by A. J. Thomas
Sean looked up at Nate and shook his head. His lower lip trembled, and he looked more desolate than he had when Nate had first met him in the hospital. “I don’t know what to do.”
Nate shrugged. “Whatever you need to do.”
Sean limped toward the older pump equipment, turning back once and giving Gallagher a pleading look. “Is there anything left?”
“I think there’s a bit,” Gallagher said, joining him. Walking together through the debris, Gallagher helped Sean pick up and move pieces, discussing bits of metal, chunks of broken rubber, and everything else they came across. The port seemed to revolve around them. Dozens of men, who seemed to be watching Gallagher for any cue about what they should be doing, eventually produced a table and chairs, a large set of tools, and then a smaller one. A stack of drafting paper and a bulky, industrial-grade laptop was set in front of Gallagher and Sean, and soon Gallagher was talking excitedly. And Sean, focused on something as simple as a gear he had designed, modeled, and forged himself, ended up with the same little half smile he wore when he got caught up in a drawing. Just like drawing, the mere act of trying to understand and explain something, of fixing something, grounded Sean, gave him a capacity to focus despite the horrific circumstances that had brought him there.
That’s what this job had always been for Sean, Nate realized. It was a puzzle for him to solve, a challenge bigger than any tattoo or mundane car repair. Sean had told Nate’s father that art and science were just different ways of looking at the world and presenting it to others, and while that might be true, Sean couldn’t stop at merely observing the world—he was driven to change it. It didn’t matter if he was designing a tattoo that left people breathless or building something that was capable of changing an entire industry, he was happiest when he was in the middle of that creative process. And when he was lost in that process, he was beautiful.
Plus, if Sean intended to linger at the port, Nate would have time to process everything.
The equipment strewn around the port looked like an absolute mess, and certainly justified the amount of manpower they’d brought in, but it didn’t feel right. Everything had looked reasonable on CPG’s maintenance records, with every blank filled in and every box checked. It wasn’t until Cory Alden had told him where the ship had been during their supposed maintenance stops that there had seemed to be anything wrong.
Sean’s pump assembly was gone, most of the bits that remained were from a different system altogether, and Gallagher had managed to get Sean to sit down and work with him without a fuss. But what he’d heard of Sean’s conversation with Cory had him worried. If Cory was telling the truth, then this entire thing might be an act to convince Sean that his invention was beyond their reach. But if Bruce really had stolen or destroyed the pump system, if this was all exactly what it appeared to be, then Cory Alden wouldn’t have panicked. Since the entire port was distracted with Sean and Gallagher’s strange conversation, Nate didn’t have any trouble slipping onto the ship. The men he passed in CPG polo shirts nodded as he passed, so he kept going.
Once aboard, he went to the bridge, where the single member of the navigation crew who remained aboard recognized Nate and greeted him with a smile.
“Didn’t think we’d be seeing you again, Mr. Delany,” he said.
“I hope this is the last time I’ve got to bother you,” Nate said, keeping his expression serious and calm. “It’s Jeff, right?”
“Yes, sir. I didn’t think lawyers worked on weekends.”
He let out an exhausted sigh and shook his head. “Boy, do I wish. With everything that’s happened, I’m not sure if I’m ever going to get a day off again. Have you been stuck here all day?”
“All week. We usually trade off, but most of the guys live around here, so going home for the holiday was easy this time around. Last year we were under way, so I wanted to give them a chance to spend time with their families,” Jeff said, shrugging.
“That’s got to be hard. Especially since you’ve had to deal with the fallout of all this,” he said, waving his hand toward the dock. “I still can’t believe it.”
“You and me both. Since I was the only one on watch, no one else had to be called in to give statements, but it’s been a pain. Have they got you out here for the same thing?”
“I’m afraid so. Obviously, this has thrown a monkey wrench in Wilkinson’s case, and it’s left him stunned. He couldn’t believe it.”
“Who could?”
“You don’t think Lancaster’s guilty?”
Another shrug. “Of trying to hurt Wilkinson? No. He’s a bastard, don’t get me wrong,” Jeff said. “But if he’d been the one holding the company’s purse strings, he’d have paid every dime Wilkinson asked for and then some. None of us were comfortable with the way those two carried on, mostly because Wilkinson was always an arrogant prick, but it’d take a blind man not to see how much Lancaster cared about him.”
“Were you here on Thursday night? When the police think Lancaster tried to kill him?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Do you know if Lancaster was really here? Did he sign in when he came aboard?”
“He signed in.” Jeff slipped through the door onto the bridge, then returned a moment later with an old wooden clipboard. There was almost a half an inch of paper stuck on the clipboard, but Jeff flipped through the top few quickly. “Here it is,” he said, wrapping the more recent logs around the top of the clipboard and holding it out for Nate to see. “I didn’t personally see him, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t here.”
“Huh.” Nate took the clipboard and searched for the jagged scrawl of Bruce Lancaster’s signature. “He signed out and back in Monday—that was when you were all stuck in court. He signed out again Tuesday morning, back in Tuesday night….” The night of the hit-and-run. “And he signed back in again Thursday night. He didn’t sign out again.”
