Free Pocket-47 (A Nicholas Colt Thriller) by Jude Hardin

wrestled the hook from his bottom lip.
    “Should we keep him, or throw him back?” I said.
    “Why would we want to keep him?”
    “To eat, silly.”
    “Oh, no. I don’t want to kill him. He’s so powerful. And beautiful.”
    I lowered him back to the water. He flopped, swam away.
    We fished for about two more hours, until it started to get dark. Brittney caught one more, and I didn’t catch any. Beginner’s luck. She released the second fish all by herself.

    When we got back to my camper, Brittney asked me what was for supper.
    “We could have had those two big fish you caught,” I said.
    “Is that what you do? Eat the ones you catch?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “Don’t you think that’s cruel?”
    I thought about that for a minute. “I would never kill anything just for the sake of killing it,” I said. “But survival depends on death. Where do you think those strips of bacon you ate this morning came from?”
    “I’m thinking seriously about becoming a vegetarian. How do you feel about stem cell research?” Brittney said.
    “What?” I couldn’t figure how her mind worked sometimes.
    “You said survival depends on death. Isn’t that the same thing? They use tissue from potentially viable embryos and fetuses, thinking they might be able to cure certain diseases someday.”
    “I don’t know much about it,” I said. “I guess I would say the life of a human is inherently more valuable than the life of an animal.”
    “That’s egotistical. Let’s forget about animals for a minute. Do you believe in the concept of sacrificing one for the good of many?”
    “Depends on if I’m the one being sacrificed, I guess. There you go talking like The Professor again. What are you, a budding young philosopher or something? I’m going to grill some hot dogs for dinner. I guess you can just have a bun.”
    Brittney bit her lip. “Hot dogs sound good.”
    We ate outside on the picnic table with a citronella candle a few feet away to ward off mosquitoes. I had a Dos Equis and Brittney had a Coke. We smoked cigarettes afterward and I had another beer.
    “Why is there a picture of your wife hanging on the wall?” Brittney asked.
    “Obviously because I loved her and I miss her,” I said.
    “But doesn’t it make your girlfriend sad when she sees it?”
    “I don’t know. I never thought about it like that.”
    “Sometimes you have to let go of the past and cling to the love you have now.”
    “And sometimes, young lady, you have to mind your own business.”
    We sat in silence for a few minutes.
    “Make you a deal,” I said. “I’ll quit smoking if you quit.”
    “I can quit any time I want to. I go days at a time without smoking sometimes. It’s no big deal for me.”
    “That means you’re not hooked yet. You should quit now, before it becomes an addiction.”
    “Okay. So I’ll quit now.” She dropped her cigarette and smashed it into the sand with her sneaker. She grabbed the Marlboro pack from the picnic table, twisted it, rolled it into a ball, threw it over her shoulder. “There. Now we quit.”
    “I didn’t mean right this second,” I said. “Damn, girl. You do have a flare for the dramatic. I’m sure you’ll be a great actress some day.”
    “I have a present for you,” she said.
    She climbed inside the camper, came back out with her backpack. She unzipped it, reached in, and pulled out a paperback book. I lit my Zippo and read the cover. It was a pocket-sized dictionary and thesaurus.
    “So you can improve your vocabulary,” Brittney said.
    “Gee, thanks. You think I’m a dummy or something?”
    “You didn’t know what ‘conducive to somnolence’ meant.”
    “I knew what it meant. It just sounded strange coming from a fifteen-year-old. I have a damn good vocabulary. But thanks anyway for the book. What else do you have in that backpack?”
    “Just some things for school. Check this out.” She opened the front pocket and pulled out a silver cylinder about the size of a