Riverwatcher Page 17

  When Kit got closer, he made a little noise in the water, alerting the fisherman to his presence, called out, “Doing any good?”

  “Nothing,” the fisherman called back.

  It was the standard response on the river, and maybe even true. Kit decided the fisherman was the genuine article, not a poacher. “Okay if I pass around?” he called out.

  “No problem,” the fisherman replied.

  Kit had gone on downstream, the river twisting sharply now through an area known as the Rollercoaster, when he saw the flickering light of a fire along the bank, then heard the sound—the distinct plunk—of lead striking water. Whoever was fishing from the fire wasn’t casting flies in flies-only water. Kit felt a sudden flush of adrenalin. Then he cautioned himself: It might have been this way with Charlie Orr, coming up on a poacher who turned out to be a killer.

  He decided he would seem more a poacher himself, less a fly-fishing purist like Charlie, if he left the river and came up to the fire through the woods. He had the look of a bait fisherman, more or less, but bait fishermen didn’t wade the river at night, which implied familiarity with the nature of the bottom. They barged through the woods, noisy as deer breaking through to water.

  One more thing, though, would have added to the picture. He had forgotten to buy a six-pack of beer at High Pines, stuff some cans in his waders. The best way to get a poacher yakking away was to offer him a free beer.

  *  *  *

  THE FIRE HAD burnt down by the time Kit emerged through a tangle of deadfall into a small clearing at the edge of the river, only embers glowing. The night had cooled, but the fire was for warding off mosquitoes, not for warmth. The figure sitting beside it, his back to Kit, looked big and powerful, but beyond that and hair flaring out under a baseball cap, nothing was distinct in the weak light. The figure didn’t shift, didn’t look around at Kit’s approach.

  “Doing any good?” Kit asked.

  He could see the figure slowly shake his head.

  “Maybe too early yet.”

  This time the figure made no motion.

  “What’re you using?”

  It was a stupid question—Kit’s eyes had adjusted just enough to make out a Styrofoam container in the grass beside the figure—but he had, somehow, to strike up a conversation. It was evident the figure didn’t have flies at the business ends of a pair of spinning rods propped in the crotches of sticks. Kit was pretty sure, too, that what looked like a rope running through the grass and into the water had a stringer attached at the end. All of which added up to the fact that the figure now hunched in front of him was a poacher.

  Damned if he hadn’t found what he was hunting for.

  The poacher had inclined his head in the general direction of the container in the grass, which Kit took as an answer to his stupid question. On the other hand, nothing had been said directly, which was probably the way you handled yourself if you were poaching and a stranger came up behind you. The poacher, Kit decided, needed reassurance.

  “I’ve got some fresh crawlers, you want to give ’em a try. Fat as hogs.”

  No response.

  Kit rustled in the front pocket of his waders, drew out the worm container, extended it to the poacher’s back. “Help yourself.”

  A few moments passed, during which the poacher might have been trying to make up his mind. Then he turned slowly, peered up at Kit. His face seemed broad and dark in the light of the embers, and Kit could make out a Gothic-style D in white on the front of his cap. The poacher kept looking him over, at the same time reached out for a handful of small sticks, dropped them on the fire, a gesture Kit took as encouraging. Or the need for more light.

  The fire flaring, Kit again extended the container. After more moments passed, the poacher took it from him. He lifted the lid, held the container near the fire, the entangled nightcrawlers greasy in the light.

  He replaced the lid, handed the container back. “Got some as good.”

  Kit nodded, leaned his spinning rod against a tree trunk, lowered himself—uninvited—into the grass across the fire from the poacher. “These come from High Pines,” he said. “You got a better place?”

  “Don’t buy ’em,” the poacher said. “Pick ’em myself.”

  Kit nodded again. “That’s the way. Except, my place, we got more sand than dirt. Crappy for crawlers.”

  “Where’s that?” the poacher asked.

  “My place?” Kit shifted his weight, firelight gleaming from his waders. “In town.”

  “What town?”

  “Ossning.”

