Free The Catch: A Novel by Taylor Stevens

behind the fuel containers.
    M UNROE SLOWED AND continued beyond pristine beaches, past occasional wooden fishing boats, and finally, spotting a jetty stretching into the water, she drew in for a better look.
    To the right of the pier a wooden fishing boat sat, sail collapsed, with its bow snug on the white sandy shore, and not far from the fishing boat, three men, barefoot and in tattered T-shirts and cutoff pants, watched Munroe’s approach with open curiosity. She assumed the boat was theirs, although the pier itself probably belonged to the nearest hotel, or to one of the houses that abutted the beach. Not far off to the left a man washed his bicycle in the ocean, and a few children scampered along the sand, chasing one another in shrieking laughter that she could hear even as far out as she was.
    Beyond this, the area was thick with the impossible-to-hurry that so often accompanied detachment from urban life; laid-back quiet that said wherever this was, it wasn’t anywhere near a big city; a place where violent crime was nearly nonexistent, and where a local face was enough to keep curious, entrepreneurial hands from running off with fuel and machine parts.
    Munroe slipped in along the far end of the pier and, finding a place to tie off, cut the engine, tossed the lines up, and climbed after them.
    She glanced again at the three men on shore, stretched her legs,and worked out the kinks in her neck while measuring the responses in their body language, the nuances of their expressions. Adjusted her posture to reflect the no-hurry of the heat, and with hands in her pockets, strolled toward the front of the pier.
    The men by the fishing boat, leaned back on the sand, stopped talking as she approached. She paused a few feet away and looked out over the water, measuring minutes with the hands of African time, and finally greeted them in English. She would have tried Arabic next, then Somali if the first two failed, but the one who appeared to be the youngest among them—eighteen, nineteen tops—responded in kind.
    She nodded toward the sailboat. “Is that yours?” she said.
    The English speaker motioned to the man at his left. “My friend boat,” he said, and then staring at Munroe’s black cargo pants and boots: “You army man?”
    “On holiday,” she said.
    He smiled, stood, and said, “You want private tour? I know good fishing, pretty place. Or maybe nice lady, I have sister, you come meet her.”
    Munroe smiled wide enough to show teeth. “I might,” she said, and since he’d saved her the necessity of making small talk before moving to business, she turned toward the ocean and nodded in the direction of the waterway. “How far does it go?”
    “She go all way around island.”
    “You know the island well?”
    “Know Lamu Island very good,” he said. “Know all islands very good.”
    Munroe nodded, turned toward the water again, and let the quiet speak. “I could use a guide,” she said finally, “and a watchman. Do you and your friends want work?”
    “What is watchman?” he said.
    “A guard. For the boat.”
    “You want
askari
?” he asked, and without waiting for a response he turned to the others and spoke to them in a language with whichMunroe wasn’t familiar but that pinged inside her head and sent sparks of Arabic and English and German colliding against each other.
    The English speaker pointed to one of the men still seated and said, “Mohamed, he work five thousand shilling for day.”
    “And you?” she said. “What’s your rate?”
    He smiled. “I go five thousand shilling for day.”
    The men had told her where she was and that was what she’d needed. Hands still shoved into pockets, she said, “Let me think about it,” and turned and walked for the pier.
    Behind her the discussion started up again; got louder, carried closer.
    “We go three thousand shillings for day,” the first said.
    With no idea what the dollar-to-shilling exchange might be, she pointed to one man