Dead in the Water

by Dana Stabenow

  Their luck held. The Avilda was unpursued. They ran flat-out for eight hours through the fog to the beginning of their own string. There followed a grueling twenty-four hours with no stops of pulling pots, re-baiting and resetting them. Toward the end of the string the pots suddenly began coming up loaded, which meant they had worked their way beyond where the pot robbers had stopped or been scared off by the approach of another boat. More crab went in the hold and the atmosphere on deck improved. This trip out the weather was infinitely better, fog or no fog, and the crew worked much more swiftly and efficiently. Although Kate did miss the big swells when it came to shoving pots that outweighed her by 630 pounds across a deck that seemed to have increased considerably in width between this trip and the last.

  They were clearing the deck and covering the hold when a hammering on the bridge window made the deck crew look up. Harry was circling his extended forefinger in the air. He went so far as to open a window and yell, “I’ll bring ’er in, the rest of you get some shut-eye.”

  As before when the skipper had given the signal for home, Ned trotted astern and tossed a short length of one-inch manila line overboard, its bound end looped around a cleat on the stern rail, its free end trailing behind, twisting and turning in the wake of white foam.

  Andy watched covertly from amidships, and nudged Kate when Ned passed forward. “What’s that line for?” he asked in a low voice. “It’s not connected to anything, it’s just dragging behind us.”

  Kate was standing at the railing, her face into the wind, as if the cold, clear sea air could scour her clean of the taint of the night’s activities. Following his gaze, tired as she was, she smiled and replied in the same low voice, “It’s the lady’s line.”

  “The what?”

  She opened the door into the galley. “The lady’s line. It’s an old sailors’ custom, dates back before the whalers, I think.”

  “What does it mean?” he said, following her down the passageway.

  “When it comes time to turn for home, they toss a free line in the water, so the ladies they left behind can pull their loved ones home.”

  Andy thought it over, his face brightening a little. “I like it. It’s got tradition.”

  “Don’t say anything about it,” Kate told him, still in a low voice. “It’s not talked about, it’s just done.”

  He grinned a tired grin. “Don’t want to break the spell, huh?”

  “Do you walk under ladders?”

  His grin faded and he paused, the door to their room halfway open. “Do you let black cats cross your path?” Kate asked him. “When you spill salt, do you quick toss a pinch of it over your shoulder? Do you knock wood when you say something that might tempt fate?” He didn’t answer, of course, and she smiled again, following him into their room. “Don’t say anything about the lady’s line. Nobody likes having their superstitions made fun of.”

  “I don’t care what they do on the Avilda anyway,” he said, his momentary animation passing off, leaving his face white and weary. “I’m getting off this boat, Kate. Anybody who could do that to somebody else’s livelihood… how much does a seven-by cost?”

  “I don’t know. Three, four hundred, something like that.”

  “And all that polypro, and the buoys, and the bait jars. Not to mention the time lost fishing.” He closed his eyes and repeated firmly, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m getting off this boat.”

  She put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “That’s life in the big leagues, Andy.”

  “It’s not my life,” he declared. “And I bet I can find me a skipper who feels the same way. When I do, I’m outta here.” Without another word he stripped down to his longies and climbed into his bunk. The snores that almost immediately issued from the top bunk made Kate wish for as clear a conscience.

  So completely had she been immersed in the role of able-bodied seaman cum apprentice pot pirate that she was halfway out of her own clothes when she remembered why she had signed on the Avilda in the first place. Simultaneously she realized that with the rest of the crew in the sack and the skipper on watch, now was the perfect time to toss Harry Gault’s stateroom.

  Andy didn’t skip a snore when she cracked the door and slipped into the passageway. The snores coming from behind Ned and Seth’s door were so loud she wondered how either of them could sleep. At least she didn’t have to sneak. She wasn’t up to it.

