Seize the Storm (6 page)

Shaken
did not begin to describe his feelings.

Weeks after the incident, Martin forced himself to read news accounts on the Web. The man had been a composer, and the San Francisco Symphony had been set to perform the world premiere of the artist's newest work. What fault lines of the composer's psyche had worked to destroy him Martin could not guess. But he downloaded some of the artist's work. They were stately, abstract symphonic pieces that were beyond Martin's ability to judge, but they certainly gave no hint of their creator's ultimate despair and destruction.

His parents had met with Dr. Metz, the family physician, and the doctor had recommended a summer break, far from Oakland and full of sky and sun. Dad had known exactly what sort of trip would do the job. He had made a phone call, and now here Martin was, in the middle of the Pacific and, when you considered the voyage from every angle, really enjoying himself.

*   *   *

Every morning after breakfast on the yacht, Martin had a routine. He did an inventory of what needed to be repaired. This morning that meant that the latch on the door from the cabin would need to be fixed—the door was supposed to open from the outside in, which meant that seas and wind tended to force it shut. But now it was swinging both ways, a quirk it had acquired overnight. Martin made a mental note to patch up the fastening after the storm had passed, but the door had never fastened securely, and, Martin suspected, never would.

In addition to shipboard chores such as rubbing tung oil on teakwood and Brasso on all the metal frames and fittings, he always looked forward to a daily phone call to his parents, a call that was possible because of the small satellite transmitter on the mast.

This morning was no exception.

But just before he made this call he ran various rehearsals through his mind.

Remember, Dad, he wanted to ask, how Leonard used to race freight trains in his vintage MG, until you told him he was frightening everyone who loved him? Remember how he shot the Tuolumne River white water every year in a kayak, until he hit a bridge piling and nearly drowned? You got him to quit.

Martin was on deck, as far out of earshot from anyone as he could get, near the prow, and before he made the call, he enjoyed his feeling of solitude—a rare experience at sea.

A jellyfish slipped along on the ocean surface as he held the phone to his ear, the floating creature little more than a lovely, nearly transparent nova on the water. Two time zones ahead of California, he caught them while Dad was putting on his tennis shoes, heading out for an early morning match with his more athletic friends.

Dad was not a very good tennis player—he tended to fight the ball back across the net with too much gusto, and his serves were overpowered and wild. But people liked to play the game with him. He shouted when he missed, and he shouted when he won, and he was a cheerful loser. Martin had never yearned to be with his father more than he did right then.

The digital connection was good, but almost too good, amplifying his dad's breathing as plainly as his cheerful “God, we miss you, Marty.”

Martin's father was a produce department manager, organic California vegetables his specialty. Martin's mother, Beatrice, was a sensitive, slightly overweight woman, given to sulks if a manager reminded her to sign in on the right line on the time sheet. After a series of jobs at a florist and at a party supply store, she had settled on working from home, designing greeting cards, rag-paper prints that looked like Japanese woodcuts.

She had good years and bad years financially, loading the family van with inventory and driving to crafts fairs and street festivals. In recent years, an improved Web site had helped her business, and now she had turned the family's North Oakland garage into an office/warehouse, stacks of shipping envelopes and art paper in every corner.

Dad did sound a lot like his younger brother, Leonard, on the phone now, but less dramatic. Dad's methodical husbandry came through in the way he named the places he was walking through, looking for his wife—not in the sewing room, not in the living room—until he found her in the garage, stapling envelopes.

She got on her own phone, and then her breath was added to the chorus of breathing sounds. The computer that processed this call must not have been able to tell the difference between breathing and talking, and the three of them sounded like humpback whales on the surface after an hour in the deep.

“You use a lot of that sunblock, Martin,” she said, “and stick plenty of that zinc paste on your nose.”

Mom was like that, speaking out of a maternal codebook, a cipher that translated love into a grim classification of increasingly fraught concerns—skin cancer, broken bones, hypothermia, death.

