The River Killers Read Online Free

healthy amounts into coffee mugs and grinned at each other in a wordless toast. We slumped on the bench around the table and began the traditional bantering about how many fish we had. Normally we all guessed an amount and whoever was closest would get ten or twenty bucks from the losers. This week, feeling stakey, we increased the bet to fifty dollars a head.
    When we’d all stated our guesses, we began to speculate in earnest about the weird fish, quickly named Igor, which for some reason was more prominent in our minds than the seventeen thousand sockeye in our hatch. By the time we were on our second or third vodka, the theories had crossed the line between orthodox and quasi science and had plunged deep into the twilight zone. Billy pulled us back to reality. “Hey, you know what? It must be one of those Expo fish.”
    It made sense. As part of the international exposition held in Vancouver in 1986, a whole bunch of salmon, mostly coho, had been raised and released. They were tagged and when caught by sports fishermen would win him a large cash prize. Commercial fishermen weren’t supposed to be part of the picture, but no one had told the fish. This one, probably second- or third-generation, had strayed out of the sportsfishing preserve that was the Strait of Georgia, and had ventured into our territory, Johnstone Strait.
    â€œJeez,” Fergie said. “I know they were trying to breed them especially big but they must have produced some mutants. I wonder if our ugly little bastard will still qualify for a prize.”
    â€œBonus!” said Billy. “I’ll take it down to Vancouver and tell ’em I caught it using sport tackle. If they ask me what kind of gear, I’ll tell ’em a number two black wall of death. Wait’ll the papers get photos of it. Maybe it’ll win the ugly fish award. When I come back, we’ll split the cash.”
    He was burbling like a happy kid. He could hardly wait to get to Vancouver and return triumphantly with the prize.
    But he never came back. He left for Vancouver after network the next day, and fell off the face of the earth. Christine, who was cat-sitting for him, had tried to phone Billy a few hours after he left but couldn’t get him. Presumably he was in the wireless dead zone between Port McNeill and Campbell River. The unfortunate message she was forced to leave was that Billy’s cat had died, suddenly and strangely, of convulsions. As time passed, and it became evident that we wouldn’t have the chance to commiserate with him, the minor detail of his cat’s death faded from memory.
    When the cops suggested Billy had taken the prize money and run, we just stared at them. Not possible. Billy was our crewmate. More likely he’d been in full party mode and had fallen in with some bad people. And, as we found out, there’d been no prize money. Billy had been seen on the Vancouver ferry by other fishermen, and presumably his first stop would have been the Department of Fisheries and Oceans lab in West Vancouver, where they’d produced the Expo fish. But there was no record at the DFO lab of either Billy or Igor. And besides, they claimed they’d never produced any mutant sockeye, just ordinary everyday coho.
    Billy disappeared eight years ago, and there had been absolutely no trace of him since.
    Until now.

Two
    The money from our big set financed another year at university for me. That was the last decent money I ever earned fishing. Although we didn’t know it at the time, the salmon fleet had been targeted for “rationalization,” also known as “downsizing” or “reducing capacity,” or just “getting rid of the fuckers.” To this day, I don’t see anything “rational” about it, but the result was that within three years all the participants that had gloried in that big set, including the Maple Leaf C , were no longer fishing salmon. Sometimes I felt