our life together is fine."

  "But you want more. Something more."

  She sighed.

  "Oh, Thorn, now you're hurt."

  "A little," he said. "What'd you expect?"

  "I'm just talking about having something that belongs to me alone. You have that. Things you keep private. Worries. Fantasies, things you don't tell anybody about."

  "No, I don't."

  "Tell the truth."

  He thought about it, watching the cormorant grow bored with them, then launch itself up and flap away toward the Grady White.

  "I guess there's some stuff I don't tell you. Nothing major."

  "Well, that's all this is, Thorn. Nothing major. A small problem I want to handle on my own. That's all. Okay? Like you have with your bone-fish flies. Your own creations."

  "I see," he said.

  He watched the cormorant splash down next to the Grady White. He couldn't see anybody on board it anymore.

  "Thorn," she said, standing up now, coming to him. Sweat sparkling on her shoulders and the tops of her breasts. "I love you exactly how you are. And I'll love you when we're ninety years old, sitting in our rockers on that porch, watching the sun sink into Blackwater Sound, swatting mosquitoes, drinking white wine. I want to be with you till the day I die. You got that? Is that clear enough for you?"

  He stood up. Darcy Richards reached out, and with a single finger traced the ridge of his collarbone.

  "Just one thing," he said.

  "Yeah?"

  "Does it always have to be white wine? Can't we make it red occasionally?"

  She smiled and stepped into an embrace. He could taste the sea salt on her lips, and could feel the heat and hunger that hadn't slackened in years of kissing. Eyes closed, a lush darkness in Thorn's head as if his eyeballs had rolled back and might stay that way permanently.

  When they were finished, she stepped back and smiled drowsily. Thorn reached out for her, but she shook her head.

  "Not now," she said. "When we get back in. Okay? Right now, I really want to get that lobster before it sneaks off."

  "Sure," he said. "But find it quick."

  She bent down, picked up her flippers and began tugging them on. Thorn went back to the cooler, got another beer. He watched a flying fish break the surface and sail past the bow of their skiff. It stayed aloft for thirty yards, then sliced back in.

  Sitting on the wide gunwale, her back to the water, Darcy said, "I keep meaning to ask you, Thorn. Have you ever run across a fish called a red tilapia?"

  He popped the cold beer, slid it into the insulator cup.

  "Doesn't ring a bell," he said. "Why?"

  "Oh, I was just curious. It's nothing. Somebody mentioned it the other day, and I thought you might've heard of it. You're such a fish guy."

  "Is that what's bothering you? Some fish?"

  Darcy formed a careful smile.

  "Thorn," she said. "Don't."

  Before he could say anything else, she pressed one hand to her mask, waved at him with the other, and fell backward into the water.

  ***

  It was after one o'clock, and for the last hour while Darcy snorkeled around the elk horn and brain coral, still in pursuit of the monster lobster, Thorn fished off the other side. Twelve-weight fly rod with 850 grain shooting head and fifteen-pound tippet-heavy tackle. Using a tarpon fly he'd invented recently. Red Mylar wrapped in intricate figure eights around a plug of ram's fur. A short purple skirt that hung down over the spray of fur, and for a head, a pearl button from one of his ratty cowboy shirts.

  He'd plucked the fur from a stuffed ram's head Sugarman's wife, Jeanne, had bought on impulse at a garage sale. When they got the thing home it was just so big it overpowered every wall in their house, so Sugarman hauled the ram's head out to his car, drove over to Thorn's, and offered it to him.

  And sure, why not? Thorn liked using oddball materials. Mixing hundred-year-old fur with space-age plastic strips. And surprise, surprise, a week after Thorn sold his first dozen of them, one of his friends, a tarpon guide down in Lower Matecumbe, stopped by the house to tell Thorn the ram's-head fly was snagging a good crop of tarpon, an occasional permit. So today he'd decided to field-test it for himself.

  He'd never been a match-the-hatch fly-tier. The match-the-hatch guys believed fish would only bite replicas of the insects that were hatching during that time of year. They believed fish were programmed to avoid anything their biological almanacs told them was out of season. Made them jittery if it didn't jive.

