Seize the Storm (4 page)

Leonard held the vinyl jacket up to his front like a department store shopper posing with a new raincoat. The sight of this garment with all its pockets and fastenings for flashlights, flare guns, and whistles made Martin feel that maybe foul weather at sea was a more serious challenge than he had thought.

“Weather-resistant gloves, upward-floating flashlights,” Leonard was saying, not talking to anyone in particular, taking an inventory of their disaster readiness. “You can die of hypothermia,” he added, “right on board a ship, if you get soaked.”

“Won't happen, Skipper,” said Axel.

“But the point is,” said Leonard, “there is danger involved in powering our way into a big scarlet patch on the weather map.” He sounded pleased with the prospect.

“Doesn't bother me,” said Axel.

“It's hazardous,” said Martin, feeling a trace of disquiet, “but it's not certain destruction, right?”

*   *   *

They took their places around the dining table, leaving Axel at the helm.

The saloon table could be removed and stored when it was not being used, but it was often left in place. Crew members used the table for catching up on their reading or for tapping out e-mail on their laptops, and this was where they played cutthroat Scrabble. The yacht had a single main cabin, with sleeping quarters arranged off the main saloon and the galley well forward. The quarters themselves were small but pleasant, with doors that closed securely.

The smell of fried fish was strong.

“Uncle Leonard,” Martin said. He stopped there and had to gather his resolve. Something about the smiling, energetic man was slightly intimidating right then. “Maybe I could just have one of those frozen muffins.”

Instead of the fish, he meant.

“I thought you liked my cooking, Martin,” said Leonard.

“I love your fried fish,” said Martin. “And your oyster stew, and your turkey and bell pepper hash, and—everything. But those muffins are special.”

Leonard lifted a hand off the table, an unspoken insistence,
have a couple of herrings
, that Martin ignored.

“I could just pop a muffin in the microwave,” suggested Martin.

*   *   *

Martin got his muffin, served up warm on a plate.

The sleeve of Susannah's jacket brushed his arm as she served him, a muffin for both cousins.

As he ate the delicious blueberry-flavored treat, he reached a point at the center of the muffin where it was still frozen, a small star of unheated substance that was cold on his tongue.

How complicated would it be, he wondered, to fall in love with Susannah?

Sometimes Martin sensed someone's attention, a weight angling in on his own awareness, like the chill from an open freezer. He felt it now and glanced over at Claudette.

Claudette was watching Martin, and not simply looking at him, but reading him, like a news anchor scanning the teleprompter. Martin could see the advantage of experience and a lifetime of developing managerial skills. Claudette could guess what was happening before it was even an actual event. She liked him, he knew, but would not welcome the complication of a shipboard romance between cousins.

“Martin, how are you and Axel getting along?” Claudette was asking.

Martin recognized family cipher when he heard it. Axel was a potential rival, Claudette meant.

“I get along with everyone,” said Martin.

Susannah broke her own muffin neatly, calculating how to pull it apart so that, experimentally, she could fit it exactly together again—which she proceeded to do.

“That's the way to be,” said Leonard.

“But if you always avoid conflict,” said Susannah, “you have to spend a life in retreat.”

“Not your problem, Susannah,” said Leonard with a smile.

Susannah gave a smile in return, mock irritation. It was hard to be annoyed at Leonard.

The vessel moaned, a quiet sound that came from within the keel and resulted in a series of whispered reports through her length, the joints and strakes stirring under the grip of the sea.

Leonard gave another smile—knowing and a little scary.

T
HE AIRCRAFT
flew straight down for a long time.

Shako stopped yelling when the plane stopped its power dive toward the Pacific.

He wasn't embarrassed at first because he wasn't aware that he was the only one crying out. The engines made a very deep, baritone noise, a sound so deafening that a smaller noise, like a human screaming for his life, could not be clearly heard. Or so he hoped.

After what had seemed like a very long time, Elwood pulled the aircraft out of its dive, with the wave tops streaking past just below the pontoons, a white blur. Shako could believe, tentatively, that they were not all about to smash into the ocean.

