Read Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings for Free Online Page A

life.
    "You have any idea what he said?" Nate asked. He quickly crossed the room and snatched the negatives away from Kona.
    "I think it's from the 'Jabberwocky,' " Clay replied. "You gave him cash to get the film processed? You can't give him cash."
    "And this lonely stash can to fill with the sacred herb," Kona said. "I'll find me papers, and we can take the ship home to Zion, mon."
    "You can't give him money and an empty film can, Nate. He sees it as a religious duty to fill it up."
    Nate had pulled the contact sheet out of the envelope and was examining it with a loupe. He checked it twice, counting each frame, checking the registry numbers along the edge. Frame twenty-six wasn't there. He held the plastic page of negatives up to the light, looked through the images twice and the registry numbers on the edges three times before he threw them down, checked the earlier frames that Amy had shot of the whale tail, then crossed the room and grabbed Kona by the shoulders. "Where's frame twenty-six, goddamn it? What did you do with it?"
    "This just like I get it, mon. I didn't do nothing."
    "He's a criminal, Clay," Nate said. Then he grabbed the phone and called the lab.
    All they could tell him was that the film had been processed normally and picked up from the bin in front. A machine cut the negatives before they went into the sleeves – perhaps it had snipped off the frame. They'd be happy to give Nate a fresh roll of film for his trouble.
    * * *
    Two hours later Nate sat at the desk, holding a pen and looking at a sheet of paper. Just looking at it. The room was dark except for the desk lamp, which reached out just far enough to leave darkness in all the corners where the unknown could hide. There was a nightstand, the desk, the chair, and a single bed with a trunk set at its end, a blanket on top as a cushion. Nathan Quinn was a tall man, and his feet hung off the end of the bed. He found that if he removed the supporting trunk, he dreamed of foundering in blue-water ocean and woke up gasping. The trunk was full of books, journals, and blankets, none of which had ever been removed since he'd shipped them to the island nine years ago. A centipede the size of a Pontiac had once lived in the bottom-right corner of the trunk but had long since moved on once he realized that no one was ever going to bother him, so he could stand up on his hind hundred feet, hiss like a pissed cat, and deliver a deadly bite to a naked foot. There was a small television, a clock radio, a small kitchenette with two burners and a microwave, two full bookshelves under the window that looked out onto the compound, and a yellowed print of two of Gauguin's Tahitian girls between the windows over the bed. At one time, before the plantations had been automated, ten people probably slept in this room. In grad school at UC Santa Cruz, Nathan Quinn had lived in quarters about this same size. Progress.
    The paper on Nate's desk was empty, the bottle of Myers's Dark Rum beside it half empty. The door and windows were open, and Nate could hear the warm trades rattling the fronds of two tall coconut palms out front. There was a tap on the door, and Nate looked up to see Amy silhouetted in the doorway. She stepped into the light.
    "Nathan, can I come in?" She was wearing a T-shirt dress that hit her about midthigh.
    Nate put his hand over the paper, embarrassed that there was nothing written on it. "I was just trying to put a plan together for -" He looked past the paper to the bottle, then back at Amy. "Do you want a drink?" He picked up the bottle, looked around for a glass, then just held the bottle out to her.
    Amy shook her head. "Are you all right?"
    "I started this work when I was your age. I don't know if I have the energy to start it all over again."
    "It's a lot of work. I'm really sorry this happened."
    "Why? You didn't do it. I was close, Amy. There's something that I've been missing, but I was close."
    "It will still be there. You know, we have the