  The skipper’s cabin was the one closest to the galley. True, it was only a step from his door to the stairs leading up to the bridge, but Kate disapproved. The truly conscientious skipper, in her experience, slept in the chart room bunk at sea so as to be close to the bridge, not the galley. Still, it made it easier for her to break and enter, and she was grateful for that if for nothing else.

  Not that there was much breaking to the entering. The door to his cabin was unlocked and swung smoothly and noiselessly inward, closing with a silent click behind her. She flicked on the light.

  It was the same stateroom repeated twice on each side of the passageway, a small square room with over and under bunk beds built into the bulkhead. A single porthole was set between the bunks, drawers beneath the bottom one. What wasn’t standard issue was an old steel desk that had army surplus written all over it jammed in next to the beds, and a two-drawer filing cabinet next to it, same lineage.

  After one look Kate didn’t want to step foot inside the tiny bathroom opening off one side of the room for fear of catching something, what she didn’t know, but something unpleasant was definitely growing in the saucer-sized sink. She didn’t bother looking in the shower, mostly because she was afraid of what she’d find. The drawers beneath the bottom bunk were the dirty clothes hamper and from the smell had been so since sometime last year. She closed the second drawer hastily without bothering to paw through the contents.

  With deep reluctance she turned to the desk. If there was one thing Kate hated more than flying in anything bigger than a Cessna 172, it was paperwork.

  At first all she found were fish tickets and delivery statements. As a matter of curiosity she rummaged until she found the ticket from their last run, and was annoyed but unsurprised to find that Harry Gault had shorted the crew on their shares of the last delivery.

  The engine beat steadily up through the floor. Yawning, she left the desk for the file cabinet. It was locked, but a few moments with a straightened paper clip had the top drawer open. Each drawer was stuffed with paper, but stuffed in an orderly and alphabetical way that belied the confusion of the desk. Jack Morgan could have learned something from Harry Gault’s filing system. She pulled a file and thumbed through it, yawning again and hoping she wasn’t going to nod off. Hairy Gault coming in off watch to find her dozing at his desk might be more than even Kate could explain away.

  The first file she pulled was a collection of lease-purchase agreements between a Henderson Gantry of Ketchikan, Alaska, and various sellers of boats. From the physical description of each boat, most of them appeared to be service boats, tenders that ran between fishing grounds and canneries, or between oil rigs and town carrying supplies and crew changes, or ran pilots out to incoming very large crude carriers on their way in and out of Valdez. Kate thought it looked like the beginning of a fair-sized fleet. All of the agreements were dated in April and May of 1989, and all of them were underwritten by the same bank, in Ketchikan, Alaska. Interesting. A fair-sized fleet all bought at the same time and through not only the same bank but the same loan officer.

  Henderson Gantry. Harry Gault. If they were one and the same, what was Harry doing with all these boats? “I thought you were strictly a hired hand, Harry old buddy,” she murmured. She opened another file, and raised her eyebrows.

  A fair-sized fleet that evidently was not making enough money to meet its mortgage payments. This file held warning notices from a bank. Not a bank, she noticed, but half a dozen different banks, and none of them Alaskan. She went back to the first file, puzzled. Yes, the Southeast First Bank had
financed the purchase of the little fleet—her eyes widened, and she set the second file down on the desk next to the first and searched farther in the file cabinet. She found what she was looking for in short order.

  Almost immediately upon final signing of the original mortgages, all of the boats had been refinanced through other banks, Outside banks, most of them located in the Pacific Northwest, although two were refinanced through two different banks in San Francisco. This time the boats’ owner was listed as a Harley Gruber, with impeccable references and a credit rating that would have made the city of Cleveland gnash its teeth in envy.

  Kate made notes of names, dates, boats and banks, lips pursed around a soundless whistle. Harley Gruber, Henderson Gantry, Harry Gault. In her experience, people who assumed aliases almost always used names beginning with the same initials. “What have you been up to, Harry old buddy,” she said under her breath, “that you need a new name every time you change business partners?”

  She reached for another file and discovered one possible answer.