“He must have forgot.” Jeff took the clipboard back and flipped through the next pages.
“Does he do that a lot?”
Jeff shook his head, staring at the paper. “Not a lot, but it does happen.”
“When the police were out here, did they notice that he hadn’t signed out?”
“They took photos of the log, that’s all I know. Would it matter?”
“Maybe not.” Nate turned back to the Tuesday morning entry and compared it to the evening entry noting that Bruce had returned to the ship. The first signature was a quick, smooth line of cursive, but the second didn’t look quite right. “Maybe somebody else signed in for him?”
“Well, as you’ve discovered yourself, we’re not exactly known for reliable record keeping. But Lancaster and Alden….” Jeff grimaced and shook his head, seething. “I told them. Hell, the fucking lawyers told them they had to stop that shit. After you fucked the company over—no offense—we all got read the riot act about signing off on shit that wasn’t ours. But they don’t care.”
“Does this look like Cory Alden signed it?” he asked, choosing his words carefully.
“Maybe. See, Alden signed in at the same time. But they don’t care if it gets every single one of us fired,” he muttered. “I can’t wait until Alden’s gone too. I think Lancaster knew he was finished when this whole mess started. That’s why he….” Jeff nodded his head toward the back of the ship. “No one’s got a clue why Alden’s still hanging around.”
“Did he say he’s leaving?”
“He says he’s got an offer from Halliburton, up in North Dakota, as soon as Wilkinson’s case is done. Our side told him he didn’t have to stay, but… I don’t know. Personally, I think Confederated would be better off without any of them. I don’t care what they do when they’re away from the ship and on their own time, I just don’t want it aboard. And I’d feel the same way if one of them was a woman,” he said quickly. “Or if both of them were women.”
Nate considered him, trying to figure out how talking about Cory Alden leaving had linked back to Sean and
Bruce’s affair.
“Lancaster’s made a habit out of this, hasn’t he?”
Jeff rolled his eyes and huffed.
“He and Alden—”
“I didn’t think Alden was that type at first,” Jeff said quickly. “But for a few years there, he was making goo-goo eyes at Lancaster too. That was before Wilkinson came along. Halliburton can have him, and good riddance.”
Cory and Bruce had been together. “Was there anybody Lancaster wasn’t screwing?” Nate blurted out before he could catch himself. Luckily Jeff just barked out a laugh.
“Is there any way, other than the log, to know if he was actually aboard? Security cameras or something? Did anybody see him?” he asked.
“Ah… no.” Jeff seemed to struggle with the question, then shrugged again. “One of the reasons all those big shots are here is to inspect the damage. They had security cameras installed all over the pier and the shipyard, but they just put them in yesterday.”
“It’s okay. You said the police took photos of this?” he asked, nodding at the log.
“You could take one too, I suppose.”
Nate fumbled with his phone one-handed and took a snapshot of each entry, not entirely sure if there was any point. Gallagher had done what he couldn’t by convincing Sean that Bruce had actually set out to hurt him, so he doubted that Sean would obsess over a few inconsistencies in the logs at this point.
Five minutes later, Nate returned to the dock and found a seemingly random piece of metal to sit down on while he watched Sean and Gallagher work. He stared at his phone occasionally, not actually doing anything except distracting himself from the way Sean’s expression twisted into a frown every time he discovered something else that was broken or simply missing. As the sun began to sink beneath the horizon, the engineers and executives of CPG began to wander off the ship and toward the parking lot. When Sean finally used his arms to push himself up to his feet, steadying himself against the table he and Gallagher had covered in stuff, Nate got to his side quickly. “Is it as much of a mess as it looked like?”
“It’s trashed,” Sean announced, smiling despite the misery in his voice. “The control module is gone, the entire computer’s been wiped clean, and all of the sensors, valves, and relays are gone. If I don’t help them rebuild it, it’s going to take them years to piece everything back together again. And now….” He looked at the darkening horizon. “You’ve been sitting here all this time, haven’t you? Damn it, I’m sorry, I get carried away sometimes.”
“Don’t worry about it. I already told you I like watching you work, didn’t I?”
“This isn’t exactly a tattoo session, though, so I doubt it was that interesting.”
“Sean, as much as I love your tattoos, watching you is what I enjoy about the process.”
Gallagher held up a metal cylinder in one hand. “Wilkinson, would you mind showing me how these silicone valves are supposed to stay fixed in here?”
Sean sighed. “Yeah, give me one second.”
Nate waited until the man went back to the pile of equipment before he continued. “Do you want to know about the log?”
“The log? You went and got it?”
“It shows Bruce was aboard Tuesday and Thursday nights. The timing is about an hour after each attack, so if he was responsible for both and went straight back to the ship, it would correspond.”
“I guess I should have figured….”
Nate wanted nothing more than to keep his mouth shut. If he let this brief moment of misery pass, then Sean might finally be able to accept that his ex was a bastard and move on. Sean trusted him, though, and as he was trying so hard to remember, Nate worked for Sean. “But there’s no record of when he left the ship again. At all. I mean, I get that the record seems a little tedious to keep, but Jeff said Bruce wasn’t the type to forget to sign out. He signed in, then in, and then in again. All I can think of is that someone wanted to leave evidence that Bruce was here after the attacks, but didn’t think to fill in all the pieces of the puzzle.”
