Wood's Betrayal by Steven Becker

Author:Steven Becker [Becker, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The White Marlin Press
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

18

Kurt scanned the mangroves, thinking he should have placed some kind of marker to find the crime scene, then realizing that Martinez probably wanted the scene to disappear. The wind wasn’t helping either as it whipped the branches, making the shoreline even more indistinct. He cruised at idle speed into the twenty-knot breeze, barely making progress against the small white-capped waves. Several times he thought he had found the opening, only to find it was a dead end. Finally, he decided he would have better luck wading through the brush and anchored at what he thought was the far northern end of the area.

Under normal circumstances, he would have used the power pole attached to the transom to anchor, but when he tried it, he felt the tug of the wind-driven current against the boat. The tide was high and the pole had only a foot of bite into the mud. One large wave would easily lift the boat. Moving to the bow, he opened the hatch, dropped the conventional Danforth anchor, and fed out the rode. After he was sure the anchor had set, he let out a seven-to-one scope, just like the book said, and after counting out sixty feet of line, he tied the nylon line off on the forward cleat.

He checked the anchor twice more. Finally satisfied, he donned his waders and slipped over the side. With a flashlight in hand, he moved toward the mangroves, glancing back at the boat several times to make sure it was still there.

Fighting against the small waves, he reached the shoreline and started pulling the larger branches aside. The high water and wind waves made it hard to move, but he gladly traded them for the relief from the smell cast by the rotting vegetation at low tide. Once inside the bushes, he was sheltered from the wind, and at high tide, he found himself in a new ecosystem. Thinking he was a predator, small baitfish broke the surface in front of him, and he jumped back when he came face-to-face with a hunting egret. There was a momentary standoff until the bird determined there was better fishing elsewhere and, using its long legs, waded out of sight.

After a hundred yards, he saw broken branches and started to slow down and examine every bush. The combination of the elements was disastrous for a crime scene. The wind, sun, saltwater, and tides destroyed everything in their path, but he was confident something had happened here. Thinking of how he had found the suction line in the river out West that had alerted him of the pot grow, he breathed deeply and observed. The wind turned from a nuisance into a blessing, showing him the hidden channels he hadn’t seen before. Standing completely still, he watched the flow of the water as it moved through the roots. Reading water was the same whether in a river, a stream, or the ocean, and he soon started to see the main current and the eddies off to the side.

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