Jack Rogan - The Ocean Dark

“Well, then I doubt you’ll make it to the meeting.”

He hung up without saying good-bye. Voss nodded, breathing evenly, as she flicked her phone shut and slipped it into her pocket.

She narrowed her eyes, looking out at the darkness, wondering where the Antoinette might be at that moment, how far from their rendezvous.

Hurry up, you bastards. It’s not polite to keep a girl waiting .

Gabe Rio stood on the metal landing just outside the door of the Antoinette ’s wheelhouse, smoking a cigarette and staring out across the water. Suarez had the wheel, and Miguel sat in the chair beside him, surveying the instrument panel, hands down but ready to react, like a man about to try defusing a bomb.

The analogy wasn’t lost on Gabe. The whole situation was a bomb, about to explode in their laps. They could wait maybe a day, two at most, and then they’d have to sail on to Miami. More than eight hours had passed since the raving they’d heard on the radio. He had no idea what had happened to the rendezvous ship — pirates or mutiny or violent betrayal — but it had sounded totally fucked, and pretty final. He’d wanted the idiot on the other ship to go to radio silence, but there’d been nothing since. No beacon. No contact.

Miguel opened the door to the wheelhouse.

“We’re here.”

Gabe frowned. He’d felt and heard the engines slowing, but thought they might just be correcting their course. His cigarette dangled from his fingers and he took another drag, blew out smoke with his words.

“You sure?”

His brother cocked his head in irritation.

Gabe nodded. “All right. Don’t get an attitude. Front office said the rendezvous was six or seven miles off the shore of an island, but I don’t see any lights.”

“Me, either. No lights. No boat. Nothing on radar.”

“How long do you think we wait?”

“You’re the captain, hermano.”

Gabe smiled. “Why is it you only remind me of that when there’s trouble? When things are going good, you’ve got more opinions than anyone I ever met. Except maybe Maya.”

Miguel didn’t smile. “Wouldn’t have hurt you to listen to her opinions once in a while.”

A chill settled between them. The burning tip of Gabe’s cigarette trembled in his hand and he brought it to his lips, took a long drag, then blew it out slow. He shot a glance at his little brother, saw Miguel trying to stand his ground, and looked away again.

“You telling me things would’ve worked out if I’d just listened to her more?” the captain asked. “Maybe if I brought her flowers? Smiled more? Agreed with her when she wanted me to get a job on land so I could be home more?”

“I’m not saying—”

Gabe shot him a look that silenced him. Neither of them needed reminding that if Gabe quit working for Viscaya, Miguel’s days with the company would be numbered.

“I’m not the easiest guy to live with, Miguel,” Gabe added. “But Maya didn’t end things because I didn’t listen enough. She ended it because she started fucking somebody else.”

“You don’t know—”

“The hell I don’t,” Gabe snapped, voice low. He turned his back on his brother. “A man knows.”

The cigarette had burned down almost to the filter, but Gabe held it between his thumb and forefinger for one last drag. Behind him, he heard Miguel open the door and go back into the wheelhouse, and only then did he flick the butt overboard. His brother had tried talking to him about Maya a hundred times, and Gabe always bristled. What did he know about having a wife? He’d had plenty of girlfriends but never married, never had to deal with the crushing weight of a woman’s expectations. Maya had known he wasn’t a talker when she married him. She had known that the sea meant everything to him, and that what he did for a living was sometimes illegal, but she’d smiled and said she didn’t need the details as long as he wasn’t hurting anyone. Gabe had lied to her about that part, but the look in her eyes had told him that she wanted to be lied to.

And it had been a small lie, hadn’t it? He wasn’t some kind of bonebreaker. The only people he’d ever hurt with his own hands had been in brawls that had nothing to do with the work he did for Viscaya. He was captain of a ship — the only thing he’d wanted to be since the age of five. Gabe believed that ought to have meant something to her. Yet Maya had wanted him to give it up, to stay home with her. Even if he’d agreed, they’d never have lasted long after that. One of them would have ended up full of resentment, either way.

He told himself it was easier like this. Now he didn’t have a home to return to. The Antoinette would be his home from now on.

The door to the wheelhouse opened and Suarez stepped out, his eyes narrowed and grim.

“Captain. Mr. Rio needs you.”

Suarez ducked back inside.

Gabe followed, not bothering to close the door. As he entered the wheelhouse he saw Miguel tapping keys, checking charts on the navigational computer’s screen. The captain was about to ask what had happened when he heard the noise.

ping

“Is that—”

Miguel turned, nodded hurriedly. “The beacon from Mickey, yeah. Either someone just turned it on, or it’s been on, and we’re just coming in range of its signal.”

Gabe glanced over to see Suarez waiting at the wheel, then hurried to his brother’s side. “Where is she?”

“Due west. Way off the original coordinates. Thirteen, fourteen miles.”

Gabe peered out from the wheelhouse, looking west.

“You have your course, Mr. Suarez. Full ahead.”

Sometimes Tori wished she would never have to set foot on land again. Out on the ocean, the expectations of the modern world burnt off like morning mist. You took people at face value and judged them by the work they put in. What they might do on their own time — especially back on solid ground — didn’t matter a damn.

The crew of the Antoinette didn’t talk much about their lives, and that suited her just fine. Sailors were rough creatures with quick-draw emotions, but they seemed to share her desire to forget the world they’d left behind. Oh, they might have families back home, wives to make love to and children to feed, but in Tori’s experience they were all running from something. Escaping the past, and a world that didn’t love them enough.

There might be exceptions to the rule, but Tori wasn’t one of them. Like the rest, she had joined the crew of the Antoinette in search of simplicity. Out here, it didn’t matter who she’d been before, and nobody would even wonder. Without that freedom, the ability to be someone new, she doubted she would ever have been able to make the connection with Josh that she had. She liked being at sea, apart from the world.

Now they were headed home, with just a couple of stops along the way. Three years earlier she had adopted a new identity and a new name, but inside she had been the same woman, trapped in the same thought patterns. Leaving Ted had been the beginning of a change, not its completion. Trying to bury the past, to shed the skin of the woman she’d been — to whom names like bitch and whore had been the closest thing to terms of endearment — and to start over, she had gone through many phases, many cycles of hope and dejection. But with the culmination of this voyage, she believed she would finally have achieved that change. Once they were back in Miami, Tori really would be starting over. And as kind as the guys at Viscaya had been to her, and as much as she owed them, she knew that sometime soon she would have to begin one last time, in a job and a life where no one carried a gun or made their living outside the law.