Dead in the Water

TWO

THE smell of bacon frying brought Kate wide awake the next morning. For a moment she lay listening to the throb of the engines and the rush of the Avilda's hull through the water. It wasn't necessary to hang on to anything to stay in her bunk. Of course. Now that they were no longer picking pots and hanging their asses out over the water, the high seas had abated. Naturally.

Raising up on one elbow, she peered out the porthole.

All there was to see was fog and gray seas slipping rapidly past beneath it. It figured. This was the Aleutians.

If it wasn't foggy, it was windy. If it wasn't windy, it was foggy. After the last week, Kate would take a nice, peaceful, impenetrable fog any day.

The tantalizing smell of bacon eventually proved impossible to resist. Abandoning the contemplation of things meteorological for things hygienic and things culinary, she showered and dressed, tied her still-wet hair back into a single braid and beat feet down to the galley. There she was greeted by the dizzying sight of eggs over easy, bacon fried crisp and a huge mound of buttered toast. It was the first hot meal she'd seen in four days. She piled her plate high and sat down next to Andy.

"Oh, no," he said, looking at her plate, "not you, too."

She reached for a slice of bacon. "I beg your pardon?"

He waited until the bacon was well and truly in her mouth. "Oink, Oink, oink, oink."

"Excuse me?"

"Meat eater," he said, in the portentous tone of one crying "J'accuse!"

She looked down at her plate, and was aware, not necessarily of things coming to a halt around her, but of attention being shifted to the two of them in an almost palpable way. "And proud of it," she agreed cheerfully, and forked up some egg.

"How can you be? Animals have souls," Andy told her, as earnest and as solemn as he had been the night before holding forth on prana, "the same as humans. Did you know that after death an animal may be reincarnated as a human, and vice versa?"

"Yes," Kate said calmly, taking the wind out of his sails and causing the other two men in the galley to look askance at each other and warily at her. Aleuts believed all things, animate and inanimate, had souls. She had learned that at her grandmother's knee, almost before she learned to walk, but she saw no reason to explain this to Andy.

"Well, then," Andy said, recovering, "don't you agree that it's wrong to kill animals unnecessarily? It interrupts their spiritual journey. It forces them to suffer another rebirth." Kate bit into a second slice of bacon and Andy, his voice rising slightly, said, "It upsets the cosmic scheme of things!"

Kate swallowed and said, "Define 'unnecessarily.'

"What?"

"Define 'unnecessarily.' " Nonplussed, he didn't reply, and Kate said, "It's necessary for me to eat."

"But not meat," he said quickly.

"No?"

Her tone was mild. Andy sensed a potential convert.

"You can get everything you need, every essential vitamin, every mineral, all the nourishment your body requires for health and a long life from a vegetarian diet." Kate chewed bacon. "And without the senseless and wasteful slaughter of other living creatures!" Andy looked at her, his face expectant. If he'd had a tail, it would have been wagging.

Kate regarded him for a moment without expression, and returned to her bacon. He sighed, a gusty sigh of disappointment.

He oinked once more but his heart wasn't in it. She ignored him, eating her way placidly through the rest of her bacon and eggs, watching him from the corner of her eye as she did so.

A little over two years back, in another life, when she had worked full-time instead of part-time for Jack Morgan, Kate's throat had been cut almost literally from ear to ear in an altercation with a gentleman caught in the act of abusing his four-year-old daughter at knifed point. The gentleman was now deceased, and Kate's voice was now as scarred as her throat, a low husk of sound ranging anywhere from rough to rasping, and, when she chose, from harsh to horrifying. This morning she chose. Andy's mouth had barely closed on a heaping spoonful of granola when her scream ripped across the peaceful breakfast scene with all the soothing quality of a grizzly's claws ripping through flesh.

The eggs Ned was in the process of flipping had the frying pan jerked out from beneath them and they splattered across the stove top, and the rest of Harry's coffee splashed across the front of his shirt.

"Jesus! What the fuck is wrong with you?" Harry roared at her. Ned was cursing slowly and steadily over the charring mess on the stove. "What's going on?" Seth called down from the bridge.

She ignored them, watching Andy mop milk and cereal out of his lap with a shaking hand. He looked up and she caught his eye. She leaned forward and said in an oh-so-gentle voice, "Were you aware that scientists have recorded the screams of plants as they are picked?"

Andy's jaw dropped. He stared at her, speechless. In the ensuing silence, Ned turned away to hide a grin. A deep, rusty chuckle rumbled up out of Harry's chest.

Andy bent back over his cereal bowl without another word, and Kate bit into her last piece of bacon with relish.

After breakfast it was Kate's watch and she went up to the bridge to relieve Seth, who gave her a quizzical look, or as near to it as those bland gray eyes could produce.

She responded with an equally bland smile.

Not five minutes after her butt hit the seat of the long-legged chair bolted to the deck next to the steering wheel, Harry Gault appeared on the bridge. He came to a stop next to her and waited, obviously expecting her to move so he could sit down.

She didn't budge. "Harry," she said calmly, "it's my watch, and I'm standing it. If you didn't trust me to steer this bucket, you should never have hired me on."

His answer was almost a snarl. "Like I had a say."

That was true enough, but Kate forebore to belabor the point. The fog was lifting a little, far enough to see a flat sea the same color as the fog rolling out in every direction. The automatic pilot was on, and all Kate had to do was mind the compass and watch for deadheads.

Harry stood there for another minute, his glower gathering in force and ferocity. Kate glanced over at the radar, found a clear screen and began to hum a little beneath her breath. After a moment or two and another near snarl, Harry stamped back down the stairs into the galley. The slam of his stateroom door reverberated all the way up to the bridge, and Kate broke into song.

" ' 'Tis a damn tough life full of toil and strife we whalemen undergo.' " She leaned forward to get a better look at a spot on the endless plain of water that turned out to be an Arctic tern, starting his 22,000-mile trip south a little late in her opinion. She sat back, hooked her toes over the top rung and thought about her skipper.

