Free Soundkeeper by Michael Hervey Page B

closed to within twenty feet of the boat. Neither man turned to look at him now, afraid of being identified later if they managed to escape.
    Euhaw Creek twisted and turned and suddenly narrowed. Hall increased his following distance. A large white cooler flew out of the boat in front of him and glanced off the front of Hall’s boat with a dull thud. The suspect’s boat began to slow. Hall used his PA speaker, and ordered the men to raise their hands. They did as they had been instructed, and Hall drew his pistol and started to pull alongside.
    Just as Hall was close enough to see that the boat had no registration numbers, it took off again. Hall holstered his pistol, cursed, and slammed the throttle forward all at once. The boat in front of him made a hard right turn into a narrow break in the marsh grass. Hazzard Creek, Hall correctly guessed. He knew he couldn’t follow them when the wake from their small boat turned gray with mud. Hazzard Creek was too shallow for his boat. Both men flipped him the bird just before they disappeared in the marsh grass.
    Hall turned off his strobe light and slowly motored out of Euhaw Creek. The white cooler was almost submerged when he found it, and he struggled to get it on his boat. It was full of juvenile redfish, illegal to possess even if they had been caught legally with a rod and reel. To keep the abandoned net from becoming a hazard to navigation he hauled it on board too. It was good evidence, but he had no one to use it against.
    Running now with both the tide and the wind, Hall made the trip back down the river in just less than thirty minutes. The ride was much smoother and drier, but instead of taking the familiar route home he turned into the Beaufort River.
    The Penn School on St. Helena Island was founded by Pennsylvania abolitionists in 1862, before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Abraham Lincoln. Its purpose was to educate the freed slaves on the sea islands of Port Royal Sound and did so for many generations. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. held his annual Southern Christian Leadership Conference on the Penn campus for several years, and it was named a national National Historic Landmark by the Department of the Interior in 1974.
    Hall knew none of this when he pulled up to the rickety dock that protruded into Cowen Creek behind the Penn Center. He only knew Jimmy had told him that any fish he confiscated were to be delivered to this place.
    An old man who reminded Hall of the shrimpers he had met helped him carry the cooler into the kitchen of the small school. The cook and headmistress thanked him profusely for the fish and his generosity. He apologized for not letting them keep the cooler, but made up for it by staying and helping clean the catch.
    “You’ve cleaned a lot of fish,” the old man said after a while. Hall’s pistol belt and uniform shirt were hanging on a chair behind them. It was the first time the old man had spoken since they had met.
    Hall said “All summer long, for two summers in a row.” Between his freshman and sophomore years at the College of Charleston he cleaned hundreds of pounds of fish that the tourists caught on the charter boats. They often let him have some of the catch and he shared it with his friends at Fort Johnson.
    The old man laughed and spat tobacco juice into the sink. When they had dressed all of the fish the old man looked out the window and spoke again.
    “Dinner time’s soon. We’d be blessed for you to join us,” he said.
    Hall declined the invitation, but didn’t refuse a piece of pan-fried redfish stuffed inside a homemade biscuit. It was delicious and made him second guess his decision to leave.
    On his way back out to the river, he relied on his instruments to help him navigate in the darkness and noticed a light in an old fishhouse that he had believed to be abandoned. A dump truck was pulling up to the dilapidated building and Hall wondered how soon the area would become the newest gated