“You OK?” Elwood was asking, first Jeremy and then Shako. Shako looked down to check his own crotch. To his great relief he had not peed himself.

Elwood's face with its red eyebrows under his visored cap was looking right at Shako, and Shako felt sheepish now, embarrassed.

He wanted to ask what had happened. Maybe someone had shot at them from an unseen aircraft, or a drone had shot a burst at them. You heard about such things. Well, Shako had never heard of a military drone on a mission over the Pacific, but it probably happened.

Shako gave a thumbs-up, but his thumb looked like it was wavering, just a little. Elwood grinned sympathetically. Shako hated himself.

He owed everything to Elwood and wanted to please him. And he was both jealous and envious of Jeremy, a guy who did not have to work at being impressive and who had kept his mouth shut just now.

And he wanted Jeremy to like him. He was Ted Tygart's son, after all, and there was a future in getting along with Jeremy. Furthermore, Shako had a philosophical attitude toward making enemies. He had seen how easy it was to kill people, no trouble at all, and as a result he felt that maybe one living friend was more important than many dead enemies. You could always kill someone who bothered you, even a little. But a friend had to be courted, jollied along, fed protein bars.

Shako didn't mind. He saw the big picture.

“It was a bird,” said Elwood. “We hit a bird.”

“Frigate bird,” said Jeremy.

“Tropic bird, I bet,” said Elwood.

He reached over in front of Jeremy and touched the fissures in the windscreen. The Plexiglas in front of Elwood was undamaged.

Elwood looked back at Shako again.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Quinn,” he said in that respectful way.

You needed Elwood's respect. More than that—you needed him to like you. That's why Shako had exaggerated his exploits in California, said that he had used an Uzi to kill a bunch of guys in the Home Depot parking lot. It was not true, but it had been a part of his instant legend.

Elwood was an alternate father to Shako, but a dad who showed Shako how to kill and make money, an interesting alternative to real parenting. And Shako's exploits had shortly become true, when he killed an Australian couple in a blue and white yacht off Lahaina, and a couple of Americans in a catamaran off Hanalei harbor, whale watchers and tourists with too much cash on board.

There had been one other guy, a clip fired into his head off Hilo, where there had been an actual contract, with big bucks going to Shako. And it was all too easy, following Elwood's instructions, all that gun lore you heard about marksmanship and nerve just empty talk. With an Ingram submachine gun on full automatic you just let the equipment do all the work.

Shako's actual, biological dad looked like Ulysses S. Grant on the fifty-dollar bill, whiskery and hungover. His mom looked like Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill, pensive and quietly alarmed, except with lipstick and eyeliner. They had run a business that sold pea gravel and river stone, sharp-edged quarry gravel for construction, along with high quality sand and premium chicken wire.

If you had to buy fireclay or Portland cement Chuck Quinn's Building Supply was the place, but it turned out that his parents were facing prison time for helping get rid of dead bodies on behalf of local gangs. There had not been much choice. When the street gangs of Richmond, California, said they wanted you to plop a couple of gunshot victims in the foundation of the new Taco Bell you did just that.

These days his dad was in the men's colony in Vacaville, but his mom was in a hospital for the criminally disturbed in Atascadero. Shako did not think his mother was insane—far from it. But she had gotten into a very violent fight with the public defender, furious with him for cutting such a bad deal with the prosecution.

Shako had been ordered by the court to go and live with his maternal uncle in Lihue, Kauai, in the state of Hawaii.

Uncle Andy was a man who looked like his sister, except bald. His wife looked like a Q-tip, skinny with overly bleached hair, and the two ran an auto supply for Budget and Alamo car rental agencies, ordering brake pads and timing belts from the Mainland or Japan. They put in eighteen-hour days, and when Shako went increasingly missing, they were eager to be reassured that he was staying with neighborhood families to be closer to school.

Shako liked Hawaii. He liked the pale geckos that came out at night and the way the nights were never cold. He liked the way people smiled, easy, and had all the time in the world to just stand around, not even talking. Just enjoying life. A lot of people his age skipped school, sucking strawberry-flavored shave ice and filtering back into the sugarcane fields if a cop car approached.