" 'And we don't give a damn when the gale is done how hard the winds did blow.' " And then there were three, and the third was Harry Gault, skipper of the good ship Avilda, now and six months ago, when Alcala and Brown had disappeared. He was short, bulky and obstreperous, one of those men who took his lack of height out on every moving target that came within range. That and the fact that his seamanship was borderline competent were the only two things she knew about him. So far. Finding out more was why she was on board.

"'Now we're homeward bound 'tis a grand old sound on a good ship taut and free, and we won't give a damn when we drink our rum with the girls of old Maui."' There was a tentative noise at the top of the stairs and she turned to see Andy Pence standing there, his expression indicating he had yet to forgive her for the scene at the breakfast table. "Hey there."

He directed his gaze at a point two inches above her left shoulder. "I was just on my way into the chart room."

She waved a benevolent hand. "Be my guest.

Fourth on the crew roster was Andy Pence, fresh off the beach of Ventura, California, seeking true adventure in the Far North, high as a kite on anything and everything Alaskan, and Kate's bunkie. Thus far, she had discovered that he meditated beneath a percale pyramid and didn't eat red meat. Last and most important, Andy Pence had been hired on after Kate, when the deckhand who had replaced Alcala had quit, and probably had nothing whatever to do with Alcala's and Brown's disappearance.

At best, he was harmless; at worst, a hindrance.

She thought back to the galley and grinned to herself. He was also, she hoped, a fast learner.

The rustle of stiff paper came from behind her. Curious, she checked the horizon and the autopilot and went back to see what Andy was up to.

The chart room stood aft of the wheelhouse. Andy was leaning his elbows on the tilted surface of the chart table, mooning over a marine chart. Kate stood up on tiptoe to peer over his shoulder. "What're you looking at the Shumagins for? That's a tad north of our heading, isn't it?"

Still very much on his dignity, he did not deem the question worthy of a civil reply. She smiled a little behind his back. He was so very young. The smile faded. As young as Stu Brown and Chris Alcala. She returned to the wheelhouse and hoisted herself back into the captain's chair, resuming her scan of the horizon.

It was almost noon, and the fog was beginning to burn off.

It was one of those still winter days when the Cradle of the Winds lay calm and deceptively quiescent, gray sky and silver sea melding into a luminescent horizon without color or definition, a day handmade for dreaming.

Sam Shugak had shown Kate a picture of a very old map once, drawn when people thought the world was flat and square. On each edge the mapmaker had written

"Beware-Heare Bee Dragons and Diverse Monsteres of Ye Deepe." It was that kind of day, a gift of a day, a day with dragons just over the next swell, a day when she didn't wince away from the thought of her father, or worry at the task that lay before her. The sea and the sky and the throb of the engine was all there was, and she settled back and gave herself up to it.

The knots rolled by. She heard the sounds of a chart being rolled and stowed. A moment later Andy appeared, still very much on his dignity. "Have some coffee," Kate said amiably, pouring him a mug from the thermos she'd brought topside with her.

"I'm not thirsty," he said stiffly.

"Have some anyway."

He took the mug because she might have dropped it on him if he hadn't. She jerked her head. "So what's with the chart on the Shumagins?"

His face lit up. For a moment the desire to share his news with someone, anyone, warred with the awareness of who he was talking to, but eagerness won out in the end. "I was looking for Sanak and Unga."

"Why?"

"Because I was reading this book about the Aleutians, and there's a story in it about a boat race back in the thirties or thereabouts. A boat race between a hundred twenty-five-foot steamer and a kayak."

He beamed at her, blue eyes expectant beneath tousled blond hair, and dutifully she said, "A steamer and a kayak? No kidding? What happened?"

"The kayak won!" The announcement was delivered with all the air of an eyewitness to the event.

Kate expressed suitable astonishment, and he needed no further urging to disgorge the whole story. "The steamer put in at Sanak to offload cargo, see, and these four Aleut guys came up in a kayak and challenged the captain of the steamer to a race." Andy's lip curled. "He wouldn't do it until they bet him a hundred dollars they could win."

"Easy money," she observed. She thought she caught a glimpse of an island off to starboard, but a tardy wisp of fog obscured it almost as soon as she saw it, and she settled back in the chair, listening to Andy with half an ear.

"That's what he thought," Andy said, his scorn immense and magnificent. "The steamer took off, and the kayak just sat there, and everybody onshore started hooting and laughing, but the Aleuts were waiting, counting the waves for the right wave, what they called the ninth wave. When it came along, they paddled to catch it and balanced themselves on top of it, and then they rode it, all the way to Unga! Before the trip was half over, they were out of the steamer's sight!" The beam was back. "First surfers north of the fifty-three!

God, don't you just love Alaska!"

"Hitchhiking on a wave," Kate said. "I like it. Did the Starr's skipper pay up?"

Andy nodded vigorously. "Uh-huh. He was a good sport."

"Good for him. More coffee?"

"Wait a minute." Andy paused, mug outstretched.

"Did I say the steamer's name was the Starr?"

"Sure you did." The can of Carnation Evaporated Milk was empty but for a few drops. Kate sighed.

"No, I didn't," he said. "You already knew it. You already heard that story."

She looked over at his accusing expression. "About a thousand times," she admitted, a slow smile spreading across her face.

He didn't know whether to take offense or not, and as the decision hung in the balance Kate played her trump card. "I'm an Aleut myself, Andy. I think the first time my dad told me that story I was four years old."

Andy stared at her, eyes and mouth three round, astonished O's. "Gosh," he breathed. "You're an Aleut? A real live Aleut?"

Kate kept her face straight with an effort. "A real live Aleut. Now be a good guy and go get me another can of milk for my coffee, okay? And toss the empty while you're at it."

She handed the can to him. He took it automatically, his eyes still wide and fixed on her face. "Have you ever paddled a kayak?"

"Never in my life," she said, and took him by the shoulders to turn him around and give him a firm shove in the direction of the stairs.

They made Dutch that evening. The harbor was crowded with crabbers, and their turn to unload didn't come until the following morning. The crew suited up in rain gear while Harry brought the Avilda around to the processor's dock. Working both booms on the dock and with all four of the deck crew in the hold loading brailers they had the old girl emptied out in less than two hours.

