Free Tropical Depression by Jeff Lindsay Page B

“Because I’m not going to.”
    I was still fairly new at this. I had to believe I hadn’t heard him right. “What’s that?”
    “Tra-vel time,” he said, drawing it out so even an idiot like me would understand. “Twenty-two minutes so far. I’m paying four hundred fifty bucks for a boat ride? I don’t think so.”
    “It’s a package, not an hourly rate,” I said, showing him three teeth. “But if you’d rather fish right here, we can do that. Of course, then you’re not getting your money’s worth out of the guide, are you?”
    He looked over the side of the boat. We were still in the Lakes, a series of flats and pools that run from Key West Harbor down to Ballast Key. At the moment we were idling over a stretch of unhealthy-looking weeds.
    “They got fish here?” Pete demanded.
    I shrugged. “Some grunts. A few eagle rays. Maybe a turtle.”
    “So where are we going? I want a tarpon.”
    I nodded at him like he had just made sense. “That’s where we’re going. To where the tarpon are.”
    He looked over the side again. An old Clorox bottle floated past. “Uh-huh. How far is it?”
    “Another ten or fifteen minutes,” I told him.
    “So let’s go,” he said with authority, and turned back to face front again.
    I pushed the throttle forward without saying anything. By the time we got to the flats on the south side of Woman Key, Pete was already fidgeting and looking at his watch. This is usually a bad sign.
    Fishing, the way I do it, takes some patience. I like to fish proactively, like deer hunting. That means you stalk the fish carefully, because you have studied them and you know their habits and their hangouts. You pole up quietly, spot them, and cast directly, carefully, to the place the fish will be just after your bait gets there: not too close or you spook them, not too far away or they go right by.
    I had just finished explaining that the faint ripple one hundred yards away meant the tarpon were coming in and we had been poling quietly towards them for less than a minute when Pete muttered, “Oh, hell,” and whipped a very clumsy cast straight ahead.
    I was standing directly behind him, on the raised poling platform above the outboard, pushing the boat forward with my guide pole. I had to duck quickly as the crab on his hook whirred past my ear on his back-cast, snatched my hat off coming forward and whipped a good thirty feet ahead. His crab hit the water with a belly-flop smack, which knocked my hat loose from the hook. It went floating off to the right.
    “What are you trying to do, Pete?” I said through carefully gritted teeth.
    “This is supposed to be good fishing?” he accused. “You said fish. So where’s the fucking fish?”
    “Well, the fucking fish were up ahead. If you haven’t terrified them into heading for Cuba with all that splashing, they might still be there.”
    “That supposed to be funny?” He glared at me. “How the fuck long am I supposed to wait? While you dick around with the pole like it’s fucking Venice or something.”
    “How about if you wait until I tell you, then cast to something we can see? Is that too long?”
    He looked sour and savage and turned away. He started to pump his reel furiously. “I’m not paying four hundred fifty bucks for a fucking boat ride,” he grumbled. And since the reel was apparently too slow for him he gave a tremendous, two-handed backward yank on the rod. The tip slapped my ear and smashed onto the poling platform. Even as I turned slightly and watched the small silver loop of the rod tip snap off and roll onto the deck I felt the crab smack into my head just above the other ear.
    “Some fucking guide,” said Pete. “Can’t find fish. Can’t even duck in time.” He snorted.
    Some people belong on the dock. If they really have to go fishing they should do it standing on the end of a long pier, clutching a $6.98 Flintstones Model Zebco and a plastic bucket, swearing because the water is too far down for