Стюарт Стерлинг - Collection of Stories

“We don’t want any reward!” Annalou’s arm tightened around Don. “This is all the reward we want.”

“Yeah! Only—” Don looked at her fondly, “these Clark-McGeekin people make blankets, hon. We’re goin’ to have a use for blankets, pretty quick. Maybe we could make a deal — for wholesale.”

Popular Detective, September, 1950

Crisply the voice came over the loud speaker:

“Attention Vigilant: Tug Helen Maginn, towing barges westbound, reports some small craft adrift and awash five hundred yards north northeast City Island Point, seven-fifty P.M. That is all!”

“That is all,” Lieutenant Steve Koski repeated silently, snapping the toggle on the two-way from Listen to Talk. Just “some small craft” adrift in boiling whitecaps on a night so wind-lashed even the cross-bay ferries were taking a terrific beating!

Maybe some late-season eel-fisher-man overturned in the ugly channel chop. Or perhaps only a reckless kid whose leaky scow got swamped in the tide rip. Nothing really important, the dispatcher’s tone had indicated. No hot headline police stuff, like a Broadway theatre stickup or a Third Avenue bar battle!

Koski was burning up at the casual way the radio room at headquarters handled such relay calls. As if it were only the big crimes — and as far as the Harbor Precinct was concerned — only the big seagoing ships that mattered. The particular small craft referred to in the message might not have looked like much to that tugboat captain, high and dry in his pilot house. But it would have been pretty important to anybody who happened to be on the small craft when it went down. In Koski’s book, any boat was as big as the people on board, and human lives were all the same size.

Of course this might be a false alarm. Harbor Squad patrols were used to shagging after floating fruit crates or waterlogged mattesses somebody’d mistaken for drifting boats. But this was a tough time to be doing it.

It was his own dumb fault he was out here at all, in weather a walrus would avoid if he could, Koski reminded himself. He could have accepted that proffered promotion. He’d now be sitting pretty in a padded desk-chair instead of trying to keep his footing on a desk that buckled like a sunflshing bronc.

But he always had liked saltwater work better than paper work. Besides, the Commissioner’s offer of a captain’s gold badge, instead of a lieutenant’s silver one, hadn’t mentioned what would happen to Sergeant Mulcahey. It would take more than a pay raise to break up the roughest, toughest two-man crew on New York harbor’s six hundred miles of waterfront.

He leaned close to the mike. “Patrol Nine, checking,” he said — and swung the wheel to starboard.

In the dim glow from the binnacle his face had the weather-chiseled quality of a stone gargoyle, accustomed to the worst that wind and water could offer. His close-cropped hair, beneath his uniform cap, might have been cut from the frayed ends of a new hawser. “Better get your nose wet, Sarge.”

The bulking shadow beside him stirred resentfully. “Would you so kindly explain why some people get all the breaks, Steve?” Sergeant Joe Mulcahey tucked a towel inside the collar of his slicker. “Only five minutes and we’d be off duty. Now we got to play Ring-Around-the-Rosy with that rotten channel chop just to salvage a rowboat for some rich poop who is prob’ly sittin’ aboard this palatial yacht right this minute, a highball in one hand an’ a choice chick in the other.”

“You’ve got more beefs than a Chicago packing house.” Koski squinted at the amber beads strung across the slim neck of the distant Point; the riding lights of schooners, yawls and power cruisers at the Neptune Yacht Club. “It costs these upper-bracket boys at least a hundred clams per day to spend their time on the Sound; you get paid for doing the same.”

Mulcahey stepped out into the spray; his round face glistened like a wet tomato in the Vigilant’s running light:

“Call this doin’ the same thing? Gettin’ soaked to the shorts? Imibin’ sea-water instead of bonded likker? Putting in overtime with no extra pay on account some dumb clunk forgets to secure his dinghy?”

“Your crystal ball must have spray shields, if you can see a dinghy adrift at this distance.”

“What I can see is I am going to have to stand up my doll tonight — whilst we go chasin’ after a wild goose.”

“A nice night for geese, Sarge.”

“You ask me, ’tis a nice night for homicide. That I wouldn’t mind so much. Putting in overtime — if we was after a floater, say, or grappling for some stool-pigeon who took a dive with his feet in a concrete block. But this huntin’ after a boat that’s gone adrift — that’s for children.”

Koski switched on the searchlight, pointed the long finger of the light across the churning froth of the channel, let it feel its way along the jagged rocks of the windward shore. “I hope there were no kids in that, Sarge. See her, beyond those pilings?”

The white finger touched a spot of pale blue, bobbing in the lashing surf between barnacled boulders.

“Eyes like a goonie you have, Steve. That’ll be one of them plastic beauties they advertise as non-sinkable.”

“She’s not exactly sunk.” Koski slowed the hundred and eighty horses beneath the Vigilant’s motor-hatch. “Sure stove-in, though.”

Mulcahey ducked a dollop of water sloshing over the coaming. “I take it back about other people getting the breaks. We won’t be held up. at all, at all. My doll will not bawl me out for standing her up, either. We just shortwave our report.”

“Report my stern.” Koski threw the clutch to neutral. “We’re going in after her.”

“ ’Twill make kindling of us, Steve! Thrashing around in those rocks! There’s no more’n two feet of water!”

“It’ll be enough. Lash a grappling iron to a life-ring. Let the wind run it in.” Koski gauged the sweep of the tide, the force of the gale. “I’m curious to know how a dink from the club managed to drift in there. Current ought to have carried it out in the Sound if it broke loose from any of the yachts.” “Maybe ’tis second sight you have an’ not gull-eyes, at all. Always imagin-in’ some fidoodling. The dinghy prob’ly went ashore at high tide.” The sergeant squatted by the transom with a three-pronged hook and life preserver.

“Tug reported her adrift ten minutes ago,” Koski reminded him. “Pay your line out fast.”

He maneuvered the thirty-footer like a jockey coming through by the rail at the head of the stretch. The life-ring hit the water, was driven to leeward as if it was under power.

The ring bumped the bobbing blue hull. The hook took hold. Mulcahey hauled in the dinghy.

Koski helped the sergeant empty the tiny egg-shelled craft, hoist it into the cockpit.

“Sea-Pup!” Mulcahey read the lettering on the stem. “The names some nitwits give boats!”

“Yair. This pup got hurt, Joe.” Koski knelt with his trouble-light.

“Don’t look like those holes come from bein’ smashed on rocks, for a fact.” The sergeant scowled. “More as if they were stove in with a boat hook.” He pointed to inch-wide wounds in the shiny plastic hull.

“What would you say made that?” Koski held the trouble-lamp close to the white nylon rope which ran around the dinghy’s gunwale.

Mulcahey gawked at the blob of crimson smearing the rone where it coiled into a knot just above the lettering: Pup. “For a guess and without no tests from the Broome Street lab boys, I would say that was prob’ly not pooch blood. Indeed it’s not second sight you’ve got, either. ’Tis a super-human sense of smell. To sniff out somethin’ fishy about this rowboat!”