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Nevada Barr
A Superior Death
The second book in the A
Special thanks to Daniel Lenihan
For Peter, who always knows who did it and doesn’t think that necessarily makes them bad people
ONE
These killers of fish, she thought, will do anything. Through the streaming windscreen A
She fiddled irritably with the radar, as if she could clear the lake fog by focusing the screen. Her mind flashed on an old acquaintance, a wide-shouldered fellow named Lou, with whom she had argued the appeal-or lack thereof-of Hemingway. Finally in frustration Lou had delivered the ultimate thrust: “You’re a woman. You can’t understand Papa Hemingway.”
A
The hull of the Bertram slammed down against the back of a retreating swell. For a moment the bow blocked the windscreen, then dropped away; a false horizon falling sickeningly toward an uncertain finish. In a crashing curtain of water, the boat found the lake once more. A
Five weeks before, when she’d been first loosed on Superior with her boating license still crisp and new in her wallet, she’d tried to comfort herself with the engineering specs on the Bertram. It was one of the sturdiest twenty-six-foot vessels made. According to its supporters and the substantiating literature, the Bertram could withstand just about anything short of an enemy torpedo.
On a more kindly lake A
The Belle Isle plowed through the crest of a three-meter wave and, in the seconds of visibility allowed between the beat of water and wiper blades, A
She braced herself between the dash and the butt-high pilot’s bench and picked up the radio mike. “The Low Dollar, the Low Dollar, this is the Belle Isle. Do you read?” Through the garble of static a man’s voice replied: “Yeah, yeah. Is that you over there?”
Not for the first time A
“Um… ten-four,” came the reply.
For the next few minutes A
She missed Gideon, her saddle horse in Texas. Even at his most recalcitrant she could always get him in and out of the paddock without risk of humiliation. The Belle Isle took considerably more co
The Low Dollar hove into sight, riding the slick gray back of a wave. A
I’ll never be an old salt, A
The Low Dollar wallowed and heaved like a blowsy old woman trying to climb out of a water bed. Her gunwales lay dangerously close to waterline and A
Two men, haggard with fear and the ice-slap of the wind, slogged through the bilge to grapple at the Belle Isle with bare hands and boat hooks. “Stand off, stand off, you turkeys,” A
There was a creak of hull against hull as they jerked the boats together, undoing her careful maneuvering.
The man at the bow, wind-whipped in an oversized K-mart slicker, dragged out a yellow nylon cord and began lashing the two boats together as if afraid A
She shut down to an idle and climbed up the two steps from the cabin. The fisherman at the Low Dollar’s starboard quarter began to tie the sterns together. “Hey! Hey!” A
“Untie that,” she shouted against the wind. “Untie it.” The man, probably in his mid-forties but looking older in a shapeless sweatshirt and cap with earflaps, turned a blank face toward her. He stopped tying but didn’t begin untying. Instead he looked to his buddy, still wrapping loops of line round and round the bow cleats.
“Hal?” he bleated plaintively, wanting corroboration from a proper authority.
A
Hal finished his pile of Boy Scout knots and made his way back the length of the boat. He was younger than the man white-knuckling the stern line, maybe thirty-five. Fear etched hard lines around his eyes and mouth but he looked, if not entirely reasonable, at least able to listen.
“Hi,” A