Seize the Storm

by Michael Cadnum

  Claudette gave Axel a smile, severe but with the hint of something new.

  “We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” she said. “For all we know, the owners are passed out drunk and all we have to do is give them coffee and some Advil.”

  “But we aren’t sure,” said Axel.

  “How much does that bother you, Axel?” asked Claudette.

  Axel was aware of a challenge in Claudette’s voice, something sexual and dismissive, as though Claudette might find Axel attractive, just like most other women, if she didn’t have such a low regard for his character.

  “It doesn’t bother me at all,” said Axel.

  Martin knew that he was lying. The strange vessel disturbed all of them.

  As they drew even closer, they could see further signs of trouble.

  A constellation of bullet holes punctured the side windows of the cabin. What looked like red paint was splashed down from the helm, along the hull. And an outline showed along the boat’s rail, like a red glove that had been folded over the side. But this was not a glove.

  It was a bloody handprint.

  THIS EVIDENCE OF VIOLENCE hushed them.

  As the yacht edged closer to the powerboat, Martin felt cold—he wanted to be miles away. And yet, his conscience reminded him, what if someone has been shot and is too feeble to call out?

  When they got closer, the streamlined bulk of the power cruiser bucked, a surge of wind catching the two vessels. Athena’s Secret moved close, and the two crafts collided.

  The crash was powerful enough to make Martin stagger, and Axel was quick to reverse the engines, backing the sailing vessel out of the way. The masts and the rigging swayed, and the yacht shrugged and shuddered along her length.

  “I’m not afraid to board her unarmed,” said Axel. “How about you, Martin?”

  “Wait,” said Claudette, “until we find where Leonard keeps the shotgun.”

  “Looking for the gun might take a long time,” said Axel. “A boat like this carries valuables.”

  He seemed to like that word, because he said it again. “Valuables that could be ours. If Martin wants to listen to his aunt’s advice, I’ll go right ahead all by myself.”

  Martin’s pride required him to say, “I’ll go, too.”

  * * *

  Belowdecks, Laser was drowsily awake, lifting his head to see who was passing by. Susannah had made her patient a bed in a corner of the cabin, with a buffer of rolled-up quilts. Laser was a handsome animal, with tawny forepaws and flecks of gold in his coffee-colored eyes.

  “Sorry about the little boating accident,” said Martin, adding a brief explanation of what was happening.

  The dog licked the air in the direction of Martin’s voice and settled his head back down.

  “Martin,” Susannah said, “don’t take any more risks than you have to.”

  Martin took three yellow and black Motorola walkie-talkies out of the equipment case, along with a couple of flashlights. “It’s a deal,” he said.

  Martin was weak-kneed from the collision, and the effort of rescuing the dog had left him feeling drained. He was not ready to investigate anything, much less an unknown craft in the middle of the ocean. But he did not imagine Leonard recovering anytime soon.

  “Axel will talk you into trouble, Martin,” she said.

  Martin clipped a two-way radio to his belt.

  He said, “It’s not that simple.”

  * * *

  Claudette took the helm and eased the yacht closer.

  Steering the yacht was more halting now, because Claudette was using exaggerated care, afraid of another crash. She gunned the engines, nearly stalling them, swinging the stern too close, backing up too quickly.

  Claudette kept the yacht in place only long enough for Martin to clamber up and over the rail of the other craft. Axel joined him, making a point of not needing a helping hand, the two of them half climbing, half stumbling onto Witch Grass.

  MARTIN KEPT HIS BACK TO THE SEA, leaning against the side of the vessel.

  He had never been less happy to be anywhere. Maybe Susannah was right. Maybe it was that simple: Axel had talked him into trouble.

  Axel waited right beside him. Martin turned to gaze at Athena’s Secret. He could see his fellow crew members, people who had become so familiar. How alive with curiosity they both looked, thought Martin. Claudette gave a wave. Martin drank in the sight of the beautiful yacht, her two masts red in the afternoon sunlight.

  “Blood,” said Axel.

  Martin followed his gaze.

