From Trap Line, Glades Edge Book 1, by E.J. Boss. Copyright © E.J. Boss. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1: Opening Day
Thursday, October 15 — on the outside, off Indian Key Pass
Wade Loftin left the Chokoloskee ramp at ten minutes to five with the running lights on and his coffee wedged between the console and the cooler where it wouldn’t tip, and for the first four miles he didn’t say a word, because Tito was asleep sitting up with his chin on his chest and the coffee was still too hot to drink. The no-see-ums had found them at the ramp. He could still feel them in his hairline.
It was flat. Thank God for that. Two years running, opening day had come in on a northwest blow, chop stacked up in the passes like broken concrete, and you spent the morning getting your kidneys punched and hauling half your line because the other half was buried in sand. This morning the bay lay out black and oily under a sky full of stars and no moon at all, and the hull of the Kenzie Lee slid out across Chokoloskee Bay with no more noise than a hand run over a sheet. Mangroves went by on both sides, darker than the dark. Somewhere a mullet jumped three times, the way they do, like it was trying to get somebody’s attention.
He picked up the channel markers and swung west into Indian Key Pass and opened her up a little. The thirty-one-foot hull was older than he was, glassed over so many times she weighed like a church, but the Yamahas were new, the insurance money from Ian finally coming loose after eighteen months of a man in Tampa telling him on speakerphone that the claim was under review. Two hundred and fifty horse each. He’d stood in the shop in Fort Myers with the check in his hand and had a feeling he hadn’t had since high school, like the world had made a mistake in his favor and might notice.
Tito woke up when they hit the Gulf swell at the mouth of the pass and said, “We there?”
“We’re there when I say we’re there.”
“That’s what my wife says.”
“Your wife ain’t never said nothing to you but get a job.”
“That’s why I’m here, cabrón.”
The old man’s claw gauge hung on a lanyard off the throttle, a stainless notch worn bright on both edges, two and seven-eighths stamped into it by somebody’s hand long before anybody had a computer to tell them what a legal claw was. Boyd had carried it every season since 1971 except the four he’d been in Talladega, and when Wade took over the boat his daddy had hung it on the throttle himself and walked off the dock without saying anything, which for Boyd Loftin was a speech. Wade touched it now. He didn’t believe in it. He touched it anyway.
By the time Wade throttled down on the line it wasn’t six yet and it was still full dark, and he put her in neutral and let her sit. Sunrise was 7:23. The rule said you didn’t pull a stone-crab trap until an hour before official sunrise, not one minute sooner, and FWC loved opening day the way some people loved Christmas. So they sat, and drank the coffee, and the Yamahas muttered, and out across the black water there were a dozen other boats doing the same thing, running lights scattered over the Gulf like a town seen from a plane, engines grumbling, everybody waiting on the same bell. Some of them he’d known since he could walk. Some were new money, guys from the east coast who’d bought permits off widows after the storm.
Gray came up behind them over the islands, barely, the first thinning of the dark. The Gulf went from black to pewter.
He put the chartplotter on the line.
There it was on the screen, ninety traps laid out in a long northwest-to-southeast run in fourteen feet of water, a string of little dots like somebody had stitched the Gulf. He’d set them on the fifth, the first legal night of the soak, him and Tito and Ronnie running till two in the morning with the deck stacked so high you couldn’t see the transom. Ten days they’d been sitting down there with their bait, nobody allowed to touch them. Ten days he’d laid awake doing arithmetic.
His eyes went, without him asking them to, to the history track. The plotter remembered everything. Every route he’d ever run was there in faint blue under the dots if you scrolled back, and last Wednesday’s was there too, a thread running south and east into water he had no business in.
He switched the screen to the radar overlay and left it there.
“Okay,” he said. “Wake up. We’re rich.”
The first buoy came aboard at 6:41 by the clock on the plotter, orange over white with the black band, his colors, his number burned into the foam. Tito gaffed the line and threw it over the block, and the hauler whined and the rope came up dripping and smelling like the bottom, and then the trap broke water, slime-green and heavy with its concrete ballast, and inside there were four crabs climbing over each other with their claws up like they’d been waiting to fight somebody specific.
Wade measured. He didn’t need to. You knew a legal claw the way you knew a sober man from a drunk one across a bar, but he measured because his daddy measured and because FWC sometimes sat out here with binoculars. He snapped the big claw off the first crab, the way you were supposed to, a quick twist at the joint so it’d grow back, and dropped the crab over the side, alive and pissed off and lighter by a pound.
“Three,” Tito said. “Three legal. Look at that one. Jesus, look at that.”
The claw was the size of a man’s fist, black-tipped, shell like old ivory. Wade held it a second longer than he had to.
They found their rhythm by the tenth trap. Gaff, block, haul, open, measure, break, toss, rebait, stack, next. The bait box stank of pigs’ feet gone soft in the heat, and after a while you quit smelling it. The sky went pink over the islands, the thin kind, the color of the inside of a shell, and somewhere past the thirtieth trap the sun came up and lit the water green over the sand and the gulls arrived the way gulls do, out of nowhere, a whole loud white city of them riding the air over the stern waiting for the old bait. The cooler started to fill. By the fortieth trap Wade had quit doing math in his head, because the math kept coming out good and he didn’t want to jinx it. By the fiftieth he did it anyway. Call it ninety, a hundred pounds of claws, more. Medium and large and some jumbos. At what the dealers were paying on opening day, after two seasons where the crabs had just plain vanished, rotted out by the red tide or walked off somewhere nobody could find them —
“You’re smiling,” Tito said.
