The Damagers

by Donald Hamilton

  I frowned. “Translate. Six-pack? I gather you’re not talking about beer.”

  “Six-pack is what we call the Coast Guard license that lets you skipper a boat for hire with up to six people on board. The hundred-ton license is tougher, but I expect to be ready for it pretty soon. Actually, I don’t really need it in the boat-delivery business; but if you’re female and not very big it helps to have a lot of impressive papers to wave around.”

  I said, “If you’re in the boat-delivery business, why didn’t you deliver this one home, after your dad died? I was told that your stepmother got a commercial crew to do the job.”

  “She didn’t give me time to get down there, damn her!” Lori said with sudden anger. “Dorothy knew I’d have loved to do it. It would have been a way of, well, kind of saying good-bye to… to Daddy, so she hired a couple of local yokels and had the boat on its way north before I could…

  “Oh, well. The stepmother-stepdaughter relationship is notoriously poisonous. Are you pro or anti onions?”

  “Pro.”

  After a little, Lori said, “I hope I didn’t hurt your feelings by calling you a cowboy. You’ve really done a good job of restoration; I understand she was in pretty bad shape when you got her. Daddy would approve of you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I mean, if being patronized by a kid half my size was part of the job, well, I always try to do my duty.

  “You didn’t happen to come across Daddy’s last logbook while you were working on the boat? It seems to have gone missing in all the confusion. I looked for it after… after he died, but I didn’t have time to make a thorough search.”

  I said, “There was no logbook on board when I got the boat.”

  “Well, it’s too bad; I have all the others.” Lori shrugged resignedly. “She’s such a great old boat; I hate the way she seems to have turned into a jinx ship.”

  I said, “Well, I don’t really believe in jinxes, but there’s no doubt that four people have died on board, including your dad.”

  “And whoever it was who bled all over the aft cabin?” She made her voice casual, but it obviously took a certain amount of effort.

  I said, “I thought I cleaned it up pretty well.”

  “The carpet was damp so I got curious and looked more closely. You missed a few spots. I mopped them up for you.” She licked her lips. “I think… I think you’d better tell me about it.”

  I told her about Ziggy Kronquist-Greta Larsson. Well, as much as she needed to know.

  Lori was silent for a little after I’d finished. At last she said, “So that’s why you were so careful to check my identity.” She eyed me dubiously. “Of course there’s just your word for what happened. Maybe you raped her and slit her throat.”

  “It’s certainly a possibility,” I said. “How did they get hold of you, anyway?”

  “It was a lady named Mrs. Bell. I’d met her last spring when… Well, Daddy’s will split everything down the middle, except that Dorothy got the house and I got the boat. This woman called and said she worked for the government. She said they’d had a little problem somewhere down south along the waterway. They were checking all boats that had passed through the area between such-and-such a date and such-and-such a date; and would I mind if they put a couple of people aboard Lorelei III to take her where some experts could go over her thoroughly. For certain reasons Mrs. Bell wanted to do it inconspicuously. She wouldn’t tell me what she was looking for, but she said it wasn’t drugs, and she promised that her people would leave the boat in mint condition. She reminded me that she could easily pull a few strings and get the Coast Guard to do it; and those clowns have never been known to put anything back where they found it. So I checked with the lawyers, and they said all right and, well, you know what happened, first one of Mrs. Bell’s people—would you call them agents?—getting murdered and then another one drowning?” She made it a question.

  “I’ve been told,” I said.

  “That’s one reason I put the boat on the market as soon as I legally could,” Lori said. “She’d been such a happy ship, but after having so many people die on board she didn’t… didn’t feel happy anymore, poor old girl. But then, out of a clear blue sky, this Mrs. Bell called me this morning in Newport, Rhode Island, where I’m living now, and said they were hard up for a female nautical expert; it seems they’d run through all theirs. Well, they had one left but she was in the hospital. Mrs. Bell remembered me, and said it was really right in my line, a delivery job, and a boat I knew very well; and would I help them out at double my usual rates—there was some danger involved—until they could get somebody else to take over? Well, I was between engagements, as they say on Broadway, and anyway, as I said, she’s a great old boat. I’d hate to think of her getting wrecked because I wouldn’t lend a hand. The two-hundred-mile offshore jump from here to Cape May can get kind of mean, and Mrs. Bell made it sound as if you didn’t know a hell of a lot about sailing.”

