The Ocean Dark

by Christopher Golden

  As Rogan maneuvered the lifeboat alongside the fishing boat, Josh saw the writing on the stern that identified her as the Mariposa out of Costa Rica. Rogan cut the engine and let the transport drift over to bump against the side. In the sudden quiet, Josh caught a sound on the breeze--a lone voice singing high and ethereal. He strained to hear more but it was gone as quickly as it had come, snatched away by the shifting wind, and he wondered if he’d imagined it.

  “Did you hear that?” he whispered.

  Miguel cocked his head, listening, the H&K slung over one shoulder. “What?”

  “Music,” Josh said, feeling foolish.

  “Maybe a radio on board,” Rogan muttered. In the moonlight, his white skin gave him a ghostly countenance.

  Miguel grabbed hold of the ladder and kept them in place while Josh and Rogan tossed a couple of bumpers over the side to keep the boats from smashing together, then tied up to the Mariposa.

  Rogan stepped back and raised the shotgun’s barrel, swung it in an arc, but no one appeared on the deck of the fishing boat. Pulleys clanked against metal posts as the waves rocked both vessels, but nothing moved on board the ship.

  With the barrel of his H&K, Miguel gestured for Josh to climb the ladder. He didn’t like the idea much, but couldn’t argue. He’d volunteered to help, after all--practically insisted on coming along. If he tried to balk now, Miguel would not be happy. And given the weapon in his hands, Josh wanted to keep the chief mate in a good mood.

  He went up the ladder in about three seconds, stayed low as he came onto the deck, and snatched the SIG-Sauer from his belt. Standing, he clicked off the safety, making an arc with the gun, checking the shadowy places. The moon showed details in black and white, bathed in gold. There had been a fire on the port side, though it had been put out before any real damage had been done. Equipment had been bent and broken. All but one of the wheelhouse windows had been shattered. Some serious shit had gone down out here, but the Mariposa was still afloat.

  Josh beckoned Miguel and Rogan to follow and started toward the wheelhouse. His heel slipped in something but he managed to maintain his balance. In the moonlight, the damp, jellied mess on the deck looked like the innards of some fish. There wasn’t much of it; a handful, really. But a trail went across the deck toward the far railing, just a hint of something viscous that had been smeared there and then dried.

  What the fuck am I doing here? Josh thought.

  Taking a breath, he kept on. Miguel and Rogan came aboard as quietly as they could, but in the near-silence they were far from stealthy. Still no noise came from within the fishing boat. If anyone remained on board, they hadn’t heard or had heard and not responded. This last thought troubled him. Certainly there existed the possibility that someone lay injured below and couldn’t come up to investigate the noises they were making, couldn’t call out. That didn’t worry Josh. His concern was whether or not there might be someone on board who had chosen not to respond, who didn’t want the intruders to know they were not alone.

  With a glance back, he confirmed that Rogan and Miguel were in motion. They moved quickly across the stern--the sticky deck where the fishermen would have hauled much of their catch out of the water. Josh had already confirmed for himself that that section of the boat was clear, but he didn’t blame Miguel for not relying on him. Then they started moving up the port side, past the burnt section, until they were parallel with Josh on the starboard. With a signal from Miguel, all three of them continued forward, weapons at the ready as they reached the wheelhouse.

  Josh and Miguel moved in synch, stopping to peer through the shattered glass of the wheelhouse windows, weapons trained on the darkness within. They sidestepped, searching for movement, but saw nothing as they continued making their way around the ruined box of a room. The instrument panel looked as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to it, the radio and radar destroyed.

  At the front of the wheelhouse, they paused. Miguel gestured silently to Josh to stay put and Josh nodded, pistol trained on the wheelhouse as Rogan and the first mate searched the bow. The Mariposa was large for a fishing boat, but there weren’t very many places to hide on the deck. They were back within moments.

  The three of them moved together to the stairs that led below. This time Miguel went first, the barrel of his H&K preceding them all into the dark. Rogan flipped a light switch to no effect; the darkness remained. Josh descended last, one hand on the thin wooden rail. His fingers passed over a deep groove, and then another, and he investigated further, feeling scars in the wood.

