Dana Stabenow - Dead in the Water

"Did they go ashore to check?"

Jack shook his head. "No."

" What?

"No, they didn't. They said they had no way to get there. The skiff was already ashore."

Still disbelieving, Kate demanded, "I presume they had a life raft?"

"Two of them." Jack grinned at her. "Gault says he didn't want to use them, in case he ran into trouble later on."

Kate stared at him. "And this is the good ship Lollipop you signed me onto? Thanks a whole bunch, Jack. So what happened next?"

"Gault called the Coast Guard."

Something in his voice made Kate say sharply, "How soon?"

"From the Coast Guard logs it was noon the day of the disappearance before Gault got around to calling them."

He looked up with a bland expression. "He ran the Avilda up and down and around the island, looking for signs of life through the binoculars. When he couldn't find any, he pulled the hook and set course for Dutch."

Kate was speechless. Jack's smile was bland. "It gets better. When the Coast Guard fired up a chopper and took a run out there, it seems that Gault had given them the wrong coordinates, so they searched the wrong part of the island."

When Kate found her voice it was only for a very weak, "You're kidding me."

"Nope. The Coasties didn't discover this until a couple of weeks later, when the operator who took the call compared notes with the pilot. So they went out again.

Didn't find anything that time, either."

"Nothing at all?"

"Nope."

"Not even a jerry can? An oar? A hat or a glove?

Nothing?"

"Nothing." Jack refiled the list of boat names in the folder, just missing losing the entire mass on the floor.

"Why the hell hasn't Gault been fired?" Kate demanded.

Jack smiled. "Because Captain Harry Gault had the forethought to marry a daughter of one of Alaska Ventures' board of directors. Just last January, in fact."

Kate folded her hands behind her head and stared at the ceiling. After a moment, she said thoughtfully, "How very strategic of him."

"The guy is slick," Jack admitted. "And of course, no one has been able to prove otherwise, Skinner and Nordhoff back Gault up, so no charges have been filed."

"But."

"But," Jack agreed. "The board of Alaska Ventures is as nervous as a cat with two tails in a room full of rocking chairs."

"Alcala and Brown have family?"

Jack bestowed an approving smile on her. "Yes, they do, and they want to know what happened, and they're starting to get loud about it. Marine insurance is not exactly cheap or easy to come by, so the board of Alaska Ventures has begun a little discreet investigation of Harry Gault's past."

"And now the state's getting into the act."

"You and me, babe."

She twisted her head to stare at him. "What's this 'you and me babe' crap? I don't see you out on the deck of the Avilda, soaking wet and freezing cold and up to your ass in tanner crab." And puking your guts up over the rail every five minutes, she could have added, but didn't.

Jack managed to look hurt. "You're the one with the fishing experience."

"Fishing for salmon in Prince William Sound and a couple of months fishing for king crab out of Kodiak isn't quite the same thing as trying to drown myself in the Boring goddam Sea," she retorted. "I can't believe I let you talk me into this. The Aleutians. In October. I must be out of my mind."

"You never did answer me. About why you did come. I would have lost money betting you wouldn't."

"Why'd the bear go round the mountain?" She shrugged. "I've never been on the Peninsula, or seen the Aleutians. I could never afford the airfare."

Unconvinced, Jack let it slide. "So. Tell me about the good ship Avilda and her happy crew."

Kate looked back at the ceiling. "She's a good ship, all right, or she would be if someone took the time to take care of her. She deserves a better crew than those assholes."

"All of them are assholes?"

Kate thought back to her first day on board. Harry, his face congested with suppressed rage, had shouted at her.

"Nordensen says I gotta hire you, okay. But I don't like women, and I don't like Injuns, and I especially don't like Injun women on board my ship, they're nothing but trouble. You stay out of the guys' pants, you hear?"

He'd shaken his fist in her face, practically frothing at the mouth. "You fuck one of us, you fuck us all, you understand? Any trouble between the guys over you and you're off the goddam boat!" He'd leered at poor Andy, who had blushed beet red beneath his tan and hung his head.

Kate, unperturbed, had given Harry a cool nod. "I heard you the first time."

In truth, she felt Harry had done her a favor with the blunt announcement. All or none? That was fine with Kate. Harry Gault wasn't much of a sailor or a fisherman, but he understood the dynamics of a cramped and isolated workplace. So far, neither Ned nor Seth, nor Harry for that matter, had made any moves in her direction.

There'd been a few leers and some crude remarks, but no pawing, and from her last fishing experience she knew how fortunate she was.

"They're men," she told Jack. "They're fishermen. They're crab fishermen. And they're Alaskan crab fishermen. Of course they're assholes." She thought, and added, a trifle reluctantly, "Except maybe for Andy, my bunkie."

Jack sat very still. "You're bunking with a guy?"

Kate raised an eyebrow in his direction. "Don't go all Neanderthal on me, Jack. He's just a kid, and from California at that. The kind of guy who thinks the New Age arrived with the invention of the fast forward button on the VCR remote."

The amusement in her voice when she spoke, warm and somewhat rueful, was not reassuring. "What about Skinner and Nordhoff?"

"Too soon to say, but they're in tight with Gault,"

Kate said. "They hardly talk to Andy or me outside of work."

"And Gault?"

Kate gave a short, unamused laugh. "For the health of every fisherman afloat on the Pacific Ocean, Harry Gault should shoulder an oar and walk inland until he finds someone who doesn't know what it is and stay there for the rest of his life."

"Umm," Jack said, who had never considered poetry necessary, and who was more interested in the way Kate tucked her hair behind her left ear anyway. "What did you pull down, this trip?" he asked idly, gaze on that left ear.

"The usual crew share. Eight percent of the gross."

'Which was?"

"Eighty-three hundred bucks."

His eyes widened. "Wow. Eighty-three hundred? For eight days work?" He gave a respectful whistle. "Hell, that's, what, that's almost eleven hundred a day, isn't it?" She nodded. "Wow," he said again. "Marry me and support me in the style in which I intend to become accustomed."

She stretched out her inconsiderable length in one long, lazy reach. She fluttered her eyelashes and patted the bunk. "Mmm, I don't know. Let me review your application one more time."

She didn't have to ask him twice.

THEY rose early the next morning, hungry from no dinner the night before, and went looking for a restaurant. Over breakfast at the Unisca Restaurant, equally beguiled by the eggs Benedict and the view of the old submarine dock, Kate said impulsively, "Let's fly out there."

"Out where?" Jack said around a mouthful of Canadian bacon.

"Anua." Kate waved a hand at the clear sky. "It'd be flying in the face of Providence not to take advantage of that, so let's fly out there and take a look for ourselves. You have got Cecily with you, right? You're supposed to be caribou hunting and sight-seeing, you must have brought her along."

He swallowed. "How far is it?"

"If that map you gave me last night is accurate, I figure about a hundred and sixty miles from Dutch."

"Hmm." He studied the ceiling and chewed, figuring.