“Now you think Bruce is being set up?”
Nate shrugged. “It seems too perfect. We drive all the way out here on the off chance that the log might give him an alibi and they’ve got this whole thing set up, with the engine opened up and on display, just to show you Bruce did it.”
“Maybe whoever signed him in didn’t have time,” Sean suggested. “Think about it. If someone signed Bruce in at midnight, they couldn’t just skip down to the next line and sign him out again this morning, because they’d have no way of knowing which other members of the crew were going to sign in and out, or when. Someone signing out at seven the next day would look suspicious if there were half a dozen people signing in and out on the lines below at an earlier time.”
Nate cringed, because Sean’s theory made a frightening amount of sense. “So if someone forged those log entries, they were either incompetent enough to forget to forge log entries for Bruce leaving or intentionally didn’t do it. Since I was only too willing to point out the crew’s tendency to keep shitty records, anyone who noticed that Bruce hadn’t signed out would probably write it off as him being lazy or incompetent. And I really don’t like that idea.”
Sean’s smile fell. “No one from the corporate offices had come aboard the ship when we pulled out of port before the accident. No one else was aboard but me, Cory, Bruce, and the crew. The thrusters worked fine in port, so if someone put that greensand mixture into the engine oil, it had to be someone on the ship.”
“I know. And I would honestly rather deal with you having a homicidal ex who’s sitting in jail than trying to guess if CPG is systematically trying to manipulate you.”
Sean paled. “You think that’s what this is?” he asked, gesturing to the ruined equipment.
Nate took a deep breath. “I wish I knew. It just… feels off. They want us to believe that all of those guys were out here on the Saturday after Thanksgiving voluntarily trying to put that pump system back together again. If they weren’t all watching you and Gallagher like you two poking at a gasket was the equivalent of the Super Bowl, I’d be on the phone with the police already. But they honestly seem just as drawn to trying to fix things as you are.”
Sean grinned sheepishly.
That smile faltered as Sean swayed with the gentle rocking of the ship. Nate caught him gently, holding on to his forearms until Sean regained his balance. “You okay?” he asked.
“Tired. Not that sore, but I should have brought pills with me.”
“What do you need?” Nate asked, wondering if there was any way to get him something for the inevitable pain and muscle spasms without having to drive back to Houston.
“Everything’s at the shop,” Sean explained, shaking his head. “But Gatorade helps when my right leg starts to cramp, if we can stop and get some after we’re done. Let me just….” He nodded back toward Gallagher.
“There’s a vending machine by the office,” Nate recalled. “I’ll go grab you one.”
Despite the chaos and noise that still surrounded the office and the Republic Sea, the rest of the port was quiet. Once he left the pier, Nate didn’t pass another soul as he walked past the office and found the line of vending machines he remembered from his last visit to the CPG offices. Among the sodas, iced coffees, and energy drinks, he found a single flavor of Gatorade. He had to set his briefcase down to pull his wallet out with his left hand, feeling triumphant when he finally got a dollar bill free and flat enough to work in the machine.
The crunch of gravel behind him was the only warning he had before pain exploded across the back of his head. Splotches of light and dark flashed behind his eyelids, and for a moment he felt as if the world was falling away around him. Which it was, he realized when he managed to open his eyes, because he’d gone straight to the ground. Jeff Hendricks stood over him, holding a small pistol in one hand, the barrel pointing at Nate’s chest.
Jeff let out an exasperated sigh. “After you looked all offended
about Bruce fucking that little shit, I’m surprised you sunk just as low, Mr. Delany. But if he didn’t care about you, we might not have any way to salvage this.” Jeff shifted his grip on the pistol, holding the barrel as he slammed the butt into Nate’s temple, making the world go dark.
Chapter 15
SEAN STARED at the phone in his hand, not quite sure why Nate was calling him. He handed the valve off to another engineer and stared across the parking lot at the office. Nate’s car was still sitting beside the trailer, but there was no sign of Nate himself. “What’s up?” Sean asked, answering the phone.
“Sean?” Cory Alden asked, his tone panicked.
“Cory? What the hell?” he growled. “Where’s Nate?”
“He’s right here. They knocked him out, but he’s alive. And both of us might stay that way, if you listen to me.”
“What the fuck?”
“They’ve got us both, Sean. They’ll kill us. If you want him to survive this, you need to do exactly as I say. Don’t call the police, just listen, do you understand?”
“No! I’m still trying to get passed the ‘what the fuck’ part! Where are you?”
“Your lawyer’s got an address over here in Galveston. Do you know how to get there?”
“Yes,” Sean growled.
“Good. I’m supposed to tell you that his car is still parked by the CPG office, and his keys are on the hood. Get in the car and drive over here. Come alone. No cops. If they so much as hear a siren nearby, they’ll kill him.”
The call ended with a beep. Sean stared at the screen, debating with himself about whether he should call 9-1-1, call the Houston police officer whose business card was still inside his back pocket, or do what Cory told him to.