Excerpt from The Marauders by Tom Cooper, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"No you ain't. How many times I gotta tell you about those sting-a- rees?

All I need, a trip to the hospital."

Wes lobbed a croaker back into the water.

"Jesus Christ," his father said. "End of the world out here." It took them several minutes to toss the pile off the boat. Most of the fish and crabs swam back into the bayou's keep, but a few lay stunned on top of the water, finning in dazed circles.

His father climbed back up into the wheelhouse and again Wes lowered the nets. While the Bayou Sweetheart moved along the pandemonium of boats, he checked his watch. The hands told him that it was half past two. His eyes felt hot and grainy and he wanted nothing more than to have this whole ordeal behind him. He longed for a shower and the cool clean sheets of his bed. But he knew they'd be out here for several hours more at least. Maybe days.

If he and his father didn't kill one another first.

* * *

When Wes and his father docked at Monsieur Montegut's two days later, it was an orange and foggy dawn. Three young deckhands in creaking rubber waders scrambled aboard the Bayou Sweetheart and scooped the shrimp into huge woven baskets. Whenever a shrimp fell onto the deck, seagulls swooped down and lit on the gunwales. One would snatch up the small pink morsel and wing away, a cawing mob chasing after.

The deckhands carried the baskets onto the dock and poured the shrimp into sorting vats. Then the shrimp were separated from the ice and dumped onto a rusty conveyor belt that rattled and groaned into the bargeboard tin-roofed shed, where the shrimp were loaded onto a scale.

The first weigh-ins of May and August were always the tensest, the bellwethers of the spring and fall seasons. Some years the bayou was such a miser that Mother Nature seemed to be telling the trawlers to give up. Other years, few and far between, seemed blessed, the Barataria giving up more shrimp than they dared hope for. Old-timers talked about the fabled hauls of the twenties and thirties, the apocryphal salad days. How the swamp hadn't been the same since the oil companies brought in their diggers and started chewing up the land. Nowadays, trawlers considered themselves lucky if they made enough to pay their bills and feed their families. And if they ended up with a little more on the side to squirrel away—lagniappe— that was nothing short of a miracle.

When the deckhands finished unloading their haul, Wes and his father stepped off the boat and walked down the splintery dock into the open-sided weighing shed. Monsieur Montegut stood rheumy-eyed and haggard behind the scale, a cigarette dangling from the crimp of his mouth. He shook their hands. Told them that if the price of shrimp went down any further he was going to sail out to one of the British Petroleum oil rigs and blow the fucking thing up himself.

"Well, let's see what you have here," Montegut said. "Sure you two got better things to do than socialize with my old ass." First Monsieur Montegut weighed their total haul. Seven hundred and twenty-six pounds. Not nearly as much as Wes and his father had hoped for.

"These look a whole lot bigger than some I've been seeing," Montegut said. "You shoulda seen the last guy. Lucky Sevens? Not a one bigger than my pinkie. And I got the hands of a geisha girl."

Wes's father huffed a polite laugh through his nose.

There was still some hope, Wes knew. The total weight of their haul didn't matter as much as the size of the shrimp, how many it took to make a pound. If it took only thirty or thirty-five shrimp to make a pound, they were in business. If it took sixty or seventy, then the trawling expedition was a bust.

Wes's father lit a cigarette and watched as Montegut took a metal ice scoop and dug into the pile of shrimp. These he dumped on a smaller butcher scale. Montegut added four or five shrimp to the scale until the red needle quivered up to two pounds. Then he transferred the shrimp to a waist-high wooden table and began counting. His puffy lips moved and his stubby fingers flicked as he tallied.

Excerpted from The Marauders by Tom Cooper. Copyright © 2015 by Tom Cooper. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.