Read The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1) for Free Online

issuing warnings, handing out summonses, and making arrests. Wherever I went in the woods, I traveled with the heart-heavy knowledge that I was alone and without backup, that the most apparently casual encounter could turn bad on me if I let down my guard, and that if I ran into trouble, I should probably not expect help any time soon.
     
    After leaving the Square Deal, I decided to drive north along Indian Pond. I swung past a couple of roadside turnouts—shady places along the bank of the pond where you could cast out into the weed beds for smallmouth or pickerel—but no one was fishing this early. Across the pond, though, I got a glimpse of the public boat launch. Someone in a black SUV was backing a big powerboat on a trailer down the ramp into the water. I decided to say hello.
    By the time I arrived at the ramp, the powerboat was already in the water. A boy who looked to be about nine years old stood on the shore, holding a nylon rope that kept the boat from floating off across the pond. The sport-utility vehicle, a new-looking Chevy Suburban with so much chrome it reflected the sun like a mirror, had pulled up the road to park. As my truck rolled to a stop at the top of the ramp, the boy gave a quick look in the direction of the SUV.
    I saw right off that there were no registration stickers on the bow of the boat. “Good morning,” I said.
    The boy didn’t answer or make eye contact. He was a scrawny, dark-haired kid, dressed in a T-shirt and a baggy bathing suit.
    I took a step toward him. “That’s a sharp boat you’ve got.”
    The boy glanced again up the road. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a man climb from the Suburban.
    I tried a new approach. “You going fishing this morning?”
    The boy nodded, almost imperceptibly.
    “Hey!” The driver of the SUV came walking up fast, holding a pair of spinning rods, one in each fist. He was dressed in a lavender polo shirt and white tennis shorts, and he wore a gold chain around one tanned wrist. His shoulders, neck, and chest were corded with muscle as if from lifting weights in a gym, but his legs looked like they belonged to a skinny teenager. “What’s going on here?”
    “Your son and I were just talking about fishing.”
    “Is that so?” The man approached within a few feet of me, his eyes on a level with my own. An invisible, aromatic cloud of aftershave hung around his head.
    “You two headed out for the day?” I asked.
    “That’s right.”
    “You’ll find some good-sized smallmouth at the south end of the lake where the creek flows in.”
    He didn’t answer at first. “You wanna see my fishing license, right?”
    It wasn’t the way I’d wanted the conversation to go, but so be it. “Thank you. Yes, I would.”
    He transferred both of the rods into one hand and reached into his back pocket. He handed me a folded piece of paper. It was a fifteen-day, nonresident fishing license issued to an Anthony De-Salle, of Revere, Massachusetts. In the summertime it seemed that the entire population of Greater Boston participated in a mass invasion of the Maine coast. You could sit along Route 1, watching the traffic crawl north to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, and for minutes at a time you wouldn’t see a Maine license plate. Tourism was the lifeblood of the local economy, and so it was probably inevitable that these summer people—with their flashy cars and fat wallets—provoked equal amounts of love and hate among my neighbors in Sennebec.
    “And your registration for the boat, too, please,” I said.
    “You gotta be kidding.”
    “No, sir. I’m not. You have no registration stickers on your boat.”
    “I just got them yesterday.”
    “You need to put them on.”
    “I haven’t even gone out onto the fucking water yet!”
    The little boy was watching us with wide eyes.
    “Watch your language, please,” I said.
    “My language? Jesus Christ.” He rummaged in his pocket for his registration. Then, realizing he didn’t have it on