The Last Annual Slugfest (21 page)

Lights flashed from the ceiling. The brightness blinded me. And when my eyes finally focused, I could make out Angelina Rudd by the door. She was alone, and she was holding the biggest pistol I had ever seen.

“Get up,” she demanded.

“I can’t.” Pressing on my wrists sent another wave of pain into my fingers.

“Get up.”

I looked behind her at the door, expecting the guard to burst in, but the door stayed shut. Thrusting my weight forward onto my feet, I swung up.

“Over here.” She pointed the pistol toward the office door. Despite the size of the gun, she held it steady. She had big hands, muscular for a woman.

I moved into the office. It was a six-foot-square room—without windows, of course—in the southwest corner of the building. Next to it, in the middle, were the double doors to the dock. On the far side was a door to another tiny room, probably the lab.

The tiny office was barely big enough for a metal desk, chair, and a two-drawer file cabinet. All were gray. There was nothing on the desk but a phone at the far corner—no papers, no pens, no photo of spouse and child. The wall above held a bulletin board with schedules tacked on. I propped myself against the file cabinet.

Where was the night guard? Why was it Angelina who was here, pointing a gun at me? Why did she have a vicious guard, if she didn’t use him to trap interlopers? Why, unless she couldn’t afford to let him in the building, because she was holding a captive—Leila—here?

Angelina looked like I felt. Her hair hung in wild, knotted clumps. There were dark circles under her eyes. And her naturally olive complexion looked khaki green. Her jeans and jacket were wet. When she leaned back against the office doorway—blocking any chance I had of making a run for it—she seemed to need the support of the wall.

But there was no note of weariness or weakness in her voice, or in the hand that held the gun. “Just what are you doing in here?”

I shivered violently in my soaking clothes. Pushing my wet hair off my face, I stared past her into the main room. There should have been wall-to-wall fish vats with water gurgling through them, maybe a bench in the middle loaded with supplies. I had expected to find Leila Katz tied up between them. But there was none of that; no vats, no fish, no Leila. There was nothing. The room was entirely empty! Only the smell of fish and chemicals remained. If Leila was being held here, she was either in the lab or behind the doors that led to the dock, ready to be dragged to a boat and dumped out in the ocean.

Angelina could easily shoot me now. Deep-sixing two bodies wouldn’t be much harder than one. But if she did plan to shoot me, tempering my questions wouldn’t save me. “Where are the fish?”

“Be quiet!” she snapped.

“This place is supposed to be filled with tiny fish. Where are they?”

She tightened her grip on the gun. The veins in her hand stood out. Her teeth pressed together; she was thinking, deciding. I held my breath. Finally she said, “They were diseased. I had to dispose of them.”

I sighed, then asked, “Nicotine poisoning?” It was a long shot.

“What? I don’t use nicotine on the fish.” She looked at me like I had suggested she fed it to her son. “They had IHN—Infectious Hematopoietic Necrosis. Once they’ve got it there’s no way to save them. You have to dispose of them. Then all you can do is disinfect and be more careful the next time.”

Knowing how hard Angelina had worked, I could see why having lost her entire crop of salmon would put her in this state. Still, I didn’t believe that was the cause. If the salmon had been lost due to unavoidable circumstances, she would have been discouraged; if they had to be destroyed because she hadn’t taken the proper precautions, her job would have been in jeopardy and she would have been frightened. But she was neither; she was angry and frustrated. There had to be something else going on here. Taking advantage of Angelina’s turmoil, I said, “You were Leila Katz’s lover, weren’t you?”

Her eyes widened.

“When she was in high school, right?”

She laughed—the forced laugh of someone for whom humor is not familiar. Her eyes remained tired and hard. Again, her hand tightened on the pistol. “Just what are you doing here?” she demanded.

If she were going to call the sheriff, she would have done it by now. Whatever happened would be between us here. That meant that the stakes were higher, a lot higher, but maybe that my chances were better. I said, “Leila is missing. And Chris Fortimiglio has been arrested for Edwina’s murder.”

Her whole body seemed to tighten, but I couldn’t tell whether the reaction was surprise or fear, whether she was alarmed at Leila’s disappearance or my discovery of it, or Chris’s having been arrested.