The only way to respond to the code was to say that you were in truth being careful. He could hear her working, holding the phone to her ear by cocking her head to one side. She stapled bags shut as she talked, the stapler making a pleasant
ka-chunk
sound.

In answer to how things were going, Martin replied, as always, with that casually reassuring “Things are good,” but now as he heard the words, what he wanted to ask was
Have you seen the weather map this morning
?

His dad answered the question before he had to, because he had in fact seen the weather chart on the Web, and he said that it did look like some serious weather.

Serious weather
. The word
serious
was a significant part of his dad's vocabulary. A garden could be seriously good-looking, and an athlete possess a serious throwing arm.

His dad added, after a split-second hesitation, “But I know that Leonard will sail away from trouble.”

Martin thought about this.

“Uncle Leonard's eager to dive right into the storm,” said Martin after a pause. He made this remark sound offhand.

“Eager?” asked Dad thoughtfully, as though Leonard's eagerness was not always a characteristic to be admired or relied on.

“Enthusiastic, maybe,” said Martin.

“Well,” said Beatrice, “I'm sure he knows what he's doing.”

She had stopped stapling.

Perhaps Martin expected a blanket dismissal of his worries, but what he got was strangely unsettling, even as it showed his dad's faith in him.

“Use your head, Martin,” Dad said.

His father hesitated to say more. Martin could sense his father's conscience working through family politics, his knowledge of his brother's history, and his desire not to unduly alarm either his wife or Martin.

“You go right ahead,” said Dad, “and give Leonard hell if it looks like he's about to get you all drowned.”

T
HEIR AIRSPEED
was one hundred and ninety-eight miles per hour, about as fast as the de Havilland could go. The heading indicator showed that they were traveling east-northeast, outrunning the storm, which the aviation weather radio channel had defined as a “very well-formed depression heading in a northerly direction.”

Jeremy imagined the storm as a creature shaped like a timber saw, a wheel with ragged blades. You could see it on the radar screen, hovering over
Witch Grass
, swallowing the pulsing zit of light, coming right after Jeremy.

Jeremy handled the stick himself, piloting the plane. It was not actually a stick so much as the portion of a wheel, padded and shaped like half a Frisbee.

“Watch the artificial horizon,” said Elwood, leaning forward to tap the attitude indicator.

The display showed whether the aircraft was level from side to side and whether the nose was angling too high or too low. They were heading slightly downward, and Jeremy eased the nose up until the plane was level again, and then overcompensated. The engine changed its timbre, taking on a lower note, the machinery somehow recognizing that a new pilot was in command.

As Elwood had reached out to touch the cockpit display, Jeremy had once again noticed the scar on his right hand. Someone had bitten Elwood years ago, between his thumb and forefinger. Maybe a man, maybe a dog.

“Is it true,” Jeremy asked, “that you tried to kill Laser when he was a pup?”

“I tried to drown him,” said Elwood smoothly, as though this was a perfectly reasonable answer.

“Why?”

“He chewed up a new pair of Corcoran combat boots,” said Elwood, “and Kyle wouldn't shoot him like I wanted, just offered to buy me a new pair. Which he did—these are the ones he bought me.”

“So it all worked out.”

“Not really. I took the dog out to the Hanalei River in a garbage bag and would have thrown him in but Kyle stopped me. The dog hates me ever since. He got big and ugly, but he didn't change toward me.”

“I'd hate you, too,” said Jeremy.

Elwood gave him a you-can't-please-everyone smile. “I have to work at it,” said Elwood.

“At what?” asked Jeremy.

“At being a human baseball bat,” said Elwood, rubbing his eyes and blinking. “I have to keep inventing ways to impress your dad, making sure the dealers don't cheat him, rejecting counterfeit bills and phony artifacts, picking up heavy stuff and loading it myself.”

“Who taught you to do all this?” asked Jeremy.

Picking up heavy stuff
was probably a euphemism for murder.

