Dana Stabenow - Dead in the Water

If Kate lived in the Park, Prince William Sound was her backyard. She had relatives in Cordova and Tatitlek and Valdez and Seldovia and Kodiak and Iliamna who were still hurting from the spill, spiritually and financially, to this day, four years later. If Harry Gault or Henderson Gantry or Harley Gruber or whoever the hell he was had had anything to do with the farce of a cleanup that followed that devastating spill and its many peculiar financial arrangements with a relatively few, select boat owners, she, Ekaterina Ivana Shugak, would personally have Harry Gault's or Henderson Gantry's or Harley Gruber's balls served up on a platter for Sunday brunch. Wide awake now, she went to work with a vengeance.

As she was finishing up her notes and preparing a second assault on the filing cabinet, there was a thump overhead. There were no other sounds, nothing to indicate that Harry was doing anything but checking the chart, but Kate decided she had pressed her luck far enough. And she had enough to go on with. More than enough. She grinned, thinking of Jack's expression when he heard her story and saw her notes. The grin faded a little when she remembered Alcala and Brown, and she gave the files a speculative look. Was this information important enough for Harry Gault to kill two men for? She tried to remember, if she had ever known, the penalties for fraud and embezzlement. Her area of expertise had always been assault and murder; white-collar crime was out of her league. She yawned again, and wondered if collusion in the matter of who got the plum jobs on the spill cleanup could be prosecuted under the RICO statutes.

An involuntary chuckle rippled out of her torn throat.

She was getting sleepy again, and silly with it, and it wasn't her problem anyway. Jack Morgan wanted background on Harry Gault, and background on Harry Gault he would get. Working quickly but not carelessly, she reassembled the documents into their original files and the files into the cabinet. A few more seconds work with the paper clip and it was locked again. Pocketing her notes and cracking the door, she eyed the empty passageway for a moment before slipping outside and pulling the door shut soundlessly behind her.

She turned and bumped straight into Harry Gault.

With great restraint she managed to keep herself from bolting down the passageway in a panic. "Oh. Sorry, skipper. I didn't see you standing there."

His eyes flickered between her and the door to his cabin. Had he seen her come out, or had he just come down the stairs from the bridge? "What're you doing up? I thought I told Ned for everybody to get some shut-eye."

She scratched and produced a face-splitting yawn. "I woke up thirsty," she mumbled in a grumpy voice. The best defense is a good offense, and she gave him an impudent grin. "What about you? What're you doing down here? Who's steering the boat?"

"The autopilot."

"Oh." She manufactured another yawn. "Well, I'm going to get some pop. You want something?"

"No." He added grudgingly, "Thanks."

"No prob. See you in the A.M."

In the galley she stood holding on to the door handle of the refrigerator, her head pressed up against the cold enameled surface, waiting for the shaking in her knees to stop. That had been too close.

The snores from the top bunk didn't miss a beat as she stripped and slid into her own. She was so tired she ached with it, but she tossed and turned, unable to shut down her brain. Eventually she fell into a doze and a series of waking dreams, filled with ruined pots rusting on the ocean bottom and avenging fishermen coming after her with boat hooks and bank statements with overdrawn accounts and bills with red warning notices and pink crabs swimming in green gasoline.

Sleep deserted her in a rush and she sat bolt upright in bed. "Pink!"

"What?" Andy's drowsy, startled voice came from the bunk overhead.

"Pink!" she said. "Old aviation gas used to be pink!

Pink as a tanner's new shell, by God!"

There was a brief silence, followed by a click as Andy turned his reading light on. A tousled blond head peered over the side of the bunk. "I beg your pardon?"

"New aviation gas is green," she explained. "But the old aviation gas was pink. I remember from helping my dad gas up his Supercub."

The befuddled expression on the upside-down face didn't change. "And you think I'm weird."

The head disappeared, the light went off and Kate was left lying wide-eyed in the dark, her mind busy with this new piece of the puzzle.

"OLD aviation gas, what we used to call 80/87, was pink,"

Kate told Jack the following afternoon over greasy hamburgers and even greasier fries at the Blow-In Caf‚.

"So?"

"So the gas in that tank on Anua was green." He paused in mid-chew and looked uncomprehending. "Don't you get it? If that gas had been left over from a long time ago, it would have been pink. How long has aviation gas been green?"

Jack's face cleared and he swallowed and said, "Somebody's been using the strip regular enough to need to refuel."

Kate bestowed an approving smile on him and he sat up straighter in his chair. "And the strip was maintained, too," he remembered, "or at least there had been traffic in and out recently. Enough to keep the snow packed down, anyway. Not that there is much out here." He looked at her. "It surprised me."

"What?"

"So little snow."

"The mean winter temperature out here is thirty degrees Fahrenheit," she told him. "And I think the average snowfall is less than two feet. Plus you've got the jet stream just offshore."

Jack looked out the window at the wind blowing fog and a few flakes of snow straight down Iliuliuk Bay and shivered inwardly. "A nearly tropical climate," he agreed. "How'd you do out there, this time? Kill lots of defenseless crabs?"

"More than we should have."

"Oh, my," he said with his quick grin, "do I detect the tone of someone who has been involved in high seas skulduggery? Have you been keeping five-inchers?"

"No, just committing grand theft and malicious mischief," she replied. Her tone was glum; the imp of perverse pleasure she had taken in her first larcenous action had deserted her, and all she could think of was the crew of the Daisy Mae circling round and round, pulling buoys attached to nothing, not even line, and coming into Dutch with an empty hold and an emptier deck.

Jack sat up straight in his chair, hamburger dripping mustard and grease down his hand and into his sleeve.

"Mind telling me what the hell that means?"

Kate told him about the pot robbing. Jack was more amused than outraged, but then Jack wasn't a fisherman.

"Pretty gutsy of Gault," he observed.

"It was dumb," Kate said flatly. "There's forty thousand plus pots in the Bering Sea during any given period and hundreds of boats picking them. Not to mention the Fish and Game. It's a miracle we weren't caught. If we had been, we would have lost an entire season's fishing, and you're talking a gross anywhere between one million to two million dollars." Jack choked over his next bite of hamburger and had recourse to his Coke to wash it down. Kate, unheeding, punctuated her words with a militant french fry. "And Gault had no proof, none, that it was Johansen who robbed our string." She noticed the french fry was getting cold and crammed it into her mouth. Around it, she said indistinctly, "Dumb. If Gault hadn't married into the family, he would have been out on his ear long since."

"How long you in for this time?"

Kate shrugged. "Engine broke down again."

"That happened last week."

"I get the feeling it happened the week before and the week before that, too. Gault's not giving the engine the maintenance it needs. He's not giving the old girl any of the attention she deserves, he just drives her until she breaks, fixes it with spit and baling wire and drives her some more. One of these days she's going to break down for good. I just hope we're not out in the doughnut hole when it happens."