  Axel added, “And more blood.”

  Red matter was spattered all the way up the steps to the helm, as far as Martin could tell without moving from where they stood. A splotchy, air-darkened trail of blood led into the cabin, where a door was held open, fastened by a bungee cord. The empty doorway was dark, with a wedge of sunlight that shifted as the vessel moved.

  Martin called out, a cheerfully singsong hello. They listened for a response that did not come.

  The cruiser had a different layout than the yacht, with two chairs in the stern, bolted into place, presumably for fishing. The helm, what Martin could see of it, was forward and up on the cabin, protected by a Plexiglas windscreen and a sunroof. The interior of the cabin, and whatever lay belowdecks, remained to be seen.

  The vessel had an unfamiliar motion, too, swaying from side to side and pitching unpredictably, even in the relatively calm water. The deck was teak, weathered but high quality, seventeen or eighteen feet across, with a stainless-steel cargo hatch. The hatch had a small Plexiglas skylight, and the two of them knelt, peering into the dark interior, using their flashlights.

  They could see nothing except for the answering circles of their two flashlights, several feet below. The smell in the air was of something that had burned—seared electronics and ozone.

  “Empty,” said Axel. “No wonder she floats so high in the water.

  A storage compartment, a metal trunk, was set into the vessel’s aft, and Martin opened it. He saw what appeared to be a bright orange Avon life raft, folded and compressed, exactly as it had left the factory.

  Their walkie-talkies sputtered and chattered, Claudette’s voice sounding comically diminished.

  “It smells like they had a lightning strike,” Martin told his aunt. “The storm probably knocked out their ignition, maybe killed their engine.”

  “Do you see any survivors?” Claudette asked, sounding like someone far away, on the other side of the planet.

  “Not exactly,” said Martin.

  “Martin, tell me what you see.”

  “The life raft is still on board, unopened,” said Martin, “so it doesn’t look like they safely abandoned ship.”

  He didn’t want to mention all the blood. He felt squeamish, but that was not the problem. Talking about the blood made it more real, and more unavoidable, and brought Martin closer to actually setting eyes on evidence of death.

  But Claudette was persistent. “Do you see any more signs of trouble?”

  “We’re taking care of it,” said Martin.

  “How are we going to do this?” Axel asked when Martin had reassured his aunt that they would report every significant observation and replaced the walkie-talkie onto his belt.

  “You’re a lot more courageous than I am,” said Martin. His voice was a raspy noise he scarcely recognized as his own. “I’ll go check out the helm,” said Martin. “And you—”

  “You want me to look at the cabin?” said Axel.

  Axel was deferring to Martin, letting him take the lead, and Martin appreciated this. He also realized that this kept Axel in Martin’s favor. It also guaranteed that if anything went wrong, it could be blamed on Martin.

  “Be careful,” said Martin.

  MARTIN CLIMBED THE STEPS to the pilot house, forward on the cabin structure.

  The steps were slathered in darkening blood—more of the stuff than Martin would have thought possible. He crept up the side of the steps, clingin
g to the rail to avoid stepping in the gore.

  The pilot house was high, overlooking the prow and the ocean, and swayed even more drastically from side to side than the rest of the vessel.

  He smelled the dead body before he saw it.

  The man was not dead so much as completely reduced from a living being to a lifeless assembly of limbs and clothing. He wore a puka shell necklace, a blue all-weather poncho, and a pair of Levi’s, with black K-Swiss running shoes. His jaws were parted, exposing a steel tooth.

  Martin examined the details of the clothing carefully because he did not want to look directly at what else was there—the man’s face and the rain-diluted blood on the metal grid of the flooring.

  The pilot house was designed to give the impression that the vessel was a spaceship. A tall seat upholstered in black leather overlooked a console with a computer screen and many dials, along with a Lowrance sonar fish finder. A radio was built into a console, the entire setup more sport- and fishing-oriented than anything on Athena’s Secret. A side chest of melting ice was packed with Red Bull and Dos Equis. Many of the cans were empty.

