Dead Angler Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Thunder Bay Bar soaking wet. But if you want to pick up some dry clothes for me, and give my place a quick once-over, you can check for your hat right now. If it’s at my place, it’ll be out on the front porch by your chair.”
    Even as he said it, Osborne was almost certain Ray’s hat was there. The two men often shared a sunset cocktail, ginger-ale and ice, looking out over Loon Lake and commiserating over the day’s wins and losses. Ray had a habit of carefully placing the prized hat on top of Osborne’s leather-bound volume of Shakespeare. The one he inherited from his father and never read.
    “Doc—I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Thanks!”
    But if Ray’s gratitude was palpable over the telephone wire, Osborne’s feelings towards his neighber ran even deeper. Once upon a time, he had cursed the sight of the younger man in the trout hat. To his face, he had called him “a poacher and a lazy bum,” but that was two long years ago.
    Osborne had since learned Ray was many things. With his butt too often planted on a barstool, he was a talented raconteur who prided himself on knowing and embellishing the grim details of any local event—comedy or tragedy—for any crowd, whether it be the in-town Kiwanis wannabes or the bearded woodticks that hunkered in from the backwoods. Osborne had had to admit the man could tell a good story even if he did have the extremely annoying habit of stretching it out until his audience had to scream for the punch line.
    Though he made his money as a hunting and fishing guide for wealthy tourists up from points south, Ray was so habitually short of cash that he often chopped wood, shot wildlife photos for local printers, and dug graves to make it through the long, fiercely cold northern Wisconsin winters. This career mix gave him access to excellent material for his barroom tales.
    But Ray was not uneducated nor had he been raised in a wolf pack. His older sister was one of Chicago’s top litigators, and his younger brother was a hand surgeon at the Mayo Clinic. No one knew why Ray chose a lifestyle one step above cave man, but to Osborne he seemed a happy man. He was an optimist. His arrival almost always brightened the day.
    That did not mean, however, that Osborne did not still question some of his personal habits. Ray had launched their relationship by being the pain in the ass who bought a choice piece of lake-front property right next door to Osborne when an unexpected estate sale put it on the market while Osborne and his wife were at a dental convention in Milwaukee.
    Osborne had arrived home to find a beat-up house trailer and an old blue pick-up with a door missing on the driver’s side parked, not just illegally close to the lake, but in full view of Osborne’s living room window. The view from this window had been a key architectural element, engineered at considerable expense during the building of Osborne’s retirement haven. One shouting match later, Ray grudgingly backed up twenty-five feet.
    A few months later, Osborne discovered that Ray had rigged his plumbing away from the city sewer system, which required fees for hook-up and annual use, to empty raw sewage just short of the property line and a little too close to Mary Lee Osborne’s prized rose bushes. “Earth to earth” had been his smart-aleck excuse. Osborne couldn’t lodge a legal complaint because he had a few violations of his own he didn’t need checked out. Which Ray had known, of course.
    Ray was not a stupid man. “The best goddamn huntin’ fishin’ guru north of Chicago” was how he introduced himself, and in Osborne’s book he was right. He knew people, and he knew animals, and he knew how to horse trade. After the Osbornes got apoplectic over the poop in the rose garden, Ray made sure he had a tasty sling of fresh-cleaned blue gills hanging on their back porch every Sunday morning. That didn’t appease Mary Lee, who crabbed at Ray every time he appeared on their property, but