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honey?” Cal said to the girl. “Feeling okay? Not getting queasy, are you?”
    “Why’d you think I’d be getting queasy?” she said.
    “Oh, I don’t know, just that you’re a . . . you know . . . you’re . . . you’re not used to boats, and all.”
    She shook her head and looked back down at her book, which lay open in her lap.
    Ernie said, “Ah, lighten up, Ali. Hey, listen. You hear about the idiot who got a camera for his birthday? He just got his first set of pictures back—twenty-four shots of his left eye.
Bwahahahahahah!
”
    “That’s lovely, Uncle Ernie,” the girl said. “Was your next roll like that, too?”
    Ernie laughed harder, slapping the table. Even Cal smiled. “Come on, Ernie, stop yakking and deal.”
    “All right, all right.”
    Mikey thought it was weird the way the girl talked back like that. These people were really strange.
    Mikey checked the depth recorder. Forty-eight fathoms. While he watched, it jumped to seventy, then back to fifty-one. He figured Bill was following an undersea shelf. He made note of the coastline, looking for rock formations or tree clusters that he could use to pinpoint this trolling spot again, this shelf. A fisherman needed all the secrets he could collect.
    He sat in the seat across from Bill with his back to the window. The hull rose and fell over the mild, easy-moving swells. He breathed deeply.
    Bill glanced over and nodded.
    The engines droned.
    Bill dug out a chart and studied it, his forehead furrowed. He reached over and turned on the shortwave radio, which spat static over a small, faraway voice. Some Honolulu boat, fishing out near Penguin Bank.
    Cal and Ernie played blackjack. Drinking slow morning beers. Smoking cigars. The smell was sharp and strong, but Mikey didn’t mind it.
    After a while, Ernie placed his cards facedown on the table and sat back. He took a deep pull on his cigar and let the smoke out around his words. “So, Billyboy, I’m kind of wondering where that action is. Can you give us a clue?”
    “It’ll come,” Bill said.
    “Marlin?”
    “That’s the idea.”
    Cal put his cards down, too, and turned in his seat to face Bill. “Guy at the hotel bar last night told me a story about some skipper here whose swordfish stuck its bill in the bottom.”
    Bill nodded. “That was a strange one, all right. He fought that fish for hours. Finally, it got so enraged it sounded, went straight to the bottom and stabbed its sword into the sand. Got stuck there.”
    Bill shook his head.
    “Of course, on board they didn’t know that. All they knew was the line was stuck. Well, that skipper was stubborn. Most guys would just cut the line and move on. But he didn’t like losing a fish like that. So what he did was he pulled out his Aqua-Lung and went down to see what was going on.”
    “Not,” Mikey said. He couldn’t even imagine doing that.
    “It’s true,” Bill said. “He went down to look. What he found was a dead marlin. Probably died of exhaustion and pressure. So the guy dug the sword out and went up and pulled the marlin aboard. It weighed in at over four hundred pounds. Now that’s stubborn.”
    “What boat was that?” Cal said.
    “He’s long gone. That was a while back.”
    Cal pursed his lips. “Too bad.”
    “That kind of stubborn is what it takes, ain’t it?” Ernie said.
    Cal picked up his cards. “Yup.”

CHAPTER 5

    THE CHROME CLOCK above the companionway clanged the half hour. Mikey watched the minute hand click forward. One stiff step, then another.
    He glanced back at the girl.
    She was sitting cross-legged on the bunk. The notebook she’d brought was a sketchbook. The purselike thing held pencils and a black-ink drawing pen, which she was using now. Mikey couldn’t see what she was drawing, but he watched her movements, loose and fast. Was she any good?
    She glanced up just as he stretched his neck to get a better look.
    He shifted his eyes, pretending to look beyond her. At the rods, maybe. Or