Dead in the Water

by Dana Stabenow

  She liked Andy Pence. He was very attractive in his youth and his innocence, and his boundless enthusiasm for all things Alaskan had rekindled her own. She might not have been so open to Olga’s tales and teachings had she not been first exposed to Andy’s enthusiastic and indiscriminatory endorsement of all things Alaskan. Oh, she would have gone along with the old woman, would have listened to her, might even have taken a few winds with a weaver on a spoke, but it would have been in a mood of amused tolerance and only as a means to an end; specifically, a way to weasel herself into the old woman’s confidence. Instead, she had been an actively interested participant. All her childhood she had listened to the stories and watched the ivory carvers and the basket weavers and the oomingmak knitters and kayak builders, but she had resisted taking an active part, chiefly, she realized now with no little chagrin, because of her grandmother’s determination that she would.

  The discovery that Andy’s company was a pleasure, New Age enthusiasms and all, was a distinct shock. It was not enough, however, to take him into her confidence. Not yet. “Andy, I’m grateful for what you did last night,” she said, meeting his eyes frankly. “I’d about had it. I’m not sure I could have climbed back aboard without help. But I can’t tell you what’s going on. For one thing, I’m not sure myself. For another, the less you know, the safer you are.”

  He looked frustrated, and she said, “When it’s over, I’ll tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Harry Gault and Ned Nordhoff and Seth Skinner but were afraid to ask.” She stuck out her hand. “Deal?”

  He hesitated. “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  He took her hand with no enthusiasm. “Okay,” he grumbled. “Deal.”

  “In the meantime, I’ve got to trust you,” she told him.

  “You’ve got to keep all this under your hat.”

  He was hurt. “Of course.” He looked at her, a speculative gleam in his clear blue eyes. “You’re not really a fisherman, are you?”

  She smiled and admitted, “I’m not even a fisherwoman.”

  “Never mind,” he said, consoling her on the mortification she undoubtedly felt at having this disgraceful admission wrung from her. “You’re out here now. Even if it is on the Avilda, Even if you are working for Harry Gault. And you know, Kate? You are pretty good at it.”

  “Why, thank you, Andy,” she said gravely, and burst out laughing in his affronted face.

  *

  It took the Avilda fourteen hours to make her way back to Dutch, and when they tied up at the dock it was too late for Kate to go find Jack. She rose early the following morning and was in the galley assembling breakfast when she heard the thump of feet hitting the deck. The starboard door swung open and she looked up. She recognized him at once. It was the shark who had tried to pick her up in the Shipwreck Bar.

  It was obvious that he remembered her, too. He looked her over, an unpleasant grin spreading across his face, and unconsciously her hand took a firmer grip on the knife that was slicing Jimmy Dean’s Pure Pork Sausage into neat rounds. “Well now,” he said with a geniality as mocking as it was menacing. “Look what we have here.” He took a step toward her, and every muscle in her body tightened.

  “What the hell do you want?”

  Kate closed her mouth and looked around. Harry Gault stood in the passageway, glaring at the shark.

  “Why, Harry,” the shark said, all his teeth showing,

  “I’m just making a neighborly visit.” He winked. “How was the fishing last trip?”

  “I told you never to come down here,” Harry snapped.

  The shark looked at Kate. “I can see why,” he drawled. “If only I’d known I’da been after you to share the wealth.”

  Kate kept her face carefully blank and went back to frying sausage and flipping French toast. The shark strolled over to stand close enough behind her for her to smell his after-shave, which seemed to have been applied with a garden hose.

  He sniffed. “Smells good, sweetheart,” he said, his voice low, his tone insinuating.

  He rubbed up against her back and her eyes narrowed to slits. “I wish I could say the same,” she purred.

  “You’ve obviously met,” Harry said with awful sarcasm.

  The shark heaved a mournful sigh. “At the Shipwreck, week before last. But she ran off with somebody else, didn’t you, babe?”

  “That so?” Harry said, looking at Kate through narrowed, assessing eyes.

