Fire Water (4 page)

He thought it over with a frown. “That'd be sort of cool, I guess.”

“And the house has a big backyard.”

His eyes lit up. “Can we get a dog?”

I hesitated. “Maybe.” The dog discussion had been ongoing for the last year. I'd put him off this far by claiming our apartment was too small and no one was home all day to play with a dog. But now I'd just ruined that excuse. “Tell you what? Let's get moved in first and then we can talk about getting a pet.”

“All right,” he said. “But no fish. They're boring.”

I ruffled his hair. “Deal.”

The next day Cap'n allowed me to leave my milk crate and join him in the pilothouse of the boat. That victory combined with the excitement of finding out we'd gotten the house made me ridiculously happy. I leaned forward with the binoculars at my eyes and a huge smile on my lips.

“What are you grinning about, girl?”

I lowered the binoculars and shot him an exasperated expression. “It's a beautiful day.”

“Hmmph.”

We were crawling through the waters farther from the mouth of the river. Here the factories and buildings of the city had given way to trees and farmland. The sun was warm, and a nice breeze drifted across the deck. A crane took flight from the surface of the water and flew a lazy circle overhead. This part of the river wasn't as polluted as the areas closer to Lake Erie, so wildlife was more plentiful.

“Don't know what's so beautiful about it,” he grumped. He shifted to his right, taking weight off his left leg. Remembering what Sergeant Reams had said about him getting shot, I wondered if the movement had something to do with the old injury. “Get ready to tie up.”

Excited to do an actual job, I jumped up and went to the starboard side, where the lines were neatly coiled. Cap'n angled the boat toward a dock. An old tin sign hung from a pole on the end of the dock. The placard had a picture of a kid sitting at the end of a dock, fishing. Under that were the words,
EARL'S BAIT AND TACKLE
.

When we came aside the dock, I jumped out to quickly tie up. “Tie her up tight,” Cap'n called. He cut off the engine, and it took a second for my ears to adjust to the unaccustomed silence. I finished the knot he'd shown me and stood back to admire my handiwork. Cap'n climbed off the boat to inspect it. “Hmph.”

With that, he turned and limped up the dock. With a grin on my face, I stared after him. Cap'n wasn't the kind of man to get real flowery with the accolades; the fact he hadn't yelled or found some small thing to nitpick about was his version of high praise.

He stopped at the end of the dock and turned. “Well? You comin'?”

I hopped to and sped to catch up with him. Stepping off the dock, we landed in a sort of open grassy area in front of an old building with a rusted tin roof. Fishing nets decorated the metal walls, and old dog snored in the shade.

Signs tacked to the walls advertised the store's offerings: night crawlers, red worms, wax worms, minnows, pike shiners, and maggots.

“Why are we here?” I asked.

“Seeing a man about a thing.” His eyes sparkled with mischief that belied the no-nonsense tone. But before I could question him more, he reached around me. The old screen door screeched like a banshee. The dog wasn't impressed.

Inside, the bait shop smelled like rotten fish parts, old beer, and mold. I scrunched up my face, but Cap'n stilled and pulled a deep breath through his nose. “You ever fish, Prospero?”

“Of course not.” I'd grown up in the Cauldron with a single mother. My uncle Abe was the most likely person to take me fishing, but instead he'd taken me under his wing in the potion-cooking game.

He shook his head. “Kids these day aren't raised proper.”

Considering I'd spent a lot of my childhood committing petty crimes and wanting to grow up to be the leader of my coven, I couldn't exactly argue with him. But I did make a mental note to be sure to take Danny fishing at some point. “What kind of project are you working on, exactly?”

At that moment a tarp-covered door to the shop's back room crinkled open. The man who emerged looked like an extra from
Deliverance
. His sun-weathered arms extended from a sleeveless T-shirt advertising a brand of motor oil. He wore a mesh cap on his head, and a toothpick jutted from his lips.

“Well, hell, Marty didn't know you was coming around today!” The man smiled, exposing sepia-colored teeth earned from years of smoking the cigarettes he pulled out of his pocket. He had the accent of a transplant from below the Mason–Dixon. I wasn't a linguistics expert, but I knew redneck when I heard it.