Harry shinnied up the ladder to the dock, reappearing in the galley half an hour later. "How much?" Andy said, his young voice excited. "What kind of price did we get?"

The skipper made a show of consulting the fish ticket he held in one hand. "Buck-fifty."

"A dollar and fifty cents?" Andy said. "Per crab?"

"Per pound," Kate corrected him gently.

Andy's voice went up into a squeak. "Per pound? Per pound?"

He lunged for paper and pencil. His face screwed up with concentration, the tip of his tongue protruding from one corner of his mouth. After tremendous amounts of scribbling and adding and erasing and multiplying, he produced a figure and stared down at it with disbelieving eyes. "Eighty-three hundred dollars?" he said finally. His face paled, flushed and paled again beneath its tan. Again his voice went up to a squeak. "A crew share for this one trip is eighty-three hundred dollars?"

Kate smacked him on the back. "If it was easy, everybody'd be doing it. That's why they pay us the big bucks, boy."

She looked around for agreement and found it, in a mild sort of way. Seth gave a casual nod, Ned said "uhhuh" in an absentminded tone, and Harry disappeared into his stateroom.

A little deflated, Andy turned to Kate. "For crying out loud, you'd think they made eighty-three hundred bucks every day out there."

"Yes," Kate said, "you would think that, wouldn't you." She picked up the piece of paper and peered at the clumsy squiggles. She made a few doodles with the pencil and totaled them up.

"Eighty-three hundred dollars?"

She nodded, her face wearing a rueful expression he didn't understand but was too wrought up to question.

"Yup. It's eighty-three hundred dollars, all right. Each."

Laying pencil and paper aside, she rubbed her face with both hands, hard. "Eighty-three hundred dollars," she repeated in a thoughtful voice. "Not bad for eight days' work."

Jack Morgan might live after all.

In one of those impetuous changes of mind for which Aleutian weather is rightfully famed, the fog shifted and revealed a high, broken overcast and, if Kate was not mistaken, a pale, brief and wholly transitory gleam that might be sunshine. The resulting scene was somewhere between appalling and enthralling. Dutch Harbor was a sheltered piece of Iliuliuk Bay, nuzzled up against Amaknak Island behind a mile-long spit of sand and gravel and grass. Amaknak Island, four miles long and a mile wide, in turn lay snugly within two arms of the much larger Unalaska Island, eighty-seven miles long and thirty-seven miles wide and the second largest in the Aleutian Chain. Amaknak Island looked like a pelican facing northeast, Unalaska like a tomahawk with the blade facing north-northwest.

Mount Ballyhoo formed the beak of Amaknak's pelican, so named, Kate dimly remembered from some long-ago lesson in Mr. Kaufman's sixth-grade geography class, by Jack London when he'd been sealing between the Aleutians and the Kuriles at the turn of the century.

That voyage had formed the basis for local color in The Sea Wolf which Mr. Kaufman had forced down the class's collectively unwilling educational maw. All Kate could remember of the story was her conviction that though Humphrey Van Weyden might have survived Wolf Larsen, he wouldn't have lasted five minutes in the Park.

Ballyhoo had been her first sight of Dutch. In fact when she saw it loom up in the window of the 727 she flew in on she had been certain it was going to be her last sight of anything at all, as the airstrip clung precariously to a very narrow strip of land between the southwestern slopes of Ballyhoo (or the back of the pelican's head) and the Bering Sea. From the maps she knew a five-hundred-foot bridge connected Amaknak with Unalaska, and on the island of Unalaska was the village of Unalaska. Somewhere off to the northwest in the surrounding clouds was 6,680-foot Makushin Volcano, the second largest in the Chain. It was still active, as were most of the volcanoes in the Pacific's Ring of Fire.

Kate tried not to think about it.

From nowhere on either island was there a view that did not include a vast, unending expanse of water. In the north it was the Bering Sea; in the south, the Pacific Ocean. Both bodies of water were a constant reminder of what fueled Dutch Harbor. Dutch was a boom town and looked it. Prefabricated buildings crowded up against each other along narrow strips of beach, beaches that were themselves crowded between a landscape that rose suddenly and vertically with very few softening curves, and a sea that from one moment to the next varied in color from bright blue to dull green. Looking at this view was as alarming as it was invigorating, Kate now discovered, as if she were riding a roller coaster with both feet planted firmly on the ground.

Kate always felt better when she knew exactly where she was, and having identified all the relevant topographical features, she started out down the gravel road with a will. It was sodden beneath her feet. Gulls gave raucous screams as they swooped and dived overhead. A bald eagle perched on the top of a streetlight. He looked down his beak at her in the haughty manner of his kind, and after admiring him for a moment she passed on. The road was an obstacle course of fast-moving pickup trucks and vans, each of the vans with the logo of a different taxi service painted on their sides. Another interesting fact Andy had gleaned from his book on the Aleutians was that there were thirteen cab companies in Dutch, and within the first mile of her walk Kate had narrowly missed being run over by twelve of them.

She passed a crab processor, a surimi plant, another processor, another surimi plant, making her way down the gravel road that paralleled the beach and the rectangular harbor. She dodged a red Ford pickup with a supercab crammed with an indeterminate amount of people in bright yellow rain gear, and came upon a group of fishermen, identical in jeans, plaid shirts, shoepaks, navy-blue knit watch caps and unshaven faces. They stood in the middle of the road, oblivious to the trucks and vans rattling impatiently around them. They were all talking at once, at the tops of their voices, and punctuating their words with vociferous gesticulation. Kate paused to listen.

The man at the center of the group shook his head adamantly and held up ten fingers.

"Forget it!" one of the other men exclaimed. He had a dark, full beard that did little to conceal his choler. "Fifty and not a penny more!"

Kate, craning her neck, saw that the man at the center of the group had a bundle of loose fur beneath one arm.

He held it up and it resolved itself into a hat, the kind seen in illustrations of winter life in Moscow. The fur was long and deep brown, almost black in color. The man showed it around the circle, allowing the prospective buyers to finger it admiringly. There were murmurs of appreciation at its softness and shine. Kate realized the scruffy guy must be off the big Russian processor anchored in the harbor, and was in the act of trying to raise some spending money. She elbowed forward for a closer look at the fur.

