Dead in the Water

by Dana Stabenow

  “You have a girl?”

  “Sure. Just haven’t found her yet.”

  Kate smiled in spite of herself.

  Before he left he pulled out his first-aid kit and rummaged through it. He held up two slender whitish rocks, flat-sided and columnar, about three inches in length. “Tabbies,” he pronounced, and at her confused look elaborated, “tabular crystals.” He closed her right hand around one, her left hand around the other. “A tabbie in each hand balances your energy flow and assists in communication with your higher self. They’re especially good in helping ease extreme emotional stress. Every first-aid kit should have at least two. I chose them and they know me, but they’ll help you because you’re my friend.”

  Looking up, he saw her eyes closing and broke off the lecture. “Relax,” he said, patting her shoulder. “Sleep. I’ll get us home.”

  It might have been sheer exhaustion, it might have been the tabbies. Kate slept, her last conscious sense the feel of cool quartz crystal warming to the palms of her hands.

  Ten

  “SO HE BOUGHT UP a bunch of old boats with nothing down and a promise of balloon payments within six months.”

  “He reneged on the balloons,” Kate guessed.

  “Got it in one.”

  “When was this?”

  Jack’s grin widened. “April of 1989.”

  “Right after the RPetCo oil spill.”

  “I told you you’d like it.”

  “Gault was a spillionaire, wasn’t he? He signed on with RPetCo, and his boats worked the spill.”

  “Got it again.” Jack nodded smugly. “There’s a guy at RPetCo we’re talking to, seems he may have earned a little extra that summer for putting Harry’s boats at the top of the hiring list. Then, when RPetCo declared the cleanup a success, Gault skipped on the mortgages, the boat crews’ last paychecks, and boogied Outside. Next known address—”

  “Freetown, Oregon,” Kate said.

  Jack cocked his thumb and fired his finger at her.

  “Where he married the boss’s daughter and was rewarded with a boat of his own. Nice work if you can get it.” He remembered and looked as abashed as a grown man can. “Sorry, sir.”

  Nordensen inclined his head. “Don’t be. It is the truth.”

  Kate thought of the freezing wind, the icy salt spray, the slippery, shifting deck beneath her feet, tossing her cookies every two hours. Nice work if you can get it? She wouldn’t go that far.

  “And,” Jack said lightly, recovering from his embarrassment, “as I taught you when you worked for me in the D.A.’s office, if a perp has screwed up once, it’s even odds he’s screwed up in a prior life.”

  “Don’t start holding out on us now,” Kate said. She was warm and full and rested for the first time in what felt like months and she didn’t really care if Harry Gault had cheated on his wife, robbed his grandmother and beaten his dog all on the same day, but she summoned up a dutiful interest to keep Jack happy and the story rolling. “Tell, tell.”

  “There’s a warrant out on one Harley Gruber in California, who matches Gault’s general description.”

  “What’s he wanted for?” Andy wanted to know.

  Kate smothered a laugh and Jack grinned. “Fraud and embezzlement. Something to do with a land development deal in western San Diego.”

  “I thought most of western San Diego was ocean,” Andy said, puzzled.

  “Also, when Gruber skipped, not one, not two, but three, count ’em, three wives came forward to file claims to his estate.”

  “Not including the wife in Freetown, Oregon. Any kids?”

  “By which wife? Guy’d been married more times than Mickey Rooney and had more kids than the King in The King and I.”

  “Poor woman,” Kate said.

  “Poor women,” Jack said. “And this is the best part, Kate, you’re going to love this. You know what Gault was doing with part of the dough he was scoring off the coke sales?”

  “No,” Kate said, playing along, “what was he doing, Jack?”

  Jack’s delighted grin almost split his face in two. “He was buying up sides of Kodiak beef, flying them down here in the Navaho and smuggling them on board Japanese processors. When they got back to Yokohama with their load of fish, whatever crew member was in on the deal would somehow smuggle the beef past customs and sell it on the black market.” Jack’s already wide grin widened. “You know how much beef costs per pound in a store in downtown Tokyo these days?”

  “No,” Kate said faintly. “How much?”

