The River Killers by Bruce Burrows Page A

people who are affected by a policy should have some input into it.
    We cruised along in silence for a while. I wrestled with my thoughts but we were booed out of the ring. I stared out at the shoreline fading in the dusk. Eagles festooned the trees like large fierce flowers. Seine boats weren’t the only predators gathering to feast on the herring.
    And so my thoughts returned, laudably but late, to work. “Pete, when do you think it’ll happen?”
    He rubbed his jaw. “Well, I don’t know if George will agree, but things look pretty much on schedule to me.” George nodded without taking his eyes off the water. “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Pete continued, “I think we can afford to take the day off. But we’ll send the plane up and I think we’ll see more spot spawn, maybe fifteen, twenty miles of it. There’s bigger tides starting on Monday and they’ll push those southern fish farther up into the channel. I’m thinking maybe Wednesday we should let ’er go.”
    â€œOkay,” I said, “maybe tonight we should put the fleet on forty-eight-hour notice.” George and Pete both nodded. “Congratulations gentlemen, we have formulated a plan.”
    Dinner that night was an impromptu experience that only fishermen and us parasitic bureaucrats could ever experience. We started with the crabs I’d caught, then got into a bucket of clams that someone had dropped off. George brought out some sockeye that he’d smoked last summer, and we finished with grilled halibut donated by one of the company scout boats, obviously trying to curry favor.
    After genuflecting before Alex, the cook, I headed to my stateroom with the intention of perusing Alistair’s computer. I realized I’d need a monitor and turned toward the wheelhouse. George was there, picking his teeth. “How much you figure that meal would have cost downtown?”
    â€œYou couldn’t have got it downtown,” I said. “Not that good. I need to borrow a computer monitor. Do you mind?”
    â€œTake the one off the GPS . It’s the best one.”
    â€œThanks. I’ll have it back in a couple of hours.” I performed a quick lobotomy and lugged the monitor into my stateroom. In no time, I had it hooked up to its new brain, and powered up Alistair’s computer. As I’d feared, though, the computer asked for a password. I tried to bypass it but Alistair had been much too canny for that. Prawns? No. Hmmm. Shrimp? Crustacean? Wait a minute. Latin. What the hell was the Latin for prawn? That didn’t work either. Shit! A flash of memory: Chimera. Bingo! I was in.
    The password allowed me access to the desktop. I looked at the array of program icons and clicked on Excel, and then “open.” The drop-down menu showed a list of files and I opened the first one. I was now looking at a database like the ones pasted in the journal. I opened more files. More of the same and I still couldn’t make heads nor tails out of it. I closed Excel and considered the other program icons. There was Word, Access, Adobe, Eudora, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, and all the assorted junk stuff that no one ever uses. I opened Eudora, knowing there wouldn’t be much because he didn’t have a phone line. His inbox, surprisingly, ran to seven hundred and thirty-eight messages, courtesy presumably of landlines in Bella Bella. Most were of the “Cheaper prescription drugs from your best friendly guys in Nigeria” or “Drive your women crazy in bed” variety. There were a few messages from colleagues, invitations to conferences, and family updates from a daughter in Ontario, but nothing to interest me.
    I opened Word. There were three files and every one of them was gobbledegook. Alistair had encrypted them. Ergo, they were really important. Ergo, I had to read them. Ergo, I’d have to enlist someone more computer literate than me. Maybe this