“Had a little time in my busy schedule,” Cap'n said. For some reason, both men started cackling. Bored, I looked into a case of hooks and lures.

Once they sobered, the owner of the shop nodded at me. “Who's this you got with ya?”

“This is Prospero,” Cap'n said. “She's stuck with me for the week.” His tone implied he considered himself the one who was stuck.

The owner lifted a cigarette to his lips and squinted as he lit the tip with a Zippo in his left hand. This told me he was most likely an Adept, which meant he'd been born with ability to turn Mundane ingredients into magic potions. Whether he actually used those talents was still up for debate. Not all Adepts chose to go through the training necessary to work magic. He exhaled the drag slowly as his gaze crawled over me like the maggots in his bait fridge.

I'd quit smoking a couple of years earlier, but, like most former smokers, I still craved the feel of smoke in my lungs. Seeing the cloud of nicotine emerging from under his mustache, though, turned my stomach.

“You must be Earl?” I said.

His eyes squinted. “How'd you know that?”

I pointed toward the door. “Sign outside.”

He didn't crack a smile or relax his posture. Those two black eyes stayed on me as he spoke to Cap'n. “I got that stuff you wanted, Marty. Come on out back.”

Cap'n turned to me. “I'll be right back.”

I started to ask him what was going on, but he shot me a look that promised retribution if I got too nosy. With a sigh, I leaned a hip against the counter.

Without another word, the pair of men disappeared through the tarp. I heard their shoes on creaky wooden boards and low-toned discussion, but I couldn't make out any words. Pushing off the counter, I looked around the store. Several large fish were stuffed and mounted on the walls with brass plaques bragging each specimen's weight and the date it was caught. A drinks cooler along one wall offered six-packs of beer, sodas, and bottles of water. There were even a few shelves filled with snacks and convenience items someone might need on a fishing trip, like sunscreen and foam coolers.

In other words, it was really boring. I looked to the right and spied a cloudy window looking our on the shop's side yard. A rusted-out Chevy sat on cinder blocks in the tall weeds just beyond the wraparound porch.

The sound of a screen door closing echoed through the shop. An instant later Earl and Cap'n appeared on the porch. I quickly stepped behind a display shelf of koozies so they wouldn't know I was eavesdropping.

“These look real good, Earl,” my temporary boss was saying.

“Glad you think so. You, uh, brought the payment?”

Cap'n reached into the inner pocket of his windbreaker and withdrew a thick envelope. I frowned. What the hell was going on? I'd spent enough time in the Cauldron to recognize a deal going down when I saw one. My conscience told me I was overreacting, but Cap'n was acting awfully suspicious about this entire visit.

I looked up in time to see the men shake hands and turn to come back inside. Jumping away from the window, I moved toward a display of fishing poles. The men emerged from behind the curtain.

“You ready, Prospero?”

I looked up as if he'd dragged me away from something very interesting. “Oh, sure.”

Earl tipped the bill of his mesh cap. “Nice to meet you, ma'am.” The way he said it, though, sounded anything but polite.

I forced a smile and nodded before following Cap'n out of the store. When we emerged from the screen door, the dog opened one eye and emitted a halfhearted growl. I jogged past it to catch up with my boss on the dock.

“What was all that about?”

He glanced out of the corner of his eye. “Nothing.”

I laughed. “Didn't look like nothing.”

He stilled and turned toward me. “You spying on me, girl?”

I raised my chin. “You were right next to the window.”

“I don't know what you think you saw, but it's none of your damned business.” With that, he turned and stalked across the dock's weathered boards.

“Hey,” I called, following him. “I'm talking to you.”

He waved a hand behind him, as if swatting off an annoying bug.

I walked over to where he was bending over the lines. “I might be a rookie, but I didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday.”

He paused and looked up under the brim of his BPD ball cap. “What?”

I put my hands on my hips. “What kind of potion was it?”

He eyed me for a couple of beats. Then he threw back his head and laughed.

