Pulling broadside to the trawler, Casey keeps shooting.
“Good afternoon!”
“Fuck you and die!” shouts Black Hat.
“How much do you get for a pound of thresher fin?”
“No sharks. No fins. This is all legal. License paid.”
“Well, that’s quite a fantasy, Mr. Hat. What port are you out of?”
“Don’t you take video.”
He’s Asian looking, but it’s hard to tell with the hat shading his face. Young, ripped chest like he works out.
The finners keep slicing away and throwing mutilated sharks overboard, barely looking up.
“How can you do that to living things for money?” Casey asks. And considers the dark parallels between what they’re all doing out here. I’m fishing, too, he notes.
“Feed family,” says Black Hat. “Buy American dream. No video. No Fish and Wildlifes to come after us.”
Casey has more than enough video to post. He can edit it down and shoot a sign-off later at home. Post tonight after dinner, PST, a perfect time here, though not so perfect for the East Coast. He lowers his phone, takes another clip of Mae’s trusting face. He’s got, like, tons of posts across his platforms, containing more videos of Mae, probably, than any other creature than himself.
“This is majorly uncool,” he says. “You should think about what you’re doing,” he says. “There are other ways to make a living out here. She’s generous, this ocean.”
“Shut up. Go.”
“I’ll report you to Fish and Wildlife and the Shark Stewards if I see you out here again.”
The finners are still cutting and dropping the bloody black fish into the deep blue water. Pink contrails descend. The finners are laughing now, looking down at Casey. One waves a knife at him.
Casey sets his phone back in the steering cabinet, guns Moondance into a wide one-eighty, and away.
He’s only half an hour from the Oceanside Harbor boat launch—it’s much faster to trailer Moondance from Laguna to Oceanside to fish Desperation Reef—when he sees the ratty blue-and-red trawler lurching at a good pace toward him from the south.
Empress II flies a red-smeared white flag and through his Leicas Casey sees Black Hat waving. He slows and turns Moondance toward the craft.
Comes to a rest within shouting distance.
“We talk!” Black Hat yells.
Casey nudges the throttle, eases Moondance a little closer.
“Don’t post video!”
“I will if I see you finning again.”
“We make a living. We are legal.”
“Come on, bud—you know it’s against the law.”
“If you show or post or tell Fish and Wildlifes, it would be bad for my family. And for you.”
“I don’t groove on threats.”
Suddenly two boats appear from the west. Bigger than Moondance, and coming fast. They converge, Mae sitting up alertly and Casey retrieving his phone, reading trouble.
“Oh fudge, Mae, we have a situation.”
He emails the shark-finning video to himself as the vessels decelerate, lunging deeply—a dark green Luhrs and a Bayliner. He furtively trades out his good phone for his cheap backup burner.
The two boats then post up a little behind him, one to port and the other starboard. No names, no numbers. With big Empress II at the apex, they’ve got Casey in a bobbing triangle. Moondance rocks steeply in the wakes.
Casey sees three people on each newly arrived boat. Men and women both. The ones on the Luhrs look Asian but it’s hard to tell with the ball caps and bandanas and gaiters. Aboard the Bayliner are a husky Latino or maybe Middle Eastern guy, a lanky Black man, and a wiry red-headed white dude with both arms sleeved in tattoos. Casey can’t guess what nationality the women are.
From the Luhrs, a female voice cuts through the rattle of Casey’s idling engine:
“Hands up, surf dude!”
Most of the crew on the Bayliner and the Luhrs draw handguns and point them at Casey.
Whose guts drop and knees freeze. Hates guns. He got robbed once in Todos Santos, Baja, at gunpoint, and to his humiliation, peed. These pirate pistols look big and rusted. His brother, Brock, has much better guns than these, Casey thinks. He has no defenses except the flare gun, stowed back in the cabin. And two long fillet knives, sharp as razors, secured under the lid of the bait well, a gaff and a fish billy. None of them a match for guns. And there’s no way he could stab somebody or stick them with that gaff anyhow.
Suddenly, with a muffled thud, a gangplank drops from the green Luhrs onto the sturdy gunwale of Moondance.
It’s a well-padded thing, surfboard-wide, with filthy carpet fragments nailed through soft foam to a long flexing beam, down which strides a black-haired woman in black cargo pants, a black windbreaker, and a handgun holstered to her hip.
She’s aboard Moondance before Casey can get to the gangplank and pitch her into the sea. He doesn’t even try, believing her comrades might just shoot him. Mae approaches the woman, mouth open and tail wagging.
