Terrors of the High Seas - DK6

by Melissa Good

  Dar smiled at her. “Right. More about that, and more about your friend Bob’s grandfather, who ran it.” She picked up the laptop and sat down next to Kerry again. “I think we need to start collecting ducks, so we can pin them down in a nice, neat row.”

  Kerry snuggled closer, putting an arm around Dar and leaning against her shoulder as the laptop booted up. Dar’s log in came up and her partner put in her information, then they both watched as the autonomic systems kicked in and started establishing a satellite cellular connection to their world-wide network.

  It took less time than most people would expect. After about sixty seconds, Dar was presented with the same desktop she usually saw on her machine in the office, right down to the collection of broadcast messages sent to their local Miami group ranging from parking violations to a test of the fire alarm system. Dar started up her database parsing program and cracked her knuckles as she waited for the screen to come up. When it did, she typed in her Terrors of the High Seas 127

  request.

  “Is that the boat’s name?” Kerry asked.

  “Lucky Lady? That’s what the dive maps have it as,” Dar answered, adding a few other details. “Did Bob say what his grandfather’s first name was?”

  “No,” Kerry said. “You’re not going to ask me to go talk to him to find out, are you?” She gave her partner a mournful look.

  Dar chuckled dryly. “No. Let’s see what this comes up with first.”

  “Good.” Kerry rested her cheek against Dar’s shoulder. The long day on the water in the sun was starting to take its toll, and she found herself getting a little sleepy as the rattle of Dar’s keystrokes lulled her. “They were really trying to get on the boat?”

  “Uh huh,” Dar murmured.

  “Slimy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What if they try again?” Kerry asked.

  “I fixed that,” Dar said, watching the response on the screen.

  “Damn. Nothing on that name.” She shook her head, then typed in another command. “Okay, we do this the hard way. Gimme all the maritime incident reports in this sector… damn.” Dar cursed, closing her eyes. “What the hell were the coordinates of that blasted wreck.”

  “Oh.” Kerry stirred, then got up and trotted over to her notebook. She opened it to her dive log and studied the page. “Here you go. I logged it.” She recited the longitude and latitude.

  “You rock.” Dar typed in the numbers and hit return. “That’ll take a few minutes,” she said, putting her arm around Kerry as she resumed her seat. “You know something?”

  “What?” Kerry curled up against her, one hand stroking Dar’s thigh absently.

  “We are one damn good team.”

  Kerry’s eyes twinkled happily. “We are, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, we are.” Dar kissed her on the head. “I couldn’t ask for any better.”

  “Me either.” Kerry relaxed, putting her head back down on Dar’s shoulder. She watched the scanning markers on the screen, her eyelids drooping shut after a few minutes of it.

  Dar heard the faint change in Kerry’s breathing and she glanced over, suppressing a grin at her dozing partner. She carefully shifted a little to a more comfortable position and rested her head against Kerry’s, content to let her well-designed program do its job.

  In her sleep, Kerry seemed to sense Dar’s emotion. Her fingers curled around Dar’s arm and clasped it, creating a warm band around her forearm.

  128 Melissa Good

  “KER?”

  DAR’S VOICE nudged her out of a very pleasant dream, one that involved her, Dar, and a bunch of grapes. Kerry let her eyes drift open slowly, complacently taking in the glistening sunset for a moment before her mind kicked in and fully woke up. “Oh.” She lifted a hand to stifle a yawn. “Sorry.”

  “For what?” Dar inquired. “Sleeping’s not a punishable offense, even in our division.”

  “I know, but we’re supposed to be solving a mystery here.”

  Kerry peered at the laptop. “Anything?" She could see a table of information in Dar’s usual structure on the screen.

  “Lots,” Dar said in a dry tone. “I managed to exclude all the non-relevant shipwrecks. That took me forever, because they’re a dime a dozen around here.” She brought the laptop closer. “The wreck has to be this one.”

  “Lucky Johnny?” Kerry read the screen. “Oh, I can see where they’d confuse that with Lucky Lady.” She observed. “Wonder if they have a thing about sexual confusion around here.”