In the main room, a skylight banged against its frame.

“Why Chris?” she asked.

“Edwina found a treaty from the eighteen-fifties giving the Pomo Indians a rancheria. It extended across the river.”

Her long narrow face scrunched in from the sides. It was clear that she understood the implications Chris had explained to me. She nodded slowly, deliberately, as if checking off the various effects of the treaty.

I said, “He told me it could endanger the entire fleet.”

The skylight banged. She barely reacted. She looked like she was trying to restrain her urgency. But something, some intention I couldn’t make out, or perhaps pent-up anger, pushed her on. “Maybe that’s what that fleet needs,” she said bitterly. “Cowboys, these men riding out to sea in their little boats. Half of those boats are so old they shouldn’t be floating around the inlet, much less out at sea where the waves can be fifteen, twenty feet high, coming three directions at once, and the weather can change from sun to fog so fast you can’t even check which direction shore is.”

I wanted to keep her talking, not considering the advantages of disposing of Leila and me together. “They take care of their boats. I’ve seen them at the docks.”

“They do what they can. But they can only do so much. They can’t make fifty-year-old planks new. They can’t stretch a twenty-six-foot Monterey into forty feet. And nothing they do will change the fact that every year one or two, and some years eight or ten fishermen, will be washed overboard. Do you know what happens then?” She glared at me. The gun rested in her rigid fingers.

“They drown?” Could I surprise her and knock that gun out of those stiff fingers?

“Oh, a few are saved,” she went on, “if they happen to be lucky enough to be fishing near a friend, or sensible enough to keep their radios going. A few. Most of them drown. But they don’t just fall into the water and die and have the waves carry their bodies to shore. Sometimes it’s weeks before their bodies are found. They wash up miles down the shore.”

The gun barrel had dropped a little; it pointed at my stomach. “Is that what happened to your father?”

“Oh, no. His body didn’t wash in at Bodega Bay or Point Reyes. We waited, my mother and I. At first we hoped he’d been picked up by some boat heading north or south, that we’d hear from him any moment. Then, slowly, we realized that we wouldn’t hear at all. Then we waited, dreading the time when we’d get a call to come look at some body so bloated that we wouldn’t be able to say for sure it was him.”

At the far side of the desk, the phone was out of reach. I had seen the cord lying behind it—it would reach across the room. “And?” I said.

“Even that didn’t happen. His body never turned up. A lot of bodies don’t. The currents sweep them out to sea. Maybe they sink to bottom. Maybe the crabs eat them.” She shivered in the unheated room. “We’ll never know what happened to him. But I’ll tell you what it did to us. He was a fisherman—macho. He didn’t want his wife working. My mother had never worked. And when he died, we didn’t have any money. We didn’t have any boat. All we had was the bank wanting their money for the payment on the house and the truck.”

“Didn’t he have insurance?”

She laughed, bitterly. “Without a body the insurance company doesn’t have to admit he’s dead. And they don’t. They don’t pay a cent until seven years go by and you can get a court to declare him legally dead. By that time, the house was gone, and it had been so long since we’d had a truck that we’d forgotten what it was to leave town.”

I shifted nearer the phone. My water-logged sweater hung heavy on my shoulders. The smell of wet wool battled the stench of fish and chemicals.

“And you think I was spending those years screwing around with little Leila Katz?” she said.

“You were her babysitter.”

“She was a child, for Christ’s sake.”

“She trusted you then. She trusted you later.”

“I never touched her.” Her face was red.

“You were just home for the summer then, a college student, full of new ideas, exciting experiences.”

Angelina laughed. The gun shook. “So you assume I went off to seduce women at San Francisco State or U.C.L.A.? Off to the wild life? I’ll tell you where I went when I got out of high school. I’ll tell you how much I hated the macho way this town was, how much I hated my life here. I went to a convent.”

“A convent!”

For the first time, she gave me a smile with a flicker of pleasure in it, as if she was comforted by the fact that I could see the ludicrousness of that move. “I stayed two years. Long enough to get college credits to transfer to Sonoma State. Long enough to try for loans and scholarships, and plenty long enough to see that I’d jumped from one form of slavery to another. But don’t misunderstand me, when I went there I was sure I’d be in that convent till I died.” She adjusted her grip on the gun. “And when I got out of there, I worked like the devil to prepare myself for something like this, this fish ranch.”