  A Panasonic transponder was attached to the underside of the console, a metal box with a glowing red light, no doubt kept working by battery power. Otherwise, none of the equipment was turned on, or else the electricity was out, flash-burned by lightning.

  Martin called to Axel, but his voice was too weak with the strain of his discovery. He called again, and at last used his most piercing whistle, two fingers in his mouth.

  When Axel appeared from inside the cabin his lips were set in a grim line, an upside-down smile, and his cheeks had new shadows.

  “Come up here,” was all Martin could say.

  Axel carried himself carefully, putting his hand on the rail as he came up the stairs in uncharacteristic caution.

  Martin stood aside so Axel could take a look.

  Axel was silent. He plainly did not like what he was looking at, either, but he knelt beside the dead guy’s handgun, a large automatic lying on the crosshatched, slip-proof-metal flooring of the pilot house.

  “A Glock nine-millimeter,” said Axel. “This is the guy who tried to shoot the dog.”

  “He did,” said Martin.

  “Did what?” asked Axel, rising to his feet. He had the pistol in his hand, across the flat of his palm.

  Martin’s voice was trembling, and he clung to literal truthfulness, forcing his mind to endure one detail at a time. “He did shoot the dog, apparently.”

  Axel briefly removed the ammunition clip, examined it, and slid it back in. “Two bullets left,” he said, tucking the Glock into the top of his denims.

  “What about fingerprints, Axel?” said Martin.

  “You mean,” said Axel, his voice flat, “when the homicide detectives and the crime scene unit show up, I might be in trouble.”

  Martin did not respond to this.

  Axel said, “There’s a dead guy in the cabin, too.”

  THE CABIN WAS POORLY LIT, once they got beyond the angle of daylight thrown by the open door. The space smelled wrong—unhealthy and overripe, but not as bad, Martin surmised, as it would in a few more hours.

  There was enough illumination to allow Martin to briefly examine the other body. It was clad in a hooded Nike jogging jacket, khaki cargo pants, and Converse basketball shoes. The body was on its side, wedged between a cabinet and a fixed-in-place barstool. The dead guy’s left hand held an iPhone, and a handgun lay in a corner nearby, a revolver.

  Martin did not mind looking as this corpse so much, because the light was muted and he was perhaps already getting used to this sort of thing. Or so he told himself. He touched the body. It was clammy, and it was stiff, too, the arm rigid where Martin nudged it. And there was that growing dead smell here in the enclosed space that he had not noticed so strongly in the partially open structure of the pilot house.

  Martin was very sorry he had disturbed the corpse’s repose, and he nearly apologized out loud. He felt particularly troubled because this person had been trying to contact help, probably, using the handheld device. How terrible it was, thought Martin, to die so dismally, out in the ocean. He said a prayer—a spontaneous, unspoken God help these people.

  Martin picked up the revolver.

  He held the firearm very cautiously, and carried it into the doorway. He did what he had seen detectives do in movies, swinging the cylinder out, and letting the shells spill into his hand. The copper shells were all empty—the unknown man had fired every bullet in the gun.

  Axel wasn’t talking, and Martin kept his mouth shut, too. He put the revolver down next to the DVD player. His flashlight beam joined Axel’s in probing the interior. The lights shifted from shelf to floor to galley. The place was sparsely furnished, but what was there was quality—a Sony LCD hi-def screen, a Bosch freezer and ice maker, with what looked like teak paneling on the walls.

  The walkie-talkie on Martin’s hip was making a tiny squawking sound, like a transmission from deep space—Claudette’s questioning voice. Martin turned down the volume. He didn’t want to talk about any of this, ever, if he could help it.

  Martin examined the living quarters. There was a liquor cabinet, the bottles held in place by a crossbar, gin and tequila. An Apple laptop lay closed on a side shelf, and the DVDs were all X-rated and action movies. He found two metal dishes on a bottom shelf, beside a neatly folded bag of Natural Balance Ultra Premium dog kibble.

