Dead in the Water (9 page)

"The tension alone I get from rooming with you, nothing could diminish."

"Plus your disposition will improve," he observed.

Kate took a deep breath and managed a smile. "My disposition doesn't need improving, thank you."

He shook his head disapprovingly. "You're so resistant, Kate. I'm going to have to do something about that."

What scared her most was that he might succeed.

They left Dutch Harbor on the evening tide and were pulling pots in the Gulf of Alaska thirty-six hours later.

The halogen lights mounted on the cabin illuminated the Avilda's deck and nothing else; the fog was back with a vengeance, as if in retaliation for the one perfect day.

The swells, too, were increasing, long, slow swells that came in from the southeast, each one higher than the last, making Ned Nordhoff shake his head and mutter into his beard. He climbed the ladder to the bridge and Kate saw him arguing vociferously with Harry Gault. A few minutes later he was back on deck, his face red beneath his beard and his voice curt.

The first pot they pulled had half a dozen Dungeness and a pollock inside it. "Garbage," Ned growled, and hoisted the pot over to Andy and Kate. They opened the door, tossed the dungies and the gasping bottomfish over the side, rebaited the pot and tied the door shut again.

Something about the pot bothered Kate but by then the next pot was aboard and routine took over.

The second pot came in, as empty as the first one of anything harvestable, and gloom settled in on deck.

A crew share of nothing was nothing. Still they went through the motions, pulling, baiting and resetting. Kate wondered why the skipper didn't tell them to stack the pots on deck, to set them somewhere else, because the tanner had obviously vacated this part of the ocean for greener sea bottoms elsewhere.

It wasn't until the sixth pot in the string that the nagging feeling clicked over to recognition. "Hey," she said, puzzled. She looked at the yellow ties holding the door of the pot closed. "Andy, you're a southpaw, aren't you?"

"Yeah .

"So your wrap on the door ties would go this way.

Right?"

He stared for a moment. "I guess so."

"Show me. Tie one."

He reached for the twine, his fingers moving slowly and clumsily, making several false starts. "It's harder to do when you're thinking about it," he apologized.

Finished, he stepped back.

"Uh-huh," Kate said. "See? Your hitches go the other way around. You didn't tie these," she elaborated when he looked mystified. "And look at the bait jar."

"What about it?"

"I use a becket to hang our jars. That looks like some kind of granny knot." She raised her voice. "Hey, Ned?

Come here a minute, would you?"

There was a responding growl next to the pot launcher and Ned materialized out of the fog, which had thickened into a gray-green soup that swirled and eddied all around them. "What?" he asked sarcastically. "The kid making suggestive remarks about your ass?"

"What can he say except that it's perfect?" she snapped back. "Look at this."

"Look at what? I don't see anything."

Kate, holding on to her temper, said evenly, "Somebody's been at these pots before us." She showed him the ties and the bait jar.

"The shots are coming up tangled, too," Seth said from behind Ned, "and the bridles don't look right, either."

Ned examined the knots, and they waited. An oath ripped out that singed the ears of his listeners and he turned to make for the bridge ladder. After a moment the Avilda's engine settled into a low, neutral purr and Ned returned to the deck with the skipper at his heels.

Gault's mouth worked soundlessly and his face slowly reddened as he looked at the door ties and the bait jar. The rest of the crew waited, Seth impassive, Andy nervous, Kate watchful.

Ned said something to Gault and was waved away with an abrupt movement. "It's that fucking Johansen on the fucking Daisy Mae again," the skipper spat. "This time I don't take it lying down." His grin was mirthless and malevolent when he added, "This time I know where the little prick's pots are."

"It's not worth it," Seth said, his voice as clear as it was unexpected. "We shouldn't take chances, not with what else we've got going-" He looked over at the rest of the crew, hesitated and said, "It's not worth the grief we'll get from the owners if they ever find out about it."

"I don't give a damn what they say in Freetown!" Gault yelled. "I don't grab my ankles every time Freetown says bend over! Secure the deck and rig for running!"

Gault returned to the bridge. Ned and Seth exchanged a long glance. Seth shrugged, and Ned growled, "You heard the man. Secure the deck."

