Dana Stabenow - Dead in the Water

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.

So completely had she been immersed in the role of able-bodied seaman cum apprentice pot pirate that she was halfway out of her own clothes when she remembered why she had signed on the Avilda in the first place.

Simultaneously she realized that with the rest of the crew in the sack and the skipper on watch, now was the perfect time to toss Harry Gault's stateroom.

Andy didn't skip snore when she cracked the door and slipped into the passageway. The snores coming from behind Ned and Seth's door were so loud she wondered how either of them could sleep. At least she didn't have to sneak. She wasn't up to it.

The skipper's cabin was the one closest to the galley.

True, it was only a step from his door to the stairs leading up to the bridge, but Kate disapproved. The truly conscientious skipper, in her experience, slept in the chart room bunk at sea so as to be close to the bridge, not the galley. Still, it made it easier for her to break and enter, and she was grateful for that if for nothing else.

Not that there was much breaking to the entering. The door to his cabin was unlocked and swung smoothly and noiselessly inward, closing with a silent click behind her.

She flicked on the light.

It was the same stateroom repeated twice on each side of the passageway, a small square room with over and under bunk beds built into the bulkhead. A single porthole was set between the bunks, drawers beneath the bottom one. What wasn't standard issue was an old steel desk that had army surplus written all over it jammed in next to the beds, and a two-drawer filing cabinet next to it, same lineage.

After one look Kate didn't want to step foot inside the tiny bathroom opening off one side of the room for fear of catching something, what she didn't know, but something unpleasant was definitely growing in the saucer-sized sink. She didn't bother looking in the shower, mostly because she was afraid of what she'd find. The drawers beneath the bottom bunk were the dirty clothes hamper and from the smell had been so since sometime last year. She closed the second drawer hastily without bothering to paw through the contents.

With deep reluctance she turned to the desk. If there was one thing Kate hated more than flying in anything bigger than a Cessna 172, it was paperwork.

At first all she found were fish tickets and delivery statements. As a matter of curiosity she rummaged until she found the ticket from their last run, and was annoyed but unsurprised to find that Harry Gault had shorted the crew on their shares of the last delivery.

The engine beat steadily up through the floor. Yawning, she left the desk for the file cabinet. It was locked, but a few moments with a straightened paper clip had the top drawer open. Each drawer was stuffed with paper, but stuffed in an orderly and alphabetical way that belied the confusion of the desk. Jack Morgan could have learned something from Harry Gault's filing system. She pulled a file and thumbed through it, yawning again and hoping she wasn't going to nod off. Harry Gault coming in off watch to find her dozing at his desk might be more than even Kate could explain away.

The first file she pulled was a collection of lease purchase agreements between a Henderson Gantry of Ketchikan, Alaska, and various sellers of boats. From the physical description of each boat, most of them appeared to be service boats, tenders that ran between fishing grounds and canneries, or between oil rigs and town carrying supplies and crew changes, or ran pilots out to incoming very large crude carriers on their way in and out of Valdez. Kate thought it looked like the beginning of a fair-sized fleet. All of the agreements were dated in April and May of 1989, and all of them were underwritten by the same bank in Ketchikan, Alaska. Interesting.

A fair-sized fleet all bought at the same time and through not only the same bank but the same loan officer.

Henderson Gantry. Harry Gault. If they were one and the same, what was Harry doing with all these boats? "I thought you were strictly a hired hand, Harry old buddy," she murmured. She opened another file, and raised her eyebrows.

A fair-sized fleet that evidently was not making enough money to meet its mortgage payments. This file held warning notices from a bank. Not a bank, she noticed, but half a dozen different banks, and none of them Alaskan. She went back to the first file, puzzled. Yes, the Southeast First Bank had financed the purchase of the little fleet-her eyes widened, and she set the second file down on the desk next to the first and searched farther in the file cabinet.

She found what she was looking for in short order.

Almost immediately upon final signing of the original mortgages, all of the boats had been refinanced through other banks, Outside banks, most of them located in the Pacific Northwest, although two were refinanced through two different banks in San Francisco. This time the boats' owner was listed as a Harley Gruber, with impeccable references and a credit rating that would have made the city of Cleveland gnash its teeth in envy.

Kate made notes of names, dates, boats and banks, lips pursed around a soundless whistle. Harley Gruber, Henderson Gantry, Harry Gault. In her experience, people who assumed aliases almost always used names beginning with the same initials. "What have you been up to, Harry old buddy," she said under her breath, "that you need a new name every time you change business partners?"

She reached for another file and discovered one possible answer.

The latest file held lease agreements with Royal Petroleum Company. Each of the boats purchased in the Southeast had been leased to RPetCo for use in the cleanup of the RPetCo Anchorage, which had run aground off Bligh Reef in March of 1989 and spilled over ten million gallons of North Slope crude oil across the western half of Prince William Sound. The spill had virtually canceled the salmon fishing season that year, wiped out shrimp beds and entire schools of spawning herring, annihilated ducks and geese and terns and murres by the thousands, killed sea otters-in short, with a large and malicious sense of indiscrimination, the spill had spread a path of death and destruction across eight hundred miles of previously pristine wildlife habitat and Alaskan coastline.