  The poacher kept looking at him, studying him, which was probably to be expected. Poachers might like to talk, but they had to make certain they were talking to another poacher. Kit looked back, trying to give the appearance that he was sizing up the poacher, too. Facing him, the poacher looked even bigger, thick as a bull through the shoulders, but he had some years on him. In the dark skin around his mouth, there were deep lines.

  He was about to ask the poacher where he was from, then decided against it. He didn’t want to push too hard too soon. He took another tack. “You follow the Tigers?” he asked, and directed a finger at the poacher’s cap.

  “No,” the poacher said.

  “Just as well,” Kit said.

  “They got good caps, is all.”

  “Can’t beat ’em, that’s so.”

  “You want a beer?”

  The poacher reached through the grass for the rope, pulled it toward him. What came over the bank at the end wasn’t a stringer but a net bag heavy with beer cans. The poacher reached in, removed two, lowered the bag into the river. He handed Kit a dripping can of Milwaukee’s Best.

  “A life saver,” Kit said. “I got crawlers at High Pines, forgot my brew.”

  “You old enough to buy?” the poacher asked.

  “Sure.”

  Kit worried for a moment that if the poacher thought him too young to buy beer, he might consider him too young to poach. Most poaching seemed done by older guys. “Like I say,” he said, “I forgot.”

  The poacher shrugged, popped open his beer can. Kit did the same. He drank off half his can before he said, “So you think it’s too early or what?”

  “Could be,” the poacher said.

  “I’ve been having some luck. Big browns.”

  “Where?”

  “Upriver.” Kit remembered his waders, said, “Got a place I get out to. Little island.”

  “With crawlers?”

  “What?”

  “What you’re having luck with.”

  “What else? Big browns along here don’t see many crawlers.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Kit looked back across the fire, decided it was time to push harder. The beer was encouraging, but he didn’t want to waste the whole night before the poacher got around to talking. “You know why. The hot shots in here use only feathers and fur, is why.”

  The poacher seemed to indicate his agreement but kept studying Kit. With his free hand he tossed more sticks on the fire just at the moment the moon edged from behind the clouds, flooding the grassy bank above the river with light. The lines of the poacher’s two rods were visible now, angled tightly to the water.

  “Where’d you say you’re from in town?” the poacher asked.

  “Didn’t say.”

  The poacher didn’t appear to take Kit’s response in the wrong way. He nodded, seemed to turn inward, thinking. “Come from in town,” he said after a moment, “you’d know that campground.”

  Kit leaned back, tried to hold himself rigid, adrenalin again flushing through him. “Which one?”

  “On the mainstream. Along them high banks.”

  “I know it,” he managed to say.

  “So you know about the old man got himself shot.”

  “Sure.”

  “I heard tell,” the poacher said, “he fished the South Branch at night. Used them feathers and fur you were tellin’ about. One of them hot shots.”

>   “Yeah?” Kit said, his voice as bland as possible.

  “Never ran into him myself.”

  “Yeah,” Kit said again, and thought, So why’d you bring it up? Then he thought, Most things you plan in life don’t work out. They fizzle, make you realize it’s stupid to plan anything. But this . . . it’s working. The poacher’s being cagey about it, asking me about Charlie Orr, but he’ll come around, blab what he knows. It’s just the way I told Gwen. Poachers get beered up, they talk their heads off. If you find the one who killed Charlie, he’ll end up bragging about it. So what happens? The first poacher I run into brings up, out of the blue, the killing. It blows your mind, a plan actually working like that.

  “Another beer?” the poacher asked.

  “Just waitin’ for you to ask,” Kit said, and realized he had crushed the empty can in his hand.

  *  *  *

  THE POACHER HAD reeled in both his lines, added crawlers to the hooks, tossed out again into the middle of the stream, replaced the rods in the crotches of the upright sticks. He had thrown more wood on the fire, creating a decent blaze. And he had again pulled up the net bag from the water, removing a third Milwaukee’s Best for each of them. Kit, edged away from the fire now, had found the limb of a downed tree to lean his back against.