“I ain’t.”
“You’re smiling like a girl.”
“I’ll throw you over, you keep talking.”
At the sixtieth trap he went to the plotter to swing them onto the back half of the line, and that was when he saw it.
It wasn’t on the screen. It was out the windshield. Off to port, maybe two hundred yards off the end of the run, where there wasn’t supposed to be anything but water: one buoy, sitting alone, orange over white with a black band.
He looked at the plotter. He looked at the buoy. The line went straight as a fence across the screen, ninety dots, and there wasn’t a dot where the buoy was.
“That’s ours,” Tito said.
“I can see it’s ours.”
“Somebody move it?”
Wade didn’t answer. Traps walked. A big blow could drag a trap a quarter mile, ballast and all, but there hadn’t been a big blow, and a dragged trap fetched up crooked, near the line, not out on its own like a dog that had wandered off. Somebody’s prop could cut a line and float a buoy, but then it’d be floating loose, and this one wasn’t drifting. It was sitting on a line, tight, anchored.
He swung the boat over. He didn’t like it. He couldn’t have said why.
Up close it was his buoy for sure. His paint, his number. The foam was nicked on one side. He had twelve spares rigged and stacked on the dock at the fish house, and he couldn’t swear from here this wasn’t one of them, and he couldn’t swear it was.
Tito gaffed it. The line came over the block and Wade hit the hauler, and the hauler groaned.
It didn’t whine the way it did on a trap. It groaned, a low sound in its gears, and the rope came up slower and slower, stretched thin, water squeezing out of the line, and the stern of the boat dipped toward it.
“Hung on something,” Tito said.
“It ain’t hung. It’s coming.”
It was coming. It was heavy wrong, heavy the way a trap wasn’t. A trap was dead weight, fifty, sixty pounds with the concrete. This was more and it moved different on the line, it swung. Wade had pulled up a lot of things in his life. A sea turtle once, drowned and tangled. A kid’s bicycle off the Barron River bottom. A Yamaha cowling. A bale, once, when he was eleven and out with his daddy, and Boyd had looked at it a long time and then cut it loose and watched it sink and told Wade he hadn’t seen it, and Wade hadn’t.
The smell got there before anything else.
It came up off the water in a sheet, sweet and rotten and thick, and it got in his mouth, and he knew what it was before he let himself know it. Tito stepped back from the rail with his hand over his face.
The trap broke the surface. Lashed to it, wrapped round and round across the chest with a pale greenish rope, was what was left of a man.
Wade looked once and made himself look away. Then he looked again, because once hadn’t been enough to make it real. The body hung face down against the trap frame. The crabs had been at it, and the fish, and whatever else lived down there; the shirt was gone in strips and the skin under it had gone the color of wet newspaper. One arm floated out from the rope at an angle no arm should take. Something small and quick let go of it and dropped back into the green.
Tito made it to the far rail and was sick over the side, hard, twice, and then again with nothing left.
Wade stood with his hand on the hauler. His heart was going in his ears and the hot-oil smell off the hauler was in his throat with the other smell.
What he thought, and he would be ashamed of it later and never once say it out loud, was: cut it.
It was right there. The knife was on his belt. One pass through the line and it all went back down, the trap and the rope and the man, and he’d mark nothing and say nothing and run the rest of his line and go home with a cooler full of claws. Nobody had seen. The nearest boat was a mile off and working. It was his buoy. It was his trap. Everybody in two counties knew what he’d said to Preston Kell in that school cafeteria in September with half of Everglades City watching. He could feel the shape of what was coming at him, the whole thing, the questions and the sheriff’s boats and his daddy’s face, and all he had to do was not let it come.
His hand was on the knife. He didn’t remember putting it there.
Kenzie was fifteen. She’d been asleep when he left, one foot hanging off the bed the way she’d slept since she was two.
He took his hand off the knife.
He keyed the VHF. His voice came out steady, which surprised him. “Coast Guard, Coast Guard, this is the fishing vessel Kenzie Lee. I’m about four miles southwest of Indian Key. I got — I hauled up a body. A dead man. Over.” He gave the numbers off the plotter. Then he dug his phone out of the console and dialed 911 with his thumb, because the radio would bring the Coast Guard and FWC and every crabber within ten miles, but it wouldn’t bring the sheriff, and he wanted it on the record that he’d called the sheriff.
While the dispatcher was asking him to repeat his location he looked down again. He shouldn’t have. The swell had turned the body a little on the rope, the way the current turns a flag, and the left arm came up out of the water across the trap frame.
On the wrist there was a watch. Gold bezel, black face, thick as a hockey puck. It caught the new sun and threw it back at him.
He knew that watch. Everybody in Everglades City knew that watch. They’d seen it at the fish house, at the school, at the Ian meetings in the church fellowship hall, flashing every time the man wearing it reached across a table to shake somebody’s hand and tell them what their house was worth.
“Sir?” the dispatcher said. “Sir, are you still there?”
“Yeah,” Wade said. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”