“Hardly any.”
“I enjoy it about as much as freshwater, and I enjoyed that day on the Banks even without getting a nibble. The sun was warm and there was a light breeze blowing off the ocean and you couldn’t have asked for a better day. The next best thing to fishing and catching fish is fishing and not catching ’em, which is a thought we can both console ourselves with after today’s run of luck.”
“I’ll have to remember that one.”
“Well, I was having a good enough time even if it looked as though I’d wind up buying my dinner, and then I sensed a fellow coming up behind me. He must have come over the dunes because he was never in my field of vision. I knew he was there — just an instinct, I suppose — and I sent my eyes as far around as they’d go without moving my head, and he wasn’t in sight.” The big man paused, sighed. “You know,” he said, “if the offer still holds, I believe I’ll have one of those cigarettes of yours after all.”
“You’re welcome to one,” Mowbray said, “but I hate to start you off on the habit again. Are you sure you want one?”
The wide grin came again. “I quit smoking about the same time I quit work. I may have had a dozen cigarettes since then, spaced over the ten-year span. Not enough to call a habit.”
“Then I can’t feel guilty about it.” Mowbray shook the pack until a cigarette popped up, then extended it to his companion. After the man helped himself Mowbray took one as well, and lit them both with his lighter.
“Nothing like an interval of a year or so between cigarettes to improve their taste,” the big man said. He inhaled a lungful of smoke, pursed his lips to expel it in a stream. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “I really want to tell you this story if you don’t mind hearing it. It’s one I don’t tell often, but I feel a need to get it out from time to time. It may not leave you thinking very highly of me but we’re strangers, never saw each other before and as likely will never see each other again. Do you mind listening?”
Mowbray was frankly fascinated and admitted as much.
“Well, there I was knowing I had someone standing behind me. And certain he was up to no good, because no one comes up behind you quiet like that and stands there out of sight with the intention of doing you a favor. I was holding onto my rod, and before I turned around I propped it in the sand butt end down, the way people will do when they’re fishing on a beach. Then I waited a minute, and then I turned around as if not expecting to find anyone there, and there he was, of course.
“He was a young fellow, probably no more than twenty-five. But he wasn’t a hippie. No beard, and his hair was no longer than yours or mine. It did look greasy, though, and he didn’t look too clean in general. Wore a light blue T-shirt and a pair of white duck pants. Funny how I remember what he wore but I can see him clear as day in my mind. Thin lips, sort of a wedge-shaped head, eyes that didn’t line up quite right with each other, as though they had minds of their own. Some active pimples and the scars of old ones. He wasn’t a prize.
“He had a gun in his hand. What you’d call a belly gun, a little .32-caliber Smith & Wesson with a two-inch barrel. Not good for a single damned thing but killing men at close range, which I’d say is all he ever wanted it for. Of course I didn’t know the maker or caliber at the time. I’m not much for guns myself.
“He must have been standing less than two yards away from me. I wouldn’t say it took too much instinct to have known he was there, not as close as he was.”
The man drew deeply on the cigarette. His eyes narrowed in recollection, and Mowbray saw a short vertical line appear, running from the middle of his forehead almost to the bridge of his nose. Then he blew out smoke and his face relaxed and the line was gone.
“Well, we were all alone on that beach,” the man continued. “No one within sight in either direction, no boats in close offshore, no one around to lend a helping hand. Just this young fellow with a gun in his hand and me with my hands empty. I began to regret sticking the rod in the sand. I’d done it to have both hands free, but I thought it might be useful to swing at him and try whipping the gun out of his hand.
“He said, ‘All right, old man. Take your wallet out of your pocket nice and easy.’ He was a Northerner, going by his accent, but the younger people don’t have too much of an accent wherever they’re from. Television, I suppose, is the cause of it. Makes the whole world smaller.
“Now I looked at those eyes, and at the way he was holding that gun, and I knew he wasn’t going to take the wallet and wave bye-bye at me. He was going to kill me. In fact, if I hadn’t turned around when I did he might well have shot me in the back. Unless he was the sort who liked to watch a person’s face when he did it. There are people like that, I understand.”
Mowbray felt a chill. The man’s voice was so matter-of-fact, while his words were the stuff nightmares are made of.
“Well, I went into my pocket with my left hand. There was no wallet there. It was in the glove compartment of my car, parked off the road in back of the sand dunes. But I reached in my pocket to keep his eyes on my left hand, and then I brought the hand out empty and went for the gun with it, and at the same time I was bringing my knife out of the sheath with my right hand. I dropped my shoulder and came in low, and either I must have moved quick or all the drugs he’d taken over the years had slowed him some, but I swung that gun hand of his up and sent the gun sailing, and at the same time I got my knife into him and laid him wide open.”
He drew the knife from its sheath. It was a filleting knife, with a natural wood handle and a thin, slightly curved blade about seven inches long. “This was the knife,” he said. “It’s a Rapala, made in Finland, and you can’t beat it for being stainless steel and yet taking and holding an edge. I use it for filleting and everything else connected with fishing. But you’ve probably got one just like it yourself.”
Mowbray shook his head. “I use a folding knife,” he said.
“You ought to get one of these. Can’t beat ’em. And they’re handy when company comes calling, believe me. I’ll tell you, I opened this youngster up the way you open a fish to clean him. Came in low in the abdomen and swept up clear to the bottom of the rib cage, and you’d have thought you were cutting butter as easy as it was.” He slid the knife easily back into its sheath.
Mowbray felt a chill. The other man had finished his cigarette, and Mowbray put out his own and immediately selected a fresh one from his pack. He started to return the pack to his pocket, then thought to offer it to the other man.
“Not just now. Try me in nine or ten months, though.”
“I’ll do that.”
The man grinned his wide grin. Then his face went quickly serious. “Well, that young fellow fell down,” he said. “Fell right on his back and lay there all opened up. He was moaning and bleeding and I don’t know what else. I don’t recall his words, his speech was disjointed, but what he wanted was for me to get him to a doctor.