Read Online Shooting at Loons by Margaret Maron - Free Book Online Page A

eight years. Sticking up from the scrubby bushes were piles of building scraps, aluminum siding, and old pipes and barrels. Further out, a yaupon tree grew straight up through a cast-off stove.
    “She says if I don’t get my mess off, she’ll pay somebody twenty-five hundred dollars and put the law on me if I don’t pay it. I ain’t got twenty-five hundred dollars. This boat’s taking every penny and I still got to get the diesel engine for her. Andy was going to let me have one off a old truck of his, but now, I don’t know if his boys’ll still do it or not.”
    “Well, she can’t have you hauled off to jail like a criminal,” I assured him, “but she could file in civil court and get a judgment against you.”
    “What would that mean?”
    “It might mean a forced sale of your house if you didn’t pay up after a certain length of time.”
    “I knew it!” he said angrily. “That’s what she’s after. She’s already got title to two or three pieces along here. If she’n get mine and maybe Carl’s—”
    “Carl and Sue would never sell,” I said.
    “It ain’t been in his family a hundred years,” Mahlon said shortly. “Wave enough money under people’s noses and you can’t tell what they’d do.”
    He smoothed on some more caulk dots. “Well, it don’t signify. With this boat, me’n my boys’re gonna get ourselves out’n the hole for good and all this time.”
    “How
is
Mickey Mantle?” None of us ever knew whether or not to ask, but since Mahlon had mentioned him first...
    His sun-leathered face crinkled with a gap-toothed grin. “Doing a lot of walking these days.”
    “Oh?”
    He smoothed another row of nail heads. “Yeah. Got his license pulled again. For a year this time. If he can’t get there by boat or thumb, he has to foot it.”
    “So you figure that’ll keep his mind on fishing for a while?” I laughed.
    “Should do,” he answered dryly. “If I’n get her done by the time shrimping season starts, the money’ll keep ‘em both in line.”
    I hesitated. “I hope I didn’t get Guthrie in trouble yesterday, asking him to take me out for clams?”
    Mahlon scowled. “Worn’t your fault. He knowed better’n to take my skiff ‘thout asking.”
    “That was pretty awful about Andy Bynum getting shot.”
    “Yeah.” He laid aside the caulk gun and began to peel the gummy stuff from his fingers.
    “I guess you’re in that Alliance he started?”
    “Hell, no!” He saw my puzzlement. “Oh, they tried to sign us all up, but I ain’t never joined nothing yet and I’m sure not going to start with something that don’t give a damn about me.”
    “But I thought it was to help the independent fishermen.”
    He snorted. “Yeah, that’s what was
said
, but I ain’t never seen nothing started by the man that don’t end up with money in their pockets.”
    Startled, I tried to remember if I’d ever seen Andy linger under Mahlon’s boat shed or seen Mahlon over at Andy’s. “You and Andy weren’t friends?” I asked.
    “He was the man,” he said, as if that explained it all.
    Well, if Andy was, I guess it did, diesel engine or no diesel engine.
    Mahlon wrapped a piece of plastic around the tip of the caulk gun, secured it with a rubber band, then reached over and turned off the light bulb.
    “Reckon I’d better get on in to eat,” he said, reminding me of the chowder I’d left simmering on the stove.
    It was full dark but there were enough scattered lights from nearby houses to guide me the few feet down the shoreline to the main path once my eyes adjusted. I went slowly, thinking about “the man.” Not a purely local concept, of course. There was that old Ernie Ford coal miner song about owing one’s soul to the company store. And sharecroppers certainly knew about never getting out of debt to the man who bankrolled you to the tools or supplies you needed if you were going to work for him.
    Andy Bynum had owned a fish house. Barbara Jean could probably tell