  Despite himself, he was half hoping the poacher would get a strike. It would take a monster brown to suck up the gob of crawlers resting on the river bottom, maybe the biggest brown Kit, a hot-shot fisherman himself, had ever laid eyes on. All he wanted, though, was a look at the fish. He didn’t want a stringer run through its jaw, the brown dying slowly in the river.

  “I’ve been having some luck,” Kit said to the poacher, “but later in the night.” The poacher, it occurred to him, might be wondering why he hadn’t baited up, tossed out himself. Poachers didn’t seem to mind fishing side by side. They weren’t like fly fishermen, in a funk if another angler came within eyesight. “After midnight. Big browns start moving around then.”

  In the light of the fire, the poacher looked at his watch. “It’s after midnight now.”

  “Yeah?” Kit tried to shift his weight, to check his own watch, but it took too much effort. He was feeling, he realized, a little mellow. “Soon as I finish this brew.”

  “You fished upriver, after midnight, maybe you ran into the old man.”

  Ah, Kit thought, back to that. Finally. He had been waiting, letting the poacher get around to it. It might take all night and a load of beer, but it was worth the wait. “What old man’s that?”

  “One got himself shot. Old man smoked a pipe.”

  “You see that,” Kit said, “with old types.”

  “You ever run into him?”

  Kit shrugged. “Could be.”

  “You’d know if you did. He’d give you grief.”

  “Why’s that?”

  The poacher looked at Kit through the firelight, studying him again, his eyes heavy lidded but alert. “Breaking the law, is why.”

  Kit looked back, meeting the poacher’s eyes, smiling now. “The old man didn’t like that, huh?”

  “Hear he didn’t.”

  “He bitched to the DNR?”

  “Might have.”

  “But you never ran into him yourself?”

  “What I said.”

  “You did,” Kit said. “I remember.”

  Together their eyes held across the firelight. Minutes seemed to pass. Then the poacher reached into the pocket of his shirt, drew out a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. With them on, leaning forward, peering through the firelight, he had a different look. Kit experienced a moment of confusion. It didn’t seem quite right, a poacher wearing wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Hell!” the poacher blurted out, and in one motion rose to his feet, through the firelight looming twice as big as Kit had thought. The confusion cleared, replaced with a sting of fear. Then the poacher said, “You owe me three beers, kid.”

  “What?” Kit was able to say.

  “Make it a whole pack,” the poacher said, “for wasting my time.”

  Kit managed to get to his feet, clumsy in his waders. He felt better standing even though the poacher didn’t look any smaller. “What’re you talking about?”

  The poacher seemed to release a stream of air through his nose, roll his shoulders. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans. He wasn’t angry, Kit realized, so much as mightily irritated. “Your cap I’m talking about. You noticed mine, I’ve been trying to read yours. Been sitting here, trying to. Didn’t want to put on my glasses.”

  Kit narrowed his eyes, cocked his head. “Why not?”

  “Poachers don’t wear glasses.”

  “Ah, hell,” Kit said, and seemed to feel air escape from him, too.

  “You know Calvin McCann?” the poacher asked.

  “Sort of,” Kit said.

  “That’s how you know about the reward he’s giving? Him and Verlyn Kelso.”

  “Heard about it,” Kit said. “How’d you know?”

  “Heard, too.” The poacher lowered himself heavily back into the grass and reached for the rope. “What’s it matter,” he said. “Have another, you want.”

  Kit shook his head. “I got to be going.” He turned away, grabbed his spinning rod, then looked back at the figure across the fire. “You really poaching,” he asked, “or what?”

  “It’s a long story, kid.”

  “Yeah?” Kit turned back, eased himself down to the grass. “We’ve already shot half the night.”

  “You want a beer, then?” the poacher asked.