  But for Thorn, verisimilitude wasn't the point of fly-tying. Hell, the truth was, he wasn't interested in catching some goddamn fish with no more imagination than that. Far as he was concerned, the only fish worth catching was one willing to strike something it had never seen before. Willing to take that risk, that leap of impulse, crazy faith in its own abilities.

  He glanced over at Darcy, floating on her stomach, peering down into the water. He could hear her breathing through her snorkel. That raspy breath coming in spurts as she moved around for a better view of things below.

  Okay, so Thorn's quiet retreat wasn't holding Darcy's full attention anymore. She was right, of course. Thorn's daily script was unvarying. Had been for years. Tying bonefish flies each morning to make his borderline income, a nap in the hammock after lunch, out in the skiff at five to catch yellowtail, grouper, trout for supper. Dusk reserved for a couple of glasses of wine, lighting the grill, studying the fluid patterns of birds in flight, and the nights were for reading novels, or charting the long slow passage of the moon and constellations. An occasional splurge at a Key Largo restaurant.

  For Thorn, none of the vitality had leaked away from the rituals. He did what he did, then did it again the next day, but it never seemed monotonous. Always a familiar newness, a steady, growing pleasure. He thought of his routine as an endless perfecting of what was already very, very good.

  He watched Darcy dive into the calm waters. Watched her fins wave in the air for a moment as her body sank. Hearing again what she'd said a few moments ago. Wanting her own turf, her own private challenges. He'd cringed when she'd said it. Sounded like the preamble to a parting speech. But now, he felt fine. Her kiss had done that. There was no doubt in that kiss. No uneasiness. None whatsoever.

  Thorn turned away and cast again, planting it delicately in front of a large shadow. He watched the fly sink slowly through the surface of the brilliant water. He watched the shadow approaching, quickly taking shape, becoming bright silver, a tarpon, a massive fish, whisking past the bait, past the bow of the boat, on its way out to sea.

  He watched it go, then watched it begin slowly to veer to the right, ten yards ahead of the boat, peeling off its course into a wide arc. Beginning a cautious circle back.

  Apparently Thorn's fly had registered somewhere inside the great fish, a small prick of curiosity. A faint hunger. Growing as the fish turned, as it fought against its suspicions, the itch deepening in it, becoming something else perhaps, a craving, a desire so strong, it could only be satisfied by gulping down that object of its fascination, that bright, tantalizing tuft of fur with its gleaming, hidden hook.

  CHAPTER 2

  Darcy floated on the surface and watched the lobster's antennae wiggle at the base of a big mound of brain coral. Twenty feet of water between her and the critter. At that depth, she'd have about thirty seconds to tickle the lobster out of its cave and get it into her bag before her breath ran out and she'd have to kick back to the surface.

  She seemed to recall a time when she could have lasted more than a minute down there, twenty years ago, a girl of fifteen, many afternoons like this one, out on the reef with Thorn and Sugarman and her brother Gaeton, everyone staying down it seemed like hours on one breath. But no doubt that was a trick of recollection. Nostalgia giving things an expansive glow.

&n
bsp; The hard truth was she'd never been able to hold her breath long enough to catch the wiliest lobsters. Two grabs was about all she could manage, then it was back to the surface for another gulp of air. Though Thorn was something else again. When he dived, he never seemed to gulp any extra air, just nonchalantly ducked his head under and dove and stayed down and stayed down and stayed down some more. Darcy would go back to the surface, gasp a few times, drag in another breath and come down again, and that damn Thorn would still be down there from the first breath, snaking his arm deep into some hole, coming out with another crawfish.

  She could never match that, but then neither could Sugarman or Gaeton. Thorn had something special, a gift, some biological quirk that let him stay under longer than anybody she'd ever met. None of them ever put a clock on him, but she guessed he could manage somewhere near two minutes, like those pearl divers in Japan or something.