"Fifty," the fisherman who had bid last repeated.

The Russian, obdurate, shook his head and held up ten fingers again,

"Goddammit!" The fisherman was frustrated. A friend standing next to him said something in a low voice and he gave his head an impatient shake, "I forgot her birthday, I've gotta send her something or she'll throw all my clothes out the window like she did last time. She's into that ethnic shit, she'll love a Russian hat from a real Russian. Okay, sixty." He held up six fingers.

The Russian stood firm at a hundred. He couldn't speak a word of English but he knew a desperate man when he saw one. He was right; the fisherman eventually peeled five grimy twenties from a roll that would have choked a hippopotamus and exchanged them for the hat.

Kate waited until the men had moved on before going to stand next to the Russian fisherman. "What kind of fur was it?" she asked.

He was counting his money, laboriously, licking his fingers between each bill. Unsatisfied with the first count, or perhaps disbelieving it, he counted a second time before looking up, his face split with an immense grin. It widened when he saw Kate, and he fired a stream of Russian in her direction.

She spread her hands and gave him a rueful smile that he had no problem interpreting and that left him undiscouraged. He pantomimed chugalugging a drink and looked at her hopefully, a big, rumpled, enthusiastic puppy dog. "Oh-kay?" he said, evidently the limit of his English vocabulary.

What the hell, she thought. Might as well provide herself with some cover in case she ran into someone else off the Avilda. The prospect of meeting Jack with an enormous Russian in tow also had its appeal. "You know the Shipwreck?" she suggested out loud, and the Russian's grin threatened to split his face in two. It appeared he knew the Shipwreck. Kate smiled, shrugged and nodded.

Without further ado her new friend placed a massive and proprietary arm around her shoulder and urged her down the road.

"Wait a minute," she said, holding up both hands. He halted, his face failing ludicrously. "No, it's okay, I'll go with you, I'm going that way anyway. But the hat." She demonstrated, pulling off her own, a baseball cap with the Niniltna Native Association logo stitched across the front. She pointed after the other fishermen, patted the canvas on her hat and rubbed her fingers together. "What was it made of? Your hat?"

He hesitated, looking at her.

"It's all right, I'm just curious," she assured him. "I do a little trapping myself. What was it?"

Still he hesitated. Kate wet her lips and gave him her best smile and his reservations dissolved. He looked around to make sure no one was looking, and held one hand at his side, palm down. "Woof," he said.

She laughed. "That's what I thought." She remembered Mutt and her smile faded, but he laughed back at her and offered his arm again. She took it. He would have steered her directly for the Shipwreck if she hadn't just as firmly steered him first to the Alyeska Trading Company, an all-purpose general store selling everything from California oranges to Stanley screwdrivers to Nikon cameras to Levi's jeans. Kate was there to buy dental floss but her Russian admirer took one look at the crowded shelves and fell in love, and Kate spent the next thirty minutes trailing after him up one aisle and down the next. He swooned over the coffee. He agonized over the relative merits of Marlboros and unfiltered Camels.

Dismissing the best Timex had to offer with a decisive shake of his head, he was investigating the workings of a Canon Sureshot when Kate looked up and saw Harry Gault over by the meat counter, talking rapidly in a low voice to a short man with Asian features. He looked stubborn, Harry angry, and they both looked somehow furtive.

Kate had begun an unobtrusive drift in their direction when half a dozen of her new Russian friend's shipmates rolled in the door and engulfed the two of them. Harry looked up at the shouts and laughter. Caught looking at him, Kate met his eyes calmly and nodded hello. His eyebrows snapped together, he scowled and ushered the Asian man down an aisle and out of sight.

The Russians looked from Kate to their shipmate and back again and there was a considerable wagging of eyebrows and a lot of talk recognizable as ribald -in any language. One of them asked her a question. Of course it meant nothing to her and she shook her head helplessly. Her newfound bosom buddy held up one finger in inspiration and poked himself in the chest.

"Anatoly! Anatoly!"

"You're Anatoly," she said, nodding. He pointed at her and waited. "Kate. I'm Kate."

He looked puzzled for a moment. "Kate?" Dawn broke.

"Ekaterina!" She nodded, and jumped when the entire crew shouted her name with one voice, causing heads to turn all over the store. Anatoly, noticing her alarmed expression, grabbed her hand and hauled her over to the window. He pointed at the processor anchored in the harbor, a squat, ungraceful ship that towered over its harbor mates, looking like an immense gray gull with its head tucked beneath one wing. "Ekaterina!"

He pointed from the boat to Kate and back again.

"Ekaterina! Ekaterina!"

"Ekaterina!" his shipmates yelled, beaming at her.

A light went on over Kate's head. "You mean your boat's name is Ekaterina, too?"

He nodded excitedly. "Ekaterina! Ekaterina!"

"Well, it's nice to meet you, Ekaterina," she said to the boat, "and you, too, Anatoly." She held out her hand.

He was at least six feet tall and seemed six feet wide, so when he put his hands on her upper arms and lifted her without seeming effort she was unsurprised, if a bit startled. He kissed her, great smacking kisses on both cheeks and mouth, before setting her back down on her feet. There was a cheer from his shipmates and Kate could feel herself flushing, but she had to laugh. "Well, thank you. Nice to meet you, too.

I think."

Eventually Anatoly decided on a Sony boombox and a selection of Top Ten cassette tapes, leaving Kate to wonder how Hammer was going to go over in Magadan.

With the boombox clutched firmly beneath one arm and Kate beneath his other, Anatoly plotted a course for the door, followed by laughing, chattering shipmates similarly laden with packages. Kate felt like she was leading a parade. -As they exited the store, what looked like an entire ship's company of Japanese fishermen flooded in and headed straight for the meat counter. So that was why everything in the store was priced in yen, too, Kate thought, and wondered why the store's owners didn't price their products in rubles as well.

