Shooting at Loons by Margaret Maron

here heard the case today and got me a little justice.”
    Now I remembered. Hudpeth owned a fishing pier over on Atlantic Beach.
    “I guess it’s hard to remember every case,” said Willis Hudpeth.
    “No, I remember yours. I gave the defendant a suspended sentence conditional upon his working out a repayment plan with you and paying a fine. You must get a lot of that in season.”
    “Not as much as you might think. Most sportsmen are pretty honest.”
    I shook my head. “Practically all I’ve heard since I got down here is the controversy between recreational and commercial fishermen. I suppose you want to get rid of netters, too.”
    “Well, no, ma’am, not particularly,” he answered, surprising the hell out of me.
    “But I thought pier owners—”
    “Look,” he said patiently. “Drive onto Atlantic Beach and the first pier you come to, Sportsman’s Pier, the first thing you see is that big sign, ‘You Should Have Been Here Yesterday.’ The reason it’s there’s because fishermen always grumble when they don’t catch fish. Maybe they don’t have the right rigs, maybe they don’t know the first thing about fishing, or maybe the fish just aren’t biting that day. You spend a couple of hundred to come down to the coast and you don’t catch anything but pinfish, then you can get mad at yourself or mad at the fish or mad at the pier owner. But if the pier owner says, ‘Hey, pal, it’s them netters out there that’s catching all your fish,’ who you going to blame?”
    “But stop nets do stop fish,” I said, enjoying the novelty of his position enough to play devil’s advocate.
    “Well, of course they do. But if they stopped all the fish, crews on the east would be richer’n Midas and those working the westernmost part of Bogue Banks would be poorer’n Job’s house cat.”
    “You’re a most unusual pier owner, Mr. Hudpeth. I’m surprised you’re here this evening.”
    “Because I don’t agree with Linville Pope’s solution to every problem? Know thy enemy’s what they preach in my church.”
    “Is she the enemy?”
    “Not Willis’s,” said Telford Hudpeth. “And not mine either particularly. No, he means
she’s
the one wants to know who’s thinking what. That’s why she invites people from all walks.”
    “And what’s your walk?” I asked him.
    “Oh, I’m one of those independent fishermen the other pier owners grumble about.”
    I’d already picked up on their “hoi toide” accent, yet it wasn’t just their measured views that intrigued me. Maybe I was stumbling over stereotypes again, but Telford and Willis Hudpeth in their well-cut jackets, oxford cotton shirts, and tailored slacks seemed a far cry from a Harkers Islander like Mahlon Davis.
    “So fishing really can compete with a shore job?”
    He nodded. “Beats flipping hamburgers by a fair bit.”
    His brother laughed. “Buys a brand new car every few years, takes his boys to Europe every summer—yeah, it’s a fair bit.”
    “But how can you make money when so many others complain that sportsmen are running them off the water?”
    “I treat it like a business and I fish the whole cycle,” he answered matter-of-factly. “I shrimp in the spring, long-haul in summer, sink-net in the fall, scallop in the winter.”
    Willis Hudpeth nodded approvingly. “Most islanders, they’ll wait on a shrimp set and wait and wait till they get the gold mine and maybe they’ll bring in two or three hundred pounds. Set out there two or three nights, sometimes longer, and make four or five hundred dollars in just one good night.”
    “So?”
    “So then they won’t go back out again for maybe a week or ten days. Not till their money’s all gone again. Telford here’ll channel-net every night. Maybe only get forty or fifty pounds some nights, but he’s averaging a hundred and fifty, two hundred dollars every night, five nights a week during shrimping season. His hours are just as regular as mine. Just as regular as