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assaulting her? You think she’s gonna sleep tonight? What do you think messes with her mind more: a dead child, someone she knew, lying on that steel table; or a crazy drunk threatening her, by screaming at her? Or both at once? Sometimes we have to make moral choices to protect innocent people and sometimes we have to burn the damn book and just do it.”
Murphy responded seriously. “If you clocked him, he would shut up. I don’t doubt you could do that, but he has or had a concussion – you heard that too. You might kill him. Then where do I stand? I take my brother-in-law to jail and book him with manslaughter, or worse? I don’t burn the book, because people smarter than me wrote it. I need to keep peace in this county. I need to keep both you and Lester out of jail.”
Billy’s anger continued heating up. “That is where you are wrong again. It’s not black and white – in jail, not in jail. You have to have a moral side that sees things before disasters happen. If you had been listening, when I told you about that thing with Amato, maybe that net wouldn’t be in the channel right now and maybe that boy wouldn’t be room temperature. Some things you can’t fix after they happen.”
“Bill, I’ll write all this down at the office. We can make an official statement when you’re a little calmer, but tell me one thing again. Who exactly did you talk to at the Coast Guard station? Was it only Amato?”
Billy stopped pacing and stared out the window before turning back to Murphy. He pressed his fingers into his temples and slowly massaged while he drew a series of deep breaths. “Good idea. Change topic. Yes. Yes definitely. The little prick was bustin my balls about my registration. I’m telling him a factory ship is hauling a pirate drift net over the banks and suddenly he’s yanking my chain about my registration. Never guessed it would be this multi-net monster, all I saw was some floats. It was night and I was trolling with the current.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked if it was legal for me to be drifting over the banks and what was I doing there? What kind of moron question is that? I’m trolling, not dragging a mile of net.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him he didn’t have the balls to do anything but safety patrol, and he should be kicking those assholes off our shores instead of giving parking tickets.”
Murphy smiled. “Your usual style of winning friends and influencing policy. Why do you think it was their net?”
“Who else has nets a mile long? We don’t even have boats that can pull a monster like that.”
“But why that ship?”
Billy heated up again. “What else is she doing inside our water? Waiting for repairs; checking the weather; mapping sea floor - or any of the other lame bullshit Amato claims? I don’t care what their official status says. They’re out there snagging salmon before they get to the river - and every other ocean creature that gets in its path. That was a harbor dolphin on the rocks. They’re doing it at night. And he’s too lame to go out after dark.”
Murphy countered rationally. “Nets like that have been illegal for years. An identified vessel isn’t likely to use one, or lose one, if the Coast Guard knows they’re inside our waters. Suppose someone still had one of these nets; they’re worth a fortune. No industry ship could afford to lose one.”
Billy calmed as he considered the options. “It is possible it’s a phantom net. Maybe it sank with a heavy catch and finally resurfaced. A pod of dead porpoise would sink one of those for years. Those nets catch everything from herring up to great whites. Once they fill with baitfish, everything big comes to feed and dies. If it’s not hauled in - storms, bad navigation, bad timing – it goes to the bottom till everything in it rots. If it’s deep water, it could take a year to get to the bottom and another year to get back up – killing all the way down and all the way up. And if no one spots it, it could keep doing that. Monofilament doesn’t die.”
It relieved Murphy that Billy had settled down. “Isn’t that more likely? How could an industry ship lose something like that over the banks?”
Murphy’s attention encouraged Billy to expand his lecture and Murphy indulged him, preferring lectures to threats. “Factory ships used to find bait fish swarms and set five, six of those at the same time in a small radius. They would kill everything and process it. Cat food to sushi, they took it all. The factory that’s out there now has been in and out of our water for three weeks. The salmon are moving closer now, ready to come in. Suppose they set nets ten miles out – where I was drifting – and they’re doing that at night. The float beacons are probably infrared. I could barely see them and they didn’t blink. I’d put money down that those floats are high-tech, brand new. Anyway, that wind we had two days ago moves in and spreads their nets out. The big ship plays round up, but one of its nets gets a little lost, a little too close to shore. The sun comes up. Christ, you can see a big ship that’s eight miles out from any highway turnout going around Neahkahnie Mountain and tourists take a million pictures there every day. They could have panicked and figured they would get it the next night. This big south swell moves in and the next thing you know, the net comes across the bar, snags the jetty and swings into the channel.”
The explanation satisfied him and he concluded. “After I open one of those floats, we’ll know a little more about this. Batteries don’t make it to the sea floor and back.” He paused. “I know one thing; that dickhead Amato didn’t go out there to check out what I told him.”
Murphy felt the danger returning. “How do you know that?”
“Because that little jerkoff gets seasick in big water and this last week was big. I doubt he’s ever been out twelve miles in his life.”
Murphy shifted to serious and personal. “People that lame don’t survive in our Coast Guard. I will follow this Billy, but please take my advice - do not, please, do not tell people Amato was responsible for what happened to Sammy. “
“That little prick … “
Murphy stepped away from the wall and raised his voice to emphasize that this conversation had ceased to be speculation. “Stop! Bill, listen to me. Let me deal with this. A lot of fishermen are involved and if Amato decides he hates us, people will suffer. You need to shut this one away for a while. You know me. Let me do this.”
Billy stared hard at Murphy, released his shoulders into a relaxed posture and took two deep breaths. Turning back to the window his long arms dropped to his sides. He shook his hands rapidly as if they were wet and he was throwing off excess. “You going back to file the report? I could stay till the doc gets here and keep an eye on this situation, if you want to go and come back with my truck.”
Murphy smiled. “It might be safer if we file this report together. We could go to my place, where you can take a real shower and put on some dry clothes. Come back here in an hour and let the doc look at those cuts. Or if you still want to be a hard ass, there’s iodine in the medicine cabinet.”
“I’ll do that, but only if you sort out Lester first. Nobody deserves that, especially a nurse. And what’s wrong with these clothes?”
“I’ve known you to wear a clean shirt, when you’re wounded. You don’t look that Republican in my uniform. Right now, you look more like a highway hippie than a local hero.”
Murphy opened the door to the examination room and Billy turned his gaze away to the window. “Those kids are the heroes I didn’t do shit.”
Before he closed the door behind him, Murphy addressed Billy’s back. “There was nothing more you could do. You could barely breathe when they got you out.”
Billy waited following the flight of a gull headed back to the coast and muttered to himself. “I survived.”
8:45 AM: The Harbor
Billy took the shower and the dry clothes, drove the truck back to the harbor and ate alone in the Sandbar. Through the window he could see the wind chopping at the channel and smaller boats returning. Hecate rode low in the water as she headed toward