Shako had begun holding cash and drugs, even weapons, for older guys, because as a juvenile the law would be easier on him if he got caught. He would hang out by the abandoned sugar refinery out by Koloa and pick up whatever needed to be distributed to the tourists at the shoreline hotels, dealing with middlemen, but that ended after only a month when a rangy, red-haired guy in a white Chevy pickup told him to get in and start his new and wealthy future as a valuable member of team Tygart.

So now here he was, the aircraft gradually gaining altitude again, Jeremy laughing now that it was over, and Shako felt how great it would be to have a life like Jeremy's. Jeremy was even good at conversation, saying that an albatross was big enough to cause damage if it collided at speed, talking like a bird expert or an aircraft authority. Or both.

“Yeah, the albatross would for sure do a lot of damage,” Elwood was agreeing.

And Shako thought how bad he himself was at making conversation. That was one of the things he liked about the Hawaiian fields, when the sugarcane had been burned off and plowed clean. The white-feathered cattle egrets settled in, spearing bugs with their yellow beaks, and you and your friends could just walk in the tropical breeze, nothing to say, and no need to talk.

Shako tightened the seat belt around his middle and felt that he was the expendable member of the team, the wrestling partner who would get beaten up almost fatally so the more handsome fighter would take revenge, to everyone's delight.

Shako wanted to be the hero. He wanted to be liked. He wanted Elwood to say, “Good job, Shako.” Shako wanted to maybe rescue Jeremy from danger. A shark or a stingray—pull Jeremy out of the surf at a climactic moment. Shako wanted Elwood to say what an asset Shako was, a brave man. And then Elwood would take Shako into the Tygart home with the big glass windows, a place Shako had never actually entered, and speak with Ted Tygart, a man Shako had never met in person. Elwood would say, “This is the toughest guy I ever hired.”

So Shako began to pull together phrases he could use later on. But it was not easy. What could he say? Right now Elwood was offering a typical Elwood remark: “Tropic birds circle for altitude, Jeremy, and maintain it for hours without actually moving their wings.”

You know, Jeremy, Shako could say, the big problem with guns is blowback, bits of the guy getting all over you.

No one wanted to hear that. So Shako would keep quiet. If he spoke at all, death would come out, like in the talk bubble over a cartoon character's head. Names and last words, like how the Australian woman begged for her life, in that tweaked accent,
please, we'll give you anything
.

And shooting them wasn't even fun, no more than using a weed whacker on the ti plants behind his uncle's house.

Shako knew his world. He had seen
Friday Night SmackDown Live
when it broadcast out of Oakland. He had the autographs of nineteen professional wrestlers from the convention in Sacramento, signed in black Magic Marker, beautiful swirling names with underlines and exclamation points. A professional wrestler was a complete package, like Elwood, knowing how to shake hands and say
thanks for being here, my man
, even to a kid.

Shako knew he would end up dead. Just like Mo Millimeter, the guy who shot up the Hilton in Waikiki and who lived on through the Web, graffiti, and T-shirts. Just like suicide bombers and famous killer rap artists. Being dead was just the price. You were dead, but you were big.

Shako pulled out his phone right there in the airplane and watched a video of himself changing expressions, no smile, small smile, and the video of him loading the Ingram, then breaking the weapon down. Shako liked the way he looked. He liked the picture of him with green and gray camouflage grease Elwood had bought him, real Marine Corps face goop. He was a one-man strike force.

“
T
HE CRACKS ARE ALL ON THE SURFACE
, see?” said Elwood. “No airflow comes through.”

“So this isn't an emergency?” Jeremy was asking.

“Not even close, Jeremy. Not even a serious annoyance.”

Elwood was happy but even when he wasn't he kept a smile stuck onto his face, welcome and virile, the kind of smile that attracted young men to adventure and women to a night of muscular romance from time to time. His one true love, Zeta, used to say he had the best smile in the world. She had been a caring, considerate woman he almost never let enter his mind.