The Shipwreck Bar had been a Dutch watering hole for time immemorial, which at this longitude meant since at least before World War 11. A cargo ship for Alaska Steam, she'd been conscripted by General Samuel Buckner to supply troops rushed to the Aleutians following Pearl Harbor. A gale drove her ashore during her first year of service. The SeaBees restored her to an upright position, filled her hold with concrete for ballast, reconditioned her generator and used her for a barracks during the war. Abandoned for two decades, when the crab fishing picked up in the sixties a local businessman acquired her as government surplus and remodeled her into a restaurant, hotel and bar.

Double doors were cut into the side of the hull. Kate entered first, only to dodge back out of the way of a fisherman slow dancing with a bar stool, eyes closed and cheek to seat. Jimmy Buffet was wishing he had a pencil-thin mustache and about thirty fishermen were crowded around the jukebox, leaning up against it and each other and singing along in an enthusiastic if tuneless chorus. Grimy windows cut through the hull looked out over the docks and boats of the harbor, tables were scattered around the room with a lavish hand, the floor was filthy with spilled beer and cigarette butts, and Kate couldn't even see the bar with all the bodies crowded up against it. Her eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom, she conservatively estimated about one woman for every twelve men in the place. She further estimated that at thirty-one years of age she was by far the oldest person in the room, save perhaps the bartender. He was a wrinkled little man with an anxious expression between the creases, who seemed to be the only waiter and was in constant motion between bar and tables.

One of those tables became free and Anatoly and his shipmates herded their prize female across the room in a proprietary manner that made Kate feel like the single houri in a harem otherwise filled with very needy sheiks.

A chair was produced and she got to sit in it for all of thirty seconds before Anatoly had her out on the dance floor. He was promptly cut in on by one of his friends, and he by a third, and so on. They rotated her through the entire crew several times and what had to have been most of the jukebox's repertoire before Kate, flushed and laughing, protested. Anatoly, her current partner, became all concern and ushered her solicitously back to her chair, its current occupant removed by the scruff of his neck. Anatoly rattled off something to his shipmates and there was a concerted rush to the bar. Almost instantaneously on the table before her appeared a Michelob, a Rainier, an Olympia, three shot glasses brimming with a clear liquid and one mixed drink with a slice of pineapple hooked over one side of the glass and a tiny pink paper parasol draped over the other.

Kate looked from the drinks to her escorts. "Thank you, but-"

Anatoly said firmly, "Spasiba.

"I beg your pardon."

" 'Dank you,' nyet, " he said. "Spasiba.

"Oh. I see." Kate waved a hand over the table and said, "Spasiba, then, spasiba very much, but I don't drink." She pointed at the assorted glasses and bottles and back to herself, all the while shaking her head from side to side. "I don't drink." She couldn't help laughing at their crestfallen faces. With a firm hand she moved each drink to a place more or less in front of one of them and before any of them could beat her to it rose to her feet in search of something tall, cold and nonalcoholic.

"Hi, honey," some jerk at the next table smirked. He patted his lap suggestively. "Have a seat." She ignored him, and someone jerkier seated next to him growled,

"Got something against Americans, girlie?" She ignored him, too, only to be brought up short against a barrel chest clad in brilliant orange and green plaid wool. She took a deep breath and looked up, prepared to defend her virtue at all costs, only to encounter a pair of mild brown eyes in a moon-shaped face. "Name the Beach Boys," he demanded.

"I-what?"

"Name the Beach Boys," he repeated. He swayed a little on his feet. There wasn't room enough for him to fall down, for which Kate was profoundly grateful.

"The Beach Boys," she said. "Well, there was Mike Love, and the Wilson brothers-"

"Which one's still dead?"

" 'Still dead!1 "

The moon face looked disapproving, "What's the matter, I don't speak English good enough for you? Which Beach Boy's still dead?"

Kate offered him a conciliatory smile. "I'm sorry. I don't know which one's still dead."

The moon-faced man buffed out an impatient sigh.

"Don't anyone in this bar know nothing about the legends of our own time? Jesus!" He looked back at Kate and said with exaggerated patience, "D for Dennis. D for dead. Simple. Get it?"

"Got it," Kate said solemnly.

"D for Dennis. D for dead." The moon face crumpled and a tear ran down his cheek. "Goddammit."

It was like that all the way across the bar, and the journey took time and persistence and some strong elbow work. When she finally got through she could see why.

She stood stiff and still, barely breathing.

Someone had dribbled a thin line of white powder on the bar, a line that extended the entire twenty-foot length of the scarred wood. About one fisherman per inch was snorting it up through straws, thin glass tubes and rolled-up hundred-dollar bills with all the finesse of a bunch of enthusiastic hogs working their way through a cornucopian trough.

Kate was not exactly a virgin when it came to understanding the effects of rash and reckless youth combined with too much money, but this blatant display was something even beyond her ken. As she stood there, stunned, an amused voice drawled, "Like a toot, little lady?"

She turned to see a man with a grin like a hungry shark standing next to her, and she remained so astounded that he mistook her silence for interest. An expansive sweep of one arm took in the bar. "Go ahead, the party's on me." He looked her over with a predatory eye. What he saw must have pleased him, for he gave the bulging bag in front of him a possesive pat, grinned that shark's grin again and said, "Plenty more where this came from.

Maybe we can work out a little something in trade?"

A deep voice said, "I don't think so." Jack Morgan was tall, six feet two inches, and he was broad, well over two hundred pounds, but what gave the shark pause was the expression on his almost ugly face. It might have been the broad, unsmiling mouth, or the high-bridged nose already broken more than once, or the cold, clear, steady blue of his eyes, narrowed slightly against the cigarette smoke that swirled and eddied across the room like the Aleutian fog offshore.

He stood where he was, waiting, like a rock indifferent to the roughest surf, and he looked at the shark, calm, watchful and without a trace of apprehension.

The shark was clearly taken aback by all this sangfroid but he was game. "Why don't we let the little lady speak for herself?"

"Because she's already spoken for," Jack said, just as smoothly. He looked at Kate and quirked an eyebrow, daring her to react. Little pleased as she was by his high-handedness, still less did she want to start a fight.

