Free Under Cover of Daylight by James W. Hall Page A

circuit.
    Captain Eddie would be showing up at dawn. Seven days a week he poled up to Thorn’s dock, even at high tide, when there was water enough to use his engine, always wanting his half dozen assorted flies.
    And after Eddie it would be Bill Martin, a retiree from Massachusetts, a professor of something or other who had discovered fly-fishing for bones and had acquired gradually the same reticence and sun-glazed stare of all bonefish addicts. And on like that all day, Thorn tying between their visits, never enough, always learning from them what was catching fish this week. And standing out on his coral dock, wondering with them why in the hell that little scrap of hokum brought those fish awake.
    Crazy Charlie was the epoxy flat base fly he’d created in June. It skittered across the mud flats, trailing purple flasharoo, these Mylar strings that shook like tassels on a stripper’s skirt. Silver beads from a key chain for eyes. A pinch of white squirrel fur for the body. Like a Martian roach. Glitter and flash, dressed for a twenty-first-century nightclub.
    He had a desk full of animal fur, pelts, tails, whiskers, toenails. His friend Jerome Billings had a contract with the county to keep the dead animals off the highway. Thorn got his pick of the daily supply of highway cats and dogs, squirrels, raccoons, and rats. If the pelt were still fresh, Jerome would drop it by. Thorn gave him flies as payment, though he knew Jerome had never fished a day. Either Jerome sold them, or Thorn couldn’t imagine, displayed them somewhere, used them in the bedroom? Scraping up squashed animals all day might have put a deep kink in there somewhere.
    He laced the Crazy Charlie tight with the purple Mylar, tying a double turle knot and leaving a single thread, something to attach the last of the squirrel fur to. All glitter and flash, but a bonefish might smack that thing and rip off a hundred yards of line in about four seconds. All torque, that fish wouldn’t waver or jump, just burn those reel bearings, one long frizz. The pole straining. Heart crawling up into the esophagus. Thorn had been there; he’d been there and been there. And now he was here.
    He loosened the vise a notch and rotated the Crazy Charlie. That vise had cost him a couple of hundred. It was a custom job he’d designed with a machinist in Tavernier. It had a needle-nose vise, rubber-coated gripping surface, and a largemouth vise with a fine-tune setting so he could hold a hook without marring the finish. Beautiful little tool.
    The vise was about the most expensive thing he owned. His house. A few tools. A trickle of cash to pay the lights, and more anytime he wanted to speed up production. A library card. The land was his. Taxes paid from the trust fund Dr. Bill had left. A little cash left for gas for his rusted-out ’65 Cadillac Fleetwood, his Keys Cruiser.
    It’d been Dr. Bill’s final car and had just enough life left to make the journey down to Islamorada once a month for Mexican food. It was about that often that Thorn wanted a break from snapper, grouper, trout, lobster, his payments, or gifts, from the guides who knew who he was, where he was, and what he did better than anybody else in the Keys.
    All of his two dozen regular customers could tie their own flies, often bringing one by so Thorn could admire. But Thorn could do something else, some bright tiny nightmare magic he could bring to that chenille, that pipe-cleaner body, the flourish of calf tail or rabbit fur or cat. His flies caught fish. And not one of them looked like anything real.
    Let it drift down into the murky dull mud of a saltwater flat, down into the drab world of bonefish, that little wedge of clear epoxy with bead-chain eyes and a flare of calf tail, and drag that fantasy through the silt anywhere in the peripheral sight of a bone and it’d smack that thing and run that zinging line to Bimini.
    Bones ate like paranoid schizophrenics. Scared of food half the time. Offer them a