Coldwater Revenge, James Ross [books for 9th graders txt] 📗

no doubt hear about later. In the meantime, that was a call from a concerned citizen who thinks I should rescue some idiots who got their boat stuck on the rocks in Wilson Cove before they freeze or drown or something.”

“Flip on the bubble lights, brother. It’ll be like making rounds with Mad Dog again.”

Joe turned the cruiser onto the highway and headed downhill toward the lake. “Could be kids; but there was a boat out there last night running without lights. It went dark when I started after it in the patrol boat. Nearly peeled off the bottom on a rock. If I find out it’s the same punks, I’ll let them swim home.”

Tom gestured at the fresh cuts on the back of his brother’s muscled forearms and across the top of his dirty blond buzz cut. “You fall out and land on the propeller?”

Joe smirked. “Different bunch of assholes. Dopers planting on Watermelon Hill. I go up there sometimes to have a look and pull up plants. But they plant thorn bushes around them now, to keep the deer away. Spray, too. The stuff itches like hell.”

“You get a kick out of Dad’s old job, don’t you?”

“More than you get out of yours.”

Bull’s eye. Flagging interest in a legal practice that had brought Tom white collar wealth in his early forties might come as a surprise to his partners. But it had never been possible to keep a secret in the Morgan house. Too many natural detectives. Joe’s comment was a gentle probe. Their mother would bring out the backhoe and start digging before he had time to put down his suitcase.

Even so, it felt good to be home. He missed the hills above town that clung now to the last of their fall plumage, and the salmon-filled lake that gave its name to the community and shared its shoreline with French Quebec. The only thing he didn’t miss were the “Call Of The Wild” winters which would come at any time now, and the lack of meaningful work for anyone with more than a high school education.

“Be funny if it were the Dooley twins out there,” said Tom, dragging out old names and shared memories. “Remember when Dad caught them red handed with a haul of salmon, took their boat and left them stranded on Sunken Island up to their nuts in forty-five degree water?”

Joe’s carrot-sized fingers squeezed the steering wheel. “Not everyone appreciated the old man’s idea of instant justice, Tommy. That’s part of what got him killed, don’t you think?”

The cruiser accelerated.

Let’s not go there.

The patrol car turned onto the lake road, past gabled houses with wraparound porches and vistas of blue water that stuttered by like subliminal advertising for turn of the century splendor. The elms that had lined the road when Tom and Joe were boys had long since succumbed to disease, their crippled skeletons lending the lakeshore road an air of permanent Halloween.

Where the road turned east to follow the knuckle of Wilson Cove, Joe pulled the car to the gravel shoulder. A hundred yards offshore, visible through patchy but rapidly lifting fog, a battered twenty-foot Boston Whaler churned circles in the cove’s muddy shallows. Joe took a pair of binoculars and a battery-operated bullhorn from the trunk, slapped on his Smokey the Bear hat, tossed the binoculars to Tom and swaggered toward the shoreline.

Through the binoculars, Tom watched a short, wiry figure leap from the stern of the Whaler into knee-deep water. A graying ponytail swung from the back of his sun-faded tractor cap. Oblivious to Joe’s approach, the man waded beside a taut down-rigger cable, pulled a long-handled filleting knife from a sheath on his hip and started to saw away on whatever was there.

Joe’s amplified voice boomed across the water. “You guys need help?”

Tom swung the glasses toward the man who’d remained in the boat. He was pony-tailed too, slightly built, and as oblivious as his companion to the arrival of local law enforcement. Tom steadied the glasses against the dashboard and moved them to the man in the water and then back to the man in the boat. The Dooley Twins?

Some things never change. The poacher brothers padding the winter larder with fat fillets weeks after the season ended. Rods springing from downriggers, trolling reels screaming like toy tops, Kevin Dooley whooping like a kid, and brother Mickey angrily shushing him. Though as soon as they realized it was a snag, not a fish, the bickering must have started. Other than fishing and hunting out of season, that’s what the Dooley twins were known for: world-class bickering.

Turning the glasses to the back of the boat, Tom watched the ponytailed man lift the lid on the fish box and dump its contents into the lake on the side of the boat opposite the shore. His partner in the water continued to do whatever he was doing with the knife. Then, as a gentle wind began to ripple the cove, pushing the fog away from the shoreline, a line of floating fish carcasses spread across the water in a slow, incriminating drift from boat to shore.

Joe bellowed through the bullhorn, “Gotcha, Mickey!”

The man in the water turned toward the amplified boast. As he did, a large cloth-covered something floated to the surface and began to drift behind the fish carcasses. Tom focused the binoculars to get a closer view of the thing bobbing in the water. Disbelieving seconds ticked by before he recognized what and then who it was.

“What” was a lean, pock marked face peering out of a water-logged sleeping bag. “Who” was Billy Pearce.

CHAPTER 3

When the ambulance left with Billy’s body, Tom and Joe walked the shoreline looking for what might have floated out of the bag Billy had been stuffed into. Bickering voices wafted from the back of the patrol car. Morgan has no right to take our boat!

“Billy must have really pissed somebody off this time,” said Joe.

“What do