“I?ve been accused of that before too,” I said.
“Just so you?ll know,” Dutch added, “Salvatore knows where O?Brian is. If you?re not back in two
hours, we?re going in with the marines, although I don?t know why we should bother.”
“We?re just getting accustomed to that ugly pan of his,” Charlie One Ear commented.
It was nice to know they cared.
37
LURE
The fat old pelican sat on a corner post of the deck surrounding the fishing shack, looking bored. He
surveyed the broad expanse of bay which emptied into the Atlantic Ocean a mile away to the east at
Thunder Point. A warm breeze ruffled in from the sound and the old bird stared, half-asleep, across
the surface of the water, looking for the tell-tale signs of lunch. Then, spotting a school of mullet, he
flapped his broad wings and sod red off the post, climbing twenty feet or so above the water, wheeling
over and diving straight in, hitting with a splat and bobbing back up with a fish flopping helplessly in
his bucket of a beak.
The Irishman watched the pelican make his catch. He was making a fishing lure. He had set up a
.small vise on the edge of a table and was carefully twining and ret wining nylon, hook, and feathers,
weaving them into a shiny lure. He had stopped to watch the pelican, keeping the line taut so it would
not ravel.
He was a big man with one of those florid Irish faces that would look fifteen years old until he was
ninety. A few lines grooved its smooth surface, but not enough to mar his youthful, carefree
expression.
There was very little traffic along the bay. A few shrimp boats had gone out against the rising tide
arid a weekend sailor was trying, without much success, to get a lackluster wind in the sails of his
boat a couple of hundred yards away. Otherwise it was so quiet he could hear what little wind there
was rattling the marsh grass.
This was the Irishman?s love, his escape from a business he neither liked nor understood. He felt like
a misfit, a Peter Principled gunman forced to act like a businessman. O?Brian liked to settle disputes
