looked at the screen. It was a console with a black and green display and it showed cartoony images of fish drifting past with numbers attached to them. Jellinek explained the size of the images correlated to the size of the fish, and the numbers told how far down they were. “Fish-finder’s the best cheat there is,” he said. “When you got three hours and you’ve made your clients a promise, you can’t dick around casting into the dark.”
Tate was looking over their shoulders. “Obviously you’ve never been on an OPS investigation. Can you get that thing to scan the bottom for us?”
“It won’t be much use. It can’t pick out something lying against the lakebed.”
“What if it’s floating slightly off the bottom?”
“Maybe,” said Jellinek. “But it can tell a fish from a log and it’s not going to find you a log, you know. It’s not a log-finder.”
“Do it anyway,” said Tate, tilting a black handheld device back and forth in his palm. “Start over there” – he pointed at a spot five hundred metres to the right from where they were – “and crisscross back and forth.”
“You’re the boss,” he said.
“No,
he’s
the boss,” said Tate, gesturing at Wingate. “Right, Boss?”
“I’m
acting
boss,” he said. “The real boss is in the car.”
“You’re the acting CO for an acting CO, right? You guys have commitment issues?” “Funding issues, Officer.”
“Ah. Not
your
commitment issues then, eh?” He squinted into the thing he was holding. “Okay, here we go. Can you write this down, Detective?”
“What is that?”
“GPS. Write this down: latitude 44.9483, longitude 79.4380.”
Wingate wrote down the coordinates, and Jellinek reversed the boat to the point Tate had told him to start. Calberson had sat the whole time at the back of the boat staring off at one of the islands. Wingate imagined he wasn’t a guy whose little tasks had a lot of happy endings. His thick goggles hung against his chest.
The boat moved slowly across the surface of the water. They kept their eyes on the fish-finder. “Goddamn waste,” said Jellinek as what appeared to be a school of ten or more fish drifted across the screen. “Bass. Four-pounders.”
“They’ll be bigger tomorrow,” said Tate.
“They’ll be gone tomorrow.”
They made three crossings and saw nothing the finder didn’t image as a something you’d roll in breadcrumbs and fry in butter. Behind the boat, some of the fish were hitting the surface, making rings in the water.
“Stop there,” said Tate. Jellinek cut the motor. There was something in the finder at nine metres. It was massive compared to the bass they’d been watching get off scot-free. Wingate’s stomach flipped. He’d been hoping all along it would turn out to be a goose chase.
“Well,” said Jellinek, “either this lake is sprouting tuna, or there’s your man.”
“Let’s get down there then.” Calberson was up at Tate’s signal, shrugging the tank onto his back and shoving the mouthpiece between his teeth. He pulled the goggles down over his eyes. He hadn’t said a word yet. “You good to go?” asked Tate.
Calberson gave him a thumbs-up and sat on the edge of the boat with his back to the water. Tate smacked his tank hard, some kind of superstition between the two men. “Go,” he said.
Calberson pushed himself backwards off the boat and hit the water with a heavy splash. Wingate saw Jellinek shake his head ruefully. Then Calberson was gone and the surface was still again. They returned their attention to the finder, which showed Calberson as a kind of shark under the boat. It gave hima sleek missile-like form and translated his flippers as a long, forked tail. The number on his body grew as he descended. Five, seven, nine metres. His sharkform tracked slowly toward the tunaform, and finally obscured it. “Let’s get the claw over the side,” said Tate, and he handed a hook attached to a thick cable to Wingate, who dropped