Jack Rogan: The Ocean Dark

The wind kicked up again — no rust this time — and she relished it. She really did need to get inside and shower. Her skin felt coated with grease from the two hours she’d spent in the galley. Josh always prepared something simple at lunch — today it had been blackened chicken sandwiches — but every couple of days he added a special on the side. This afternoon, the twenty-four members of the crew had been treated to scallops wrapped in bacon.

Tori wondered if Viscaya Shipping, the owners of the Antoinette , knew how well the crew was being fed. She’d seen the ship’s ledger, and either the captain was hiding the cost or he was paying for the extras out of his own pocket. It was the sort of thing Tori ought to be looking out for. Technically she’d been sent along on this trip for quality control — to evaluate efficiency and expenditures, to look over the manifests, and to help out in any way she could.

The Rio brothers — Gabe, the captain, and Miguel, the first mate — weren’t happy about it, but since nobody else acted like she had the plague, she presumed they had kept it from the crew. Which was fine with Tori. She hadn’t asked for the assignment. All she’d wanted was to crew one of the Viscaya container ships, just once. She would have swabbed the deck or polished the railings if they’d asked.

As a girl, she had loved to read classic stories of adventure — Jack London and Jules Verne foremost among them — the sort of books that caused her teachers to mutter in disapproval and attempt to interest her in the Brontë sisters, or even Nancy Drew. The teachers at St. Catherine’s had rigid opinions about which books were and were not proper for girls. But reading offered her an escape from the poisoned air of her home, and dreams of someday having her own adventures.

By her sophomore year of high school, she had ceased to believe in escapes or in dreams, and had stopped reading almost entirely. Yet she’d never forgotten those stories. They’d had a deep impact upon her, and filled her mind with powerful presumptions — not the least of which was that rough men could be honorable creatures. Her father’s cruelty, far from disabusing her of that notion, had only reinforced it. If men like him existed — brutal bastards who took pleasure from the pain of others — then the world must also contain his opposite: a rugged hero who would be better with his hands than his words, kind to friends and lovers, but fearsome and merciless to those who crossed him.

Rough men didn’t have to be bad men. Books had taught her that. But all too often, life had given her a different lesson.

For Tori, this voyage marked the completion of one journey, as well as the beginning of a new one. She’d sailed thousands of miles and seen the beauty and the industry of five Central and South American ports. She had found her adventure. Now she could pause, take a breath, and make a new beginning at last. Until then, she would enjoy the time she had left on the open ocean.

It wasn’t complicated work. A container ship, like any cargo freighter, was loaded at one end of the journey and unloaded at the other, and during the voyage the work was about keeping the vessel clean, staying on course, and making sure the crew got fed. People paid to have their lives packed up in one of those big metal sheds and shipped overseas, and corporations paid to load their products the same way, but they didn’t pay to keep the big boxes shiny. As long as the inside stayed dry and nobody damaged Mr. Hodgson’s Georgian chairs — or his new Mercedes, or the 175,000 superhero action figures being shipped to coincide with the release of a late summer blockbuster — nobody cared.

So Tori didn’t have to shine railings or wash the deck, but she had vowed to help out in any way she could. On the very first day at sea, she’d volunteered to assist in the galley. Granted, that had been partly due to Josh — a sexy mess of a man with several days’ stubble, sky blue eyes, and raggedly cut light brown hair. Since then she’d been Josh’s right hand for every meal, and had been surprised to find that she enjoyed the work.

As for the quality control assignment, she paid attention to the Antoinette ’s heading and looked out for anything that seemed an obvious waste of Viscaya Shipping’s money. But when it came to the copious drinking, the occasional fistfight, and the long hours some of the crew spent lazing around, she turned a blind eye. As long as everyone did their jobs — a potential issue with five new hires this go-round — that sort of thing wasn’t doing any harm.

Still, the Rio brothers had been edgy around her throughout the trip. When she’d been working in the Viscaya offices and they would come to pick up their checks or the manifests for an upcoming voyage, she had always gotten on well with them. Both brothers had flirted with her, brought her coffee. But when Viscaya assigned her to the Antoinette , even though it was only for one trip, that had changed. They didn’t trust her anymore, and though she couldn’t really blame them, she hated it.

It wasn’t as though they had anything to hide. Tori knew more about Viscaya’s illegal operations than the Rio brothers ever would. And though half the crew of the Antoinette pretended blissful ignorance when it came to unscheduled ocean rendezvous with fishing boats or small Central American cargo ships, even the thickest among them had to know something shady was going on. The company chose its employees carefully. Most of the men who crewed the ship had their own secrets — little stints in jail, court-ordered alimony they wanted to avoid by being paid under the table — and they returned Viscaya’s loyalty with their own silence.

The other half of the crew took a more active role when it came to Viscaya’s side business. Viscaya Shipping frequently carried cargo into and out of the United States that would have landed dozens of people in prison. Drugs, guns, stolen goods, sometimes even banned animals. But they drew the line at chemicals, powders, and radioactive materials, and they damn sure weren’t going to bring in people. Frank Esper and Bobby Jewell ran illegal enterprises alongside their legitimate business, but they were Americans. Anything that had even a hint of terrorist connections, they stayed far, far away from.

The guys from Viscaya had their own code, and Tori respected that.

For herself, she had long since surrendered any thoughts of an ordinary life. Tori had spent her life in the orbit of dangerous men, trapped by their gravity. The worst of them had been Ted — an uptown guy with a taste for cocaine and hookers who had played at being an old school thug for so long that he’d become one. Of course she’d married him. It had taken courage and the hand of fate to free her, and now Ted lingered only in her nightmares.

Tori had escaped with her life, and for a long time she had waited for fate to catch up with her. New York had given way to Miami, where she’d promised herself a new start. In the three years since she had said good-bye to Ted in Penn Station, she felt sure she had learned to steer clear of truly bad men.

The people who ran Viscaya Shipping weren’t good guys by any stretch of the imagination, but they had rules. They might smuggle drugs, and even sample the product from time to time, but Frank and the others weren’t addicts. They might bring guns into America under cover of the night, but they made sure they knew who their customers were.

The management at Viscaya liked Tori, and they trusted her. In the time since they had first taken her into their confidence, she had adopted their approach. Business was business. As an office manager, she’d handled their legitimate and illegitimate endeavors with equal professionalism.