Timothy Hallinan - The Man With No Time

“Maybe neither,” I said. “We're going out to look. If we bring anything back, it'll be a person.”

“Caroline B. , right?” She negotiated the rocking deck toward the wheel.

“That's it.”

“Bad ship,” she said, turning a key. Engines coughed beneath the deck. “Class B freighter, draws maybe thirty feet, so they got to keep it out a ways. Seen it before.”

She did something to the controls, and the boat began to back up through the greasy water. “Why bad?” I asked.

“Folks, right? Delivering folks.”

I'd been looking out to sea, but now I turned to her. “How would you know that?”

“Girl's got to keep her eyes open. Hold on a minute.”

She glanced left and right, guiding the boat out between fragile-looking hulls. “Out here, probably lots of people know,” she said, eyeing the nearer boat. “Caroline B. comes in every few months. First they unload her out there, then they bring her up the channel and unload her official.”

“Anyway, she's empty now.”

“I don't think so,” she said.

Everett looked very apprehensive.

“Or maybe we've been lied to,” I said, glaring at him.

“No truth in this world,” Captain Snow said, twirling the wheel and making the boat spin around. I sat down without planning to. The lights on shore swam away behind us and reemerged on our left, so we were headed south. “You know anything about ships?”

“Nothing at all. They, um, seem to move a lot.”

“And you think you're going aboard?”

“We both are,” Dexter said, surprising me.

She zipped up her black windbreaker and gave him a skeptical grin. “Hope you can climb a rope.” She angled the boat toward the right, in the general direction of the open sea, and the wind was wet and cold. “Shoes?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“High-tops,” Dexter said, lifting a large white-clad foot.

“Boots,” I said.

“With leather soles,” Captain Snow said, sounding irritated. “What size?”

“Um, nine and a half,” I said.

She cast me a glance. “What're you, six feet? Little for such a big guy.”

“You know what they say bout the size of the foot,” Dexter contributed. “Little feet, little dong.”

“And you're what?” Captain Snow asked him.

“Twelve.”

“In your dreams.” She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her dark windbreaker and shook the pack over her mouth. One dropped out, and she caught it between her teeth.

“Wo,” Dexter said.

“You and me,” she said to me, flipping open an old military Zippo. “We change shoes. I got big feet.” She crinkled her eyes at Dexter over the flame. “You got anything to say?”

“Tide fallin,” Dexter observed.

“Norman's a mutant,” Captain Snow said, kicking off her shoes, “but Deirdre's okay. Still, even if Deirdre was Our Lady of Fatima, I wouldn't take you out tonight if it wasn't for the money. And the fog.” We were well offshore by now, and she pointed a finger toward the southwest. I followed it and saw something that looked like a white sheet lowered from the sky into the water.

“Is that fog?” I asked, leaning against the railing to pull off my boots.

“Thick as linoleum,” she said. "The nautical asshole's best friend. Cuts off sight and sound. Give me enough fog, and I can steal Catalina." The engines beneath my feet leaped eagerly toward the fog.

“Like when we leave Vietnam,” Tran said, leaning into the breeze. “But colder.”

“I'll take Simon Legree here downstairs,” Dexter said. Twelve or not, he didn't look very happy about being afloat.

“Good idea.” I wasn't actually very happy myself. Dexter trotted Everett past Captain Snow and through the little door. A moment later, I heard Everett go Whoof.” He'd been pushed onto a bunk.

“He's with them, huh?” Captain Snow said, meaning Everett. She turned the wheel about ten degrees. The sheet of fog yawned before us, its lower edge absolutely sharp against the black water.

“And we're with us,” I said, eyeing the white curtain in front of us.

“Getting aboard isn't going to be easy,” she said, and the prow of the boat punched a hole in the curtain. I couldn't see anything. The sound of our engines suddenly sounded like something a mile away.

“Back there,” she said, “toward the stern, is a grappling hook. It's wrapped in rags to kill the noise.” I had to squint to make her out. “I'll throw it, unless your friend there is with the NBA. Can you climb a rope?”

“If I have to.” It didn't sound like fun.

“Gimme those boots. My feet are freezing. And when I say quiet, be quiet.”

“Quiet?” I said. “They're going to hear the engines.”

“Lots of engines out here, all night long.” Dexter came out of the cabin, wrapped in fog. “You guys throw those tires over the side.”

Right. Throw the tires over the side. Tran, Dexter, and I bumped into each other like a bunch of drunks as we pitched the tires over a railing that was much too low for my comfort. The tires had ropes attached to them, and they dangled just inches below the deck level. Like the grapple, they were wrapped in rags.

“You do a lot of this?” I asked, happy to be back behind the wheel. The wind was weaker there.

“Once in a while.” She was peering over the wheel, face wet with fog and the cigarette burning itself down between her teeth. “Can't tote dope anymore. The War on Drugs gets real about a year before an election. So it's the occasional stuff off a freighter-furniture, furs, car parts-whatever happens to fall into the water. Problem is, not much stuff falls into the water.”

And if it did," I ventured, it'd be all wet."

She grinned at me over the coal of the cigarette. “Give the man his weight in fish.”

“Still, it must be risky.”

“Not so bad. They don't guard them much because we don't take much. And we come in way below them, you know? They're all way up there on the upper decks. Gets real cold on a freighter anywhere near the waterline. And then, they're usually drunk.”

We motored through the fog, mostly southward as far as I could tell, for almost thirty minutes. Tran curled himself into a ball near the stern and closed his eyes, perhaps viewing private movies of the South China Sea. I watched Captain Snow take her bearings on a small green radar screen, with only occasional glances at the real world. Twenty-eight minutes out, Captain Snow pulled up on a lever I'd come to recognize as the throttle, and the engines died back.

There was nothing but fog. It condensed on our clothes, making little sparkles, and it sat like foam on the dark, oily water. We were running without lights, but Captain Snow seemed to know exactly where we were.

“We should be-” she said, sounding puzzled. And then she smiled. “They don't call me deadeye for nothing.”

A cliff loomed before us, maybe twenty yards away, maybe twenty feet high. Darker than the fog, darker than the night, it rose from the water like a rock wall. I suddenly heard music.

“Hang on,” Captain Snow said, cutting the wheel to put us on a course that would make us sideswipe the ship. “Sit down, for Chrissakes.” I sat, and the cliff got nearer and nearer, and then our little boat bounced like a walnut shell on the water, and the rags around the tires let out a wet, muffled little squeal.

Even sitting, I fell sideways, toward the ship, and Tran landed on top of me. Dexter rode it out, looking grim. We began to float away from it.

“Grapple,” Captain Snow whispered. “Quick.”

I extricated myself from beneath Tran and grabbed it. She had it out of my hand before I could even reach up, and I concentrated on the coils of rope below it, making sure they weren't fouled.