  When they kidded him about it, Thorn would just shrug. Give some silly explanation. Once Sugarman claimed that Thorn didn't have to hold his breath like normal people because the guy'd eaten so many fish, he'd mutated into one, grown gills in his armpits. He'd take a stroke, extract some oxygen, take another stroke, more oxygen. Hey, Thorn, raise your arms, let's check this out. And Darcy could picture it. All of them on Gaeton's boat, gathering around Thorn, while slowly, theatrically, he lifted his arms, everybody coming in close, and Sugarman poked through the hair under his arms. Then Gaeton gasped. Holy shit, it's true, look! Darcy screamed, and everybody broke up.

  When they were calmed down again, Thorn said, "Okay, if you must know. The secret of staying down so long is just not to think about it. Do it, but don't think about it."

  As soon as he said that, Darcy knew it was the answer. And now that she understood Thorn a whole lot better, she saw there were a lot of other things Thorn didn't think about, and usually they turned out to be the exact things he was good at. Awfully good sometimes. A skill she'd never had, turning off the thoughts, doing something with her mind dead silent.

  Maybe she should try it just then, just glide through that twenty feet of water, leisurely fetch up that damn lobster, the one that was waving its antennae at her, beckoning her down, and no matter how long it took, she wouldn't think once about the pressure, the burn in her lungs.

  She raised her head, looked over at Thorn on the skiff. He was casting his fly off the other side. Giving it that wave, that elegant loopy undulation he had, whipping it back and forth like snapping a bullwhip in slow motion, then floating the fly out onto the still water, and though she couldn't see from here, she bet the line drifted down so quietly, it wouldn't leave a ripple.

  He turned slightly, and noticed her watching him, and called over to her. Asked if she'd seen anything down below.

  "That big bug again," she said. "Hiding in a crevice under some brain coral."

  "Well, whatta you waiting for?"

  She snugged her mask into place, still looking at him.

  He raised his arm and made a sweeping gesture toward the horizon, smiling out at the amazing day. She nodded that she saw it too, then she fit the snorkel in her mouth, took a bite on it, looked back down through the water to get her bearings.

  It was slack tide, so she hadn't moved, still hovering above the same patch of brain coral. From her right, a school of violet wrasse closed in on her, ten thousand inch-long fish, moving in one sinuous cluster. They swam toward her, parted, turned the water lavender, and slid by. She felt the tickle of their passing.

  Christ Almighty, no matter how many times she came out here, every day was another amazement, always new configurations. Thousands of flecks of color endlessly shifting and rearranging. The light sliding up and down its brightness scale. Forever unique, a motley dance of tints and shapes, tranquil motions and blurs of speed. The fan coral stirring, the schools of angels, grunts, and mackerel, butterfly fish, and snapper, a lone shark cruising past, the gold and yellow twists of elk horn and fire coral and basket sponge.

  For the million million fish in these warm clear waters, this hundred miles of reef was mating ground and feeding ground and stalking ground, a place of grace and danger and endless energy. Of course, these days everyone knew the reef was dying. Darcy had watched it decline for three decades now, its vivid colors dulling, the fish not nearly as dense or varied. The water cloudier. Too much traffic out here, jerks dropping their anchors on the fragile coral, more jerks breaking off in a second what took a century to create, too much sewage runoff fertilizing the algae growth, too many humans cramming the shoreline, dribbling their oils into the bays and canals and sounds that led out to sea.

  She floated on her belly, watching those antennae wave, a small school of jack crevalle and blue runners, a medium-size nurse shark, a leopard ray fluttering along the sandy patch below, angelfish and hogfish and warsaw grouper — and yes, it was true, the reef seemed healthy enough. At moments like this, listening to her own breath rasp in and out of the snorkel, watching the million winks of color, the possibility of losing the reef seemed like some incredibly distant concern. On par with the death of the sun.

  That was the problem. It happened so slowly, it was hard to register. An antler of coral gone from one spot, and months later some yellow tube sponge turning white and shriveling in another place, and a while after that, the filter-feeding gorgonia, a soft relative of the coral, began to droop, and its thousand filigree pieces fell slowly away.