  “Actually, I wasn’t able to find out, either. None of the Japanese I talked to buy it at home, except in meals in restaurants. I talked to somebody at Alaska Pacific University and they told me imported beef is sold back and forth between suppliers without it ever leaving the freezer, until they can sell it for ten times what it cost them to buy it wholesale.”

  There was a brief, awed silence. “So if you buy a T-bone for five bucks here,” Andy said, “it’ll cost you fifty in Tokyo?”

  “At least. You know, I’ve seen those Japan Air Line crews with their shopping carts full of beef at Carr’s in the Sear’s Mall in Anchorage. I mean full carts, too, piled right up to the top, and not just one cart, either, but three and four carts at a time. Yeah, I figure our buddy Harry was turning a tidy profit on what he made off the coke.”

  Kate searched for an adequate response. There wasn’t one. “I told you he was greedy.”

  They were seated around a table at the Unisea Restaurant in Dutch Harbor, Andy and Kate hogging down the first meal in days they hadn’t had to cook themselves. Jack was on Kate’s right, Andy was across from her, and on her left was a man so lean and fit that at first it was not noticeable how old he was. He had a full head of hair, pure white, and small, twinkling blue eyes. His name was Sten Nordensen, and he was the chairman of the board of directors for Alaska Ventures, Inc. He had flown up from Freetown, Oregon, the day before and had been waiting for the Avilda at the dock. Now he pushed himself a little away from the table. When he spoke his speech was slow and somewhat formal, with the faintest trace of an accent. “How can I thank you for all you have done, Miss Shugak?”

  “Pay me my crew share from my last trip out,” she replied promptly. “And the name’s Kate.”

  He smiled, a grave and beautiful smile, and inclined his head. “Done, Kate. But I think we can do better than a mere crew share.”

  “Okay,” she said, agreeable. She pointed her fork across the table. “After you refit the Avilda, hire Andy on the crew.”

  Andy flushed up to the roots of his hair and looked nine instead of nineteen.

  “He got us back in one piece,” she told Nordensen. “I was incapable.”

  “You would have been capable if you’d had to be,” Andy mumbled.

  “He got us back,” Kate said, ignoring Andy and concentrating on the old man. “With less experience at the helm and in navigation than a newborn baby he got us back five hundred miles to Dutch, got us inside the harbor and got us safely moored. I was out cold the whole time. He may lack experience but he’s a natural born boat jockey, Mr. Nordensen. Don’t let him get away.”

  Nordensen looked at Andy reflectively. “For one who has done my company such a great service, a place can be found.”

  Andy flushed again. His mouth opened and closed a few times before he managed to say, “Thank you, sir.” The look he sent across the table contained such burning gratitude that Kate felt singed.

  “Ned Nordhoff’s rolling over like a dog in dirt,” Jack said, reapplying himself to his steak with vigor. “Too bad Harry’s dead, we coulda locked him up until the United States elects a woman president.” He looked over at Kate, wondering if the mention of Harry Gault’s death would upset her.

  Kate, puzzled, said, “Why’s he talking? Harry’s dead. All Ned has to do is say it was all Harry’s fault and claim he was a victim of circumstance.”

  Nope, Jack decided. The Avilda’s late skipper had been trying to kill h
er. She had been protecting herself, as well as this weird blond kid whom she seemed to have adopted. She wasn’t likely to be suffering any repressed guilt over Harry Gault’s grisly end. Hers would have been grislier. Squashing that thought with more haste than finesse, he produced a smile no one noticed was a little frayed around the edges. “I do believe someone may have hinted that Seth Skinner was doing some talking of his own.”

  “And is he?”

  Jack cut another piece from his steak with absorbed precision. “Now there is a strange one. I can’t figure him out. He won’t say a word, not even when I told him Ned was singing on key nonstop with no time out for intermissions or encores. He won’t talk to us, he won’t talk to an attorney. He just sits there.”

  “He can sit there and rot until he croaks,” Kate said cordially. “And I for one hope he does.”

