“Hang on, Dean!” Clarissa shouted.
Jak kept trying to work his jacket into position, but he was short by a couple of feet.
“Give me pants,” he said.
Without hesitation, Clarissa slid off her pants, stepped out of them and tied one of the legs to Jak’s jacket sleeve. Then she held Jak’s arm while he tried reaching Dean.
This time the pant leg landed over Dean’s hands. With a quick movement of his right hand, the boy grabbed the pant leg. Then, with it securely wrapped around his wrist, he let go of the rock.
“Pull!” Jak said, straining against the current.
“Jak, the fish!”
The albino teen looked past Dean. The fish was swimming against the current toward their fallen friend, as if Dean were bait at the end of a line. They continued to reel him in, but they couldn’t pull fast enough. With a mighty flip of its tail the fish lunged forward, its upper lip brushing up against Dean’s boots.
“Hurry up!” Dean yelled.
The fish kept coming, and Jak realized that even after they pulled Dean in, the mutie fish would still be able to move upstream against the current with its belly against the bottom and water flowing through its gills to breathe.
The shallow rapids weren’t any protection against this fish. They were all in danger.
“Take jacket,” Jak said, handing the sleeve to Clarissa so she could hold on to it with him while he pulled his .357 Colt Python from its holster.
Dean, seeing the big six-inch barrel of Jak’s blaster pointed in his direction, ducked his head, plunging it under the water to get it out of the way.
Jak fired off two rounds that smashed into the fish’s great head. The powerful rounds punched holes in its skull and tore big bloody swaths through its soft body. Chunks of blood, brain and meaty flesh exploded out the sides of its body. But it was still moving for Dean. Jak squeezed off another two rounds, catching the fish in one of its eyes with the first shot and blowing away the entire left side of its mouth with the other.
Blood began to turn the river around the fish a pinkish red, and it began to lose the battle with the current and slowly started to float away.
With the danger of the fish now gone, Clarissa and Jak were able to quickly pull Dean to safety.
“I’ve done a lot of things in the time I’ve been with Dad,” Dean commented, when he was back on his feet and squeezing water out of his clothes. “But I never thought I’d be used as fish bait.”
Jak stood in silence, watching the big fish float downriver, toward the lake. “Fish getting away. Not tell J.B.”
Clarissa began putting on her sodden pants. “Well, we can always try the whirlpool. That was the plan in the beginning anyway.”
But then the fish was caught by an eddy in the river, and it turned sideways against the current. As if by design, it washed up on the north shore, across the river from Whirlpool Point. They’d be able to cut as many steaks as they wanted out of the fish, and the carcass would feed Clarissa’s mutie clan for days to come.
“Hot pipe!” Dean exclaimed. “We’ll tell J.B. all about it. He won’t believe a word of it, but we can tell him.”
They hurried across the river.
“WHERE’S THE FISH?” J.B. asked when the door to the underground garage rolled up and Jak, Clarissa and Dean slid under the bottom gap.
“Floating in the river,” Dean answered.
Doc rubbed his empty stomach. “Are you saying that you did not chill a single fish?”
“Chilled one fish,” Jak said, a burlap sack slung over his shoulder.
“Just one,” J.B. said, working to loosen something in the cockpit of the P-39. “Don’t tell me. All the rest got away, right?”
“Nope.” Dean smiled. “After Jak chilled that one fish, it floated downriver and we didn’t need to chill any more.”
“Washed up on shore,” Jak said, dropping the sack at Doc’s feet.
“But a half-ton fish was too big to bring back here,” Clarissa said, “so we decided to bring back fifty pounds of fish steaks instead. Hope that’s enough.”