  The latest file held lease agreements with Royal Petroleum Company. Each of the boats purchased in the Southeast had been leased to RPetCo for use in the cleanup of the RPetCo Anchorage, which had run aground off Bligh Reef in March of 1989 and spilled over ten million gallons of North Slope crude oil across the western half of Prince William Sound. The spill had virtually canceled the salmon fishing season that year, wiped out shrimp beds and entire schools of spawning herring, annihilated ducks and geese and terns and murres by the thousands, killed sea otters—in short, with a large and malicious sense of indiscrimination, the spill had spread a path of death and destruction across eight hundred miles of previously pristine wildlife habitat and Alaskan coastline.

  If Kate lived in the Park, Prince William Sound was her backyard. She had relatives in Cordova and Tatitlek and Valdez and Seldovia and Kodiak and Iliamna who were still hurting from the spill, spiritually and financially, to this day, four years later. If Harry Gault or Henderson Gantry or Harley Gruber or whoever the hell he was had had anything to do with the farce of a cleanup that followed that devastating spill and its many peculiar financial arrangements with a relatively few, select boat owners, she, Ekaterina Ivana Shugak, would personally have Harry Gault’s or Henderson Gantry’s or Harley Gruber’s balls served up on a platter for Sunday brunch. Wide awake now, she went to work with a vengeance.

  As she was finishing up her notes and preparing a second assault on the filing cabinet, there was a thump overhead. There were no other sounds, nothing to indicate that Harry was doing anything but checking the chart, but Kate decided she had pressed her luck far enough. And she had enough to go on with. More than enough. She grinned, thinking of Jack’s expression when he heard her story and saw her notes. The grin faded a little when she remembered Alcala and Brown, and she gave the files a speculative look. Was this information important enough for Harry Gault to kill two men for? She tried to remember, if she had ever known, the penalties for fraud and embezzlement. Her area of expertise had always been assault and murder; white-collar crime was out of her league. She yawned again, and wondered if collusion in the matter of who got the plum jobs on the spill cleanup could be prosecuted under the RICO statutes.

  An involuntary chuckle rippled out of her torn throat. She was getting sleepy again, and silly with it, and it wasn’t her problem anyway. Jack Morgan wanted background on Harry Gault, and background on Harry Gault he would get. Working quickly but not carelessly, she reassembled the documents into their original files and the files into the cabinet. A few more seconds work with the paper clip and it was locked again. Pocketing her notes and cracking the door, she eyed the empty passageway for a moment before slipping outside and pulling the door shut soundlessly behind her.

  She turned and bumped straight into Harry Gault. “Oof.”

  With great restraint she managed to keep herself from bolting down the passageway in a panic. “Oh. Sorry, skipper. I didn’t see you standing there.”

  His eyes flickered between her and the door to his cabin. Had he seen her come out, or had he just come down the stairs from the bridge? “What’re you doing up? I thought I told Ned for everybody to get some shut-eye.”

  She scratched and produced a face-splitting yawn. “I woke up thirsty,” she mumbled in a grumpy voice. The best defense is a good offense, and she gave him an impudent grin. “What about you? What’re you doing down here? Who’s steering the boat?”

  “The autopilot.”

  “Oh.” She manufactured another yawn. “Well, I’m going to get some pop. You want something?”

  “No.” He added grudgingly, “Thanks.”

  “No prob. See you in the A.M.”

  In the galley she stood holding on to the door handle of the refrigerator, her head pressed up against the cold enameled surface, waiting for the shaking in her knees to stop. That had been too close.

  The snores from the top bunk didn’t miss a beat as she stripped and slid into her own. She was so tired she ached with it, but she tossed and turned, unable to shut down her brain. Eventually she fell into a doze and a series of waking dreams, filled with ruined pots rusting on the ocean bottom and avenging fishermen coming after her with boat hooks and bank statements with overdrawn accounts and bills with red warning notices and pink crabs swimming in green gasoline. Sleep deserted her in a rush and she sat bolt upright in bed. “Pink!”