  I said, “Mrs. Bell was so right.”

  “Matt,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  Lori was putting a plate in front of me. “I’m not very promiscuous, if you know what I mean,” she said.

  I glanced at her sharply. “What brought that on?” I asked.

  “The way you were looking at my legs, earlier.” She went back for her own plate, saying, “And this is a kind of, well, cozy situation, isn’t it? I’ve crewed on plenty of boats with lots of men on board, and there’s never been a problem; but here there are just the two of us and I thought we’d better, well, get things settled between us.” She sat down on the far side of the big table, facing me bravely.

  I spoke deliberately: “Miss Fancher, on my ship—and I seem to own this bucket now after a fashion—you can be as unpromiscuous as you like. That’s a promise, even though I do think you have very pretty legs, and the rest of you isn’t half bad, either, what there is of it.”

  It occurred to me that I’d had a somewhat similar conversation with the last girl to occupy the forward cabin of Lorelei III.

  7

  I heard her in the galley before daylight. We’d agreed to get an early start, conditions permitting; and apparently she took her commitments seriously. When I joined her she looked slightly startled, as if she’d forgotten that there was somebody living at the other end of the boat. This morning she was wearing a loose blue T-shirt and wide white shorts—her pants seemed to fit her either too soon or too late, I reflected. No shoes. Her feet were small and brown, with nice straight toes and no nail polish.

  “Scrambled okay?” she asked.

  “Fine. Anything I can do?”

  ‘“Turn on the VHF and get us the weather. I’ll have coffee ready in a minute.”

  Standing at the stove, she moved aside a bit to let me reach my place at the big cabin table after switching on the boat radio (VHF means very high frequency, in case you’re curious) to one of the two NOAA weather stations—National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to you. Administering the oceans and the atmosphere always seems to me like a fairly ambitious project, even for Washington.

  Lori spoke without looking around: “You were doing a lot of prowling around the deck last night.”

  I had a hunch she might have wondered a bit, when she first heard me, if I was prowling in her direction, but it didn’t seem diplomatic to ask.

  I said, “Somebody’s tried to scuttle this boat twice, remember? And me once, not to mention some other characters they actually managed to terminate. I got a bit careless back in that Connecticut marina with nothing happening, but now I figured I’d better start keeping my guard up again. I’ll catch up on my sleep while you’re chauffeuring us to Cape May.”

  “Well, let’s see what it’s going to be like out there.”

  She put a cup of coffee in front of me, and I sipped from it as we listened to partly cloudy and patchy fog and winds southwest fifteen to twenty knots, seas six to eight feet, small-craft advisory in effect. A thirty-eight-footer does not qua
lify as a small craft in weather jargon; the U.S. Navy might think otherwise. Lori put plates on the table, stepped up to switch off the radio, and sat down facing me.

  I said, “I never could figure out the difference between partly cloudy and partly sunny.”

  Lori said, “It’s about as good a forecast as we’re going to get this time of year. I think we should give it a try.”

  “You’re the navigator.”

  She hesitated. “Well, it’s more or less up to you, Matt. I mean, I’ve been out in a lot worse; but it could be a rough ride for… for somebody who isn’t used to it. If we start now we should pick up the lights of the Jersey coast before daylight tomorrow morning and reach Cape May fairly early in the afternoon, but we’ll have the wind and sea against us the whole way and we’ll have to keep powering into it regardless; there’s no safe place to slip into for shelter.”

  This was, of course, just about what her blonde predecessor had told me.

  I grinned. “Okay, you’ve done your duty; you’ve terrified me. So let’s clean up the dishes and get the hell out of here.”

