She glared at him. “It better not.” She let go of the wheel and moved to the doorway and stared out at the sea.
She'd tried, after her dream went sour. She'd moved back home and ended up a sorry-ass whale-watching driver. She'd tried to forgive Lanny. She'd taken him on and turned him into a competent deckhand. She'd tried to make her peace. She'd really really tried.
And now, what had he screwed up this time?
She had a real bad feeling about this.
She was, she had to admit, a little bit scared.
They drove on through the fog.
She moved back to her spot in the doorway and leaned against the jamb and folded her arms.
She shivered.
The damn fog.
They motored on.
And then Lanny powered the engine down to an idle and she moved behind him and looked over his shoulder and saw him tracing a finger on the screen of the fish finder.
She saw big shadows on the screen. Looked like bait balls, she thought. “Chovies? We hunting chovies after all?”
“I have to catch…” He shook his head.
“Catch what, Lanny?”
He just stared at the screen.
“All right then little brother, you tell me this. You came out here hunting something. How'd you know how to find it?”
“I just know.”
“Oh yeah? Jock tell you?” She spat the name.
“That's not nice.”
“Neither are you,” she said. “Bullshitting me.”
“I'm not. I'm using equipment.” He pulled the handheld out from under his shirt and showed it to her. “I said I'd show you. It tracks things in the ocean, you put a chip in them and then a satellite can watch them and it shows where on my tracker.”
“Fred gave you that? Part of your messed-up job?”
“I borrowed it, he doesn't know but he won't get mad because I'm going to fix everything.”
She peered at the tracker. A little satellite icon in the corner. Blips on the screen. “Can you even read that thing?”
“Yes. And that's not all.” Lanny straightened in his captain's chair. He angled his head to look up at her. “I know things, Sandy. I know how to read charts. I know how the shape of the bottom makes currents go, and I know where there's a canyon that…”
She stabbed a finger at the chartplotter, at the seafloor contours. “There's no canyon down there.”
“It's somewhere else. It makes currents like in a funnel and it funneled things up and so I know where they came from, but they move so I have to use the tracker to find them now.”
“What things?”
“You'll see.”
She wasn't sure she wanted to see.
“It's my fault they escaped,” he said. “I have to catch them and then I have to fix the other thing and we have to hurry.”
She didn't like this. Not one bit.
She geared herself up to start in on him again but he leapt up and brushed past her to the afterdeck, to the winch control panel.
She was right on his heels.
She watched him set the lever to the free-wheeling position. She watched him grab the anchor buoy lead that pulled the bunt end of the net off the drum, that started the net unrolling. She watched him guide the net to the stern and throw the buoy overboard, pulling the net into the sea.
Simple moves, but she held her breath waiting for her brother to screw it up.
He didn't.
Muscle memory, she thought. Drum netting off Dad's boat. It was bred in Lanny's bones.
Hers too.
She moved to help, to guide the unrolling net and keep the small white floats of the float line from tangling.
Lanny turned and gave her a nervous smile and went into the wheelhouse to start the engine up.
She remained at the stern watching the net slide into the water, watching as the Outcast pulled away from the anchor buoy and the net began to spread. The float line laid a nice curve along the surface, and down below the weighted lead line would be pulling the net down like a curtain to encircle the chovies.
Her stomach suddenly went sour.
Not chovies, not today, something else down there.
She stood freezing with her stomach churning until the Outcast completed its circle and came back to the buoy. And then Lanny shut down the engine and came out of the wheelhouse.
Without speaking, they both suited up in their waterproof gear.
And then — bred in the bone — she was helping him. Use the boat hook to bring the net buoy back aboard, bring in the other end of the net, wind the two net lines onto the drum, set the winch control lever to reverse and let the drum start reeling in the lines, pulling the net toward the boat, closing up the bottom.
She moved opposite him and the both of them took hold of the cables to help guide the incoming net back onto the drum.
She said, “How were you going to do all this all by yourself?”
He just looked at her, like it hadn't even crossed his mind.
She thought, that's why he called her this morning. Oh sure, he had big ideas of coming out here and fixing up his mess all by himself but in the end he saw that he needed her.
Like always. It made her mad.
It made her needed.
It made her crazy.
And then she caught the look on Lanny's face — gritting his teeth, his worried look — and it made her anxious. She turned to watch the net coming in through the water, no visible catch yet, the catch was down below being corralled by the tightening net, but right now there was nothing to see but black netting on gray sea.
And then the winch started to creak.
So much for Robbie keeping his gear in shape. She hoped the damn winch wouldn't die before the net got hauled in. Keaslings hadn't hauled in a net by hand for donkey's years.
The winch kept creaking but the net kept rolling in.
And then Lanny let go of his side of the net and moved to the stern and looked into the water.
She dropped her cable and followed him.
The winch screeched. Working its ass off.
The net was coming in.
She thought she felt the stern dip.
She steadied herself.
Lanny let out a sound — croaking like the winch, she thought — and pointed.
She saw.
She wasn't sure what she was seeing.
The gathering net was now close enough to bring its catch up to the shallows. The bag was full. It was a big catch but what the hell was it? It was muck. It wasn't a good catch, it was some kind of seafloor muck caught in the net only she had never seen or heard of such a thing.
The winch screamed.
The net wings continued to roll in across the deck, onto the drum.
The bag of the net in the water tightened, drawing the catch toward the stern, and all of a sudden she could see that the muck wasn't muck. It was pulsating.
They were pulsating.
Jesus. Christ. They were huge, they were bigger than barrels, bigger than she was and she wasn't small, bigger still, big as a nightmare, every one of them big as the double-wide fridge in her kitchen for crying out loud, she couldn't believe them, and they were heavy heavy heavy because as the screaming winch began to haul the net out of the water, the stern of the boat began to dip. The winch couldn't take it. The boat couldn't take it. She couldn't take it, she was screaming at Lanny to get his ass back to the controls and stop the winch—no—put it free-wheeling, let this bag of monsters fall back into the sea.
Lanny was screaming too. “Don't let them get away.”
Now water was coming in over the stern and she gripped the railing to keep from falling and she screamed at him “we're foundering” and she turned to see him at the control levers, frozen, his need to catch this net of giants warring with his need to save his boat.