Andy looked bewildered. "What do we do with the pot? We need to dump out the garbage and bait it, right?"

"You got a hearing problem, blondie?" the deck boss demanded. "The skipper said dump it."

"But what about the rest of the string?"

"Dump it!"

They dumped it, the bait jar empty, the pot still holding three immature tanners, the fragile pink of their shells testifying to a recent molt. Almost before the water closed over the bridle, the Avilda was coming about in a 180-degree turn, and if the whining protest of the engine was any indication, the throttle was open all the way. Kate stood at the railing, face into the wind, and breathed deep of the salt air.

"Somebody robbed our pots, is that it?" Andy said, coming up behind her.

"That's it," she agreed.

"Somebody pulled them and picked the legal tanners and left the junk-the garbage," he corrected himself,

"for us."

"Looks that way."

"Who would do that?" he said, his voice shocked.

"Who would steal from their fellow fishermen like that?"

Kate, amused and a trifle touched by his innocence, said, "Probably somebody on their way out to their own string stumbled across ours and got a little greedy.

Although it sounds like the skipper knows exactly who did it, which means it's happened before."

"So what's going on?" Andy asked her. "What're we doing now? Are we going back to Dutch? Are we calling the cops?"

"I don't know," she said, although she had a pretty good idea. When the Anchorage District Attorney's accounting department found bail money listed as an expense incurred in the investigation of this case, Kate hoped they found it in their hearts to pass it through.

The Avilda ran flat out and north-northeast, in six hours fetching up just south of the Islands of Four Mountains.

There, they ran back and forth, quartering and subdividing the seas off Yunaska. The fog had thickened and Kate was glad, but then a buoy slid by the port rail, and she resigned herself. There just wasn't going to be any getting out of this one.

Seth, moving more quickly than Kate had ever seen him move before, had a boat hook over the side and hooked on to the buoy before it passed out of reach.

When it proved to be a buoy belonging to the Daisy Mae, the deck crew could hear Harry's shriek of triumph right through the walls of the bridge.

When Seth pinched a section of the rope and started the winch to pull the pot, Kate knew enough to keep her mouth shut. Andy didn't.

"Wait a minute," he said, "those aren't our buoys."

When Ned ignored him, he caught his arm. "Hey, Ned.

I said we aren't picking our own pots."

"I heard you," Ned grunted, shaking him off. "Sort that goddam crab, blondie."

Andy stared from Ned to Seth, and lastly to Kate, who was coiling the incoming line into a wet pile at her feet.

He opened his mouth to say more. She gave her head a small, single shake. Her steady gaze held a clear, silent warning, and Andy, if naive, was not stupid. He shut his mouth and stepped forward to help pull the pot on board.

It was only the beginning. For five hours they picked pots that weren't theirs. On the bridge Gault worked the spotlight, picking the next set of buoys out of the fog, while he watched the radar for approaching vessels.

On deck, with a grin of pure enjoyment on his face and a knife in his hand, Ned slashed through the pot webbing. His face expressionless, Seth cut bait jars loose and pitched them over the side, and then cut the shots of line, once where it attached to the bridle of each pot and again below the buoys. They were good solid pots, one-and-a-quarter-inch mild steel, with zinc anoids to retard rusting. When the pot did go overboard, it was a seven-by-seven-by-three-foot 750-pound piece of junk. Even if it could be salvaged, it would have to almost entirely be remade before it was fishable again.

Kate, working silently and efficiently alongside the rest of the crew, was sickened, both at the display of spite and at the waste of equipment. She worried about Andy, who worked next to her mechanically, a strained look on his pale face. "You okay?" she asked him in a low voice. He nodded without replying and she had to be satisfied with that.

They pulled pots, they sorted crab, they slashed webbing, they cut line, they punctured buoys, until their backs ached and their heads hurt. They hurried for fear of discovery, and spoke only seldom, and then in whispers.

What made it worse was that Johansen wasn't on the crab at all and the pots coming up were mostly garbage.

One had what Kate would have sworn was at least a thousand pounds of females in it, another only a couple of chicken halibut. If she'd known how hard thieving was, and how unrewarding, she might have made more of a protest in the beginning.

