Flush by Carl Hiaasen

Author:Carl Hiaasen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780375837524
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2005-12-20T10:00:00+00:00

My dad was an awesome fishing guide. Everybody in the Keys said so. Tarpon, bonefish, redfish, snook—Dad was dialed in on all of them. He could put his customers into fish when the other guides were getting skunked. My mother said it was a special talent he inherited from Grandpa Bobby.

We all knew how much Dad missed being out on the boat every day. He never complained, but he was basically miserable driving a taxi up and down the highway. Three different times he’d gotten rear-ended by other cars while crossing one of the bridges. That’s because he always slowed down to stare out at the open water. He couldn’t help himself—scoping out the tides, the depth, the wind direction, all the things that were important if you were hunting fish.

After the third accident, my father’s boss at the cab company got on his case. Dad pointed out that, technically, none of the rear-enders had been his fault. It had always been the other drivers who’d gotten the tickets, for following too close.

But his boss didn’t care. It was costing him money every time the cab was off the road, in the body shop. “One more crash,” he’d warned my dad, “and you’re fired.” The guy acting like he was Donald Trump.

I had a hunch he wouldn’t hold Dad’s job open after what happened with the gambling boat, and I was right. When Mom called the taxi company, the owner told her that he’d hired a new driver the day my father got arrested. Mom told us that she didn’t blame the guy—he had a business to run. Still, I knew she was worried. The bills were piling up, and her paycheck wasn’t nearly enough to cover them all.

It would be a while longer before Dad could start searching for a new job, because now he was back in jail.

I don’t know if Dusty Muleman ratted him out, or if the electronic ankle bracelet was programmed to send a certain signal when somebody messed with the lock. In any case, the sheriff ordered my father hauled in again, for “tampering with a court-ordered monitoring device.”

He wasn’t in a great mood when I went to visit.

“This is really getting old,” he said wearily. “You didn’t have to come today, Noah. This place is the pits.”

In a way I was glad to find my father depressed, because that was a perfectly normal reaction to being in jail—and Dad acting normal wasn’t something you could take for granted. He was a much different person from the happy camper I’d visited there only three weeks ago.

“I bet your mother’s really ticked off,” he said.

“What for?” I said.

How could any of us be mad at him? The only reason he’d pried off the stupid ankle monitor was so that he could leave the house to hunt for Abbey. Any father would have done the same thing if one of their kids had disappeared in the middle of the night.

“Mom’s trying to get hold of Mr. Shine,” I said.

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