  In the common area of the cabin, they all paused while their eyes adjusted to the diminished light available from the four small portholes in the room. The broken pieces of a wooden chair were piled in a corner near a small card table and another, unmarred chair. The benches seemed untouched, but a rack of DVDs and CDs had been spilled onto the floor. A TV sat unharmed on a shelving unit set into the wall beside the stairs.

  Miguel started forward, moving along the short, narrow corridor toward the three smaller cabins. One would have belonged to the captain of the fishing boat, with the crew splitting up to bunk in the other two.

  “Josh,” Rogan whispered, his pale face seeming to float in the dark. He pointed to one of the portholes, which had been shattered.

  With a glance back up the steps and then down the dark corridor, where Miguel was now only a shadow, Josh went over to see what had drawn the Irishman’s attention. Rogan nodded toward the porthole.

  “What do you make of that?”

  Only a few jagged shards of thick glass remained in the frame, but around its edges the metal had been smeared with something that in the moonlight looked like paint or tar. It had run in streaks down the wall beneath the shattered porthole.

  Rogan reached out to touch it.

  “Blood,” Josh said.

  Hesitating, Rogan sniffed the air. His lip curled and his hand came back to close around the shotgun as if the weapon was his most precious possession.

  A thump came from the corridor.

  Josh spun, SIG-Sauer coming up in a two-handed grip. Rogan fumbled with the shotgun and they were all lucky he didn’t accidentally pull the trigger.

  Miguel stood at one end of the corridor, outlined in the open door of one of the crew cabins, the assault rifle lodged against his shoulder. The three men aimed guns at one another for several heartbeats before twitching the barrels aside.

  Completely still, they listened, rocking with the gentle sway of the boat, but the only sound was the distant clang of pulleys and winches back on deck. Then Miguel took a step toward them and waved them closer, swinging the H&K toward a closed door. He’d been nearer to it, and seemed pretty certain now about where the sound had originated.

  Josh padded quickly down the short corridor with Rogan at his back. He nearly tripped over a single black boot that lay in his path. The oddity of it registered, but he didn’t have time to focus on it.

  The thump had come from the head. The room would be tiny--as small as an airplane restroom, with a mini-sink and toilet jammed into a space the size of a closet. Something might have fallen over, but Josh’s pulse quickened, pounding in his ears, and his skin prickled. Someone was on board with them. He’d had the sense that they weren’t alone from the moment they had come down into the cabin, but hadn’t wanted to say anything. He could’ve been wrong. Now he was sure he wasn’t.

  He narrowed his eyes, nodded toward Miguel, gestured to the other two cabin doors. Both hung open. No way the chief mate had searched those rooms well. The thump from the head had distracted him from that job. In the gloom, Miguel’s eyes narrowed. Reluctantly, he nodded and turned in the corridor, put his back against the wall and held the H&K ready so that if anyone tried to come at them from one of those two cabins, he could strafe the doorways with bullets.

  Josh looked at Rogan, held up a hand to make him pause, to get him ready. The Irishman might be young, but he’d clearly held a gun before. He seemed unphased by the tensi
on in the air. Rogan leveled the shotgun at the door to the head.

  With his free hand, Josh tried the door and found it locked.

  Nothing had fallen over. They weren’t alone.

  He glanced at Miguel, then Rogan, a simple warning, then stepped back at an angle and put a bullet through the lock, blowing a hole in the door. The report echoed in the closed space and he flinched before he reached for the ruined door and yanked it open.

  Rogan aimed the shotgun into the cramped space. No one came out of the cabins. Josh had expected a scream, some kind of reaction. But no sound rose from within.

  A man sat on the toilet in torn, bloody clothes, pressed into the corner of that tiny room with his legs drawn up under him as though he had tried to make himself smaller, by forcing his body into a ball. His legs were covered in horrible gashes, blood crusting over, and what they could see of his body through the torn clothes showed dark welts in strange patterns all across the flesh. His face was turned toward them, eyes wide and glassy, lips pulled back in a rictus of terror and frozen in place. Were it not for the tremulous hitching of each breath, Josh would have been certain he was dead.

