The Hundredth Man by Jack Kerley

Author:Jack Kerley [Kerley, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Mystery
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

For two hundred bucks and up depending on the season, you can get a private or semiprivate fishing charter for a half day. Your money buys a competent captain who knows tides and currents and where the fish are running. Forty to sixty bucks buys you space on a “party boat,” standing shoulder to shoulder with a hundred others and crossing lines for four hours. Twenty percent of the customers will be beered up and get violently seasick. They’ll be the ones standing next to you.

The Gast brothers ran the Drunken Sailor, a slum with scuppers and the ugliest reputation of all the party boats on the island. Tourists didn’t know this, so the Gasts scratched a living out of puttering a few miles out and handing customers a fishing rig guaranteed to jam, backlash, or flat-out disintegrate. If a mark wanted to keep his catch, the Gasts charged a usurious fee to toss a couple of ice cubes over it, and a buck for a plastic bag to put it in. The Coast Guard was always hauling the Gast brothers’ boat back to the dock and I figured they planned it that way to save on fuel. No one sailed the Drunken Sailor twice.

The Gasts were even dirtier and uglier than their boat, white trash on water, as amoral as sharks. They lived in a cinder-block sweat haven on the mainland and only crossed to Dauphin to run their rat-ass enterprise.

The Drunken Sailor bobbed against pilings. Shoreside was a small picnic area with figures moving in the semidark, lit by a sputtering yellow light on a phone pole. The air was thick with the smell of rotting fish. I cut the headlamps and parked on the crumbled macadam and jogged the hundred feet to the picnic area. Ava was sitting on a picnic table and sucking from a quart of Dark Eyes. My shirt wasn’t doing a good job covering her. Johnny Lee Gast, about two hundred twenty pounds of tall white trash, had a grubby paw on Ava’s thigh. Earl, a loudmouthed runt, was leaning against her, laughing and sucking a beer so loudly it sounded like he was gargling.

“All right, party’s over,” I said, coming into the light.

Ava turned to me with a cockeyed grin. “Carshon! Guess what? Jimmy and Lee are gonna take me on a boat ride. C’mon ’long.” She waved the bottle like ringing a bell and took a gurgling swallow.

“Come on, Ava, we’re heading back,” I said easily, knowing it wasn’t going to be easy at all. I knew how the Gasts fought. Little Earl was the bait and Johnny Lee the trap. I also knew that Johnny Lee didn’t know when to stop hitting, and he’d done three years on a manslaughter conviction to prove it.

“Ah, c’mon, Carshon. Have a li’l drinkie.”

“Private party, Ryder,” Johnny Lee said.

“Let’s go, Ava.”

“I said private party, boy,” Johnny Lee growled from somewhere around his groin. “Move on.”

Earl had a whiney singsong voice straight from the playground. “What you gonna do, Ryder? Maybe you’re a dee-tective in Mobile, but here you ain’t shit.

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