"MacDonald, John - Travis Mcgee 07 - Darker Than Amber" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacDonald John D)

and the bright neckties and the scatological jokes and the incipient
coronary accident.

Chugging away from Flamingo at low cruise after dropping my passenger, I
had the dreary feeling Charlie was going to snare her again and extract
double penalties for the little attempt to escape. I was getting oil
pressure fluctuation on the starboard diesel and had a friend in
Marathon who would take a look at it without trying to find some
plausible 1' way to pick my pocket, so I aimed her in that direction.

My pockets were reasonably hefty. Enough to give me a chance to enjoy
another installment of my sporadic retirement. By the end of the year
I'd have to dig up a new prospect, somebody so anxious to recover what
was legally his that he'd give me half its value for getting it back,
half being decidedly better than nothing.

The repair was a minor job, one I could have done myself if I'd been
able to diagnose it. I heard the word on the snook hole, remembered the
way Meyer would talk a good one up to the side of the boat, and that was
how we happened to be under the bridge in a rented skiff Monday
midnight, casting the active surface plugs into a splendid snook hole,
with the skiff tied to one of the bridge pilings. In the current boil
of the incoming tide they had been feeding nicely. I'd had good results
with a Wounded Spook with a lot of spinning clattering hardware on it to
fuss up the water and irritate them. We'd hooked into at least ten good
ones, lost seven amid the pilings, boated three in the eight to
twelve-pound range. But we were down to that just-one-more cast.

After midnight on a Monday in June, traffic is exceedingly sparse. The
concrete bridge span was about twenty feet above the water. We were in
the shadows under the bridge. I heard a car coming; it seemed to be
slowing down. There was a sudden screech of brakes overhead. And,
moments later, the girl came down. She came down through the orange
glow of bridge lights and the white pallor of moonlight. Feet first.
Pale skirt fluttered upward baring the long legs. Just one glimpse of
that, and she chunked into the water five feet off the bow of the skiff,
splashing us, disappearing. Motor roared, tires squealed, car rocketed
off.

It was a forty-foot drop for her. Twenty feet of air, twenty feet of
depth. I would have expected her to bob up but for one thing. She hit
my line. The surface plug was a few feet beyond where she hit. And she
took it right on down to the bottom, and there the plug stopped taking
out line against the drag.

I had 10-pound mono on that reel. I pulled at it, and it held firm. I
tossed my wallet into the bottom of the skiff, shoved my rod at Meyer
and asked him to keep the line tight. I yanked my boat shoes off, went
over the side, took a deep breath and let half of it out, and pulled
myself down the monofilament, hand over hand, sliding my hands along it,