  Dar eyed her, both brows lifting.

  “Well, if they thought Johnny was a lady, I mean.”

  Dar chuckled soundlessly.

  Kerry rubbed her eyes. “Okay, so maybe I should go back to sleep,” she admitted. “Anyway, what else is there?”

  “Mm.” Dar pulled up a screen. “Problem is, there’s nothing special about the damn thing. It was just a forty foot working trawler, out catching crabs.”

  “Ah.” Kerry read the details. “Storm?”

  “Uh huh,” Dar confirmed. “Capsized and sank. Two survivors, both mates. Captain went down with the ship.” She brought up another screen. “This is Bob’s grandpa.”

  Kerry peered at the whiskered, scraggly looking man in the blue Macintosh. “Holy pooters, it’s Popeye’s Pappy!” she yelped.

  “Is there a picture of Grandma? You take a bet it’s Olive Oyl?”

  “That explains a lot.” Dar chuckled. “He mostly trawled the North Atlantic. I don’t know what brought him all the way down south, but the boat couldn’t take it. It was his first, and last, Carib run.” She studied the picture. “Nothing on him—just a working sailor.”

  Kerry’s head cocked to one side. “Yeah? I thought Bob said his family had money, though. At least that’s the impression he gave me,” she added with a touch of droll humor. “How’d they make that from a rig like this?”

  “Well.” Dar tapped a few more keys. “He didn’t lie. According to this tax filing, old Popeye left a ton of cash to Mrs. Popeye, and they’ve got a place that’s worth another small fortune up in Maine.”

  She scratched her jaw. “Maybe he already had wealth and just Terrors of the High Seas 129

  decided to fish for a living because he could.”

  “Maybe down here, Dar.” Kerry shook her head. “I’ve spent time in Maine. No one does that if they’ve got a choice. It’s a hard, dangerous life—fishing the North Atlantic.” She moused through the results Dar had called up. “Hm. You’re right, though. I know that neighborhood. Outhouses go for a quarter mil.”

  Dar glanced at her. “You’d think places that expensive wouldn’t use outhouses.”

  “They’re very traditional,” Kerry replied blithely. “I think they just got three- pronged forks.”

  “Huh?”

  Kerry chuckled and leaned her head against Dar’s shoulder.

  “Never mind,” she said. “My snobby upbringing getting the better of me.”

  “Okay.” Dar sent off another probe, this one into financial databases. “We’ll see what we can come up with for Popeye in Duks’ side of the house.” She leaned back. “Still doesn’t explain why a storm wreck is stirring up all this interest, all this time later.”

  “No,” Kerry agreed. “If there was something really important in that wreckage, you’d think they’d have come after it before now.”

  Dar drummed her fingers lightly on the keyboard. “That’s true,” she mused. “Unless…” The screen beeped and she looked up at it. “Huh.”

  Kerry peered over her shoulder. “Wow,” she murmured, running a fingertip along the data. “Those must have been incredible hauls.”

  “Mm.” Dar frowned. “But it’s still not making sense, unless he took a pile of that money, converted it to gold coin, and it went down with him in the storm,” she said. “Why would they be interested in that hulk now, is the question.”

  They both were quiet for a moment.

  “Unless the ‘why’ behind those num
bers went down with him.”

  Dar spoke slowly. “And now that ‘why’ is worth something.”

  “Has the family become society now?” Kerry asked suddenly.

  Dar gazed at her with a droll smile. “I don’t know, hon. Where do you check for that kind of thing?” she said. “They didn’t teach that in my redneck hacking classes.”

  Kerry slid her hands between Dar’s and started typing. “That’s easy.” She hit a few keys. “The local newspaper, and let’s hope they actually use public archives.”

  “Let’s say they are nouveau riche,” Dar said. “You think it has something to do with the whole thing?”

  “I think people will do a lot to avoid family embarrassment,”

  Kerry stated in a quiet, very flat tone. “Especially if they have 130 Melissa Good something to lose by it.”

  Dar put her arms around Kerry and pulled her closer, not saying anything.

  Kerry pushed the laptop away a little and accepted the comfort.

