Busted by Dad, Judged by Mom

Danny Voss is 28 and works a $3,400-a-month day job at a water utility writing articles that tell people to save water. In the dark he is The Skunk, the masked fishing reviewer with 15,268,904 followers and $880,000 declared and taxed over the past twelve months, funded by 697 secret night trips covered with excuses about overtime and team building. His father is a lieutenant in the Kessler County Sheriff's Office marine unit. His mother is a judge in the environmental resources division of the circuit court. On the first night of the closed season he is caught on the north bank of the Cypress Reservoir, twenty-seven meters inside the protected core, and the next four days have to decide what the thing he built in the dark is worth once it is read out loud: in a family hearing at the stool in his parents' apartment, in an interview room with an air conditioner too loud for the room, and in a courtroom his mother has already formally recused herself from because the case now carries her son's name. Nobody in the story wants him to lose everything. Two of them want him to lose it on their terms.