"What's he do with the salmon?"

Lamar shrugged. "He's a middleman for the gourmet fish processing industry. Probably a lot of folks with more money than sense willing to pay top dollar for the first king up the Kanuyaq."

"But they won't be," Kate said, adding, at his look, "the fish he buys after today. They won't be the first fish up."

Lamar smiled kindly at her. "That's why they call it marketing, Kate."

Kate sat back in the booth. "Right. My mistake."

The shock of Tim's news was giving way to indignation. Four out of five of the men in the room had boat and insurance payments due in September. Three out of five of them would lose their impellers at least once during the summer, two of the five would snag a drifting log, known colloquially as a deadhead, in their gearor a monster halibut, Kate thoughtand rip it beyond repair, and at least one of the five would have trusted his rebuilt engine one season too many, break down and miss out on the remainder of the fishing season altogether. They all went head to head with the IRS every year of their working lives, which bureaucracy failed repeatedly to understand why fishermen had difficulty in making quarterly tax payments on arbitrarily set dates that had nothing whatever to do with when fish were or were not in the Sound.

And now, with the prospect of the first good run in five years, the price per pound was dropping almost before they'd had a chance to get their nets wet. It wasn't five minutes after Tim had burst into the room that the word "Strike!" was hanging in the air.

A brunette shorter than Kate whose brown uniform was belted around her petite body with as much style as a burlap sack came in the door and spotted Lamar. She waded through the incipient mob to their table. Strong men gave way at her approach, probably due to the sour smell of vomit that emanated from her in a miasmic cloud. It reached the booth well :n advance of the trooper herself.

Lamar looked her over, taking in the stained front of her uniform shirt, and said with more severity than Kate had thought him capable of, "Becky, I told you, you go up to count rish, not watch the trees. Leave the flying to the pilot and you'll be fine."

An expression of nausea crossed Becky's face, and she swallowed hard.

"So what's the story?" Lamar said.

She fished a slip of paper out of her pocket. "We're over," she said, handing it to him.

Some of the stain had soaked through the pocket. Lamar touched only corners of the paper with the tips of his fingers, and held it as far away as he could and still read it. He nodded. "Way over. Okay then, put out the word. We're open Wednesday, six to six."

He handed the paper back, and Becky folded it and stowed it carefully in the same pocket as before. Kate wondered if it would become part of the official record of this fishing period. She also wondered how many official records were marked with the puke of fledgling fish hawks, trying to reconcile their stomachs with a profession that kept them in the air in a small plane for half of their working lives. It was one way to weed out the faint of heart.