Dana Stabenow - Dead in the Water

The third book in the Kate Shugak series, 1993

THE Avilda rolled into a trench of opaque green seas.

Normally, when she was vertical, those seas rose as high as her masthead. Now the crabber was listing so steeply that the portside railing was awash. Kate, legs braced against the slant of the deck, had her head and shoulders jammed up against the frame of an empty crab pot. The pot was threatening to slide over her and the port rail in that order. Her arms were widespread, her fingers, numbed with cold and wet with salt water, clutched desperately to the frame of the pot. The wire mesh pressed into the flesh of her face. Something warm and liquid slid down her cheek. She wondered, without interest, if it was tears or blood.

The pot was seven feet tall and seven feet wide and three feet deep, a steel frame covered in metal netting, pounds of dead weight empty. Kate was five feet tall, weighed just over 120 pounds and was mere flesh and bone, but she had Newton on her side, and she waited. She could feel the rest of the crew watching, but she was fiercely determined to do this herself, without help and, more importantly, without asking for help.

A muscle in her back rebelled at the unaccustomed strain and spasmed. She cursed beneath her breath, though if she'd shouted her voice would not have been heard above the crash of Aleutian water on deck, the howl of Aleutian winds overhead and the rough, deep-throated roar of the engine beating up through the soles of her feet.

At last, at last, the crabber mounted the next swell and began its inevitable slide in the opposite direction.

Groaning in every sheet of plate steel, her submerged hull began to roll and in one smooth, inexorable shift swung through the perpendicular. The killing pressure of the pot on Kate's shoulders eased. "For every action," she muttered as her feet pushed against the slippery deck, "there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every action, there is-"

The Avilda began her heel to starboard. With an involuntary sound, half grunt, half howl, in harmony with the shriek of the straining ship, Kate shoved with all her strength. The pot shuddered, moved a fraction of an inch, another, gave a sudden, stuttering lurch and began to slide. Kate, almost running to keep pace, shoved and slid and cursed her way behind it and across the deck, to fetch up against the opposite railing with a solid thump.

Behind her she heard Andy Pence give a whoop and a shout of approval mixed with amazement, and she thought she heard Seth Skinner swear in a tone distinctly admiring, but she was busy catching her breath. Besides, it was a point of honor not to acknowledge that she had done anything out of the ordinary. Panting, she clutched at the pot for support, fighting a wave of dizziness that made her close her eyes and lean her forehead against the cold, wet mesh. She tried to remember the last time she'd eaten something, anything. When she couldn't, she straightened painfully and looked around for the burly figure of the deck boss. "Hey! Ned!"

Ned Nordhoff looked as if he were wading through a nest of pale spiders, up to his knees in the long, knobbled legs of tanner crab scrabbling frantically for purchase whether they were on their way into the hold as keepers or over the side and back into the Bering Sea. At Kate's shout, he looked up. She held up a hand, rubber-gloved fingers splayed, and jerked a thumb aft toward the cabin. He scowled, his hands barely checking.

"You just went!"

Kate was soaked through to the skin and chilled through to the bone. Hunger had been gnawing on her for so long that her stomach felt like it was about to crawl up her esophagus. Her first, knee-jerk response to the deck boss's terse comment was anatomically impossible, her second sociologically taboo, both eminently satisfactory.

She opened her mouth and a sheet of spray slapped her in the face, no bigger or harder than any such over the last week, but enough to ring two faces up before her eyes, side by side, wearing identical accusatory expressions, a macabre jackpot in a hellish casino.

Christopher Alcala.

And Stuart Brown.

That's all. Just two faces staring out at her from Jack Morgan's bulging file folder. Christopher Alcala, a thin, pale ascetic's face with big brown bedroom eyes, dark hair falling into them. He reminded Kate of her cousin Martin, when Martin was sober. And Stuart Brown, all fair curls and laughing eyes and wide grin. He looked cuddly, like an overstuffed teddy bear, and almost that mature.

Both Alcala and Brown had disappeared off the deck of the very ship upon which she was currently standing, more or less, not six months before, during the last fishing season. She was working Brown's spot.

Both of them very probably dead.

Both of them just twenty-one years old.

Kate looked at the mocking expression of the deck boss, who had been on board when Alcala and Brown disappeared and who may or may not have assisted in said disappearance, and let the furious words back up in her throat until she thought she might strangle on them. But it wasn't her job to tell the deck boss where he could get off, preferably into five hundred fathoms of North Pacific Ocean five hundred miles from Dutch Harbor, although, if God was good, that would come with time.

No, she was casual labor for the Anchorage District Attorney, for a price, and it was her job to find out what had happened to those two very young men. And Jack Morgan, one-time boss, part-time lover and full-time chief investigator for the Anchorage District Attorney, was paying her five hundred dollars a day, a hundred over his usual fee, to let the deck boss of this happy ship dump on her, if such was his pleasure. A hundred dollars extra was what it took to get her back on the deck of a boat again, and she knew a moment of bitter regret that it hadn't taken more. A lot more.

She took a deep breath, inhaling a little spindrift along the way, and sneezed. It knocked her off balance and she slipped on a deck that rejoiced in maintaining a surface halfway between ice and slime. "Shit!" she yelled, and caught at the railing on her way down. Her hip hit hard, the rubberized plastic of her rain gear caught and almost tore. She was back on her feet in an instant.

An unfriendly grin split the bearded face of the deck boss. Kate flipped him off, and he gave a short bark of laughter. "I'm going to grab something to eat!" she yelled over the sound of the waves.

He shrugged and gave a grudging nod. She groped hand over hand across the tilting deck to the galley's starboard door and fought her way inside. The boat heeled over into the down side of a swell and Kate waited, bracing herself against the bulkhead, until the Avilda righted herself and began a swing in the opposite direction. Using the listing motion as impetus she staggered across the galley floor, barely catching the handle of a cupboard with one wildly flailing hand. Drawing herself upright, she reached in and pulled out a box of Cheerios. Great. Oat bran. Just what she needed, food the manufacturer swore wouldn't give her cancer, might even in fact cure it. At the moment developing a nice little inoffensive cancer somewhere on dry land seemed infinitely preferable to what she was grimly convinced was soon to be her death by drowning way too far out at sea.

But they were the first edible thing that came to hand, they were calories, so far as she knew there were no moose steaks on board, and in the prevailing seas she wouldn't have been able to keep a frying pan on the stove long enough to cook them anyway. Bracing herself against the continuing pitch and roll of the deck beneath her, she raised the box, tilted her head back and caught a stream of cereal in her mouth. She chewed and swallowed and repeated the process. Tossing the box back into the cupboard and latching the door, she waited for the roll of the ship to be with her and staggered two steps to the refrigerator, from which she pulled a gallon of milk and drank a quart from the spout without drawing breath. Another step to the sink and four mugs of water followed the milk down.