  “What?” Andy’s drowsy, startled voice came from the bunk overhead.

  “Pink!” she said. “Old aviation gas used to be pink! Pink as a tanner’s new shell, by God!”

  There was a brief silence, followed by a click as Andy turned his reading light on. A tousled blond head peered over the side of the bunk. “I beg your pardon?”

  “New aviation gas is green,” she explained. “But the old aviation gas was pink. I remember from helping my foster father gas up his Supercub.”

  The befuddled expression on the upside-down face didn’t change. “And you think I’m weird.”

  The head disappeared, the light went off and Kate was left lying wide-eyed in the dark, her mind busy with this new piece of the puzzle.

  Five

  “OLD AVIATION GAS, what we used to call 80/87, was pink,” Kate told Jack the following afternoon over greasy hamburgers and even greasier fries at the Blow-In Cafe.

  “So?”

  “So the gas in that tank on Anua was green.” He paused in mid-chew and looked uncomprehending. “Don’t you get it? If that gas had been left over from a long time ago, it would have been pink. How long has aviation gas been green?”

  Jack’s face cleared and he swallowed and said, “Somebody’s been using the strip regular enough to need to refuel.”

  Kate bestowed an approving smile on him and he sat up straighter in his chair. “And the strip was maintained, too,” he remembered, “or at least there had been traffic in and out recently. Enough to keep the snow packed down, anyway. Not that there is much out here.” He looked at her. “It surprised me.”

  “What?”

  “So little snow.”

  “The mean winter temperature out here is thirty degrees Fahrenheit,” she told him. “And I think the average snowfall is less than two feet. Plus you’ve got the jet stream just offshore.”

  Jack looked out the window at the wind blowing fog and a few flakes of snow straight down Iliuliuk Bay and shivered inwardly. “A nearly tropical climate,” he agreed. “How’d you do out there, this time? Kill lots of defenseless crabs?”

  “More than we should have.”

  “Oh, my,” he said with his quick grin, “do I detect the tone of someone who has been involved in high seas skulduggery? Have you been keeping five-inchers?”

  “No, just committing grand theft and malicious mischief,” she replied. Her tone was glum; the imp of perverse pleasure she had taken in her first larcenous action had deserted her, and all she could think of was the crew of the Daisy Mae circling round and round, pulling buoys atta
ched to nothing, not even line, and coming into Dutch with an empty hold and an emptier deck.

  Jack sat up straight in his chair, hamburger dripping mustard and grease down his hand and into his sleeve. “Mind telling me what the hell that means?”

  Kate told him about the pot robbing. Jack was more amused than outraged, but then Jack wasn’t a fisherman. “Pretty gutsy of Gault,” he observed.

  “It was dumb,” Kate said flatly. “There’s forty thousand plus pots in the Bering Sea during any given period and hundreds of boats picking them. Not to mention the Fish and Game. It’s a miracle we weren’t caught. If we had been, we would have lost an entire season’s fishing, and you’re talking a gross anywhere between one million to two million dollars.” Jack choked over his next bite of hamburger and had recourse to his Coke to wash it down. Kate, unheeding, punctuated her words with a militant french fry. “And Gault had no proof, none, that it was Johansen who robbed our string.” She noticed the french fry was getting cold and crammed it into her mouth. Around it, she said indistinctly, “Dumb. If Gault hadn’t married into the family, he would have been out on his ear long since.”

  “How long you in for this time?”

  Kate shrugged. “Engine broke down again.”

  “That happened last week.”

  “I get the feeling it happened the week before and the week before that, too. Gault’s not giving the engine the maintenance it needs. He’s not giving the old girl any of the attention she deserves, he just drives her until she breaks, fixes it with spit and baling wire and drives her some more. One of these days she’s going to break down for good. I just hope we’re not out in the doughnut hole when it happens.”