Already noise was dying down around them as fishermen became aware of the confrontation and downed bottles and straws to watch avidly to see what happened next.

She caught a glimpse of Ned Nordhoff toward the back of the crowd and that decided her. She gave Jack a silent nod and stepped to his side. He rested a casual but unmistakably possessive hand on her shoulder, gave the shark an amiable smile and raised his voice.

"Barkeep!"

The bartender left off rewashing a perfectly clean glass and bustled down. "What'll you have?"

Jack jerked his head. "A room."

The bartender gave Kate a speculative look and Jack a lascivious grin. When no answering grin was forthcoming his own faded and he said nervously, "That'll be a hundred bucks. Cash. Up front."

"All right." Unperturbed, Jack produced a money clip and peeled off two fifties and handed them over. "When's checkout time?"

"Checkout time?"

Jack was patient. "What time in the morning do we have to be out?"

The bartender gaped. "You mean you're staying all night?"

For the first time Jack looked a little wary. "That was the idea. Is there a problem?"

"You want a whole room for one whole night?" Jack nodded. "What the hell you going to be doing up there that'll take all night?"

It was so obviously shock rather than prurient interest that prompted the question that Jack said only, "How about a key?"

The bartender woke from his self-induced trance. "The whole night'll cost you more than a hundred, I can tell you that, pardner."

Unmoved, Jack said, "How much more?"

Taken aback, the bartender glanced around for help.

"I don't know," he admitted, "no one's ever asked for a whole room for the whole night before."

Jack reached for his money clip and peeled another hundred off. "That do?" The bartender looked dazedly down at the bills in his outstretched hand, and Jack sighed and added another hundred. The bartender swallowed hard, the bills disappeared into a pocket and he said, "I'll get that key."

Conversation picked up as they followed him up the gangway bolted to the back wall. Kate's last sight of the bar was of Anatoly's enormous brown eyes, swimming with reproach, following her every step of the way.

The room wasn't much bigger than the stateroom Kate was sharing with Andy on the Avilda, and but for the bunkbeds looked very similar. The bulkheads were metal and cool to the touch, the bunk was narrow and built in to the wall with drawers beneath it and a porthole above, and the adjoining head was the size of an aspidistra planter. "Hold it," Kate said when the bartender would have left them. Pulling back the covers on the bed, she sniffed the sheets. They smelled fresh and they looked clean. So did the toilet, and when she pulled back the shower curtain the floor looked fungi-free. It was far more than she'd hoped for. She reentered the room and nodded at Jack, who repeated, "So, when do you want us out of here?"

The bartender scratched his head. "Hell, I don't know."

"When's your boat due out?" Jack asked Kate.

She shrugged. "We're waiting on a part they're flying in from Anchorage. Could be one day. Could be two."

"But it won't be tomorrow." She shook her head, and Jack looked back at the bartender, who threw up his hands. "The hell with it," he told them, "stay as long as you like. And don't even think about complaining about the noise. This ain't exactly the Holiday Inn, you know."

"We know," Jack said dryly, and the bartender stamped out.

"Did you see that line of coke?" Kate demanded as soon as the door slammed shut behind him. Jack nodded.

"God knows I'm no prude, Jack, but Jesus! There had to be thousands of dollars worth of hits on that bar!"

He unzipped his jacket and sat down to unlace his boots. "Hundreds of thousands."

"Enough for Amaknak Island to achieve lift-off," she said, her torn voice outraged. "I'd bet my last dime there wasn't a kid there over twenty-five, and every last one of them due to go back out into the Bering Sea as soon as their boats are refueled. You've got to do something."

"Look, Kate, I don't mean to sound unfeeling," he said, grunting a little as the first boot came off, "but could we concentrate for a minute on why you're here?"

"You've got to do something," she reiterated.

He set the second boot beside the first, lining the two up with meticulous precision. "Kate. I'm an investigator for the Anchorage D.A. I am not a police officer, and even if I were this isn't anywhere remotely near my jurisdiction."

She told him what he could do with his jurisdiction, and he said, "You want me to wade into that crowd of drunks, most of them just off their boats, thousands of dollars in their pockets, thousands of miles from home and family, roaring to have a good time, and tell them they can't?" He snorted. "There wouldn't be enough of me left to lick up off the floor."

"Then call the cops! Call the troopers! Call the DEAD!"

"You think they aren't already here?"

She glared at him, impotent.

He waved a hand in the general direction of the airstrip.

"Three different public air carriers fly into Dutch every day. Ma and Pa Kettle can fly in for the price of a ticket, seven hundred dollars round-trip if they buy in advance. So can Joe Fisherman. And so can Joe Blow, your friendly neighborhood pusher." He saw her expression and his own softened. "Kate. Some of these kids are pulling down five, ten grand a trip. It's cold work, it's boring, it's lonely, and for most of them it's the toughest job they'll ever have. Oh," he said, holding up a hand palm out when she would have spoken, "the cops and the troopers and the DEA'll do their best, like they always do, understaffed and underfunded and with the entire fishing community closing ranks against them. But it all comes down to the same thing in the end, escape for sale. Here, who can resist that kind of sales pitch?"

Her glare was damning and maybe even a little righteous.

"I can."

His grin was tired but appreciative. "That's why I love you, Katie, you tough little broad, you. Now what have you got for me?"

"Zip," she said with relish.

He leaned back in his chair, crossed his feet on the edge of the bunk, laced his hands behind his head and looked at her, waiting.

She blew out an exasperated breath and flopped on the bunk, kicking off her boots. "What did you expect'? You fly into the Park with some cockamamie story about the Case of the Disappearing Crewmen, and yank me out of there so fast I barely have time to get Mutt and her pups over to Mandy's. The next thing I know I'm on a boat in the middle of the Boring Sea, in gale-force winds and freezing rain, pulling pots and wondering what the hell I'm doing there."

"You didn't have to come," he pointed out. "As you have made abundantly clear on more than one occasion, you don't work for me anymore."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she said. Jack was being reasonable and Kate wasn't interested in reasonable at the moment. "Except for when you offer me four hundred dollars a day and expenses." Not to mention $8,300 a week in incidental earnings, she thought. The prospect cheered her, but she would be damned before she let him see it.

