“You should go!” Annie had e-mailed. “You’re turning into a hermit.”
“Two words,” Nate muttered, as he loaded his gear into the cart. “Hell. No.”
He glanced up at the bright, cloudless sky. A perfect day for fishing, which was why he’d called ahead to the marina and asked to have the boat gassed up and waiting at the dock.
Now, as he stowed his rods, tackle, and cooler in the twenty-two-foot Pathfinder, he realized he’d underestimated the amount of traffic that would be on the water on this first big holiday of the summer. There were boats everywhere. He shrugged. People and boats meant business. For the Mercantile and the ferry. And, like it or not, he was in business on this island.
At the slip next to his, a horde of kids piled onto a sleek twenty-eight-foot Cobalt ski boat. They were young, in their early teens, and noisy. Even over the roar of the Cobalt’s motor he could hear earsplitting hardcore rap from the radio, and the teens themselves were laughing and goofing around. He recognized the boat’s redheaded “captain” as the oldest of the Billingsley litter. The same kid whose phone he had temporarily taken. Shane? Kid was a punk.
He busied himself dumping the shrimp into the live well. Every time he looked up, another kid was jumping onto the Billingsley boat. Now there were at least ten passengers, which meant the boat was seriously, and illegally, overloaded. Not his problem. With any luck, either the Baldwin County sheriff’s marine patrol or the Coast Guard would intercept the ship of fools before anybody got hurt.
Nate started the runabout’s twin Mercs and, looking over his shoulder, began slowly backing away from his berth. As he inched past the Billingsley boat he noticed for the first time that Riley Griggs’s daughter, Maggy, was perched on the stern. She was clad in a bright pink bikini and squeezed in alongside three similarly dressed young girls. No sign of Riley, or any other adult in the vicinity.
He wondered, briefly, if Maggy’s mother knew or approved of this outing, and then dismissed the thought. Also not his problem.
Suddenly, and without warning, the Billingsley kid jammed his boat into reverse and shot backward away from his adjoining berth, only inches away from Nate’s, sending a huge jet of water splashing over his bow.
“Hey! Watch it, goddamn it!” Nate shouted.
“Sorry. My bad!” the redhead called back. The girls on the boat screamed in mock terror, and a moment later the kid was roaring away at full throttle. In a no-wake zone.
“Slow down!” Nate hollered, but the kid and the boat were long gone. He watched in disgust as the ski boat raced across the bay. “Weekenders,” he muttered. As soon as the word came out of his mouth, he realized he sounded exactly like his old man.
Captain Joe was always polite, almost deferential to Belle Isle’s part-time residents—at least in public. “These people pay our bills,” he’d say, when Nate complained about the rich, entitled assholes who treated his father—and by extension—the rest of the Milas family, like little more than indentured servants.
If they called the ferry office and demanded that Joe hold the boat because somebody in the family was running late, Joe would calmly point out that a schedule was a schedule. If a passenger bitched at him about weak coffee from the concession stand or a clumsy deckhand, the old man would listen and nod—maybe even apologize for his employee’s supposed transgression.
At home it was a different matter. After a particularly bad day at work, kindly Captain Joe would rage about the snooty wives, pampered kids, and self-important “executives” with second homes on Belle Isle. “Weekenders,” Joe would snarl. “A giant pain in the ass, every single one of ’em.”
Joe Milas was proud of his own business, proud that he’d instilled an early work ethic in his only child, but he’d always been insistent that Nate would go to college and get a real education—“Just in case you decide running a damn boat from point A to point B all day every day isn’t what you want out of life.”
Well, Nate had gotten a degree in finance, started a business from scratch, watched it go bust, and then started another business—an app called Cribb. He’d gotten rich and then gotten the shaft—first from his business partner/best friend Matt, and then from his best girl, Cassie. And now he’d ended up right back here in Belle Isle and was temporarily making a living running that same damn boat back and forth across the bay—six times a day.
But today was his day off, and he intended to spend it as far away from any and all weekenders as possible. He steered the Pathfinder toward a favorite fishing spot, a narrow, tree-lined spit of an island local fishermen referred to as “the spoon” because of its shape. Ten minutes later he’d anchored just off the back side of the spoon’s tip at the mouth of a narrow tidal creek. Within five minutes he’d hooked a good-size flounder in the sandy shallows. His rod tip bent nearly double as he carefully reeled the fish toward the boat. He could see the flounder’s broad, pancake shape shimmering just below the water’s surface, and he picked up a long-handled net to assist in boating the fish.
Just as he was about to slide the net beneath the fish, he heard the roar of a fast-approaching boat. The Pathfinder rocked violently and his feet slipped out from under him and he landed flat on his ass on the bottom of the boat. Somehow, he managed not to drop the rod.
“Son of a bitch,” he growled, pulling himself up to a standing position. He looked down at the water’s surface, but the slack in his fishing line told him he’d lost the fish.
Nate glanced up in time to see the speedboat zoom away.
He had half a mind to go after the little punks, or maybe call the local marine patrol to alert them to the kids’ reckless behavior.
Nah, he thought. He reached into the live well, drew out a shrimp, and baited his hook again. If there was one flounder here, there would be more. Let the punk kid be somebody else’s problem. He had fish to catch.
* * *
And the fishing was good. He settled into the rhythm of casting and retrieving, forgetting about the stresses and annoyances of running a business and dealing with the public. A gentle breeze kept the heat from becoming oppressive. The sun beat down on his shoulders, which eventually unknotted and relaxed. Around noon, he ate the ham sandwich he’d picked up at the Mercantile, and washed it down with a cold beer from his cooler.
By the time the tide slacked he’d caught six keeper trout and a flounder, and it was nearing two. Time to head for the dock.
Nate caught himself smiling and humming as he raised anchor. Humming, for Christ’s sake. Hermits didn’t hum. Still. A bad day on the water beat the hell out of the best day spent in his windowless “executive suite” back at Cribb’s offices in California.
He idled the skiff’s motor and allowed the outgoing tide to ride him out of the shallow water.
When he was satisfied it was safe, he was about to start the engine when he heard it. A voice, faint, echoing over the bay’s now mirror-calm surface.
“Help! Anybody? Help!” It seemed to be coming from the front side of the spoon. “Hey! We need help!”
* * *
He spotted it as soon as he rounded the tip of the spoon—the Cobalt—beached high and dry on the sandbar. Three of the kids had climbed out of the boat and were sitting glumly on the sand, while the Billingsley kid, his red hair gleaming in the unrelenting sun, stood at the stern, madly waving his arms. The girls lounged on the bow of the boat, seemingly unconcerned about their misfortune.