I shifted my feet again. The phone was still out of reach. “So,” I said, “if the Pomos were to string gillnets across the river and trap every steelhead and salmon in the Russian River, it wouldn’t bother you?”

She shrugged. “Hardly. They can catch everything that moves upstream.”

“What about government control of the fish in the ocean?”

“You’re thinking of the Boldt Decision?”

I nodded.

“If that happens, I’ll have records of how many smolts I sent down my chute. If I had to go to court, I’d get my share.”

I stood, then sat back full against the desk. One more move and I’d be able to reach the phone. “Still, it’s hardly advantageous to have your fish caught by someone else, even by the fleet.”

She sighed, the sigh of a businesswoman at the end of a long, fruitless meeting. “There’ll be plenty of fish to go around. If every smolt I send out were to come back up my chute, this building wouldn’t be able to hold them.”

I hadn’t believed her when she told me about the disease of the fish fry, but I couldn’t zero in on why. I stared past her into the empty room. “You start with the fertilized eggs, right?”

“We fertilize them here.”

“Then where do they go?”

“In trough incubators.”

“How big are those incubators?”

“About four foot square. Look, why are—”

“Well, where are those incubators? You just flushed all your fish fry and suddenly you don’t have any equipment either? Where are they?”

Her hand tightened on the gun. “Outside.” But her voice had lost its authority.

“Outside?” The pile of crates by the fence. “Why would you take them outside?”

“To disinfect them.”

“With the river this high? Come on, you couldn’t find more germs and bacteria and just plain mud than you’ll get if it washes up here.”

From the distance came a whine.

“What are you using this place for?” I demanded. “What have you emptied it out for?”

The whine outside was louder, clearer—a sheriff’s car. I had worried about the guard. No wonder he wasn’t here. I’d thought
I
was keeping Angelina talking. I wasn’t making her talk; she was holding me for the sheriff. Lunging to my right, I grabbed the phone and slammed it down on the gun. Angelina screamed. The gun hit the floor. It didn’t go off.

She grabbed her hand in pain. I fell to my knees and scooped up the gun. It was cold, heavy. I put my finger over the trigger, hoping it wouldn’t release easily.

“Where’s Leila Katz?” I demanded.

“What?”

I didn’t have time for that. “Open the lab.”

“It’s not locked.”

I ran past her, past the doors to the dock, and pushed open the lab door. The room was empty.

The siren shrieked, then died. The sheriff’s car would be stopped at the gate. I pushed open the doors to the dock. There was nothing behind them.

I ran back to Angelina. “Turn off the electrical system.”

She laughed. “You’re not going to shoot me. Not with the sheriff right outside.”

“You’re right. But if you let the sheriff get me, I’ll make sure everyone in the Russian River area knows this building is empty. I’ll call the
Bodega Bay Sentinel, The Paper,
and the
Russian River News.
I’ll tell them your fish died.”

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

“Come on,” I said. “Either you get me over that fence, or when salmon season starts Monday, the fishermen will be laughing so hard they won’t be able to get to their boats.”

She reached for a switch. The room went dark. I followed her to the outer door and across the yard behind the cluster of overturned incubator boxes. She slapped her hand on the deadened electric wires. I climbed on a box. As I jumped down outside the fence, I could see the sheriff’s headlights come around the building.

I
TOOK OFF MY
yellow slicker and stuffed it up under my sweater. The wind stung my skin. The rain splattered on the soaked wool. But my sweater and jeans were dark. I wouldn’t make the same target I’d have in the slicker. The gun was like concrete; I shifted it to my left hand.

The fish ranch complex was surrounded by the electrified fence and a four-foot-deep ditch. Keeping down, I ran along the ditch, behind the fence to the corner that would lead back to the guardhouse. I kept straight on, forcing my wet, cold-tightened legs to push harder, sinking with each step in the sodden ground, racing for the bridge, crossing it, hurrying along the road, no longer at a run, up the hill to Jenner.