"Besides," he added, "the Avilda needed a deckhand pronto, and the board couldn't stall off Gault forever, not with so many wanna-be deckhands in Dutch. There wasn't time to brief you."

"There's time now," she pointed out.

He eyed the bunk, and her on it. "I was kind of hoping we could try out that bunk first." He waggled his eyebrows. "It's going to be tough, justifying it on my expense account. I want to make sure I'm getting my money's worth."

She bit back a smile and said sternly, "Get on with it."

He gave a mournful sigh and dug into his pack, producing a tattered, bulging file folder with sheets of paper sliding out in every direction. "I assumed when I flew into the Park last week that you had heard of the two crewmen who were lost last March."

"Don't assume anything of the kind. The Park's not on a paper route, I don't have a satellite dish, or a television, for that matter, and I only listen to National Public Radio. Or I do when the skip is right, which isn't often, and Bob Edwards doesn't talk a lot about Alaska anyway. And besides, you and I were busy with other matters last spring." Unconsciously, Kate rubbed at her right shoulder, feeling again the kick of the shotgun as she faced down a man with ten bodies, two of them children, littering the Park behind him. Lottie she refused to think about at all.

"True." Jack's voice was without inflection, but he took care not to look at her.

"Start from the beginning, and don't worry about repeating yourself. I want to hear it all this time."

"All right." He made a stab at shaking the mass of paperwork in his lap into some kind of order, and gave it up as a lost cause. Tilting his chair back against the bulkhead, he closed his eyes and recited from memory.

"The Avilda is one of a fleet of deep-sea fishing boats owned by a consortium of fishing families from Freetown, Oregon, called Alaska Ventures, Inc. They've been smart and successful, and they've built up quite a sizable fleet over the last forty years." He pawed through the folder and by a miracle found what he was looking for near the top of the file. "There's the Avilda, your boat. There's the Lady Killigrew, the Madame Ching, the-"

Kate sat up, and he looked at her. "What?"

The names triggered a memory somewhere, but she couldn't immediately track it down. She shook her head.

"Nothing. Never mind."

He looked at her for a moment longer, decided it wasn't worth the effort and returned to his list. "There's the Mary Read, the Anne Bonney and a sixth on the ways at Marco, the-"

Kate's memory clicked in and a wide grin spread across her face. "Let me guess. The Grace O'Malley."

He examined his list again. "No, the Mary Lovell."

Kate laughed out loud. "What?"

She was still chuckling, but she shook her head. "Nothing.

Never mind. It's not important."

Jack mistrusted the smug expression on her face but shrugged his shoulders and looked back down at his list. "The fleet spends summers in Freetown, refitting, maintenance and repairs, upgrading equipment, that kind of thing. Winters, they spend fishing in Alaska, out of Kodiak or Dutch Harbor, always for crab, opilio, bairdi, red and blue king. Lately there's been some talk of refitting a few of the vessels for bottom fishing, but Alaska Ventures' board of directors seems to feel that bottom fishing is going to be severely curtailed in the near future."

"They are smart," Kate observed. "A lot of marine biologists blame bottom fishing for the drop in king crab stocks in the mid-eighties, and they lobby hard in Juneau and Washington. They've got the tree huggers on their side, too. Hard to buck. What's any of this got to do with the Case of the Disappearing Crewmen?"

"I'm getting to that. As you know, the Avilda is skippered by Harry Gault. During the tail end of last season, Gault used the Avilda to haul a barge from Kodiak to Dutch Harbor. The barge belonged to the processor Alaska Ventures delivers to, so he was doing them a favor. Not much of one, as it turned out."

"What happened?"

"It is generally agreed, if not said right out loud, that through bad weather and bad seamanship Gault lost the barge."

"Lost the barge?"

Jack nodded. "The line parted twice before he finally lost it for good the third time. They spent a lot of time going around in circles trying to find it. No luck. In the meantime, they ran out of water."

"Ran out of water?"

Jack nodded. "Ran out of water." When Kate would have said more he held up one hand and cautioned,

"Remember, the deck boss and the remaining deckhand backed him up on this."

"Ned Nordhoff and Seth Skinner."

Jack nodded again. "So he drove the boat over to the nearest island, anchored, and the other crew members"Jack fumbled impatiently with the pile of paper in his lap-"doggone it, okay, here it is-their names were Christopher Alcala and Stuart Brown-went ashore to look for water."

The faces of the two young crewmen appeared again before Kate's eyes. "Went ashore where?"

"Ah, what, the island's name was Anua."

"Got a map?"

Jack fished around in his daypack and tossed a folded piece of paper over to her. She flattened it on the bunk and found the little island halfway down the chain, ringed in a circle of black Marksalot she had no difficulty in identifying as Jack's handiwork. Jack had always leaned toward black Marksalot for notes, arrows and marginal balloons on any piece of evidence that was write-onable, to the vocal disgust of the district attorneys who had then to introduce the evidence into the trial record. "What's on it? On Anua, I mean?"

"An airstrip dating back to World War 11, an active volcano. That's about it. Pretty standard for an Aleutian island."

Kate measured the air miles between Dutch Harbor and Anua, her brows puckered. "Mmm."

He waited, but that was all she said. "Alcala and Brown left the Avilda at about four in the afternoon, in the skiff. They had a flashlight and a bunch of jerry cans."

"That all?"

"Uh-huh."

"No survival gear? No tent, no sleeping bags, not even matches?"

"According to Gault, they weren't anticipating spending the night."

"This was March?"

"Yeah."

"In the Aleutians?"

"Yeah."

Kate lay back down on the bunk. "Kind of gives new meaning to the word 'dumb,' don't it. What happened?"

"What you might expect, and remember this was the first trip north for both of them."

"First and last."

'Yeah. Anyway, according to Gault, Skinner and Nordhoff the skiff made it into shore, and then it started snowing. The crew on the boat lost sight of the island and the skiff. It socked in overnight. The next morning there were two inches of snow on the ground and no sight of skiff or crew."

"Did they go ashore to check?"

Jack shook his head. "No."

