Ryan Lockwood - Below

He stretched his arm far back under the bed, trying not to breathe in the sweaty stink of the linens, and caught hold of a rope handle on the box. The small crate proved even heavier than Val’s duffel. When he had the box in front of him, he unclasped the lid and stared at the remaining contents.

He shook his head. “That dumb son of a bitch.”

When Joe stormed into the wheelhouse, Val was arguing with the captain, but they stopped when they saw his face—and the yellow stick of dynamite in his hand.

“Captain, you want to tell us what in the hell this is for?” Joe shouted loud enough to cause Karl to jump. The kneeling Swede, who had been fiddling with his instruments, struck the back of his head on the dash and swore.

The captain jumped out of his chair. “That’s my property, copper. Give it here!”

“Not until you tell me why it’s on board. Do you even have a permit for this?”

“You cops and your laws. A man needs a permit for everything, doesn’t he? This is my boat, and I’ll bring what I damn well please on her!”

“Not when we’re on board, you asshole! For Christ’s sake, you’ve got these stowed under the bunks of your own crew. Do any of them smoke?”

“All right, everybody take a deep breath.” Val stepped between the two men. “Captain, Joe’s right. We deserve an explanation.”

Captain MacDonald glared at Val, but after a moment he took a step back and looked out toward the sea. “I got it in Mexico. Cheap. My cousin’s doing some gold mining in Alaska. He’ll pay me top dollar for this.”

“Nice try. Now—why do you really have it?” Joe leaned out of the wheelhouse and tossed the explosive into the passing waves.

“Damn you and your laws! You owe me for that!”

“We’ll see about that. When we head in, I’m taking that crate with me. If you’re smart, you’ll just leave it at that.”

The captain swore and advanced toward Joe.

Karl bellowed, “Stop!”

They all looked at him.

He said, “I think I may have found them.”

The two European women were hardly awake when Sturman politely ushered them off his boat. As they hailed the water taxi cruising by in the morning fog, he explained that he had business to attend to. It wasn’t a total lie. He really would be leaving Gull Harbor for the day. Just not by sea.

He guzzled a quart of orange juice with several aspirin and forced down a big bowl of hot oatmeal with cinnamon to settle his stomach. After Sturman packed two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and some water into a daypack, he and Bud hailed the water taxi for a ride to shore. The thick damp in the air muffled the sound of the approaching boat. The driver asked about the hungover women he had ferried off the boat earlier, but Sturman didn’t answer.

Once the taxi reached the dock, Sturman and his dog set out immediately. Sturman knew where they needed to go. Up. He had developed an incredible urge to climb, to go to the highest point he could find. A place he had been to once before.

They followed a rocky trail snaking west out of the harbor, up the island’s steep seaward flank, and ascended through a wet mist that began to dampen Sturman’s face and clothes. He huffed his way up the open hillside along a series of switchbacks, the wet air cooling him. The trail alternated through thick chaparral and rocky outcrops, with few taller trees to obscure the view. Not that it mattered. He could see very little of the beauty that spread out from the island, the thick fog blinding him to the rest of the world.

His head still pounded from the night before, but the exertion was therapeutic. It felt good to push himself, to focus on the pain in his legs and chest, to feel his labored breathing. He climbed for a long time. The day brightened as the sun rose high in the sky and fought to burn through the fog. As he picked his way through the Mediterranean landscape along the narrow trail, his dog exploring the steep hillside before him, he kept thinking of the messages on his cell phone. More than anything, he wanted to talk to Val. But his shame wouldn’t allow him to return her calls. He needed to sort some things out.

A few hours into the hike, the thick fog finally broke. In the short span of just a few hundred vertical feet, the path carried Sturman and his dog out of it and into full sunlight. At the same time, they crested an exposed hilltop that Sturman had once climbed, years ago, with Maria. It was a rocky knoll surrounded by low chaparral, many shades of green but no trees in sight. This high point wasn’t much to look at in itself, but on a clear day the view was unsurpassed. There was silence. Sturman sat against the rocks, Bud at his side.

He looked down on a white quilt of fog spreading to the eastern horizon. Viewed from a thousand feet above sea level, the thick blanket of clouds disguised any turmoil on the surface of the ocean below. Turmoil that was so often there.

When Sturman and his wife had climbed this peak in the past, while on a weekend excursion to Catalina Island, there had been a long stick jammed vertically into a cairn of rocks piled to mark the summit. A white T-shirt had dangled from the end. They had waved the makeshift flag in victory when they arrived, then made love on the exposed summit before anyone else might arrive to discover them. The rock cairn was still there. But the flag was gone.

Sturman scratched Bud’s ears and looked at the blue skies above, the fog bank below, feeling the warm sunlight on his shoulders. Although Maria was gone, sometimes he thought he could feel her. He could feel her now.

“I miss you, babe. I need you.”

Then he closed his eyes and bowed his head. Bud nuzzled under his arm and Sturman scratched the dog behind his ears. He smiled. Then he stood up and began the long walk down.

“We found the shoal.”

“You found what ?”

Joe Montoya realized his wife didn’t understand the terminology he had picked up over the last few weeks. He shifted the cell phone to his other ear. “The squid, hon. We found the school of monster squid.”

“That’s great. So are you coming home now? The girls miss you. I miss you.” Joe could hear his daughters arguing in the background and smiled, forgetting how seasick he felt for a moment.

“I can’t leave yet, Elena. All we’ve done is find the squid on sonar. They’re not even sure it’s the right shoal, actually, but I guess it’s at least a group of squid. We’re going to try and net them soon. With any luck, maybe this whole thing will be over tonight and I can come home.” At the moment, Joe missed dry land even more than his family, but he wasn’t going to tell his wife that.

Joe leaned against the cold, wet metal gunwale of the Centaur , holding the phone tightly to his ear. Apparently he was close enough to either Catalina Island or the mainland for a signal. They had given him yellow rubber bibs and boots to wear, so he wouldn’t get any more dirty or wet. He was glad to have the bibs on, since he needed to lean his hip against the low, filthy gunwale of the boat to maintain his balance. He figured the low height—which in some places was only as high as his knees—must be intentional, to allow the fishermen access to netting equipment over the sides or down in the water.

Off to the west, the last traces of sunlight were seeping into the Pacific and the first stars would soon begin to twinkle through the marine haze surrounding Catalina, several miles distant. The sky was finally clearing. They were close enough to the island to see it, a low black silhouette to the south, but in the darkening evening all he could see to the north and east was ocean. The seas were beginning to calm now, yet the boat still rose high out of the water on some of the passing swells.