Dana Stabenow - Dead in the Water

The next thing she knew Andy had her by the shoulders and was shaking her roughly. "Come on, Kate. Wake up.

Wake up, dammit!"

"Andy?" she said groggily. She came upright and clutched at him. "Andy. I thought you were dead."

He grinned down at her, a fearful sight what with all the blood and swelling. "Turnabout's fair play. You okay?"

"I think so," Kate said vaguely. She couldn't look at the thing sprawled so obscenely on the deck below, the boat hook still protruding from its head. She shoved Seth's limp body farther away. "Is Seth dead?"

"Him?" Andy said contemptuously. "Not a chance. I just brained him a little. Come on, let's get you below and out of those clothes."

She shoved him away. "Take care of-take care of it first. Please?" she said when he would have argued with her. "Please, Andy?" She offered him a tired smile. "I'd do it myself but I don't think I can."

For all his bravado Andy stumbled a little as he produced a blanket from the chart room and tucked it around her where she sat, with her back against the bridge bulkhead.

He shinnied down the ladder from the catwalk to the deck and handed her up the pistol. She held it in a loose grip, not sure she could summon up the strength to fire it if Seth woke up.

Andy produced a tarpaulin, rolled Gault's body in it and rolled the body into the fo'c'sle. Armed with Gault's pistol in one hand and the baseball bat in the other and with the biggest butcher knife in the galley clenched between his teeth, he got Ned out of the hold. Ned was numb and dazed and didn't put up much of a fight. Seth moaned when Andy dragged him by his feet down the stairs and over the raised sill of the galley door, but he, too, was safely behind the locked door of the fo'c'sle before he woke up enough to protest. Andy pushed a crab pot in front of the door to be sure, and to be surer still pushed and shoved another seven-by in front of it.

Fifteen hundred pounds of insurance. He decided it was enough.

Kate watched him, sitting on the catwalk with her back against the bulkhead and her feet hanging over the edge. Andy climbed the ladder, took one hand and pulled her to her feet and hoisted her over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. In their stateroom, he stripped her down and bundled her between the covers. "I'm starting to feel like your mother," he told her.

"Can you get us back to Dutch?" she managed to ask him.

"Piece of cake,"' he said, pushing the blond thatch of hair out of his eyes. "After all, the lady's line is out, and I know my girl's been pulling on it since we left the breakwater."

"You have a girl?"

"Sure. Just haven't found her yet."

Kate smiled in spite of herself.

Before he left he pulled out his first-aid kit and rummaged through it. He held up two slender whitish rocks, flat-sided and columnar, about three inches in length.

"Tabbies," he pronounced, and at her confused look elaborated, "tabular crystals." He closed her right hand around one, her left hand around the other. "A tabbie in each hand balances your energy flow and assists in communication with your higher self. They're especially good in helping ease extreme emotional stress. Every first-aid kit should have at least two. I chose them and they know me, but they'll help you because you're my friend."

Looking up, he saw her eyes closing and broke off the lecture. "Relax," he said, patting her shoulder. "Sleep.

I'll get us home."

It might have been sheer exhaustion, it might have been the tabbies. Kate slept, her last conscious sense the feel of cool quartz crystal warming to the palms of her hands.

"So he bought up a bunch of old boats with nothing down and a promise of balloon payments within six months."

Te reneged on the balloons," Kate guessed.

Tot it in one."

When was this?"

Jack's grin widened. "April of 1989."

"Right after the RPetCo oil spill."

I told you you'd like it."

"Gault was a millionaire, wasn't he? He signed on with RPetCo, and his boats worked the spill."

"Got it again." Jack nodded smugly. "There's a guy at RPetCo we're talking to, seems he may have earned a little extra that summer for putting Harry's boats at the top of the hiring list. Then, when RPetCo declared the cleanup a success, Gault skipped on the mortgages, the boat crews' last paychecks, and boogied Outside. Next known address-"

" Freetown, Oregon," Kate said.

Jack cocked his thumb and fired his finger at her.

"Where he married the boss's daughter and was rewarded with a boat of his own. Nice work if you can get it." He remembered and looked as abashed as a grown man can.

"Sorry, sir."

Nordensen inclined his head. "Don't be. It is the truth."

Kate thought of the freezing wind, the icy salt spray, the slippery, shifting deck beneath her feet, tossing her cookies every two hours. Nice work if you can get it?

She wouldn't go that far.

"And," Jack said lightly, recovering from his embarrassment,

"as I taught you when you worked for me in the D.A.'s office, if a perp has screwed up once, it's even odds he's screwed up in a prior life."

"Don't start holding out on us now," Kate said. She was warm and full and rested for the first time in what felt like months and she didn't really care if Harry Gault had cheated on his wife, robbed his grandmother and beaten his dog all on the same day, but she summoned up a dutiful interest to keep Jack happy and the story rolling. "Tell, tell."

"There's a warrant out on one Harley Gruber in California, who matches Gault's general description."

"What's he wanted for?" Andy wanted to know.

Kate smothered a laugh and Jack grinned. "Fraud and embezzlement. Something to do with a land development deal in western San Diego."

"I thought most of western San Diego was ocean,"

Andy said, puzzled.

"Also, when Gruber skipped, not one, not two, but three, count 'em, three wives came forward to file claims to his estate."

"Not including the wife in Freetown, Oregon. Any kids?"

"By which wife? Guy'd been married more times than Mickey Rooney and had more kids than the King in The King and V'

"Poor woman," Kate said.

"Poor women," Jack said. "And this is the best part, Kate, you're going to love this. You know what Gault was doing with part of the dough he was scoring off the coke sales?"

"No," Kate said, playing along, "what was he doing, Jack?"

Jack's delighted grin almost split his face in two.

"He was buying up sides of Kodiak beef, flying them down here in the Navaho and smuggling them on board Japanese processors. When they got back to Yokohama with their load of fish, whatever crew member was in on the deal would somehow smuggle the beef past customs and sell it on the black market." Jack's already wide grin widened. "You know how much beef costs per pound in a store in downtown Tokyo these days?"

"No," Kate said faintly. "How much?"

"Actually, I wasn't able to find out, either. None of the Japanese I talked to buy it at home, except in meals in restaurants. I talked to somebody at Alaska Pacific University and they told me imported beef is sold back and forth between suppliers without it ever leaving the freezer, until they can sell it for ten times what it cost them to buy it wholesale."

There was a brief, awed silence. "So if you buy a T-bone for five bucks here," Andy said, "it'll cost you fifty in Tokyo?"

"At least. You know, I've seen those Japan Air Line crews with their shopping carts full of beef at Carr's in the Sear's Mail in Anchorage. I mean full carts, too, piled right up to the top, and not just one cart, either, but three and four carts at a time. Yeah, I figure our buddy Harry was turning a tidy profit on what he made off the coke."

Kate searched for an adequate response. There wasn't one. "I told you he was greedy."