  “Yup,” the shark said sadly. “Big fucking dude, walks slow, talks slow, but moves pretty goddam fast when it comes to the ladies. Isn’t that right, babe?” A hand settled on her waist and prepared to slip down over her hip.

  Harry swore. “I told you, Shugak, I warned you, no fucking around on the Avilda! You—”

  Kate pried the hand loose and turned. “First of all,” she told the shark sweetly, “I am not your sweetheart, or your babe. Secondly”—and she looked at Harry Gault with a straight, level gaze—“I told you that your crew was safe from seduction, and they have been. But what I do off this boat is my business, with or without slow-talking, slow-walking men.” She turned back to the stove, feeling the gazes of both men fixed on her, one suspicious, the other lascivious, ignoring them both.

  The shark didn’t like being ignored and was preparing to say so, but Harry growled, “Let’s go up to the bridge.”

  Contriving to squeeze past Kate when there was more than enough room to walk around, the shark followed.

  Kate finished cooking breakfast, loaded two plates and climbed the stairs to the bridge. Hearing voices in the chart room and finding the door closed, she kicked it a couple of times. “Skipper? You in there?”

  There was a thump, not unlike the hasty closing of a suitcase, followed by whispers and a dragging sound. The door slid open and Harry glared at her.

  “I brought up your breakfast.” She met his suspicious eyes with an expression as guileless as she could manage, and looked past him at the shark, for whom she still had no name, noticing along the way a rectangular object, just the size—surprise, surprise—of one of those shiny silver metal suitcases photographers use to pack their equipment, covered by a hastily tossed, olive-green army blanket. There must have been a locker hidden somewhere in the chart room. “And a plate for your guest.”

  The shark grinned, employing every tooth back to and including all four wisdoms. A lesser woman might have felt like Little Red Riding Hood but Kate never had intimidated well. “All this and she can cook, too? Honey, you’re the answer to a red-blooded American male’s prayer. Harry, old buddy, you’ve been holding out on me.”

  Kate set both plates down on the empty chart table, contriving to step on the blanket on the way and expose a corner of the suitcase. Aluminum, shiny, silvery bright. She grinned back at the shark and wrinkled her nose at him. “My name’s not honey, either, handsome,” she said, and left the room, swaggering, as the shark gave forth with a long, drawn-out howl.

  Harry slammed the door closed behind her and her grin vanished. So that was it. That was the connection. And Ned and Seth were in it up to their ears. No wonder the three of them were so blase about their paychecks. Their paychecks for fishing, that is. It was a safe bet the extracurricular cash they were pulling down more than covered any losses they took from the crab. She returned to the galley and dished up her own breakfast. She was in a hurry to get to Jack but Kate never neglected her stomach.

  *

  “The fact that Harry could find his way between all those reefs off Anua, in the dark tells me he didn’t just start doing it yesterday.”

  “What happened to Alcala and Brown?” Jack asked bluntly.

  “I don’t know,” Kate said impatiently. “Don’t you see, it doesn’t matter. We can use this to nail them. Gault and the rest of them are—”

  He interrupted her without apology. “The hell it doesn’t matter. They are why you were hired on the Avilda in the first place. Their families and the board of Alaska Ventures want to k
now what happened to them, not to mention two law enforcement agencies and three insurance companies. They don’t care about somebody dealing a little dope.”

  “It wasn’t a little dope, it was a lot of dope!”

  “Your first priority,” Jack said, raising his voice to match hers, “is to discover the circumstances in which Alcala and Brown disappeared and, if possible, to recover their bodies.”

  “Their bodies are probably in a crab pot at the bottom of the Bering Sea, probably because they stumbled onto this business just like I did. I’m telling you, Jack, these guys are dealing dope wholesale. We got a chance here to cut their connection off at the knees. Get a warrant and search the boat. I’m pretty sure I know where he stashes the stuff, I saw the suitcase in the chart room, so why—”

  Again he cut her off. “‘Pretty sure’ isn’t good enough in this case and you know it. You’re only a hired gun, Kate, you aren’t official. Besides, you know and I know that dope wasn’t on the boat thirty minutes after it hit port.” He regarded her, not unsympathetically. “Find out what happened to Alcala and Brown,” he repeated, “and everything else will fall into line.”

