Buried Prey

their glasses . . . like a Stephen King story.”
    “Jesus,” Lucas said. “You writing a screenplay?”

    HANSON’S FISHING PALS, Cole and Kushner, lived three or four miles away, on another peninsula, and only a few hundred yards from each other. Both of them were in, and Cole volunteered to walk down to Kushner’s place and meet them there.
    The two older men looked like the kind of plaid-shirted guys who’d be waved back and forth across the Canadian border without so much as a glance: white, balding, too heavy, too much sun, soft canvas shirts from Orvis, fishing-boat hats, and jeans.
    Cole was the taller of the two, and said, “I understand why you’re looking into it—I already told the police that Brian was supposed to be down in the Cities. He coulda come back at the last minute, I suppose, but we play golf in the morning, and he’d usually want to make sure he had a spot.”
    “A spot?”
    “We play a sixteen-man scramble with a regular crew,” Cole said. “If you want to play, you have to let us know the night before. Otherwise, one of the extras will get put in your place.”
    “It’s four hours from the Cities,” Lucas said. “The neighbors saw him pull in around three o’clock, which means he left there late. Maybe he didn’t want to take a chance of waking you up.”
    “Maybe not,” Kushner said. “But there’s another problem. He hardly ever went out fishing early in the morning. He’d get up late, have about six cups of coffee and some oatmeal, and then head out to the golf course. We tee off at eleven, five days a week. Then, we’d have a few beers, and head home, and then two or three days a week, down toward dark, we’d head out on the lake, do some walleye fishing. But he hardly ever fished in the morning.”
    Childress jumped in: “But if he got up here too late to play golf, he might’ve just decided to hop in the boat. He’d know he wasn’t playing the next day.”
    The two men looked at each other, then back at Childress and simultaneously shrugged. “It’s possible,” Cole said.
    “Ever see him pee off the back of the boat?” Lucas asked.
    “Does a bear shit in the woods?” Kushner replied.
    “Over the motor.”
    Cole frowned. “Really can’t do that. Have to pee off a corner. You trying to figure out why he fell out . . . if he did fall out?”
    “The boat doesn’t look like one where you’d want to pee over the sides, because of the slanted bottom,” Lucas said. “And the motor was running, and that doesn’t seem likely—”
    “My theory is, he hooked up with something big, a big muskie or something, while he was trolling. Maybe he hooked a walleye and the muskie took it, and he stood up and was trying to land him, and the fish came off and he sorta staggered backwards and went over,” Kushner said. “If he fell over.”
    “Wouldn’t he kill the motor when he got the hit?” Lucas asked.
    “I guess he normally would,” Kushner admitted.
    “ HE wasn’t trolling ,” Cole said suddenly. He looked at his friend. “The boat was going forward. ”
    “Oh . . . shoot. That’s right.” Kushner scratched his forehead. “Brian was a back troller. He worked it slow. If the boat was going forward . . .” He shook his head.
    “Interesting,” Lucas said. “There are three red life jackets hanging by the front door. Did he usually wear one?”
    Cole said, “If it wasn’t too hot, he would. Law says you gotta have one in the boat, and there are crick dicks all over the place. No offense.”
    “Thing is, there wasn’t one in the boat, and if he was wearing one, you think we might’ve found him,” Lucas said.
    Kushner said, “Maybe. It’s a big lake. And the way that boat was driving around by itself, we don’t really know where he went over.”
    Cole added: “He wasn’t wearing one. He only had three life jackets—couldn’t hardly get more than three people in the boat, so that was what he had. Enough for me’n Kush, if we came over in the evening, to go out.”
    There wasn’t much more; on the way out to the cars, Childress asked, “You got what you wanted?”
    “I don’t know,” Lucas said. “Is there a good motel in town?”
    “The casino’s just down the road, that might be best,” he said. “Give me a call if you need anything.”
    Childress took off, and Lucas called Del: “You think of anything?”
    “I went over to Hanson’s house and asked around. One of his neighbors thinks he saw Hanson leave his house