Dana Stabenow - Dead in the Water

They were seated around a table at the Unisca Restaurant in Dutch Harbor, Andy and Kate hogging down the first meal in days they hadn't had to cook themselves.

Jack was on Kate's right, Andy was across from her, and on her left was a man so lean and fit that at first it was not noticeable how old he was. He had a full head of hair, pure white, and small, twinkling blue eyes. His name was Sten Nordensen, and he was the chairman of the board of directors for Alaska Ventures, Inc. He had flown up from Freetown, Oregon, the day before and had been waiting for the Avilda at the dock. Now he pushed himself a little away from the table. When he spoke his speech was slow and somewhat formal, with the faintest trace of an accent. "How can I thank you for all you have done, Miss Shugak?"

"Pay me my crew share from my last trip out," she replied promptly. "And the name's Kate."

He smiled, a grave and beautiful smile, and inclined his head. "Done, Kate. But I think we can do better than a mere crew share."

"Okay," she said, agreeable. She pointed her fork across the table. "After you refit the Avilda, hire Andy on the crew."

Andy flushed up to the roots of his hair and looked nine instead of nineteen.

"He got us back in one piece," she told Nordensen.

"I was incapable."

"You would have been capable if you'd had to be,"

Andy mumbled.

"He got us back," Kate said, ignoring Andy and concentrating on the old man. "With less experience at the helm and in navigation than a newborn baby he got us back five hundred miles to Dutch, got us inside the harbor and got us safely moored. I was out cold the whole time. He may lack experience but he's a natural born boat jockey, Mr. Nordensen. Don't let him get away."

Nordensen looked at Andy reflectively. "For one who has done my company such a great service, a place can be found."

Andy flushed again. His mouth opened and closed a few times before he managed to say, "Thank you, sir."

The look he sent across the table contained such burning gratitude that Kate felt singed.

"Ned Nordhoff's rolling over like a dog in dirt," Jack said, reapplying himself to his steak with vigor. "Too bad Harry's dead, we coulda locked him up until the United States elects a woman president." He looked over at Kate, wondering if the mention of Harry Gault's death would upset her.

.Kate, puzzled, said, "Why's he talking? Harry's dead.

All Ned has to do is say it was all Harry's fault and claim he was a victim of circumstance."

Nope, Jack decided. The Avilda's late skipper had been trying to kill her. She had been protecting herself, as well as this weird blond kid whom she seemed to have adopted. She wasn't likely to be suffering any repressed guilt over Harry Gault's grisly end. Hers would have been grislier. Squashing that thought with more haste than finesse, he produced a smile no one noticed was a little frayed around the edges. "I do believe someone may have hinted that Seth Skinner was doing some talking of his own."

"And is he?"

Jack cut another piece from his steak with absorbed precision. "Now there is a strange one. I can't figure him out. He won't say a word, not even when I told him Ned was singing on key nonstop with no time out for intermissions or encores. He won't talk to us, he won't talk to an attorney. He just sits there."

"He can sit there and rot until he croaks," Kate said cordially. "And I for one hope he does."

Andy shook his head reprovingly. "The One Way teaches us to strive for right thinking and right action in this life, to earn a better life in the next. Harry and Ned and Seth will pay for their wrong thinking and their wrong action in the next life. It is written, 'Just as a man casts off worn-out clothes and takes on others that are new, so the embodied soul casts off worn-out bodies and takes on others that are new. The soul in the body of everyone is eternal and indestructible. Therefore thou shouldst not mourn for any creature.'

"And in particular not for this one," Jack said under his breath.

"Then let's hope they all come back as tanner crab,"

Kate said, "and have to work their way up from there."

She hoped Andy hadn't queered Nordensen's job offer.

She turned and said brightly, "I hear you've got a new ship coming off the ways any day now, Mr. Nordensen."

The old man gave a proud nod. "That we do."

"What's the latest one's name?" Kate said. "The Mary Lovell, wasn't it? The Avilda, the Madame Ching, the Anne Bonney, And now the Mary Lovell. Beautiful names.

You have plans for a Grace O'Malley in the future?"

He inclined his head again. "She is already designed."

Their eyes met and Kate, seeing the twinkle in the blue gaze, was unable to repress a laugh.

Jack and Andy exchanged mystified glances. "What's so funny?"

"Shall you tell them, or shall I?' Kate asked Nordensen.

The old man smiled and shook his head.

Kate turned back to Jack. "They were all pirates."

Jack and Andy looked confused, and she said, chuckling,

"Avilda. Grace O'Malley. Mary Read and Lady Killigrew and Anne Bonney and Madame Ching and Mary Lovell. Pirates, all of them."

"You're kidding." Jack looked at the old man but Nordensen just grinned at him.

"Nope," Kate said, wiping her mouth and sitting back in her chair. "I went over to the library at the Unalaska School this morning and looked them up in the encyclopedia.

Avilda was some kind of Viking, Grace and Lady Killigrew terrorized the English Channel, Mary and Anne shot up the Caribbean with Morgan and Blackbeard, and Madame Ching thought the South China Sea was her own private lake. Alaska Ventures's boats are all named after lady pirates."

"Some of them not so much the lady," Nordensen reminded her.

"No kidding," she said, "Grace O'Malley's son fell overboard once and she was so angry at his clumsiness that she chopped off his hands with a knife when he tried to climb back on board."

Jack threw back his head and roared, and after a stunned moment Andy joined in.

When the laughter died down Kate said, "What's our new best friend Ned say about the dope dealing? How'd that get started?"

"From what our new best friend Ned says, Gault's connections had been landing wholesale quantities of cocaine on Anua ever since Gault began working these waters. His crew members had been going ashore to pick them up." Jack looked across the table at Nordensen. "I'm sorry, sir, I know this is the last thing you want to hear, but according to Nordhoff, Alcala and Brown were up to their ears in the dope dealing. They got greedy, started siphoning off grims and grams and stashing them around the airstrip. Their plan was to fly in with their own plane, once they got back to port, and pick it up. Gault was suspicious and followed them in-cutting that barge loose, by the way, that's when he lost it-and caught them at it and killed them in the act."

"Who died in the dugout?" Kate asked.

"Barabara," Jack said.

"Whatever."

He smiled. "Alcala. He ran when Gault and Nordhoff caught him and Brown at the airstrip."

"Who killed him?"

"Skinner."

Kate was unsurprised. It would take a long time for her to forget the sound of Seth's voice coaxing her out of the canned goods, the indifferent mad look in his serene eyes as he raised the monkey wrench over his head. "And the slug we found?"

"From a.38 Skinner tossed over the side."

"And the bodies?"

"Wired inside a crab pot and over the side."

Nordensen spoke without looking up. "Any kind of a bearing where they went over?"

Jack shook his head. "I'm afraid not, sir. They could be anywhere between here and Anua. There's no way of knowing. And what with Aleutian weather…"

To his plate, Nordensen said softly, "It will be difficult for their families. First the drugs, then no possible hope of recovery of the bodies." He looked up, his face grave.