Galveston Read Online Free

little anchor, an apple juice can filled with concrete. Denton MacAuley looked baffled. “Is there a shoal or something here?”
    Herbert shrugged and nodded in several directions. “It’s a good spot,” he declared. “Big fish.”
    And it had proved to be a good spot. Denton tossed in a lure and water boiled around it. He set the hook and a huge pike came out of the water, its maw opened, making a mighty, if silent, roar. “Holy shit,” said Denton.
    Caldwell wasn’t fishing, even though Denton begged him to. “Come on, buddy. You love to fish. You used to be a fishing machine. Look at the size of this motherfucker.”
    Caldwell made no answer. He was looking at a huge shadow, far away where the water met the sky.
    Herbert released Denton’s pike, and Denton threw the lure back into the water and had another fish on almost immediately. This one was larger still, and Denton had a hard time managing it on the light tackle. The pike came to the surface and rolled there, wrapping itself in monofilament. Herbert grabbed a paddle and poked at the fish, trying to get it to roll the other way. In their preoccupation, neither of them noticed what the shadow was doing.
    It was spreading out across the face of the water.
    Caldwell’s rod was propped up beside him in the bow, and he heard the line snap and crackle faintly. There was no wind (there was the
sound
of wind, ever so slight, but no wind) and yet the line was twitching back and forth.
    Herbert stopped poking at the fish and jerked his head upwards.
    The shadow fell upon them.
    “Oh-oh,” said Herbert.
    He swung the paddle as though it were a baseball bat, straight at Caldwell. Caldwell merely bent over, so that the paddle sliced the air over his head and connected with the fishing rod beside Caldwell, snapping it in two. Herbert struck the pole with sufficient force that both halves flew out of the boat—the reel crank caught briefly in the cuff of Caldwell’s jeans, and the butt was propelled upwards—and then the sky cracked open.
    There occurred an instant so strange that no one who was there—not Caldwell, not Denton MacAuley, not Herbert—afterwards described it the same way. Herbert maintained that he had heard the line crackling, and looked up to see the tempest bearing down, so he’d aimed the paddle at Caldwell’s rod to launch it out of the boat, knowing a lightning strike was coming. The lightning hit the rod at the apex of its flight, and the rod carried the power into the water and the water carried it away, and that was why they were all still alive. (And, Herbert also maintained, that was why the fifty-dollar tip he’d received was wholly inadequate.) Denton, a man of science, maintained that lightning had smacked the water hundreds of feet away. The strike was nowhere near the boat, or else they’d all be dead.
    But Caldwell knew he’d been hit. He felt heaven’s fire course through his body. And if his heart didn’t stop, it was because his heart wasn’t functioning in any true sense to beginwith. No, when the lightning hit, Caldwell’s heart
started
, and in that moment before they began their panicked flight toward shore, Caldwell stood up, flushed and clumsy, and spoke.
    “Hey,” he said, “did we come here to fish or to fool around?”
     

    T EN MINUTES BEFORE the scheduled departure time, Jimmy Newton entered the little airport. Beverly recognized him at once.
    Not only was Jimmy the most famous storm chaser on earth, Beverly had once accompanied him on a tour of Tornado Alley. But she was not surprised when Newton’s eyes moved across her without pausing. On that tour there had been two van loads of chasers, and Beverly had been in the group led by Larry DeWitt, with whom she’d had a one-night fling. Beverly scowled at that memory, forced it out of her mind. It’s not that she was ashamed of her behaviour—she had, in the past few years, done many more shameful things—but she was still stung by the bitter