  Actually, if I’d been doing it alone, I’d probably have stayed at the dock, not because of the unfavorable wind and sea, but because of the morning fog, described by NOAA as patchy. We seemed to have a prize patch sitting right over us. With the deckhouse curtains drawn, I hadn’t realized how thick it was outside. Dawn was struggling to break through the murk but not making much progress. Lori didn’t seem to consider it a serious problem, however; she just helped me clear away the curtains and said that, since she knew the harbor, it might be better if she took the boat out; would I bring in the dock lines, please? When I was back on board she moved us neatly astern until we were clear of the slip, and then sent us gliding forward into the soup, picking up the necessary aids to navigation without any apparent difficulty. Outside the harbor—well, she said we were outside the harbor; you couldn’t prove it by me—she turned the wheel over to me, giving me a compass course to steer, while she programmed the loran. At last she cut in the autopilot.

  “Watch the loran display,” she said. “If you see her sliding off to port or starboard, just tweak Nicky’s knob a bit and bring her back. I could use another cup of coffee, how about you?”

  I nodded. “Nicky?” I said.

  She laughed. “Some people call it Iron Mike or Electronic Eddy, but it’s a NECO autopilot so we always called it Nicky. You’ll be good friends with Nicky before you get much farther south. Hit the switch and warm up the radar, will you? I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Alone at the wheel with nothing to do, I listened to the electronic whine of the radar beside me and the mechanical rumble of the diesel under my feet and watched the fog swirling past the deckhouse windows. Nicky steered a straighter course than I could have. The shore was invisible somewhere to starboard. The sea was reasonably smooth, but I reminded myself that we were on the north side of Long Island, sheltered from the southwesterly wind; it would undoubtedly be different after we turned Montauk Point and headed out into the shelterless Atlantic Ocean. Lori reappeared and handed me a steaming cup. Presently she switched the radar from standby to on and peered into the hood, studying the screen for a while. She raised her head.

  “You’d better take over from Nicky,” she said. “There are a lot of fishing boats ahead.”

  “Just a minute,” I said.

  I parked my empty cup, ducked below, and returned with the twelve-gauge pump shotgun I’d brought along—a Remington M870, if it matters—and checked that there was nothing in the chamber and plenty in the tubular magazine. Double-0 buck. Ashore I prefer number four buckshot loads since they carry more pellets for a denser pattern—more effective, I feel, on human targets in the open; but if you have to shoot through a boat, or even just a windshield, the little fours won’t penetrate as well as the husky 00s. I shoved the shotgun into one of the clips I’d arranged to port of the companionway, returned to the wheel, and switched off the autopilot.

  “Okay, I’ve got her.”

  Lori glanced at me uneasily. “Is that… is that necessary? The gun, I mean.”

  I said, “I most certainly hope it isn’t, but with a lot of little boats buzzing around I can’t overlook the possibility that one will suddenly make a pass at us and try to toss something inflammable or explosive aboard. It doesn’t hurt to have the shotgun there, and it might just possibly hurt not to have it.” I looked ahead. Several boats were becoming hazily visible through the fog, and one buoy. “What do I do about this buoy?”

  “Leave it to port, reasonably close, and come right ten degrees.” She glanced at me. “Daddy was in the Navy in World War II, so we always used right and left rudder for the steering commands, Navy fashion, even if it didn’t sound quite as salty as port and starboard helm. I kind of got into the habit. Do you mind?”

  “No objection.”

  The fog was clearing a bit. The sea seemed to be full of small fishing boats, and I felt as if I were conning the battleship New Jersey into harbor on regatta day. Lorelei III was the biggest thing around. A couple of times, as we plowed through the mosquito fleet, I had to change course to keep clear of little outboards trolling stubbornly without much regard for the rules of the road at sea.