Straightening her back and groaning a little, she noticed that the sound of the Avilda's engine had changed. A loud whisper floated down from the catwalk in front of the bridge, and she looked up to see Harry Gault motioning to her.

"Got a boat coming up on us on the screen," he said in a hoarse whisper. "Tell Ned we're taking off."

They stripped the deck bare of any shred of the Daisy Mae's gear, pitching it all over the side. In his haste Andy pitched over a couple of their own knives and a twenty-five-fathom shot of their own line, too. He gave Ned a fearful look.

Ned was feeling very pleased with life, and shrugged in response to Andy's look. "No problem. Plenty more where they came from."

The rumble of the diesel increased and Kate sent up a fervent hope that the old girl's engine held together long enough for a clean getaway. Sound carried over water, and the other boat undoubtedly had its own radar.

They had to know the Avilda was there, and if the pots belonged to them, they had to know what the Avilda had been up to. Kate just hoped they didn't have a rifle.

Their luck held. The Avilda was unpursued. They ran flat-out for eight hours through the fog to the beginning of their own string. There followed a grueling twenty-four hours with no stops of pulling pots, rebaiting and resetting them. Toward the end of the string the pots suddenly began coming up loaded, which meant they had worked their way beyond where the pot robbers had stopped or been scared off by the approach of another boat. More crab went in the hold and the atmosphere on deck improved. This trip out the weather was infinitely better, fog or no fog, and the crew worked much more swiftly and efficiently. Although Kate did miss the big swells when it came to shoving pots that outweighed her by 630 pounds across a deck that seemed to have increased considerably in width between this trip and the last.

They were clearing the deck and covering the hold when a hammering on the bridge window made the deck crew look up. Harry was circling his extended forefinger in the air. He went so far as to open a window and yell,

"I'll bring 'er in, the rest of you get some shut-eye."

As before when the skipper had given the signal for home, Ned trotted astern and tossed a short length of one-inch manila line overboard, its bound end looped around a cleat on the stem rail, its free end trailing behind, twisting and turning in the wake of white foam.

Andy watched covertly from amidships, and nudged Kate when Ned passed forward. "What's that line for?" he asked in a low voice. "It's not connected to anything, it's just dragging behind us."

Kate was standing at the railing, her face into the wind, as if the cold, clear sea air could scour her clean of the taint of the night's activities. Following his gaze, tired as she was, she smiled and replied in the same low voice, "It's the lady's line."

"The what?"

She opened the door into the galley. "The lady's line.

It's an old sailors' custom, dates back before the whalers, I think."

"What does it mean?" he said, following her down the passageway.

"When it comes time to turn for home, they toss a free line in the water, so the ladies they left behind can pull their loved ones home."

Andy thought it over, his face brightening a little. "I like it. It's got tradition."

"Don't say anything about it," Kate told him, still in a low voice. "It's not talked about, it's just done."

He grinned a tired grin. "Don't want to break the spell, huh?"

"Do you walk under ladders?"

His grin faded and he paused, the door to their room halfway open. "Do you let black cats cross your path?"

Kate asked him. "When you spill salt, do you quick toss a pinch of it over your shoulder? Do you knock wood when you say something that might tempt fate?" He didn't answer, of course, and she smiled again, following him into their room. "Don't say anything about the lady's line. Nobody likes having their superstitions made fun of."

"I don't care what they do on the Avilda anyway," he said, his momentary animation passing off, leaving his face white and weary. "I'm getting off this boat, Kate. Anybody who could do that to somebody else's livelihood ... how much does a seven-by cost?"

"I don't know. Three, four hundred, something like that."

"And all that polypro, and the buoys, and the bait jars.

Not to mention the time lost fishing." He closed his eyes and repeated firmly, "I don't know where I'm going, but I'm getting off this boat."

She put a comforting hand on his shoulder. "That's life in the big leagues, Andy."

"It's not my life," he declared. "And I bet I can find me a skipper who feels the same way. When I do, I'm outta here." Without another word he stripped down to his longies and climbed into his bunk. The snores that almost immediately issued from the top bunk made Kate wish for as clear a conscience.