  But the skinny little man still lived, for the moment.

  “Jaysus,” Rogan whispered, his accent flaring up. “What the fuck happened to you?”

  The man began to shake and to weep, and he spilled into the narrow corridor like a house of cards coming down, revealing a seeping hole in his stomach. He’d been holding a hand over it, had bunched himself up in that corner to try to keep his insides from poking out.

  Now he covered the hole with both hands again, pressed down, curled in upon himself, shuddering. Death had come to the Mariposa, and this man had survived its visit. But not for long.

  ~17~

  On the bridge of the Antoinette, Tori waited in silence. Captain Rio spoke to the ship’s engineer, Hank Boggs, out on the metal landing, leaving her alone with Suarez. For the most part, the second mate didn’t acknowledge her, though once she muttered something about the adventure of working with the Rios, and he smiled thinly to himself, exposing nicotine-yellowed teeth and a merriment in his eyes that surprised her. Suarez didn’t say much, but he loved his job. Tori envied him that pure devotion.

  Her own life was a work in progress. When she’d escaped her husband, she’d intended to leave the world of drugs and violence behind. But without a usable social security number, there weren’t a lot of places she could have worked. Hello, my name’s Tori, can you pay me under the table? It was like wearing a sign around her neck identifying herself as a fugitive. Most people would think her a criminal herself, maybe hiding from a parole officer or an arrest warrant.

  George had helped. Her guardian angel, coming through again. He’d e-mailed her information about a shelter for battered women, and one of the volunteers there had helped her get her first job in Miami, waiting tables in a little Italian restaurant tucked away in a hotel in Bal Harbour. Another week and she’d have been dancing in a strip club, so the job at Castaways had come along in the nick of time.

  Bal Harbour had a huge population of retirees, but the Royal Floridian skewed younger, and a great deal of business got done in the bar and restaurant—not all of it legal. The concierge, Paolo, could get hotel clientele anything they desired, with drugs and girls at the top of that list. Tori thought he was kind of sweet for such a shady character. Paolo never tried to sell her drugs and never tried to get her to sell herself to any of his clients—though he did tell her several had asked.

  Tori steered customers his way, took messages for him, even hung out sometimes with Paolo and his friends after work. They’d flirted with her, of course, but they’d treated her with respect. The one time she’d slept with Paolo, she’d been the one to initiate it, and he hadn’t expected anything afterward.

  Paolo had introduced her to Frank Esper, explaining that she needed to stay off the books, that anonymity kept her safe from bad men. Those were his words. Bad men. She’d laughed at the time, wondering what Paolo would have said if she’d asked him to define the phrase. But Frank had understood, and a couple of days later, he’d offered her a job at Viscaya, under the table, no reporting to the IRS.

  She couldn’t help feeling a little guilty now that she planned to leave Viscaya behind, but Frank couldn’t have expected she would stay there forever.

  The radio squawked, shaking her from her reverie. She glanced at Suarez, who seemed about to tell her to answer, but obviously he thought better of it.

  “Fetch the captain, please,” he said.

  Tori nodded, heading for the door. The bridge smelled of industrial cleaners and mildew, like whoever washed it down after each voyage just kept mopping with the same filthy water. When she pulled the door open, she got a refreshing blast of sweet Caribbean air, but on her second breath it was tainted with the other scents of their journey—the oil of the engines and the acrid odor of rusting metal.

  Gabe and Hank Boggs halted their conversation the second the door opened, looking at her curiously. The engineer’s lips were a thin line of annoyance.

  “The radio,” she said without being asked.

  The captain nodded and turned to Hank. “Whatever they come back with, I want only my people there when they come aboard.”

  “I’ll make sure,” the engineer replied, and then he started down the metal steps.

  Tori held the door for Captain Rio as he hustled onto the bridge and over to the radio. Miguel’s voice crackled on the speakers. “Come in Donald, this is Mickey.”