  “I think I have!”

  Jack folded his hands across his stomach with an air of humoring her that Kate wanted badly to puncture. “Prove it,” he said simply.

  “You mean I have to go back out again?” She remembered that Andy was still a member of the Avilda’s crew. With a sinking heart she realized that of course she had to go back out, if not for the reasons Jack was enumerating.

  “Yes, you have to go back out again. Probably you’re right, probably there was a falling out among thieves, probably this is why they disappeared. But we don’t know, and the only people who do are on that boat. Sooner or later, one of them is going to slip, and when they do, you’ll be there.”

  “For how long?” Kate inquired with awful patience.

  “As long as it takes.” He held up one hand. “And while you’re on board they can’t take off for Macao.”

  “Unless they decide to put me with Alcala and Brown,” she pointed out.

  “There is that,” he agreed. “Better be careful.”

  What the hell happened to Kate’s overprotective male watchdog, the one with his testosterone level tattooed on his forehead?

  “In the meantime, I’ll call in the troops. We’ll plant somebody in every bar in this dump and watch for—who’d you say?”

  “I call him the shark.” She described him, adding, “I don’t know his name, Harry didn’t introduce us.”

  “Wonderful. ‘The shark.’ That ought to narrow it down.”

  “You saw him,” she said defensively. “He was trying to pick me up in the Shipwreck when you found me.”

  “There wasn’t anybody in the Shipwreck that day who wasn’t trying to pick you up. The entire Russian Merchant Marine was trying to pick you up. Anyway, you”—he pointed at her—“you get your ass back on the Avilda and keep an eye on Gault until we gather enough evidence to return an indictment. I don’t want him getting wind of us and disappearing into the doughnut hole. It wouldn’t be like it was the first time.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean those other names you found. There aren’t any men attached to them.” He saw her expression and held up a hand. “But wait, there’s more. Southeast First Bank is looking for Henderson Gantry. Seems there’s a little matter of overdue loan payments, amounting to something like half a million dollars. And they can’t find the boats to repossess them.” Again Jack forestalled Kate. “It gets better. I had an interesting conversation with the district attorney in San Diego, and they’re looking for Harley Gruber. Seems Mr. Gruber subdivided a prime piece of property located, according to the surveyor’s marks, somewhere a little to the west of the city, and sold the lots to an Eastern developer for a luxury hotel.”

  Kate’s brow puckered. “Don’t strain yourself,” Jack said dryly, “to the west of San Diego is the Pacific Ocean. And it’s legal. The buyers apparently didn’t check beyond Gruber’s references, which were above reproach, naturally, since they were forged, and nobody noticed until after the check cleared that the construction crew building this hotel was going to have to be fitted with scuba gear.”

  Kate grinned in spite of herself. “My, I do like style in a villain.”

  Jack didn’t grin back. “This villain may be a murderer twice over. That we know of.” He looked at the bundle of paper in his hand and estimated his chances of producing what he wanted before the turn of the century. They weren’t better than fifty-fifty, so he tossed the bundle on the table and quoted from memory. “I tried to trace some of those boats. So far, I know they worked the oil spill, but that’s it. Except for one in dry dock in Valdez with a stoved-in hull, they seem to have vanished off the face of the earth. Oh, yes, and another interesting sidebar—the owner listed on the contract with the guy working on repairs is Harold Gunderson.” He paused. “I told the guy to stop working, that he probably wasn’t going to get paid and that there were probably thirteen claims before his if he filed a lien, but I’m not sure he believed me.” Jack shook his head, half in disbelief, half in admiration. “This Gault is some piece of work. When he embezzles, he embezzles down to the last dime. And now you tell me he’s wholesaling cocaine.”

  “He’s greedy,” she pointed out. “He even shorted us on our crew shares. Not much, a couple hundred each, but he is greedy. Greedy people never get enough. What’s coke retail for now? A hundred a gram?”

  “More like a hundred twenty-five.”

  She shrugged. “You see? It’s easy money, or it has been so far. How can he resist?”

