Here’s hoping you land a sail.’

‘I just hope we can still get a boat. Do you think they’ll all be taken?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s the off-season. And I’ve already talked to Holt; he’s open tomorrow. I’ll call now and confirm.’

‘I hate to keep bothering you with questions,’ she apologized, ‘but what shall I take? What time do we leave, and how long are we out?’

‘What room are you in?’ I asked. ‘If you’re dressed, I could come over—’

The brush was polite, but firm. She was about to go to bed. She repeated the questions.

‘Hat, or fishing cap,’ I said. ‘Long sleeves, dark glasses, tan lotion. That sun is murder. We’ll leave the dock at eight, and come in around four-thirty or five. They furnish the tackle; all we have to bring is our lunch. There’s a restaurant on Roosevelt that’ll be open. I don’t have a car, but I’ll call a cab—’

‘I have one,’ she interrupted. ‘I’ll meet you in the parking area behind the motel at seven-thirty. Will that be all right?’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Just one other thing,’ she asked. ‘Could you tell me what the outriggers are for?’

I wondered why she wanted to go into that in the middle of the night over the phone, but shrugged. She seemed to have an insatiable curiosity about the mechanics of big-game fishing.

‘They serve several purposes,’ I told her. ‘The line is run out from your rod tip and trolled from the end of the outrigger, clipped in a gizmo like a big clothes-pin. Takes the load off your arms, for one thing. And it’s springy on the end, so it gives the bait a good action. But the big reason, of course, is the automatic dropback when a sailfish strikes. I suppose the book told you that a billfish of any kind always stuns his bait before he takes it in his mouth. So when he raps it with that bill, it snaps the line off the outrigger; that releases about twenty feet of slack, and the bait stops dead in the water. Just as if it had been alive and he’d killed it.’

‘I see,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Well, thank you very much, Mr. Hamilton. I’m looking forward to it, and I’ll see you in the morning.’

After she’d hung up I lay there thinking about her, studying the whole thing a little warily. She didn’t ring true, somehow. Then I dismissed the worry.