Flats skiffs are delicate and light. Driving one across a moderate chop at full throttle can be tricky. Unfortunately it takes at least one hand on the wheel at all times, and that put me at a slight disadvantage. So I had to throttle way back again, until the boat was just barely moving forward, before I could lean forward and get my hands on Pete’s shirtfront. I lifted upwards. The boat rocked slightly.
Pete was a fairly large guy, maybe six feet tall and basically skinny, but with a pretty good spare tire around the middle that brought his weight up to around one-ninety. He was also one of those guys who confuses belly size with strength, because he grabbed at my wrists and tried to yank my hands away. But the hands he clamped on mine just gave me better leverage. I pulled up and Pete rose eight inches off the seat. It scared him. He shut up.
“You can shut your mouth and ride back,” I told him, trying not to let the strain of holding him up show in my voice. “Or you can open your mouth one more time and swim back. It’s ten miles, but it’s your choice.”
I held him up for another second to help him make up his mind. For a moment he thought he was going to say something. He opened his mouth; I tensed my forearm and lifted an inch higher, moving him toward the side of the boat. He shut his mouth quickly. I put him down.
He was quiet all the way to the dock.
By the time I got the first line secured he was already halfway to his car. I guess he figured he was safe there, twenty feet off, because he turned around there to yell at me.
“You haven’t heard the last of this, fuckbag!”
I smiled at him. “Yeah, I know. That would be too much to expect.” I bent and turned on the hose to wash the boat down.
Pete turned even redder, furious at being ignored. He took a half-step towards me. “Motherfucker! I know guys can put you in the fucking ground!”
I couldn’t think of anything really funny to say to that, so I just picked up the nozzle of the hose and pointed it in his direction. I squeezed the handle. A hard, very satisfying stream of water hit Pete square in the face. I wiggled my wrist, letting the stream play all over him for a few seconds, then cut it off and dropped it to the dock. “Have a nice day,” I said.
He glared at me for a few seconds, then turned away and stomped off to his car, leaving a trail of angry wet footprints.
It was a small victory, and it didn’t even really feel very good. Even Art didn’t think it was funny.
“That shit’s bad for business, Billy,” he wheezed at me a few minutes later when I went in to his arctic shack to tell him about it. He shook a collection of chins mournfully back and forth. “You don’t know who this guy’s friends are.”
“I don’t want to know anybody who’s a friend of that,” I told him.
He shook his head some more. “You just don’t know,” he said. “Guy came highly recommended. Now he’ll go back and tell everybody what a rotten time he had here trying to catch a fish.”
“Believe me, not this guy. He’ll go back with a handful of fake pictures proving he caught five record tarpons. He’ll show a testimonial from the mayor’s office stating that he saved the fishing industry singlehanded. This guy is a bullshit artist, Art.”
“You just don’t know,” he repeated. When Art got stubborn he was tough company. So I repeated a couple of Pete’s more memorable words and phrases for him. It cheered him up, and for a minute or two we were actually having a good time.
I figured out later that by the time Pete was climbing into his car and dripping on the rented upholstery, and me and Art were chuckling over the whole thing, Roscoe had been dead for about three hours, three thousand miles away. By the time I was done laughing and on my way home, six quarts of Roscoe?
??s blood had been hosed off the sidewalk and into the gutter. The lab trucks were just about done with the scene, although the yellow plastic tape would stay up a while longer.
Roscoe liked to keep a low profile. He didn’t want anything splashy on his record. Nothing too gaudy like dying on the street in Hollywood.
Witnesses say Roscoe died with a kind of embarrassed look on his face. That figures.
Chapter Seven
When I got home, Nicky was waiting for me on the front steps of my house.
“Mate,” he said without any warm-up, “you’re in the shithouse and you’re in it deep.”
“What’s up, Nicky?” I asked. I was still a little burned up after dealing with Pete. I wished I’d thrown him in. I didn’t feel like another Australian Oktoberfest at the moment.
Nicky handed me an envelope. “Telephone was ringing off the hook, Billy. It stopped. ’Bout an hour later, fella came ’round with this here.”
I looked at the envelope. The little plastic window in the front had my name showing.
“It’s a telegram, mate,” said Nicky helpfully.
“Yeah. I figured that out,” I told him. I sat beside him and ripped open the envelope. He peered over my shoulder as I read:
URGENT YOU CALL AT ONCE STOP