Once afloat, Bennett and Scott spun the RIB on a dime, and skimmed ahead along the creek to make sure it was clear, the Lyman sedately following, raising hardly a wake in the early light. No one noticed the man in the pickup truck parked on the side of Waterview Drive watching through the trees as the Lyman chugged down Pooles Gut and out onto the South River.
The RIB was infinitely faster than the Lyman, even when the antique was running with the outboard full-out, so Bennett and Scott pushed the throttles flat and bounced ahead to check for traffic downriver as it opened up onto the vast Chesapeake. One of them would always keep the Lyman in sight, and periodically check the radar display set at ten miles range to keep an eye out for the heavies: the tankers and container ships plowing up the channel to Baltimore. They would then pound back to the DCIA, take station astern in a violent turn that sent spray flying in the early sunlight, and throttle back in his wake, smelling the boss’s pipe smoke even two hundred feet astern. The process of darting ahead, then racing back was repeated as required, especially if an unknown boat—runabout, cabin cruiser, or tacking day sailer—looked as if it would pass close by.
There was only one rule: the RIB had to keep off at least one hundred yards when the DCIA began fishing. The noise of the burbling Merc outboards would scare off finicky stripers in the Gulf Stream for Christ sake, not to mention around Thomas Point Shoal at the mouth of the river, or Bloody Point Bar, five miles across the bay, off the tip of Kent Island on the Eastern Shore. These two spots were Larson’s favorites—productive and not too far from home. He tied on a Slug-Go, a five-inch bone-white plastic worm with a flattened tail that made the lure undulate irresistibly to predatory stripers. He tried the rock ledge around the historic Thomas Point lighthouse: the frivolous hexagonal house on stilts with green shutters and six gables, with the Fresnel light in a pagoda-roofed cupola, like a cherry on a sundae.
No one was home around the ledge; stripers sometimes go deep and suspend, feeding on deep baitfish schools,
A typical grimy oyster boat, a Chesapeake deadrise—describing the hard chine or angle of the bottom built for stability—with a plumb bow, forward doghouse, and long open stern, was working closer to the beach, dragging for oysters. The single oysterman was reeling in the sharp-toothed dredge that dislodged the oysters from their beds and scooped them into a steel mesh basket by the bushelfuls. Bennett and Scott didn’t know enough to notice that the oysterman was not emptying his dredge, but rather was just casting up and down the beach without result, about half a mile from the Lyman. Alex Larson didn’t notice either, because he had already hooked a thirty-inch striper that probably went fifteen pounds, and was intent on bringing in another one. Something else. None of them noticed what an instinctive sailor would have marked in the sky by late morning: the weather.
