Bunker 01 - Slipknot (15 page)

Eddie hesitated. Without looking at his father, he finally replied, “I didn’t want it out in the salt air.”

“That’s a goddamn lie! You’ve never been a good liar. You had that tripod out in the salt air last week. I remember you showing George all of the fancy-ass adjustments one night when you should have been home in bed. It’s no wonder I can’t get any work out of you. You’re up all night, dreaming about space. Now,
where
is that tripod?” demanded Quin.

It didn’t seem to me that Eddie’s stoned state was enough to numb him to his father’s humiliation. “I think it was stolen.”

“Goddamn right it was. How many times have I told you not to be so fucking trusting? You leave six hundred bucks laying around, you deserve to lose it, loser.”

I was uneasy with the mounting tension between father s l i p k n o t

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and son, and with Quin’s cruelty. But if looks could kill, Quin would be a goner, and Eddie would be heading to prison. Eddie stood flexing his hands in and out of tight fists and clenching his jaw so hard that his face turned red and beads of sweat formed at his temples. With any more goading from his father, Eddie might fly into a violent rage. He appeared to be at his breaking point. Before his father could prompt him to do something we’d all regret, I interjected, “I heard there will be meteor showers tomorrow night.”

Eddie immediately snapped out of it and replied, “Yes.

The Perseid meteors are generally the best showers of the year. There will be ninety to one hundred meteors per hour at the time of peak. Unfortunately, peak is at seven—still daylight. By the time the radiant is well placed, the waning gib-bous moon will drown out a lot of the fainter falling stars.”

I began to realize that Eddie was accustomed to covering for his father’s lack of decency. He was able to shift gears to avoid looking as embarrassed as he must have felt.

“Oh, really?” I tried to sound merely interested but was afraid my tone was sheer disappointment as I thought forward to my date.

“Don’t worry. From the layman’s standards, it’ll be a great show.”

Quin was visibly irritated. He zipped and unzipped the top four or five inches of his coveralls, up and down, up and down, while he examined what appeared to be a badly damaged fishing net on the deck at his feet. At a glance, I could see where a mistake had been made in the mending of the net that would make it impossible to have it absolutely correct, which I

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knew from experience was imperative to all fishermen. “You missed a pickup where the wing goes into the seam,” I said, pointing out the error.

“You know twine?” asked Quin with more than a note of surprise.

“I fished my way through school. I had to mend to receive a full share.”

“No shit. Thanks.”

Thinking that I might like to impress Lincoln with my newfound knowledge of meteors, I engaged Eddie further while his father cut and fixed the mistake he probably had searched for and not been able to find. “I know nothing about the night sky. What would be the easiest star for me to identify?” I asked.

“That would be Sirius. It’s found in Canis Major, or Big Dog. That’s why we astronomers refer to it as the Dog Star.”

Quin snickered nastily at Eddie’s inclusion of himself in the group “astronomers.” “In ancient Greek times,” Eddie continued resolutely, “the dawn rising of Sirius marked the hottest part of the summer. You’ve probably heard the expression

‘dog days of summer.’ ”

“Yes, I have.” This was perfect material for conversation with Lincoln. “How do I find this Dog Star?”

“Follow Orion’s belt twenty degrees southeast to the brightest star in the sky. One fist held at arm’s length is roughly ten degrees of sky. You can find Orion, can’t you?”

Faster than I could confess my ignorance of astronomy, Quin displayed his astronomical impatience with his son’s avocation. “Okay, Galileo. Back to work on this net. Miss Bunker has more important things to think about than the s l i p k n o t

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stars.” Though I begged to differ, I thanked Eddie for the primer and promised to get a real lesson from him one clear night here on the dock with his telescope and inferior tripod.

As I followed Quin up the ladder to the bridge, I couldn’t help but think what an odd young man his son was. With the exception of his knowledge of astronomy, Eddie seemed quite unusual. Shouldn’t he be obsessing about girls and cars at seventeen? Too much marijuana, I assumed. And the anger he had nearly lost control of was downright scary, I thought.

