Dana Stabenow - Dead in the Water

"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."