  For a fairly expensive pleasure craft, there was a lot of unused space and few partitions. The living area opened aft into a cargo hold. Where Martin would have expected sleeping quarters or even enclosed cabins, there was emptiness, with heavy-duty bungee cords attached to the walls, the kind shippers use to hold cargo in place.

  In the daylight that fell down through the skylight in the hatch, it was evident that the vessel had once carried a shipment, but now she was empty.

  Axel found a small door panel near the freezer and he asked Martin to hold a light on the thing while he switched circuit breakers off and on. He asked Martin to experiment with the wall switches, too, but the chamber remained dark.

  “Generator,” said Axel. “Must be fried.”

  “Can we get her running again?”

  “Sure,” said Axel. “Have to jump-start the engines.”

  “So this boat isn’t permanently—” Martin could not bring himself to say dead in the water.

  Martin had the absurd feeling that the dead person would hear the phrase and be offended.

  “Not permanently,” said Axel.

  He opened the fridge and sorted through the dark interior. “Beef patties,” he said. “Lasagna. Still pretty much frozen.”

  He unscrewed the cap of a bottle of tequila and sniffed it, as though suspicious. He did not drink any of it.

  “What do you think happened?” asked Martin.

  “They shot each other,” said Axel.

  “How?” Martin had learned how to think like this, working with scientists at Scripps—theorize about what hunting fish had taken a bite out of the sea bass, measure the bite, estimate how long ago the bass had escaped.

  “We can guess,” said Axel. He found a toolbox on a shelf and sorted through wrenches and wiring.

  “I think the bald puka shell guy shot the iPhone guy first,” said Martin. “The dog got upset, tried to protect his master, and then he got shot, too.”

  Axel found a socket wrench and spun it around, the ratcheting noise loud in the enclosed space.

  “The iPhone guy wasn’t dead,” Martin continued. “He staggered up to the helm, and the puka shell guy blew most of the rest of his clip trying to defend himself, getting killed anyway. Then iPhone guy crawled back down here and died. That explains the two paths of blood on the stairs and the bullet holes in the Plexiglas—puka shell guy did not have a very good aim.”

  Axel nodded. “Sounds about right,” he said.

  “It all happened this morning, early,” said Martin. “Rigor mortis is just
beginning to wear off.” Dead fish got rigor, and so did most other creatures, Martin had learned. Thinking analytically like this, Martin discovered, made the crimes just a little less upsetting.

  “Good theory,” said Axel.

  “But,” continued Martin, “what were they fighting over?”

  “People fight,” said Axel.

  Martin gently kicked a sports bag on a lower shelf, the kind of carryall people use for tennis equipment and gym clothes. He leaned down and poked it with his fingers, then he hooked the bag—which was surprisingly heavy—and set it down in the wedge of daylight.

  The outside of the bag was flame-red, and it featured a logo, Sleeping Giant Gym and Spa, with yellow lettering. Martin tugged the zipper.

  Martin’s understanding of the recent violence became instantly more clear. He could see, now, the possible grounds for the two homicides.

  The bag was full of money.

  THE MONEY WAS in the form of bundles of hundred-dollar bills, each held together with a light blue paper band. Each paper band, as far as Martin could tell at a glance, had been carefully defaced with a black marker to disguise the bank name and other identification.

  No sooner had Martin set his eyes on this money than he had the impulse to hide it from Axel.

  Martin had no particular reason to expect Axel to seize the money, or in any way behave dishonorably, but a hoard of this size changed the way Martin felt about his companion, and about his own personal future.

  This wasn’t the promise of money, like a future paycheck or an inheritance. This was actual money, right here, giving off the admirable but unfamiliar whiff of old printed paper, hand-worn, conserved, and refolded many times. Mine. The word was like a neon pulse in his head.

  But it was too late to hide.

  Axel was already kneeling beside the bag and running his hands down into it. He pulled out a bundle of cash and stood in the doorway. He fanned the currency like a deck of cards and held one of the bills to the daylight through the doorway without removing it from the stack, like a prospective book buyer admiring a printed page.