  You had to come here every day for years. You had to have a sharp memory, an eye for detail; you had to continually match the past against the present. So, for a tourist diver, out for an hour or so for one afternoon, there was no way to detect the loss or sense the immense calamity that was taking place. To them it all seemed marvelous, rich and plentiful.

  Lifting her head, she looked back at Thorn, still fishing, contented. Then as she peered down again at the lobster, she sensed something passing by her, some large presence just out of the edge of her narrow peripheral vision. She jerked her head to the right, then left, scanned the water slowly all the way around her, but saw nothing.

  Blowing out a hard breath, she turned onto her back, spit out her snorkel, floating for a moment to calm herself. Because this had happened before. In fact, almost every time she'd come to the reef lately she'd had another mild panic attack. Perhaps it was just another feature of middle age, some new tendency to imagine the twelve-foot white shark stalking her from behind. Time's finned chariot. Wherever it came from, it pissed her off. It wasn't like her to be spooked. Not like her to feel anything but peacefulness out on the reef.

  She pressed the mask back into place, took the snorkel in her mouth, and turned back onto her stomach. She located the antennae again, then, without hyperventilating as she usually did, Darcy simply slid her face below the water, trying to imitate Thorn, see if that had any effect, and she coasted downward through the water with a slow easy flutter of her flippers.

  She had a nylon net tied around her waist, a measuring caliper tied to that. She wore thick-weave yellow gloves on both hands, and she carried the same tickle stick she'd used for the last few lobster seasons, a two-foot aluminum poker with a slight bend at the business end. And as always, she wore the eight-inch Medlon knife in a plastic scabbard at her ankle. She'd taken a lot of kidding about that knife over the years: Darcy, the Navy SEAL, off to slit some throats. But she couldn't count all the times it had come in incredibly handy, those same people suddenly grateful she'd worn it. She'd used it to cut a ton of fishing line wrapped around propellers, or to pry anchor lines from craggy rocks. She'd sliced fishing plugs from mangrove limbs, performed numerous minor shipboard surgeries. Not to mention opening countless bottles of beer.

  Now as she swam downward, she kept her eyes trained on those two large antennae sticking out from beneath the brain coral. If it was the same monster she'd seen twice this morning, then this time it was a hell of a lot more exposed than it had been. Getting overconfident maybe. Swaggering.

  The thing was big enou
gh, it could have been ten or fifteen years old. Which meant it was crafty — had to be to survive that long, to avoid the hordes of divers, and all those lobster pots. It knew the tricks, knew which pulse of water was friendly, which was deadly. She was certain she wasn't the first diver to spot it and try to snatch it out of its watery world.

  As she reached the sandy floor, she pinched her nose and cleared the pressure in her ears. And then gave two strong kicks and was just above the antennae. Her flippers swirled up a little sand, made the water milky. But the critter seemed to have lost his earlier caution. Sleeping maybe, digesting some piece of gristle it had scrounged.

  In any case, she didn't wait for it to sense her, but angled the tickle stick to the lobster's front end and eased her free hand in behind it. She poked it with the stick, and just as it was supposed to do, it skittered backward into her hand and she gripped it hard, and then just as suddenly it kicked free.

  She pushed away from the rock, her chest beginning to ache. She twisted around and swam down against the buoyancy to see beneath the coral. It was there. Wedged backward as far as it could go inside a small crevice in the rock, its antennae working hard now, waving like a pair of fencing foils.

  She let the buoyancy lift her, kicked once on the way back up. In no hurry really, but when she broke through the surface, she spit out the snorkel and dragged down a long gasp, and another. That was her limit these days, less than a minute. Lifting her mask up to her forehead, she treaded water, got back her breath. Glancing over at Thorn, his back to her, something big on his line. Good for him.

  She snugged her mask back in place, bit down on her snorkel, found the fit. This time she used her own method. She took three measured breaths, blew them out, and sucked in a bigger one and curled over and swam through the silky water toward that wall of limestone beside the brain coral.