Dead in the Water (5 page)

A deep voice said, "I don't think so.,, Jack Morgan was tall, six feet two inches, and he was broad, well over two hundred pounds, but what gave the shark pause was the expression on his almost ugly face. It might have been the broad, unsmiling mouth, or the high-bridged nose already broken more than once, or the cold, clear, steady blue of his eyes, narrowed slightly against the cigarette smoke that swirled and eddied across the room like the Aleutian fog offshore.

He stood where he was, waiting, like a rock indifferent to the roughest surf, and he looked at the shark, calm, watchful and without a trace of apprehension.

The shark was clearly taken aback by all this sangfroid but he was game. "Why don't we let the little lady speak for herself'?"

"Because she's already spoken for," Jack said, just as smoothly. He looked at Kate and quirked an eyebrow, daring her to react. Little pleased as she was by his high-handedness, still less did she want to start a fight.

Already noise was dying down around them as fishermen became aware of the confrontation and downed bottles and straws to watch avidly to see what happened next.

She caught a glimpse of Ned Nordhoff toward the back of the crowd and that decided her. She gave Jack a silent nod and stepped to his side. He rested a casual but unmistakably possessive hand on her shoulder, gave the shark an amiable smile and raised his voice.

"Barkeep!"

The bartender left off rewashing a perfectly clean glass and bustled down. "What'll you have?"

Jack jerked his head. "A room."

The bartender gave Kate a speculative look and Jack a lascivious grin. When no answering grin was forthcoming his own faded and he said nervously, "That'll be a hundred bucks. Cash. Up front."

"All right." Unperturbed, Jack produced a money clip and peeled off two fifties and handed them over. "When's checkout time?"

"Checkout time?"

Jack was patient. "What time in the morning do we have to be out?"

The bartender gaped. "You mean you're staying all night?"

For the first time Jack looked a little wary. "That was the idea. Is there a problem?"

"You want a whole room for one whole night?" Jack nodded. "What the hell you going to be doing up there that'll take all night?"

It was so obviously shock rather than prurient interest that prompted the question that Jack said only, "How about a key?"

The bartender woke from his self-induced trance. "The whole night'll cost you more than a hundred, I can tell you that, pardner."

Unmoved, Jack said, "How much more?"

Taken aback, the bartender glanced around for help.

"I don't know," he admitted, "no one's ever asked for a whole room for the whole night before."

Jack reached for his money clip and peeled another hundred off. "That do?" The bartender looked dazedly down at the bills in his outstretched hand, and Jack sighed and added another hundred, The bartender swallowed hard, the bills disappeared into a pocket and he said, "I'll get that key."

Conversation picked up as they followed him up the gangway bolted to the back wall. Kate's last sight of the bar was of Anatoly's enormous brown eyes, swimming with reproach, following her every step of the way.

The room wasn't much bigger than the stateroom Kate was sharing with Andy on the Avilda, and but for the bunkbeds looked very similar. The bulkheads were metal and cool to the touch, the bunk was narrow and built in to the wall with drawers beneath it and a porthole above, and the adjoining head was the size of an aspidistra. planter. "Hold it," Kate said when the bartender would have left them. Pulling back the covers on the bed, she sniffed the sheets. They smelled fresh and they looked clean. So did the toilet, and when she pulled back the shower curtain the floor looked fungi-free. It was far more than she'd hoped for. She reentered the room and nodded at Jack, who repeated, "So, when do you want us out of here?"

The bartender scratched his head. "Hell, I don't know."

"When's your boat due out?" Jack asked Kate.

She shrugged. "We're waiting on a part they're flying in from Anchorage. Could be one day. Could be two."

"But it won't be tomorrow." She shook her head, and Jack looked back at the bartender, who threw up his hands. "The hell with it," he told them, "stay as long as you like. And don't even think about complaining about the noise. This ain't exactly the Holiday Inn, you know."

"We know," Jack said dryly, and the bartender stamped out.

"Did you see that line of coke?" Kate demanded as soon as the door slammed shut behind him. Jack nodded.

"God knows I'm no prude, Jack, but Jesus! There had to be thousands of dollars worth of hits on that bar!"

