The Last Coyote

story,” he said at the end. “I hope she packed more than two of these.”
    He popped the beer and drank nearly a third of it. It tasted delicious going down his throat in the afternoon sun.
    “Oh, there’s plenty more where that came from,” McKittrick replied. “You want a sandwich?”
    “Not yet.”
    “No, what you want is my story now.”
    “That’s what I came for.”
    “Well, let’s get out there to the fish.”
    He restarted the engine and they followed a trail of channel markers south through the bay. Bosch finally remembered he had sunglasses in the pocket of his sport coat and put them on.
    It seemed like the wind was cutting in on him from all directions and on occasion its warmth would be traded for a cool breeze that would come up off the surface of the water. It was a long time since Bosch had been on a boat or had even been fishing. For a man who had had a gun pointed at him twenty minutes earlier, he realized he felt pretty good.
    As the bay tapered off into a canal, McKittrick pulled back on the throttle and cut their wake. He waved to a man on the bridge of a giant yacht tied up outside a waterside restaurant. Bosch couldn’t tell if he knew the man or was just being neighborly.
    “Take it on a line even with the lantern on the bridge,” McKittrick said.
    “What?”
    “Take it.”
    McKittrick stepped away from the wheel and into the stern of the boat. Bosch quickly stepped behind the wheel, sighted the red lantern hanging at center point beneath the span of a drawbridge a half mile ahead and adjusted the wheel to bring the boat into line. He looked back and saw McKittrick pull a plastic bag of small dead fish out of a compartment in the deck.
    “Let’s see who we’ve got here today,” he said.
    He went to the side of the boat and leaned well over the gunwale. Bosch saw him start slapping an open palm on the side of the boat. McKittrick then stood up, surveyed the water for about ten seconds and repeated the banging.
    “What’s going on?” Bosch asked.
    Just as he said it, a dolphin crested the water off the port stern and reentered no more than five feet from where McKittrick was standing. It was a slippery gray blur and Bosch wasn’t exactly sure at first what had happened. But the dolphin quickly resurfaced next to the boat, its snout out of the water and chattering. It sounded like it was laughing. McKittrick dropped two of the fish into its open mouth.
    “That’s Sergeant, see the scars?”
    Bosch took a quick look back at the bridge to make sure they were still reasonably on line and then stepped back to the stern. The dolphin was still there. McKittrick pointed down into the water beneath its dorsal fin. Bosch could see three white stripes slashed across its smooth gray back.
    “He got too close to a prop one time and it cut him up. The people up at Mote Marine took care of him. But he was left with those sergeant’s stripes.”
    Bosch nodded as McKittrick fed the dolphin again. Without looking up to see if they were off course, McKittrick said, “You better get the wheel.”
    Bosch turned and saw that they had drifted far off line. He went back to the wheel and corrected the course. He stayed there while McKittrick remained in the back, throwing fish to the dolphin, until they passed under the bridge. Bosch decided he could wait him out. Whether it was while they were going out or coming in didn’t matter. He was going to get McKittrick’s story. He was not going to leave without it.
    Ten minutes after the bridge they came to a channel that took them out to the Gulf of Mexico. McKittrick dropped lures from two of the poles into the water and put out about a hundred yards of line on each one. He took the wheel back from Bosch then, yelling into the wind and engine noise.
    “I want to take it out to the reefs. We’ll troll until we’re there and then we’ll do some drift fishing in the shallows. We’ll talk then.”
    “Sounds like a plan,” Bosch yelled back.
    Nothing hit either of the lures, and about two miles from the shore McKittrick killed the engines and told Bosch to bring in one line while he handled the other. It took Bosch, who was left handed, a few moments to get himself coordinated on the right-handed reel but then he started smiling.
    “I don’t think I’ve done this since I was a kid. At McClaren every now and then they’d put us on a bus and take us out to the Malibu Pier.”
    “Jesus, that pier still there?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Must