I couldn’t help but wonder about the six-hundred-dollar tripod. Eddie, I determined, was weird to the point of being frightening. Quin, on the other hand, was just rude.

Entering
Fearless
’s wheelhouse, I was taken aback by the extent of damage to every single piece of electronic equipment. Not only were the displays smashed, cords were severed and housings were crushed, exposing innards. “Wow.

What a mess,” I said as I pulled a pad and pen from my bag.

“Yup. All totaled. Can’t even get parts for most of this stuff anymore. Guess I’ll need new equipment,” Quin said.

As I picked through the rubble, listing manufacturers and models of all the broken machines, what struck me most was Quin’s nonchalance about the complete malicious destruction of his property. I had participated in many criminal investigations of property damage in my old line of work. In cases involving this degree of sabotage, recipients of such brutal treatment usually described feelings of nausea, disbelief, and personal violation. Many were moved to tears. Quin was un-emotional. In fact, his biggest concern was not who had done this and why but, rather, how soon he would get a check to re-

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place what had been destroyed. The first and only call he had made was to the insurance company.

As I did my work, Quin made the most annoying sounds with his tongue against the roof of his mouth. When he had managed to drive me almost insane, I said, “The insurance company requires that you report this to the proper authorities.”

“Why? I wouldn’t press charges. Christ! I should thank whoever did this.”

“The insurance company will not consider your claim without an accompanying police report.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . I’ll get someone down here pronto.

I wonder if Clyde Leeman has any official forms.” He snickered at his joke, which I found quite cruel. As I continued writing and snapping pictures, Quin chewed and spat fingernails and played with the zipper of his coveralls and picked a sore on his pockmarked cheek until it bled. By the time I’d finished and climbed back onto the dock, I was certain of two things: Alan Quinby was the most annoying man I had ever met, and he had destroyed his own electronics. But Quin’s lack of integrity was not really my problem. My job was to survey and report the damage. I would not be asked to offer any opinions.

I said, “See you,” to Eddie, who never looked up. As I walked by the telescope and tripod, I hesitated and backed up to a position from which I could look through it. I stood on my toes to line up my right eye. In the center of the circular view was a ceramic red tugboat dangling from the bottom of a window shade.

10

fairly certain that nobody had seen me look through the telescope, I left it in the hands of the inferior tripod as I walked the pier at a consciously metered pace. If anyone were watching me now, they would see that I was neither nervous nor in a hurry to escape their view. I stopped before entering the shadow cast by the plant, faced the sun and stretched my arms wide, and threw my head back. Embracing the day and enjoying the warmth on my neck, I took a deep breath of the salt air, with all of its aromatics infused by the processing of fish and salting of bait. If the telescope had been employed even part-time to track my comings and goings, I now had the upper hand. Sure, I was creeped out that someone may have been spying on me. But I had nothing to gain by being apprehensive.

I couldn’t dillydally long. I had a lot to accomplish today.

Under the auspices of my “real” job, I had to survey two fishing vessels. The longtime owner of these sister ships had applied for hull insurance for the first time, a red flag to the insurance company.

Brokers and underwriters were loosening ties and rolling

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up sleeves in hot-flash-like response to new policies, inflated hull values, and increased claims by boats engaged in the cod fishery. The marine insurance industry had learned from hard-won experience the impact of poorly executed government regulations. Stringent legislation tended to become severe to the point of suffocating the participants whom the regulations were intended to protect. I had long ago observed that desperate people do desperate things. It’s a simple matter of survival. Fishermen who had been diligent about paying soaring premiums and had never filed even the smallest claim were cashing out with unexplainable total losses of boats in waters too deep for recovery or investigation. This tendency to collect from the insurance company what had been paid in over decades had become, in some areas, a default retirement plan. The overwhelming sense of entitlement had trickled down to crew members. A back injury was the deck worker’s 401(k). In many cases, I was becoming aware, it was not possible to distinguish legitimate claims from bogus ones. As a result, my workload was far heavier than what someone in my position would have experienced a few years ago.