He unzipped his jacket and sat down to unlace his boots. "Hundreds of thousands."

"Enough for Amaknak Island to achieve lift-off," she said, her torn voice outraged. "I'd bet my last dime there wasn't a kid there over twenty-five, and every last one of them due to go back out into the Bering Sea as soon as their boats are refueled. You've got to do something."

"Look, Kate, I don't mean to sound unfeeling," he said, grunting a little as the first boot came off, "but could we concentrate for a minute on why you're here?"

"You've got to do something," she reiterated.

He set the second boot beside the first, lining the two up with meticulous precision. "Kate. I'm an investigator for the Anchorage D.A. I am not a police officer, and even if I were this isn't anywhere remotely near my jurisdiction."

She told him what he could do with his jurisdiction, and he said, "You want me to wade into that crowd of drunks, most of them just off their boats, thousands of dollars in their pockets, thousands of miles from home and family, roaring to have a good time, and tell them they can't?" He snorted. "There wouldn't be enough of me left to lick up off the floor."

"Then call the cops! Call the troopers! Call the DEAD!"

"You think they aren't already here?"

She glared at him, impotent.

He waved a hand in the general direction of the airstrip.

"Three different public air carriers fly into Dutch every day. Ma and Pa Kettle can fly in for the price of a ticket, seven hundred dollars round-trip if they buy in advance. So can Joe Fisherman. And so can Joe Blow, your friendly neighborhood pusher." He saw her expression and his own softened. "Kate. Some of these kids are pulling down five, ten grand a trip. It's cold work, it's boring, it's lonely, and for most of them it's the toughest job they'll ever have. Oh," he said, holding up a hand palm out when she would have spoken, "the cops and the troopers and the DEA'll do their best, like they always do, understaffed and underfunded and with the entire fishing community closing ranks against them. But it all comes down to the same thing in the end, escape for sale. Here, who can resist that kind of sales pitch?"

Her glare was damning and maybe even a little righteous.

"I can."

His grin was tired but appreciative. "That's why I love you, Katie, you tough little broad, you. Now what have you got for me?"

"Zip," she said with relish.

He leaned back in his chair, crossed his feet on the edge of the bunk, laced his hands behind his head and looked at her, waiting.

She blew out an exasperated breath and flopped on the bunk, kicking off her boots. "What did you expect'? You fly into the Park with some cockamamie story about the Case of the Disappearing Crewmen, and yank me out of there so fast I barely have time to get Mutt and her pups over to Mandy's. The next thing I know I'm on a boat in the middle of the Boring Sea, in gale-force winds and freezing rain, pulling pots and wondering what the hell I'm doing there."

"You didn't have to come," he pointed out. "As you have made abundantly clear on more than one occasion, you don't work for me anymore."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she said. Jack was being reasonable and Kate wasn't interested in reasonable at the moment. "Except for when you offer me four hundred dollars a day and expenses." Not to mention $8,300 a week in incidental earnings, she thought. The prospect cheered her, but she would be damned before she let him see it.

"Besides," he added, "the Avilda needed a deckhand pronto, and the board couldn't stall off Gault forever, not with so many wanna-be deckhands in Dutch. There wasn't time to brief you."

"There's time now," she pointed out.

He eyed the bunk, and her on it. "I was kind of hoping we could try out that bunk first." He waggled his eyebrows. "It's going to be tough, justifying it on my expense account. I want to make sure I'm getting my money's worth."

She bit back a smile and said sternly, "Get on with it."

He gave a mournful sigh and dug into his pack, producing a tattered, bulging file folder with sheets of paper sliding out in every direction. "I assumed when I flew into the Park last week that you had heard of the two crewmen who were lost last March."

"Don't assume anything of the kind. The Park's not on a paper route, I don't have a satellite dish, or a television, for that matter, and I only listen to National Public Radio. Or I do when the skip is right, which isn't often, and Bob Edwards doesn't talk a lot about Alaska anyway. And besides, you and I were busy with other matters last spring." Unconsciously, Kate rubbed at her right shoulder, feeling again the kick of the shotgun as she faced down a man with ten bodies, two of them children, littering the Park behind him. Lottie she refused to think about at all.

"True." Jack's voice was without inflection, but he took care not to look at her.