  “I suppose you’re right.” He paused. “Can you stay for a while?”

  She shook her head. “We’re not leaving for another six hours, no, but I can’t stay.”

  “Why not? Is Gault on to you? If—”

  “No, it’s not that. There’s somebody I’ve got to see.”

  “In Dutch Harbor? What, are the Russians back?”

  “You said we need a witness. I might have one for you.”

  *

  Twenty minutes brisk walk brought her back to the little clapboard house on the edge of Unalaska village. The lights were on in the kitchen and Kate could see Olga sitting at the table, surrounded by the detritus of basket weaving. She stood still for a moment, watching through the window as the old woman’s strong brown fingers attached another spoke with deft movements.

  Something in the scene wrung her heart. One woman, old, alone, practicing a craft that had almost died out, that might have had it not been for her. She was the last of her race, and yet there were those six young girls, making their spending money at a skill as old as recorded time. There was something for everyone in the picture, Kate thought, optimist and pessimist alike. A traditionalist might be appalled that basket weaving went on only to fulfill an urgent need for the latest from Run D.M.C., but at least it went on. Andy would approve wholeheartedly.

  A movement caught the corner of her eye and she turned her head toward the beach. Sasha sat hunched over at the water’s edge, alone, her back to Kate. Kate looked from daughter to mother and back again, and after a brief tussle with her conscience went to squat next to the daughter. When Sasha said nothing, she said, “Hello, Sasha.”

  Sasha didn’t look up. “’Lo, Kate,” she said in her slow, thick voice.

  “How did you know it was me?”

  The hand holding the storyknife didn’t pause in its deft, swooping, graceful strokes. “Hear footsteps. Know footsteps. Know you.”

  Kate smiled a little. “You hear like a fox.”

  Magically, a fox appeared in front of her in the sand, all ears and tail and pointed, inquiring nose. Sasha looked up and smiled. The smile was crooked, a little unfocused, but the gleam in the brown eyes, half-hidden by drooping lids, was alert and intelligent. “Move like fox. When want.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Kate said, and pointed to a figure off
to one side. “More thunderbirds?”

  “Thunderbird,” Sasha corrected. Both fox and thunderbird disappeared, to be replaced by another thunderbird closer to center stage.

  “And kayaks.”

  “Kayak. Big kayak.”

  “With men on it,” Kate said, watching the tip of the storyknife. “Five men.”

  Five Y’s with legs appeared, to be encompassed with the thunderbird and the kayak inside two concentric circles. “Home.”

  “Home,” Kate repeated. “Where is home, Sasha? Is your island home? Is Anua home?”

  “Home,” Sasha said firmly, drawing a set of concentric rings, the first just inside the second, to enclose the other figures in two perfect circles. She paused, elbows resting on her knees. A ray of sun gleamed briefly through cloud and fog, shining off the wet sand, throwing the figures drawn there into stark relief. A boat passed by offshore, sending a wavelet to taste the edge of Sasha’s drawings.

  Kate held her hand out, palm up. “May I try? Please? I’ve never told a story.”

  Sasha considered the matter with a thoughtful frown. She must eventually have reached the conclusion Kate was a trustworthy person because she extended her two hands, the storyknife balanced between them like a ceremonial offering. Kate accepted the rich weight of the thing with care. “How do I hold it? Just like a knife? Like this. I see.”

  “Wipe.”

  “Wipe?” Kate echoed her teacher. “Oh, I see. Wipe the sand smooth for my story. Okay.” With a broad stroke of the blade she swept the sand clear and began to draw. “Thunderbird.”

  Sasha watched intently. “Longer.”

  Kate extended the thunderbird’s wing. Next to it she drew a crude hull shape. “Kayak.”

  Sasha made a face. “Everybody’s a critic,” Kate muttered, and made the three wavy lines beneath the kayak symbol, indicating the ocean. The stick figures were easier, if not as clear or as spirited as Sasha’s. “Men come on the kayak.” She paused. “Did men come with the thunderbird, too, Sasha?” She made the male figure next to the thunderbird.