" What?

"No, they didn't. They said they had no way to get there. The skiff was already ashore."

Still disbelieving, Kate demanded, "I presume they had a life raft?"

"Two of them." Jack grinned at her. "Gault says he didn't want to use them, in case he ran into trouble later on."

Kate stared at him. "And this is the good ship Lollipop you signed me onto? Thanks a whole bunch, Jack. So what happened next?"

"Gault called the Coast Guard."

Something in his voice made Kate say sharply, "How soon?"

"From the Coast Guard logs it was noon the day of the disappearance before Gault got around to calling them."

He looked up with a bland expression. "He ran the Avilda up and down and around the island, looking for signs of life through the binoculars. When he couldn't find any, he pulled the hook and set course for Dutch."

Kate was speechless. Jack's smile was bland. "It gets better. When the Coast Guard fired up a chopper and took a run out there, it seems that Gault had given them the wrong coordinates, so they searched the wrong part of the island."

When Kate found her voice it was only for a very weak, "You're kidding me."

"Nope. The Coasties didn't discover this until a couple of weeks later, when the operator who took the call compared notes with the pilot. So they went out again.

Didn't find anything that time, either."

"Nothing at all?"

"Nope."

"Not even a jerry can? An oar? A hat or a glove?

Nothing?"

"Nothing." Jack refiled the list of boat names in the folder, just missing losing the entire mass on the floor.

"Why the hell hasn't Gault been fired?" Kate demanded.

Jack smiled. "Because Captain Harry Gault had the forethought to marry a daughter of one of Alaska Ventures' board of directors. Just last January, in fact."

Kate folded her hands behind her head and stared at the ceiling. After a moment, she said thoughtfully, "How very strategic of him."

"The guy is slick," Jack admitted. "And of course, no one has been able to prove otherwise, Skinner and Nordhoff back Gault up, so no charges have been filed."

"But."

"But," Jack agreed. "The board of Alaska Ventures is as nervous as a cat with two tails in a room full of rocking chairs."

"Alcala and Brown have family?"

Jack bestowed an approving smile on her. "Yes, they do, and they want to know what happened, and they're starting to get loud about it. Marine insurance is not exactly cheap or easy to come by, so the board of Alaska Ventures has begun a little discreet investigation of Harry Gault's past."

"And now the state's getting into the act."

"You and me, babe."

She twisted her head to stare at him. "What's this 'you and me babe' crap? I don't see you out on the deck of the Avilda, soaking wet and freezing cold and up to your ass in tanner crab." And puking your guts up over the rail every five minutes, she could have added, but didn't.

Jack managed to look hurt. "You're the one with the fishing experience."

"Fishing for salmon in Prince William Sound and a couple of months fishing for king crab out of Kodiak isn't quite the same thing as trying to drown myself in the Boring goddam Sea," she retorted. "I can't believe I let you talk me into this. The Aleutians. In October. I must be out of my mind."

"You never did answer me. About why you did come. I would have lost money betting you wouldn't."

"Why'd the bear go round the mountain?" She shrugged. "I've never been on the Peninsula, or seen the Aleutians. I could never afford the airfare."

Unconvinced, Jack let it slide. "So. Tell me about the good ship Avilda and her happy crew."

Kate looked back at the ceiling. "She's a good ship, all right, or she would be if someone took the time to take care of her. She deserves a better crew than those assholes."

"All of them are assholes?"

Kate thought back to her first day on board. Harry, his face congested with suppressed rage, had shouted at her.

"Nordensen says I gotta hire you, okay. But I don't like women, and I don't like Injuns, and I especially don't like Injun women on board my ship, they're nothing but trouble. You stay out of the guys' pants, you hear?"

He'd shaken his fist in her face, practically frothing at the mouth. "You fuck one of us, you fuck us all, you understand? Any trouble between the guys over you and you're off the goddam boat!" He'd leered at poor Andy, who had blushed beet red beneath his tan and hung his head.

Kate, unperturbed, had given Harry a cool nod. "I heard you the first time."

In truth, she felt Harry had done her a favor with the blunt announcement. All or none? That was fine with Kate. Harry Gault wasn't much of a sailor or a fisherman, but he understood the dynamics of a cramped and isolated workplace. So far, neither Ned nor Seth, nor Harry for that matter, had made any moves in her direction.

There'd been a few leers and some crude remarks, but no pawing, and from her last fishing experience she knew how fortunate she was.

"They're men," she told Jack. "They're fishermen. They're crab fishermen. And they're Alaskan crab fishermen. Of course they're assholes." She thought, and added, a trifle reluctantly, "Except maybe for Andy, my bunkie."

Jack sat very still. "You're bunking with a guy?"

Kate raised an eyebrow in his direction. "Don't go all Neanderthal on me, Jack. He's just a kid, and from California at that. The kind of guy who thinks the New Age arrived with the invention of the fast forward button on the VCR remote."

The amusement in her voice when she spoke, warm and somewhat rueful, was not reassuring. "What about Skinner and Nordhoff?"

"Too soon to say, but they're in tight with Gault,"

Kate said. "They hardly talk to Andy or me outside of work."

"And Gault?"

Kate gave a short, unamused laugh. "For the health of every fisherman afloat on the Pacific Ocean, Harry Gault should shoulder an oar and walk inland until he finds someone who doesn't know what it is and stay there for the rest of his life."

"Umm," Jack said, who had never considered poetry necessary, and who was more interested in the way Kate tucked her hair behind her left ear anyway. "What did you pull down, this trip?" he asked idly, gaze on that left ear.

"The usual crew share. Eight percent of the gross."

'Which was?"

"Eighty-three hundred bucks."

His eyes widened. "Wow. Eighty-three hundred? For eight days work?" He gave a respectful whistle. "Hell, that's, what, that's almost eleven hundred a day, isn't it?" She nodded. "Wow," he said again. "Marry me and support me in the style in which I intend to become accustomed."

She stretched out her inconsiderable length in one long, lazy reach. She fluttered her eyelashes and patted the bunk. "Mmm, I don't know. Let me review your application one more time."

She didn't have to ask him twice.