  “You know what I think about the most, when I think of what my father did to me last year?”

  “What?” Dar asked.

  “How awful it felt knowing I was such a disappointment to him,” Kerry whispered. “When I woke up in that psych hospital, how ashamed I felt.” She paused. “Before I got so ripping mad that I put that aside.”

  “You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of,” Dar said.

  Kerry sighed. “I know that now,” she said. “Heck, I knew that then, but it brought home to me how family and love can take second place to image and ego.” She watched the screen. “Pride does strange things to people.” Her finger traced a headline on the list that popped up. “So, maybe you’re right. Maybe what went down with that boat is information—a secret someone doesn’t want anyone to find out about.”

  “Uh huh.” Dar studied the screen. “If that’s the secret they think we brought up from that wreck, we could be in a whole new ballgame right now,” she said. “And where, I wonder, does Bob fit in?”

  Kerry untangled herself from Dar’s embrace, but not before giving her a healthy hug. She stood up and stretched, working a kink out of her neck. Then she walked to the window and opened it, letting the ocean breeze blow against her face. After a moment, Dar joined her, perching on the sill and gazing out over the water. “So, what’s the plan?” Kerry finally asked.

  Dar folded her arms and thoughtfully nibbled the inside of her lip. “We’ve got a couple of choices,” she said. “We can just get the hell out of here and leave them to their games.”

  “Mm.”

  “We can call in legal, make a mess for them for the bugging and the attempted pullover.”

  “Mm.”

  “We can play it by ear and see if we can find out what the real story is, then decide what we want to do about it.”

  Kerry grinned.

  “Yeah, that was my choice too,” Dar admitted. “But we could be playing with fire, Ker.”

  The blonde woman’s lips twitched into a faint grin. “We could be,” she acknowledged. “But I love a good mystery. I’d hate to just walk away from this and not know what the deal was.”

  Dar leaned back against the window frame. She had no real desire to get deeply involved in what seemed like a big mess, but Terrors of the High Seas 131

  she also found herself curious. “Let’s see what we find out,” she said. “Maybe it will be enough to convince them to leave us alone.”

  “You think they’ll make the next move?” Kerry asked. “Or will they wait to see what we do?”

  Dar considered the question. “I’m guessing they’re waiting for us,” she said. “So why don’t we get moving and go find us some calypso dance music, and see what happens?”

  “You’re on.” Kerry held out a hand. “They’re not gonna know what hit ’em.”

  They shut down the laptop and walked out the door hand-in-hand, heading down the path toward the casual, beachside restaurant from which they could already hear the sound of drums rising. “Hey, Dar?” Kerry suddenly asked. “Remember what I said about rum and the samba?”

  Dar eyed her. “Yeeesss?”

  “This could get dangerous.”

  “Ker?”

  “Yeees?”

  “I never did tell you what happens when I get into too much rum, did I?”

  There was a thoughtful pause. “No, I don’t think you ever mentioned that,” Kerry allowed. “I guess this might get really dangerous, huh?”

  “Only to your reputation.”

  “Wh…. Oh.” After another pause, she stammered, “You mean you…might get, um…”

  “You do like the way I kiss, doncha?”

  “Way too much.” Kerry grinned rakishly. “Maybe we’d better stick to beer.”

  As the light faded to twilight, they joined a string of people headed in the same direction. In the shadows behind them, two other figures slipped in, trailing them with watchful eyes.

  KERRY FELT DAR’S hands come to rest on her shoulders as she stood in the doorway trying to spot an open table. The tables were rough and wooden, and the atmosphere casual and very relaxed.

  She’d spied a free table and started easing her way through the crowd, when Dar’s hold on her tightened and pulled her to a stop.

  Curious, she turned and looked up at her. “What’s up?”

  Dar pointed to a small table near the window. “Let’s sit over there.”

  “There?” Kerry squinted. “Oh.” She recognized the faces at a nearby table as the people they’d seen escorted by the police that afternoon.

