Fluke or I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings - By Christopher Moore Page 0,41

through his bloody haze, and his head bobbed as he almost nodded out into his breakfast. Amy quickened her pace and ran a Pelican case she was carrying into the back of Quinn's thigh.

"Jeez, Amy," Quinn said, having almost lost his footing.

"Do those guys dive in that condition?" Amy whispered, still sticking to Quinn like a shadow.

"Worse than that. Would you back up a little?"

"He's scary. You're supposed to protect me, ya mook. How do they keep from getting into trouble?"

"They lose one or two a year. Ironically, it's usually an overdose that gets them."

"Tough job."

"They're tough guys."

Tako Man shouted, "Fuck you, whale people! You'll see. Fucking nightwalker fuckers. Fucking fuck you, haole motherfuckers!" He tossed the remains of his breakfast at them. It landed overboard, and tiny fish broke the water fighting for the scraps.

"Rum," said Kona. "Too much hostility in dat buzz. Rum come from da cane, and cane come from slavin' the people, and dat oppression all distilled in de bottle and come out a man mean as cat shit on a day."

"Yeah," said Clay to Quinn. "Didn't you know that about rum?"

"Where's your boat?" asked Quinn.

"My boat?"

"Your boat, Clay," said Amy.

"No," said Clay. He stopped and dropped two cases of camera equipment on the dock. The Always Confused, the spiny and powerful twenty-two-foot Grady White center-console fisherman, Clay's pride and joy, was gone. A life jacket, a water bottle, and various other familiar flotsam bobbed gently in a rainbow slick of gasoline where the boat had once been.

Everyone thought someone else should say something, but for a full minute no one did. They just stood there, staring at what should have been Clay's boat but instead was a big, boatless gob of tropical air.

"Poop," Amy finally said, saying it for all of them.

"We should check with the harbormaster," said Nate.

"My boat," said Clay, who stood over the empty slip as if it were his recently run-over boyhood dog. He would have nuzzled it and stroked its little dead doggy ears if he could have, but instead he fished the oily life jacket out of the water and sat on the dock rocking it.

"He really liked that boat," Amy said.

"Can I get a duh for the sistah?" exclaimed the dreaded blond kid.

"I paid the insurance," Nate said as he moved away, headed for the harbormaster.

Tako Man had come down the dock from his own boat to stare at the empty water. Somber now. Amy backed up into Kona for protection, but Kona had backed up into the next person behind him, which turned out to be Captain Tarwater, resplendent in his navy whites and newly Kona-scuffed shoes.

"Irie, ice cream man."

"You're on my shoes."

"What happened?" asked Cliff Hyland, coming down the dock behind the captain.

"Clay's boat's gone," said Amy.

Cliff moved up and put his hand on Clay's shoulder. "Maybe someone just borrowed it." Clay nodded, acknowledging that Cliff was trying to comfort him, but comfort fell like sandwiches on the recently bombed.

By the time Quinn returned from the harbormaster's office with a Maui cop in tow, there were a half dozen biologists, three black-coral divers, and a couple from Minnesota who were taking pictures of the whole thing, thinking that this would be something they would want to remember if they ever found out what was happening. As the cop approached, the black-coral divers faded to the edges of the crowd and away.

Jon Thomas Fuller, the scientist/entrepreneur who was accompanied by three of his cute female naturalists, stepped up beside Quinn. "This is just horrible, Nate. Just horrible. That boat represented a major capital investment for you guys, I'm sure."

"Yeah, but mainly we liked to think of it as something that floated and moved us around on the water." Nate actually had a great capacity for sarcasm, but he usually reserved it for those things and people he found truly irritating. Jon Thomas Fuller was truly irritating.

"Going to be tough to replace it."

"We'll manage. It was insured."

"You might want to get something bigger this time. I know there's a measure of safety working off of these sixty-five-footers we have, but also with the cabin you can set up computers, bow cameras, a lot of things that aren't really possible on little speedboats. A good-size boat would add a lot of legitimacy to your operation."

"We sort of decided to go with the legitimacy we get from doing credible research, Jon Thomas."

"We didn't make those figures up." Fuller caught himself raising his voice. The cop interviewing Clay looked over his