  23

  LESS THAN AN hour had passed, the Cherokee pulled into a turnoff on the South Downriver Road below the entrance to Rainbow Run, when Fitzgerald saw a white truck emerge from the campground road, dark plume of dust in its wake. He replaced the top on the thermos of coffee Mercy had sent with him, switched on his headlights, turned onto the asphalt road. It wasn’t full night yet. The truck, well ahead of him, was still in sight.

  But headed in the wrong direction.

  Burt Berry ought to have turned east out of the campground, headed toward Schoolcraft Bridge and the entrance to the wilderness section along the South Branch. He should have passed the Cherokee, giving Fitzgerald, slumped in the driver’s seat, the opportunity for a positive identification that the white truck was in fact Burt’s. Instead, the truck had turned west, headed for Ossning.

  Burt might have an errand to run in town before he went fishing—or he might need to buy worms at a bait shop. Fitzgerald pressed down on the accelerator yet gained only enough ground to make certain the truck was the size of a Silverado. Wherever he was headed, Burt was in a hurry.

  When he reached the stoplight for the state highway that ran through the center of Ossning, Burt made a left turn, followed traffic to the entrance of Glen’s supermarket. Fitzgerald parked two rows away from the truck, kept the Cherokee’s motor running, watched Burt cross the parking lot to the store. Seen under the high orange lights of the lot, there was no question of Burt’s identity.

  Ten minutes later, Burt left the supermarket, a sagging plastic bag in his hand. You could buy a lot of things in Glen’s in addition to food, but Fitzgerald doubted worms were included. Nor would a container of worms fill a bag like the one Burt was carrying.

  Burt’s next stop, north edge of town on the old highway up to the Mackinac Bridge, was the F. O. E. lodge. Outside the low cement-block building, a blinking portable sign announced fish fries, spaghetti suppers, T-bone evenings, all open to the public. Was Burt planning to eat? And this time of evening? He left the truck in the jammed parking lot and hurried inside the building. He wasn’t carrying the plastic bag from Glen’s.

  Another ten minutes went by. Fitzgerald unscrewed the top of the thermos, poured more coffee, kept his eye on the building’s entrance door, ran through in his mind other possibilities. Burt might be getting a drink at the bar or rendezvousing with poaching buddies before heading out to the South Branch. More minutes tick
ed away and still no Burt. Fitzgerald decided finally on a plan of action. He would go inside, have a look around, avoiding Burt if possible. If Burt returned to the truck, on his way at last to the South Branch, he would follow close behind.

  The bar of the Eagles club was darkly paneled, dimly lit, and oddly empty given the number of vehicles in the parking area. If he had been occupying one of the bar stools, Burt would have been spotted at once. Fitzgerald ordered a draft beer from the bartender, asked if meals were being served in the dining room.

  “Were.”

  “But not now?”

  “Bingo now.”

  “Tonight?”

  The bartender seemed surprised by the question. “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “It’s Wednesday. Our night.”

  “Maybe you could explain,” Fitzgerald suggested.

  “Wednesday is always here. Other nights Moose, Elks, V. F. W., Knights of Columbus.”

  “For bingo, you mean?”

  “What else?”

  “So somewhere around here it’s possible to play every night?”

  “Except weekends. You should see what it’s like come Monday. Two days off, the regulars got wild looks in the eyes.”

  “Withdrawal signs?”

  “You got it,” the bartender said.

  Fitzgerald carried his beer through swinging double doors into a sizeable room as bright with fluorescent light as a hospital corridor. And as hushed. In long rows people sat tightly packed, heads bent to bingo sheets, hands with markers poised above, as a voice at the head of the room intoned numbers over a loud-speaker system. Fitzgerald blinked in the light, ran his eyes up and down the rows, located Burt seated at the very end of one—the poacher he had followed, playing bingo at the Eagles.

  *  *  *

  THE THING TO do was write off the evening and head back home. But a question would hang between them when he talked with Mercy. Had he just followed Burt on an off night, a bingo evening at the Eagles not necessarily overruling other nights of poaching on the South Branch? According to Billie, Burt went fishing nearly every evening. If he didn’t play bingo that often, how did he spend his other evenings?