  “Mickey, this is Donald. Over,” Gabe replied.

  “We’ve got one, Donald. I repeat, one, and the clock is ticking.”

  From the look on Captain Rio’s face, Tori didn’t need to ask “one what?” One survivor, wounded somehow and failing fast.

  “Shit,” Gabe snapped. He blew out a breath and visibly steeled himself.

  “What about the cargo, Mickey?”

  “No sign, but we’re searching.”

  “Every inch, Mickey. Radio with an update ASAP.”

  “Will do. And Donald?”

  There’d been a pause and now Miguel Rio’s tone had shifted. Tori frowned, glanced over at the captain. Gabe had noticed it, too, and a look of concern revealed lines on his face.

  “What is it?”

  On the radio, Miguel launched into a flood of unfamiliar language, inflection rising and falling, rapid-fire words to which Tori listened closely. Some she thought she understood. It was like listening to a song she was sure she knew but being unable to remember its name or how the chorus went. She assumed it was some variant Romance language--Catalan or Portuguese. In the gloomy artificial light on the bridge, she watched Gabe’s expression twist and darken with anger.

  He signed off, then turned to cast a baleful look at Suarez. The old sailor must have understood, for he nodded slowly.

  “What language was that?” Tori ventured. “You guys are from Mexico, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Gabe said as he turned grim eyes upon her. He seemed to be weighing her, trying to decide how much he trusted her, how much he needed her, both things that were incredibly popular.

  “I have a job for you, Tori.”

  His expression was so contorted with anger that she only nodded. Captain Rio took a key ring out of his pocket, chose a long key and removed it from the ring, and then handed it over to her.

  “This will open all of the crew cabins. Go down and search Josh’s quarters, now, before they get back. Then come see me.”

  Her stomach tightened, giving a sour twist. She could taste rust on her lips, the scent of it still in her mouth from being outside, even briefly.

  Her pulse raced.

  “What am I looking for?” she asked, wondering if Gabe saw the regret in her face.

  His eyes were hard. “Anything he shouldn’t have. Weapons. Radios. A fucking badge.”

  “A badge?” She stared at him, mouth agape, then shook her head. “No way. Not Josh. Where the hel
l are you getting this?”

  Gabe scowled. “Turns out our cook isn’t who he says he is. And he couldn’t wait to go with Miguel, get a first-hand look at what’s going down out there. I thought he was a little too eager, but I didn’t figure him for a Fed.”

  “How do you know?” Tori demanded, refusing to believe it.

  “That story about him sharing a cell with Hector Guarino? It’s bullshit. People who lie about prison usually do it to hide the fact they served time. The only people who lie about doing time they never did are cops working undercover.”

  Tori blanched, and a rush of anger replaced the last traces of the pleasure Josh had given her earlier. She wondered if she would survive prison.

  Wondered if it could cure her of her love for men with secrets.

  “You’re really sure?” she asked.

  “Ninety-nine percent. And that’s why you need to hustle your ass down to his quarters before they come back.”

  She swore as she rushed from the bridge. The people at Viscaya had put their trust in her, put their secrets in her hands. With the exception of Ted and his sleazy friends, bad men had always been honest with her. It turned out that the good guys were the liars.

  And Tori hated being lied to.

  ~18~

  Josh stared at the fisherman who lay dying on the floor of the Mariposa’s cabin. His breathing was a shallow, ragged wheeze, and wet with the sound of something torn and leaking deep inside him. Where his hands were pressed over the wound in his abdomen, less and less blood seeped around his fingers, his body winding down, heart slowly ticking away the last of his life.

  “Open your eyes, asshole. Stay with me!” Miguel shouted, slapping the man’s cheeks.

  “Come on, man,” Josh said.

  Miguel whipped his head around and glared. “Come on, what? You wanted to help, right? Help by shutting your mouth.”

  “Leave the guy alone. He’s almost gone, for Christ’s sake.”

  Miguel pressed his eyes tightly closed, like he was trying to shut Josh’s words out, then opened them again and stared down at the fisherman.