Free Lord of the Deep by Graham Salisbury Page A

he was satisfied, Mikey went back in.
    Bill didn’t even get up to check it. “Nice job, Mikey. I can tell from here.”
    Cal slapped his cards facedown on the table and stretched. “What’s up?” he said, yawning.
    “Mikey spotted a log in the water. I had him change one of the long lines to light tackle. Sometimes you can run into a colony of mahimahi around floating debris.”
    “Dolphinfish?” Ernie said.
    “That’s the one.”
    Cal squinted out the window.
    Mikey wondered why they weren’t more excited about the log. Floating debris could be an absolute gold mine.
    “They don’t get much bigger than fifteen or twenty pounds, do they?” Ernie said.
    “Thirty-five or forty is not unusual,” Bill said. “In these waters, anyway. But the males can get bigger than that. World record is eighty-eight, I think. They may not be as popular as marlin, but I’ll tell you this: you can’t find a better fighting fish anywhere in the world. Or a better eating one, either. In my opinion.”
    Cal frowned. “The one we lost was a fighting fish. In my opinion.”
    Bill nodded. “That it was.”
    Ernie rubbed a hand over his mouth. He gnawed his thumbnail, his beer-colored eyes intense. “We tracked a wounded elk for two days over in Utah once,” he said. “Followed the blood.”
    “Without a dog, too,” Cal added.
    “We finally found it dead in a field of waist-high grass. We don’t like to give up.”
    Bill nodded and turned to gaze out over the ocean.
    “You’re getting us that marlin, right?” Ernie said. “I mean, we’re not giving up on that, are we?”
    “I’ll give you the best I have in me, men.”
    Cal
humphed
.
    “Well, just you remember,” Ernie said. “We came here for marlin, all right? Swordfish. Don’t waste a lot of our time messing around with this small stuff.”
    Bill raised his eyebrows. “It’s your money.”
    “Glad we all understand that,” Ernie said.
    “But what you don’t understand,” Bill added, “is that marlin like to eat mahimahi, too. Sometimes a log is as good as gold.”
    Finally, Mikey thought. Bill’s getting irritated.
    But that was it. Cal and Ernie went back to their cards, and Bill stepped back into his mind.
    Mikey went back up to see Alison.
    They trolled past the log, three light tackle lures and one long line working the wake. Mikey showed Alison the silvery flashes of light beneath the surface as they passed near the log. Silver glimmerings.
    “Mahimahi,” he said. “Look. Hundreds of them!”
    The Crystal-C passed the log again, then once more. Several fish followed the boat, like porpoises, hugging the hull. “They’re trying to hide,” Mikey said. “Using the boat for protection.”
    “From what?”
    “Marlin, maybe. Probably.”
    Nothing struck the lures.
    Mikey dropped back down to see Bill. “What if we stop and chum, drop baited hooks?”
    Bill nodded. Said nothing.
    “We could cut up the ono.”
    “We could,” Bill said.
    But Mikey could sense that Bill was hesitant to do that. If the one fish in the fish box was all they were going to catch that day, he’d not want to use it as bait. But if they did use it for bait, they might have a shot at four or five mahimahi, if the conditions were right.
    “Let’s get out of here,” Cal said. “Go back to where we hooked the marlin.”
    Bill squinted out the window. The ocean was silver from the boat to the island now, with the clouding. “One more pass,” he said. “Then we’ll go.”
    Cal pursed his lips. He drained his beer and went out and flipped the bottle into the sea.
    How could they talk to Bill as if he were some idiot who didn’t know what he was doing, as if
they
were the experts? Did it really not bother Bill? Or was he boiling over and you just couldn’t see it?
    Bill studied the ocean as if Cal hadn’t said a word, as if Bill were in some kind of invisible bubble where insults just bounced away. Mikey thought if someone treated him like that, he’d get