Elwood dug into his hip pocket and brought out his wallet, a thin, black leather fold. He slipped out a small photo and showed it to Jeremy without giving it to him. A young woman in a halter top smiled at the camera, one hand up to keep the sun off her face. She looked way too young for Elwood, the kind of person you see with other young women, talking and laughing. The shadows of her fingers fell across her forehead. The photo was slightly tattered and the colors had grown dim.

Elwood glanced into the back. Shako was awake after all, leaning forward so he could hear.

Elwood gave Shako the photo for a moment.

“She was my fiancée, twenty years ago,” said Elwood. “Her name was Zeta Durant.”

“She looks like a very nice person,” said Jeremy.

Shako gave the photo back and stayed as he was, leaning forward, so he could hear what Elwood was saying.

“She worked at the airstrip where I used to have a job,” Elwood continued. “She ran the office, payroll, accounts. I fueled Cessnas and kept the padlock on the gate.”

Jeremy was surprised. “You had a regular job?”

“They never caught the guy who killed her in Fremont, California,” Elwood continued, “the day before Halloween. She was walking home on payday, got mugged, fell and fractured her skull, and I hunted down bad guys for a long time after that. The wrong bad guys, but they were better than nothing.”

And dogs had gotten to her body,
Elwood did not want to add. No need to upset Jeremy with the heartbreaking details. But the reports in the news said that a feral pack had meant her remains could not be identified for a week after her bones were in the coroner's fridge.

“That's terrible,” said Jeremy, meaning more than he could say.

Elwood put the picture back into his wallet. “I realized I would make a better bad guy than every single one of the criminals I snuffed, so here I am.”

The main fuel supply was fourth-fifths empty. Jeremy could feel how much lighter the aircraft was, nearly one hundred and fifty gallons more buoyant. The auxiliary tank held a comparable amount, and Jeremy tried to calculate how much search time they had before they had to head back to Kauai.

The aircraft leaped and shuddered, the wings banking without any command on Jeremy's part. He kept his feet on the rudder pedals and eased the aircraft back to horizontal flight.

Not bad, thought Jeremy. I'm not doing that badly.

Elwood was on the radio, his singsong, laid-back radio voice the stuff of aviation cliché. “
Witch Grass
, this is
Red Bird
, do you copy?”

The airplane was hitting turbulence, outlying eddies of air that were invisible and smacked the aircraft hard. Very hard—the cockpit jostled and shook, and Jeremy's teeth snapped together.

All of this would have been fun, except that there was nothing sporting about it from where Jeremy was sitting, his eyes on the altimeter, a digital device with numbers that kept changing, adding and subtracting feet as the invisible torrents in the atmosphere grabbed at the aircraft.

A
XEL
O
WEN STOOD
at the helm, and as he gripped the spokes of the wooden wheel and felt the vessel respond, he knew that this, exactly this, was what he was made to do.

Axel did not think that he was a very complicated guy. He was simple the way a thumb is simple. He loved the yacht and he was in love with Susannah.

He loved
Athena's Secret
because never, in his entire life, had he ever awakened in a place that was designed to be beautiful. And every cleat and wale on this yacht had been conceived and crafted to be a thing of loveliness.

This made the yacht unique in his experience. Axel had lived, at various times in his life, in apartments in Oakland, one- and two-bedroom duplexes with cockroaches like freeway traffic and rats like railroad cars, hurrying nonstop. His widowed mother had paid rent for illegal basement crannies with aluminum foil over naked lath and plaster, places where you were happy to have a mouse race his four scampering paws across the kitchen floor—at least it was company.

So he loved the yacht and would mentally say it was four stars.

His budding relationship with Susannah, however, could not be rated so highly. He was attracted to her because she was unlike any young woman he had ever known. He had played liar's dice with the women in the bars along San Pablo Avenue, places where it was illegal for an eighteen-year-old to sit and order beer, but Axel had always looked older than he was. Susannah was not like them.

Right then Martin climbed out on deck, looking fit and healthy and just that much of a rival.