  Dar led the way over, taking the rearmost seat against the wall 132 Melissa Good as Kerry settled in across from her. She glanced casually at the table next to them, where the five hijacking victims sat. They still looked shaken and not very happy, and as she watched, Dar realized one of them seemed familiar. She leaned back and searched her memory, trying to place the oldest man’s distinctive profile.

  “Two of whatever this rum special is,” Kerry told the cute waitress who stopped by with her tray at the ready. She put down the drink menu and looked over at Dar. “Boo.”

  With a start, Dar glanced back at her. “Sorry.” She rested her elbows on the table and indicated the next table with a jerk of her head. “One of those guys looks familiar.”

  Kerry’s eyes shifted. The people at the next table were somber, hands clenched around nearly empty glasses, and there was a sense of tense shock still about them that she attributed to their ordeal.

  One of the women was about her age, also blonde, but with tightly curled hair and wide, amber eyes. She seemed to be the most shaken, and even in the low light of the restaurant Kerry could see she’d been crying. “Those people who got hijacked, you mean?”

  she asked, lowering her voice.

  “Mm.” Dar turned her head slightly, studying the other table without appearing to. Kerry did the same, but none of the men looked familiar to her so she turned her attention back to Dar, lifting a brow in question. “Not to me.”

  “No.” Dar shook her head. “I think…” She leaned back on her chair arm and called out to the older man, “Jacob?”

  The man started a little, and then peered at her uncertainly.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t…” He leaned a little closer. “Good heavens...

  Dar?” He swiveled in his seat and extended a hand, an honestly pleased expression crossing his face. “Dar Roberts!”

  Dar took his hand with a firm grip. “How are you, Jacob? It’s been a long time.” Very long, Dar realized. She’d last seen Jacob Wellen over six years earlier at a technical convention in Las Vegas.

  “It certainly has.” Jacob smiled. He was a man of medium height and build, with wiry gray hair and a closely trimmed beard and moustache. “What a great surprise. Here.” He turned to his friends, who had turned to look at Dar. “Folks, this is an old colleague of mine, Dar Roberts,” Jacob said. “Dar, this is my wife Minnie and her brother Richard, and this is my son Todd and his fiancée
Rachel.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Dar replied courteously, and then half turned. “This is my partner, Kerrison.” To Kerry, she said, “Jacob and I survived the last great reorg you’ve heard so much about.”

  Kerry stood and took Jacob’s hand. “My sympathies.” She grinned. “I’ve heard.” Her eyes shifted to the rest of the table.

  “Hello.” The return greetings were cordial, if a little restrained.

  Kerry wasn’t sure if that was due to their circumstances or her Terrors of the High Seas 133

  introduction as Dar’s partner, but she gave them the benefit of the doubt and assumed the former.

  Jacob shifted his chair over. “Why don’t you pull that table over and join us, Dar,” he suggested. “We have plenty of room.”

  The others shuffled their chairs to either side while Dar edged their smaller table over, then everyone sat back down again. “What a coincidence, bumping into you here, Dar,” Jacob said. “You out here on business?” He turned to the rest of his family before Dar could answer. “Dar’s the CIO of ILS now. One busy lady.”

  “Nope,” Dar replied, lacing her fingers and resting her chin against them as she propped her elbows on the table. “We’re on vacation, as a matter of fact. What about you? Still working out in Australia?”

  “Just got back,” he said. “Thought we’d take a tour through the islands before we settled back in the States again.” His face crumpled into a frown. “Bad idea that turned out to be.”

  “Dad,” Rachel murmured.

  “Why?” Dar asked. “Seems like a nice place.”

  “Yeah, well, looks can be deceiving, as many folks found out about you, huh?” Jacob sighed. “Let me tell you what happened to us last night.”

  “Dad!” the young man interrupted. “They said not to talk about it.”

  “Thanks, kid, but I know what I can say and who I can say it to,” Jacob told Todd with a tolerant smile. “Dar here may look about your age, but she’s got more savvy up top than anybody I ever met.”

  Dar snorted. “You only say that because I saved your butt in Paris.”

  The waitress returned with Dar and Kerry’s drinks. She took in the table arrangement without blinking, then caught Kerry’s eye.