  As we rounded Montauk point, still invisible to starboard, the seas grew in size as expected. The main fishing fleet fell astern, although stragglers continued to appear and disappear in the mist. Lori gave me a new course west of south, which brought the wind almost dead ahead. I cut in the autopilot to show I knew how. Plunging into the head seas, Lorelei III developed a deliberate pitching motion; spray began to hit the windshield. I started the wipers.

  “So far so good,” Lori said. “It’s too bad we can’t use the sails with the wind right on the nose like this; they’d steady her a bit. But now we have about a hundred and eighty miles of this. Say twenty-six hours at seven knots. If it doesn’t get so rough we have to slow down. Do we keep on, skipper?”

  I said, “You can’t scare an old bronc rider with a few little bouncy waves, ma’am.”

  She glanced at me. “Did you really?”

  “Ride ’em?” I grinned. “Hell, no. Any nag that wanted to buck, I’d pick a soft spot and depart him pronto.”

  “I don’t think I believe you, but here you’re not going to be able to get off and walk if you change your mind.”

  The motion became more violent as the wind picked up. Every so often a solid wave would curl over the bow and come rolling aft to break over the deckhouse as if it were a half-tide rock. The fog seemed to come and go, or maybe it was we who came and went. Even when it cleared temporarily, the day was still dark and misty, with visibility not much over a mile. Nicky did the steering, with only an occasional correction needed to satisfy the loran. There was really nothing to do but hang on, and check that the occasional boat that materialized out of the murk was not on a collision course with us, and watch the seas coming at us.

  I peered into the radar when Lori wasn’t using it and got so I could pick up approaching vessels on the screen before I could see them. Actually, I was most interested in what was astern; but although there were often blobs back there, nothing seemed to be following us consistently.

  Lori fed us sandwiches for both lunch and dinner; there wasn’t much hope of getting a plate or soup bowl to retain its contents even though the fancy yachting dinnerware that had come with the boat had rubber inserts to keep it from sliding off the table. At last the darkness of the day turned into the blacker darkness of night. Lori switched on the running lights, red and green up forward, white aft, and white on the mast, indicating a small vessel under power.

  “I’m not sleepy yet,” she said. “If you want to sack out, go ahead. I think…” Lorelei III corkscrewed viciously as a big one passed underneath her; Lori steadied herself and went on. “I think you’ll do better in the main cabin. Wedge yourself behind the table and it’ll keep you from sliding around. In that big bunk aft you’ll wind up on the ca
bin sole with the mattress for company. The old girl isn’t really an offshore boat; Daddy never did figure out a system of bunk boards to keep people from being tossed out of bed when things got as rough as this.”

  Clinging to the steering wheel as we smashed through another wave, I said, “Just so you admit this is slightly violent. And I don’t want to hear about the real hurricanes you’ve been through; this’ll do me just fine… Lori?”

  “Yes?”

  “Keep checking the radar. If anything comes within half a mile and seems to be closing on us, wake me at once.”

  “Aye, aye, skipper.” She hesitated. “Matt?”

  “Yes?”

  “I owe you an apology. I thought I’d be sailing the boat all by myself by this time, with you moaning and puking below.”

  I laughed. “It’s my Viking heredity. Weak brains and a strong stomach. Good night, Lori. I think two hours on and two off is about right in this stuff, don’t you?”

  She nodded. “Good night, Matt.”

  I got my pillow and sleeping bag, some ammunition, and the rifle that was my primary night weapon—the shotgun was intended mainly for daytime use—and wedged myself, as she’d advised, onto the narrow cabin settee, back against the side of the boat with the big table holding me in place. At first it was hard for me to relax; then my body realized that it wasn’t really going to be thrown across the boat, and sleep hit me…

  “Matt! Matt, wake up, they’re coming in fast!”

  8

  When I reached the deckhouse, it was dark except for the small green-glowing rectangle of the loran display; all the other instrument lights had been turned out. I saw that our running lights had also been switched off. Lori had imposed a full blackout, smart girl. Of course, these electronic days, darkness doesn’t give as much concealment as it used to, but there was no sense in making life too easy for the opposition.