“He ended up getting what he wanted. Grew up to become an anchovy fisher. Take that, Keaslings.” Jake chuckled. “Course by then my parents were dead and we offspring didn’t carry on the family biz. My sister controls the estate and she very generously funded my humble livelihood here. So fine by me if Robbie’s making his living hauling in little fishies that other fishers use to catch bigger fishies.”
Tolliver said, “Then what competition were you were arguing about at Pedro’s?”
“Ah, that. That would be squid chartering. Pays big bucks. Turns out Robbie’s not making much of a living on chovies these days. Little buggers are overfished. And good luck going after the big game fish — they're going going ninety-percent gone.”
I said, in some surprise, “You know the percentage?”
Jake shot me an amused look. “I might look like a hot surfer dude but I know a little bit about this and that. Especially when it comes to figuring how to pull a few dollars out of the sea.” His eyes went flat. “Turns out renting kayaks — glamorous as that is — doesn’t pay all the bills.”
“You can’t hunt Humboldts from a kayak,” Tolliver said.
“I know somebody who’d loan me a boat.”
“Who?”
Jake picked up his beer and a slice of lime. Squeezed the lime, licked his arm, took a long drink. The whole performance. Then he lifted his chin at the next dock over.
Tolliver looked. “Sandy’s boat?”
“Yeah, sis and I were in negotiations. Profit-sharing and all that.”
“How’d Robbie find out?”
Jake sighed. “One too many of Pedro’s beers. On both our parts. Robbie boasts about his charters, so I say been thinking about that myself, so Robbie says he won’t let no damn Keasling horn in on his new gig. So he inks my dock, warning me off. End of big squid war.”
“In one sense,” Walter said. “In another sense, one could say the squid war ended with Mr. Donie missing and his boat adrift.”
Jake shrugged.
“I heard through the grapevine,” Tolliver said, “something about the Sea Spray’s engine getting damaged. About a month ago. Any chance that was Robbie?”
Jake shrugged.
Tolliver locked eyes with Jake. “Here’s a theory. Robbie warned off you and Sandy, made you think twice about using the Sea Spray to compete with the Outcast. So how about you retaliated? How about you got on board his boat this last Saturday night, maybe to dump some ink, maybe do a little damage. And things got out of hand. Or maybe you, or you and Sandy, took the Sea Spray out to intercept him, squid-hunting. And things got out of hand.”
I thought, and both boats encountered that mysterious something that left iron-embedded scrapes on their rub rails.
Jake belched. “Here’s my theory. Hunting Humboldts is dangerous. Robbie thought he was the man — superstitious as hell but thought he could fish anything. The dumbshit probably took a stupid risk out there and that’s how the story ends. Accident.”
“I truly hope so,” Tolliver said.
“We done here? I should be getting to work.” Jake toed a tangled hose. “Coil the hose or something.”
“As soon as my geologists get their samples, we’re done.”
“You don't need a search warrant or something? It's my little beach.”
“Your little beach is public property, Jake.”
Jake shrugged — no big deal — but his coppery eyes fixed on me, piercing.
As Walter and I started down the ramp to the thin beach I thought, Jake Keasling plays the slacker but he sure is interested in what we turn up in the case of Robbie Donie's disappearance.
CHAPTER 9
After a full day of Keaslings yesterday, we turned to the geology.
Tolliver had driven us back to the Shoreline Motel and we’d set to work. Take-out deli sandwiches for dinner, careful not to contaminate the evidence with crumbs. We’d worked until nearly midnight and then started again this morning. Omelets again for breakfast at the place across the street, of which Walter had already grown fond. And then we put our noses back to the scopes and worked into the afternoon, skipping lunch.
As we worked, two things vexed me.
I pushed back from the dinette-table workbench and stared out the sliding glass door.
It was a bright afternoon. The sun was at last blessedly shining and the sand was gold and the water was blue and a brown sea lion frolicked just offshore. It was the view I’d wished for.
And yet I shivered. What was going on out there?
Not knowing, not understanding, vexed me.
I spotted another color in the tide pool, beneath a rock ledge, a red so vibrant I sucked in a breath.
Walter looked up from his microscope. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“I know that sound you make. It’s never nothing.”
“It’s just a color.” I pointed. “That red. It got me thinking but it’s probably nothing.”
Walter looked out the glass door, taking a moment, because at first all you see beneath the rock ledge is that vibrant red and only after examination do you make it out to be the curled-up wedge of a starfish.
“A starfish,” he said.
“Yes but you have to really look. And I didn’t have time to really look, on the Sea Spray yesterday — there was something in the diver's mesh bag. I just glimpsed the color, a starfish red.” As I stared now at the starfish beneath the ledge I could make out its shape, a fat bat-like shape. “The thing in the bag was cylindrical. I think.”
“A pony bottle, perhaps?”
We'd learned about pony bottles in Belize — spare tanks some divers carried in case of emergency. “Could be,” I said. “About the right length, I think. Color was different, like I said. Red, instead of the yellow pony bottles we saw in Belize.” And now my memory morphed the cylinder in the mesh bag to a red pony bottle. “I don't know. What I do know is that the bag was empty on the dock. Whatever was in there had disappeared.”
“Like the diver.”
“Yeah.”
Tolliver had phoned this morning with the news that the diver fled the hospital, without paying or checking out. Tolliver was monumentally pissed, and had an officer looking into it.
Walter said, “Maybe the diver went looking for that missing something — although I can't see how he'd know what happened to his gear, since he was unconscious.”
“It’s not the diver I’m wondering about, to be honest.”
Walter waited.
“Lanny was handling the diver’s gear on the boat.”
Walter’s eyebrows lifted. “Are you suggesting that Lanny took the red something from the dive bag?”
“I don’t know. It was just a glimpse. And everybody was crowding and jostling on the boat.”
“But you wonder what happened out there.”
“Right now,” I said, “there’s a whole lot to wonder about out there.”
We took a break. Walter started another pot of coffee in our kitchenette. I took another look at the photograph of Birdshit Rock.
In the photograph, the crabs did not move.
Yesterday, out at Birdshit, they’d been moving all right. They’d been hauling ass out of the sea.
When Tolliver phoned this morning with the news about the diver, he’d also said he found us a marine scientist. She was based at a college in San Luis Obispo, about a half-hour drive. We decided to pay her a visit when we got the chance, but meanwhile it made no sense to speculate about the strange behavior of the crabs. It made sense to do the geology.