The River Killers Read Online Free Page A

sadder for her than for us.
    I loved that big old boat. She was the best seaboat I ever worked on. She was spacious and wooden; none of the clanging noisiness of steel, none of the cork-on-the-wave bounciness of aluminum, and none of the interior coldness of fiberglass. Years later, I met a guy who had deckhanded on her after I did, and he was a little more equivocal. “A comfortable ride, but the good news was that she had an excellent pumping system. The bad news was that she needed it.” A tale of neglect that bothered me more than was sensible. Because she’d never betrayed our trust, had delivered us from the worst attacks of Hecate Strait. And we’d abandoned her to the ravages of time. Just one more quantum of guilt to add to my overall total, one more specific sin added to my generic Homo sapiens rap sheet of omission, commission, and submission.
    For I had landed on my feet, after all. A degree in marine biology had led me to my present exalted station, working for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Ottawa. Current project: health, salmonids—an overview. What do we know and how reliable is our information? Not bloody much and very bloody little.
    I felt like a bit of a turncoat, working for The Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Fishermen called it DFO , dropping the definite article because the department defined indefiniteness. But amid the fuzz and haze of bureaucracy, the Wizard of Oz façade, and Mad Hatter twaddle, there lurked the odd rare soul who cared about fish and their environment. I hoped to find them and establish communication.
    Mark had gotten into the one really stable fishery on the BC coast: halibut. Fergie was pounding nails instead of shooters and actually had a couple of guys working for him. Christine had run her own gillnetter for a few years but had finally acquiesced to the inevitable and sold it. Not wanting to leave the water, she had joined the Coast Guard and had managed to survive the cutbacks there.
    It felt strange to relive those memories now. I was so far away from the where of it and the when of it, and even the who of it. The nineteen-year-old kid who had lived that one glorious day in an orgasm of sweat and blood was now me, an adult bureaucrat, not so much living as surviving, dreary day after distinctly unorgasmic day.
    Even stranger was that in this of all places, I should come across any connection to those long ago events. It stared at me from my computer screen, as ugly as ever, with bulging baleful eyes. It was a harsh flat-light mug shot of Igor the Frankenfish, of whom DFO had denied any knowledge. Yet here it was in a DFO data bank. The high-resolution jpeg format permitted a detailed view of the fish. It was somewhat mutilated, looking like something had chewed a chunk off the tail. But I could make out the red tag, marked PC-102, and the pattern of indentations left by the Vise-Grips I’d wielded eight years earlier.
    Memories segued into thoughts. We had been told the fish was never delivered to the DFO lab. So who took its picture and entered it into a DFO data bank? Why was there no record of the delivery of the fish, or Billy, the person who had delivered it?
    Billy, Billy, what happened to you? You left Sointula on Wednesday morning. I know you were hungover. By the time you got on the ferry at Nanaimo, you’d probably had a few beers at the pub next to the terminal. Smug and Snuffy off the Island Gale told me that you sat in their van and had a few more beers on the voyage to Vancouver. And had lied seriously about our catch. Like all commercial fishermen, you downgraded our catch so the competitors wouldn’t find out we had loaded up at spot X. As if they didn’t know.
    But Billy, pal, you couldn’t have been seriously drunk when you drove your almost-new-but-badly-battered Camaro off the ferry at Horseshoe Bay. And there’s not much trouble you could have gotten into between there and the DFO lab in West