  Andy shook his head reprovingly. “The One Way teaches us to strive for right thinking and right action in this life, to earn a better life in the next. Harry and Ned and Seth will pay for their wrong thinking and their wrong action in the next life. It is written, ‘Just as a man casts off worn-out clothes and takes on others that are new, so the embodied soul casts off worn-out bodies and takes on others that are new. The soul in the body of everyone is eternal and indestructible. Therefore thou shouldst not mourn for any creature.’”

  “And in particular not for this one,” Jack said under his breath.

  “Then let’s hope they all come back as tanner crab,” Kate said, “and have to work their way up from there.” She hoped Andy hadn’t queered Nordensen’s job offer. She turned and said brightly, “I hear you’ve got a new ship coming off the ways any day now, Mr. Nordensen.”

  The old man gave a proud nod. “That we do.”

  “What’s the latest one’s name?” Kate said. “The Mary Lovell, wasn’t it? The Avilda, the Madame Ching, the Anne Bonney. And now the Mary Lovell. Beautiful names. You have plans for a Grace O’Malley in the future?”

  He inclined his head again. “She is already designed.”

  Their eyes met and Kate, seeing the twinkle in the blue gaze, was unable to repress a laugh.

  Jack and Andy exchanged mystified glances. “What’s so funny?”

  “Shall you tell them, or shall I?” Kate asked Nordensen.

  The old man smiled and shook his head.

  Kate turned back to Jack. “They were all pirates.”

  Jack and Andy looked confused, and she said, chuckling, “Avilda. Grace O’Malley. Mary Read and Lady Killigrew and Anne Bonney and Madame Ching and Mary Lovell. Pirates, all of them.”

  “You’re kidding.” Jack looked at the old man but Nordensen just grinned at him.

  “Nope,” Kate said, wiping her mouth and sitting back in her chair. “I went over to the library at the Unalaska School this morning and looked them up in the encyclopedia. Avilda was some kind of Viking, Grace and Lady Killigrew terrorized the English Channel, Mary and Anne shot up the Caribbean with Morgan and Blackbeard, and Madame Ching thought the South China Sea was her own private lake. Alaska Ventures’s boats are all named after lady pirates.”

  “Some of them not so much the lady,” Nordensen reminded her.

  “No kidding,” she said, “Grace O’Malley’s son fell overboard once and she was so angry at his clumsiness that she chopped off his hands with a knife when he tried to climb back on board.”

  Jack threw back his head and roared, and after a stunned moment Andy joined in.

  When the laughter died down Kate said, “What’s our new best friend Ned say about the dope dealing? How’d that get started?”

  “From what our new best friend Ned says, Gault’s connections had been landing wholesale quantities of cocaine on Anua ever since Gault began working these waters. His crew members had been going ashore to pick them up.” Jack looked across the table at Nordensen. “I’m sorry, sir, I know this is the last thing you want to hear, but according to Nordhoff, Alcala and Brown were up to their ears in the dope dealing. They got greedy, started siphoning off grams and grams and stashing them around the airstrip. Their plan was to fly in with their own plane, once they got back to port, and pick it up. Gault was suspicious and followed them in—cutting that barge loose, by the way, that’s when he lost it—and caught them at it and killed them in the act.”

  “Who died in the dugout?” Kate asked.

  “Barabara” Jack said.

  “Whatever.”

  He smiled. “Alcala. He ran when Gault and Nordhoff caught him and Brown at the airstrip.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “Skinner.”

  Kate was unsurprised. It would take a long time for her to forget the sound of Seth’s voice coaxing her out of the canned goods, the indifferent mad look in his serene eyes as he raised the monkey wrench over his head. “And the slug we found?”

  “From a .38 Skinner tossed over the side.”

  “And the bodies?”

  “Wired inside a crab pot and over the side.”

  Nordensen spoke without looking up. “Any kind of a bearing where they went over?”

  Jack shook his head. “I’m afraid not, sir. They could be anywhere between here and Anua. There’s no way of knowing. And what with Aleutian weather…”

  To his plate, Nordensen said softly, “It will be difficult for their families. First the drugs, then no possible hope of recovery of the bodies.” He looked up, his face grave. “Yes, it will be very difficult.”