“I don't see what's so funny about it.” I crossed my arms.

He bent over and slapped his knees. “Hoo! I haven't laughed like that in weeks.”

I cocked a brow.

The last of his chuckles subsided. “I wasn't buying a potion.”

“What were you buying, then? Guns? Drugs?”

He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, as if fighting off another round of laughter. “Lures.”

I froze. “What?”

“Fishing lures.” He pulled the package Earl had given him out of his windbreaker. I took it from him carefully and opened the flap. Inside, there was a plastic box filled with six little compartments. In each, there was a fishing hook decorated with colorful feathers and rubber worms. “They cost a king's ransom, too.”

Heat crawled up my neck and up to my forehead. “Oh.”

He snatched the box out of my hands. “Hmph.”

I ran a hand through my hair and tried to collect my thoughts. “I don't get it. If you were just buying fishing stuff, why all the secrecy?”

He looked down at the dock. “Because I didn't want you to know.”

“Know what? That you like to fish?”

He shook his head and squinted at me. “I'm taking an early retirement.”

“Huh? Why is that a secret?”

“You don't get it. Where I come from, men work. They don't quit early just because something's hard.”

“That's silly. You've been a cop—what? Twenty years?”

“Twenty-three. Don't change how I feel, though.” He pointed down at his leg. “After my accident, I took the river patrol thinking it'd be a way to stay in the game. But I can't do it anymore.”

“No one would blame you for that. I mean, I've only been with you a few days and I'm bored as hell.”

He shot me a warning look.

“Sorry, but it's true. Anyway, there's no shame in taking an early retirement. But I don't get what the lures have to do with all this.”

“They have to do with my plans.” Two spots of red appeared on his cheeks. “Once I retire, I'm planning to head to Montana to open a fly-fishing business.”

“That's cool,” I lied. The idea of spending any amount of time in the wilds of Montana, thigh-deep in icy water trying to hook fish, was pretty close to my idea of hell. But I didn't mention that to him. Now that he'd opened up a little, I didn't want to ruin it by mocking his dream.

He nodded and looked at the river. Even thought we were upstream from the worst of the pollution, the water moved sluggishly, as if it simply had lost the will to flow. “Sure beats spending my time on this watery graveyard. Last time I tried to fish the Steel, all I got for my efforts was an old boot, a dead bird, and three bloated fish.”

My mouth curled up. “Gross.”

“No shit.” He smiled at me. “You know, you might be all right after all, Prospero.”

I tilted my head. “I'm a little offended you thought otherwise.”

He shrugged. “Can't blame me. When they told me I was getting a rookie, that was bad enough. But then one of the boys from the academy warned me you had a chip on your shoulder about being an Adept and all.”

I crossed my arms defensively. “I do not.”

He quirked a gray brow at me. “Sure ya do, but it doesn't matter really. One thing I learned being a cop in this town is everyone's lugging around baggage. The trick is you can't let it trip you up when things really matter.”

He put the box back in his windbreaker and lifted his face to the sky. Sucking in a lungful of the sun-drenched air, he smiled. “Anyway, I'd appreciate it if you didn't tell anyone else about my plan. I'm still waiting on the paperwork to go through.”

I nodded. “Understood.”

“All righty.” He stepped onto the boat. “Untie that line and we'll shove off.”

I smiled after the man. As it turned out, he wasn't so bad after all, either. “Aye, aye, Cap'n.”

The next day rain made traveling up and down the river a real pain in the ass. A yellow slicker covered my clothes, making me look like a large, annoyed banana. But the rain wasn't the only source of my frustration. I'd been on river patrol duty for four days. In that time, we'd done little more than float up and down the water. In fact, the only excitement we'd seen in the last few days was when a boater got himself caught on a sandbar and we'd had to tow him off.

I coiled the rope and threw the end on top of the pile. With a sigh, I lifted my head and looked up at the steel-gray clouds.

“What crawled up your rear end?” Cap'n said in a gruff tone. He stood in the wheelhouse where the rain couldn't touch him.