Absolutely any proposed change to a policy or vessel was scrutinized. My task was to see that Green Haven, Maine, did not become what Gloucester, Massachusetts, was in the 1980s. An astonishing number of Gloucester men had decided to not go down with their ships or without a fight.

They had tried to take the marine insurance industry with them.

In all honesty, the real job was not a lot of fun. Even after only a few days on the job, I had figured out that marine in-s l i p k n o t

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surance surveying and investigating was rarely exciting or stimulating, which, I was easily able to convince myself, was all the more reason to dabble in things I was not paid to do—

like solving the murder of Nick Dow. Not that boredom alone was enough to make me do the things I was doing. But I did believe in our system of justice and was willing to work to see that Dow’s murderer didn’t skate. Handy, I thought, that in this case my extracurricular activity did have strings attached to my real employment. The
Sea Hunter
was a major connection, and I vowed to get aboard the boat to snoop before nightfall.

As mundane as the surveying gig could be, it was my only source of income. So, off I went in search of the sister ships
Desperado
and
Witchy Woman
, while trying to recall what other song titles fleshed out the Eagles’ greatest-hits album that I had listened to over and over as a teenager. An image of Manny Gomez (the first of a string of Cuban boyfriends) playing the air guitar and lip-synching “Lyin’ Eyes” sprang to mind. I put the past back in the depths of my personal archive when I spotted the two vessels rafted together along the end of a very rickety pier.

Picking my way along the dock, being careful to step over the many broken planks and spaces where planks were missing, I realized that I had found the low-rent district for half a dozen unfortunate fishing boats. The first two had weathered remains of Marshal stickers plastered to their windows.

“Stickered” boats were legally tied up for unpaid bills or neglected mortgages, and these particular vessels appeared to have been abandoned some time ago. Sea grasses and kelps

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stretched in the current from just below waterlines that were no longer visible under scales of rust. Net drums and cable spools had been stripped bare. Even the hydraulic hoses and fittings had been scavenged. Anything of any value to anyone was long gone, similar to what happened to cars that broke down in the neighborhood where I had grown up. I was strangely at home among the derelicts.

The skeleton of a fish that had been on the deck of one of the abandoned boats so long it no longer drew flies was further testimony to the number of moons that had waxed and waned since the host vessel had weighed anchor. Dock lines were mostly odds and ends of different sizes tied together with awkward knots. Chaffed and frayed, spring lines appeared to have outlived their ability to stand up to their names.

A rat the size of my toaster lumbered the length of a rusted deck and disappeared into a jagged black hole in a thoroughly disintegrating bulkhead. The only other sign of life on this sad pier stirred aboard my destination—
Desperado
.

Four young men—Webster’s definition of a motley crew—

stood with their hands in the pockets of jeans, the waistbands of which rested below their pelvic bones. With their boxer shorts exposed and baseball caps askew, they made me think I had happened upon Green Haven’s gangsta rappers. Three green contractor bags, fishermen’s suitcases, rested on the deck along with a lone canvas duffel that I assumed held the belongings of the boat’s captain. “Hello,” I called as I reached a stretch of dock that looked as though it might support all 135 pounds of me. The men looked up with what appeared to be disappointment. They were waiting for some-s l i p k n o t

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one, but not me. Getting no response to my greeting, I thought I would try again. “Who’s the Eagles fan?”

The men looked at one another and exchanged shrugs.

One man finally emerged as their brave leader when he flicked a cigarette butt into the water over the stern. “We like the Patriots. Are you lost, ma’am?”

Patriots? Ma’am? These men were younger than I had originally perceived. No need explaining the Eagles connection, I realized. That would only result in my feeling quite ancient. “No. I’m not lost. I’m here to survey these two boats for appraisals. I’m looking for the owner, Mr. Marten.”