"Start from the beginning, and don't worry about repeating yourself. I want to hear it all this time."

"All right." He made a stab at shaking the mass of paperwork in his lap into some kind of order, and gave it up as a lost cause. Tilting his chair back against the bulkhead, he closed his eyes and recited from memory.

"The Avilda is one of a fleet of deep-sea fishing boats owned by a consortium of fishing families from Freetown, Oregon, called Alaska Ventures, Inc. They've been smart and successful, and they've built up quite a sizable fleet over the last forty years." He pawed through the folder and by a miracle found what he was looking for near the top of the file. "There's the Avilda, your boat. There's the Lady Killigrew, the Madame Ching, the-"

Kate sat up, and he looked at her. "What?"

The names triggered a memory somewhere, but she couldn't immediately track it down. She shook her head.

"Nothing. Never mind."

He looked at her for a moment longer, decided it wasn't worth the effort and returned to his list. "There's the Mary Read, the Anne Bonney and a sixth on the ways at Marco, the-"

Kate's memory clicked in and a wide grin spread across her face. "Let me guess. The Grace O'Malley."

He examined his list again. "No, the Mary Lovell."

Kate laughed out loud. "What?"

She was still chuckling, but she shook her head. "Nothing.

Never mind. It's not important."

Jack mistrusted the smug expression on her face but shrugged his shoulders and looked back down at his list. "The fleet spends summers in Freetown, refitting, maintenance and repairs, upgrading equipment, that kind of thing. Winters, they spend fishing in Alaska, out of Kodiak or Dutch Harbor, always for crab, opilio, bairdi, red and blue king. Lately there's been some talk of refitting a few of the vessels for bottom fishing, but Alaska Ventures' board of directors seems to feel that bottom fishing is going to be severely curtailed in the near future."

"They are smart," Kate observed. "A lot of marine biologists blame bottom fishing for the drop in king crab stocks in the mid-eighties, and they lobby hard in Juneau and Washington. They've got the tree huggers on their side, too. Hard to buck. What's any of this got to do with the Case of the Disappearing Crewmen?"

"I'm getting to that. As you know, the Avilda is skippered by Harry Gault. During the tail end of last season, Gault used the Avilda to haul a barge from Kodiak to Dutch Harbor. The barge belonged to the processor Alaska Ventures delivers to, so he was doing them a favor. Not much of one, as it turned out."

"What happened?"

"It is generally agreed, if not said right out loud, that through bad weather and bad seamanship Gault lost the barge."

"Lost the barge9"

Jack nodded. "The line parted twice before he finally lost it for good the third time. They spent a lot of time going around in circles trying to find it. No luck. In the meantime, they ran out of water."

"Ran out of water?"

Jack nodded. "Ran out of water." When Kate would have said more he held up one hand and cautioned,

"Remember, the deck boss and the remaining deckhand backed him up on this."

"Ned Nordhoff and Seth Skinner."

Jack nodded again. "So he drove the boat over to the nearest island, anchored, and the other crew members"Jack fumbled impatiently with the pile of paper in his lap-"doggone it, okay, here it is-their names were Christopher Alcala and Stuart Brown-went ashore to look for water."

The faces of the two young crewmen appeared again before Kate's eyes. "Went ashore where?"

"Ah, what, the island's name was Anua."

"Got a map?"

Jack fished around in his daypack and tossed a folded piece of paper over to her. She flattened it on the bunk and found the little island halfway down the chain, ringed in a circle of black Marksalot she had no difficulty in identifying as Jack's handiwork. Jack had always leaned toward black Marksalot for notes, arrows and marginal balloons on any piece of evidence that was write-onable, to the vocal disgust of the district attorneys who had then to introduce the evidence into the trial record. "What's on it? On Anua, I mean?"

"An airstrip dating back to World War 11, an active volcano. That's about it. Pretty standard for an Aleutian island."

Kate measured the air miles between Dutch Harbor and Anua, her brows puckered. "Mmm."

He waited, but that was all she said. "Alcala and Brown left the Avilda at about four in the afternoon, in the skiff. They had a flashlight and a bunch of jerry cans."

"That all?"

"Uh-huh."