  Kate thought of the two young faces that had haunted her days on the Avilda. Victims or dealers? This time, both. She couldn’t find it in her to condemn them too harshly. Wrong boat, wrong crew, wrong time. The money had come to them so quickly, more money than they’d ever seen for a day’s work, a week’s, a month’s.

  A season later and they were forty thousand to the good, but it wasn’t easy money. Kate thought of the night of ice again and shivered. No, not easy. At least when you were dealing you were dry and warm and didn’t miss any meals. It must have looked like a cakewalk by comparison.

  “So,” Jack was saying, “Harry cooked up that story about going ashore for water and getting lost in the storm to cover what really happened.”

  The waiter came by with a coffeepot and they waited until he refilled their cups. “And why not? Who was there to say otherwise? Ned and Seth were in his pocket, the guys on the plane were in partnership with him, God knows the Aleutians have taken more than their share of human life. He didn’t even have to fear the Avilda being taken away from him, what with his advantageous—and convenient—marriage.” Jack inclined his head. “Sorry again, sir.”

  “Why?” Nordensen said, this time with a touch of weary resignation. “I should never have let my daughter marry him. I knew it was wrong, I knew he was wrong.” He shrugged. “But she had been a widow for so long, and she said she loved him, and I loved her too much to say no.”

  Silence grew around the table, until Jack, appalled, said slowly, “You didn’t tell me it was your daughter he married, Mr. Nordensen.”

  The old man smiled a bleak, wintry smile. “And advertise my own stupidity?” He rose to his feet, Andy and Jack rising with him. He reached for Kate’s hand and with Old World charm bowed over it, brushing the back of it lightly with his lips. “Again, Kate, my thanks. With great initiative, and at tremendous personal risk you have found out the truth, brought the criminals to account for their actions and restored the Avilda to our fleet. Alaska Ventures will never be able to repay what it owes you.” His eyes twinkled. “But we will try. Your check will be ready to be picked up tomorrow.”

  Kate, caught by surprise with her mouth full of baked potato, gulped and said indistinctly, “Thank you, sir.”

  He released her hand and said to Andy, “I’m spending the next week here in Dutch Harbor until my crew flies up from Freetown. I’ll be bunking in the captain’s cabin. You will keep your own berth, please. I will expect to see you at breakfast tomorrow, when we will talk.”

  Andy s
tammered out his thanks and they all watched the tall, erect old man walk out of the restaurant.

  Kate looked down at her clean plate and heaved a sigh for all good things past. Catching sight of the clock on the wall, she pushed back her chair and rose to her feet. “It’s time, guys.”

  They followed her out of the restaurant and into the truck Jack had commandeered from some poor cannery schmuck who didn’t know any better. They drove to Unalaska and parked near the white frame building, perched within sight and sound of the lap of the waves and crowned with onion domes. A crowd was gathering before the church, and they climbed out and joined it. Kate saw villagers and fishermen and cannery workers, skippers and deckhands, processors and packers, standing shoulder to shoulder in clusters around the little church. Japanese stood next to Koreans, Koreans next to Chinese, Chinese next to Americans, Americans next to Aleuts. They were all men and women of the sea, all there for the same reason, to propitiate whatever the gods might be for a good catch and a safe journey home.

  The Russians were there, too, unsurprising since Kate had seen the Ekaterina in the harbor that morning.

  “Kate!” Anatoly shouldered his way through the crowd and swept her up into an exuberant embrace, kissing her smackingly on both cheeks and taking a longer and less smacking time over her mouth. Next to them Jack stood up a little straighter.

  Anatoly let her go and said anxiously, “Kate? All right are you, yes? Things hear I in Dutch, not good for you.”

  “I’m fine, but, Anatoly, you’re speaking English!”

  He beamed and produced a decrepit, leather-bound Russian-English dictionary with half the pages falling out that must have been published when the promishlyniki first came to Alaska. “Study I, yes? Speak I good?”

  This last was said with such anxiety that Kate didn’t have the heart to disillusion him. “Of course you do. You speak very well.”

  He beamed again and might have swept her up into another exuberant embrace if Jack hadn’t cleared his throat in a manner that needed no translation. With reluctance Anatoly let Kate go.