Dead in the Water

FOUR

KATE opened the door into her stateroom and found a human pretzel in the middle of the floor. The pretzel shifted and there was a flash of bleached blond hair.

"Andy? Is that you?" All the relaxed sense of well-being acquired over the last twenty-four hours abandoned her in a rush and she jumped forward, the heavy wooden door banging shut behind her.

"What?" In a single, sinuous twist, the human pretzel resolved itself into a long, lanky human with blond hair flopping into his thin, earnest face. "What's wrong, Kate?"

Kate stared at him, her mouth open. "For a minute I thought-what the hell was that?"

Andy dropped forward, his forehead on his knees, his body folded forward like a cherry popover. "What was what?"

"What you were doing!" she roared, her voice a furious husk of sound. "What are you doing?"

He popped erect, looking bewildered. "It's only yoga, Kate."

"Yoga! Yoga?"

"Sure. You want me to teach you?"

"Yoga." She pulled herself together. "I don't think so. I am not partial to twisting myself into anything it doesn't look like I could twist myself back out of unassisted."

He rippled to his feet and ran an impersonal finger over her shoulder. "You're strong and fairly supple." He poked her deltoid muscle with a critical frown. "Probably wouldn't be hard to get down a few of the more basic moves."

"No," Kate said, stepping out of range, "I don't think so. Thank you all the same."

Andy, sure that she was only waiting to be convinced, insisted, "Hatha yoga is the yoga of physical well-being.

It helps you find harmony, and peace of mind, and true happiness. You'll sleep better and sounder, your tensions will diminish-"

"The tension alone I get from rooming with you, nothing could diminish."

"Plus your disposition will improve," he observed.

Kate took a deep breath and managed a smile. "My disposition doesn't need improving, thank you."

He shook his head disapprovingly. "You're so resistant, Kate. I'm going to have to do something about that."

What scared her most was that he might succeed.

They left Dutch Harbor on the evening tide and were pulling pots in the Gulf of Alaska thirty-six hours later.

The halogen lights mounted on the cabin illuminated the Avilda's deck and nothing else; the fog was back with a vengeance, as if in retaliation for the one perfect day.

The swells, too, were increasing, long, slow swells that came in from the southeast, each one higher than the last, making Ned Nordhoff shake his head and mutter into his beard. He climbed the ladder to the bridge and Kate saw him arguing vociferously with Harry Gault. A few minutes later he was back on deck, his face red beneath his beard and his voice curt.

The first pot they pulled had half a dozen Dungeness and a pollock inside it. "Garbage," Ned growled, and hoisted the pot over to Andy and Kate. They opened the door, tossed the dungies and the gasping bottomfish over the side, rebaited the pot and tied the door shut again.

Something about the pot bothered Kate but by then the next pot was aboard and routine took over.

The second pot came in, as empty as the first one of anything harvestable, and gloom settled in on deck.

A crew share of nothing was nothing. Still they went through the motions, pulling, baiting and resetting. Kate wondered why the skipper didn't tell them to stack the pots on deck, to set them somewhere else, because the tanner had obviously vacated this part of the ocean for greener sea bottoms elsewhere.

It wasn't until the sixth pot in the string that the nagging feeling clicked over to recognition. "Hey," she said, puzzled. She looked at the yellow ties holding the door of the pot closed. "Andy, you're a southpaw, aren't you?"

"Yeah.

"So your wrap on the door ties would go this way.

Right?"

He stared for a moment. "I guess so."

"Show me. Tie one."

He reached for the twine, his fingers moving slowly and clumsily, making several false starts. "It's harder to do when you're thinking about it," he apologized.

Finished, he stepped back.

"Uh-huh," Kate said. "See? Your hitches go the other way around. You didn't tie these," she elaborated when he looked mystified. "And look at the bait jar."

"What about it?"

"I use a becket to hang our jars. That looks like some kind of granny knot." She raised her voice. "Hey, Ned?

Come here a minute, would you?"

There was a responding growl next to the pot launcher and Ned materialized out of the fog, which had thickened into a gray-green soup that swirled and eddied all around them. "What?" he asked sarcastically. "The kid making suggestive remarks about your ass?"

"What can he say except that it's perfect?" she snapped back. "Look at this."

"Look at what? I don't see anything."

Kate, holding on to her temper, said evenly, "Somebody's been at these pots before us." She showed him the ties and the bait jar.

"The shots are coming up tangled, too," Seth said from behind Ned, "and the bridles don't look right, either."

Ned examined the knots, and they waited. An oath ripped out that singed the ears of his listeners and he turned to make for the bridge ladder. After a moment the Avilda's engine settled into a low, neutral purr and Ned returned to the deck with the skipper at his heels.

Gault's mouth worked soundlessly and his face slowly reddened as he looked at the door ties and the bait jar. The rest of the crew waited, Seth impassive, Andy nervous, Kate watchful.

Ned said something to Gault and was waved away with an abrupt movement. "It's that fucking Johansen on the fucking Daisy Mae again," the skipper spat. "This time I don't take it lying down." His grin was mirthless and malevolent when he added, "This time I know where the little prick's pots are."

"It's not worth it," Seth said, his voice as clear as it was unexpected. "We shouldn't take chances, not with what else we've got going-" He looked over at the rest of the crew, hesitated and said, "It's not worth the grief we'll get from the owners if they ever find out about it."

"I don't give a damn what they say in Freetown!" Gault yelled. "I don't grab my ankles every time Freetown says bend over! Secure the deck and rig for running!"

Gault returned to the bridge. Ned and Seth exchanged a long glance. Seth shrugged, and Ned growled, "You heard the man. Secure the deck."

Andy looked bewildered. "What do we do with the pot? We need to dump out the garbage and bait it, right?"

"You got a hearing problem, blondie?" the deck boss demanded. "The skipper said dump it."

"But what about the rest of the string?"

"Dump it!"

They dumped it, the bait jar empty, the pot still holding three immature tanners, the fragile pink of their shells testifying to a recent molt. Almost before the water closed over the bridle, the Avilda was coming about in a 180-degree turn, and if the whining protest of the engine was any indication, the throttle was open all the way. Kate stood at the railing, face into the wind, and breathed deep of the salt air.

"Somebody robbed our pots, is that it?" Andy said, coming up behind her.

"That's it," she agreed.

"Somebody pulled them and picked the legal tanners and left the junk-the garbage," he corrected himself,

"for us."

"Looks that way."

"Who would do that?" he said, his voice shocked.

"Who would steal from their fellow fishermen like that?"

Kate, amused and a trifle touched by his innocence, said, "Probably somebody on their way out to their own string stumbled across ours and got a little greedy.

Although it sounds like the skipper knows exactly who did it, which means it's happened before."

"So what's going on?" Andy asked her. "What're we doing now? Are we going back to Dutch? Are we calling the cops?"

"I don't know," she said, although she had a pretty good idea. When the Anchorage District Attorney's accounting department found bail money listed as an expense incurred in the investigation of this case, Kate hoped they found it in their hearts to pass it through.

The Avilda ran flat out and north-northeast, in six hours fetching up just south of the Islands of Four Mountains.

There, they ran back and forth, quartering and subdividing the seas off Yunaska. The fog had thickened and Kate was glad, but then a buoy slid by the port rail, and she resigned herself. There just wasn't going to be any getting out of this one.

Seth, moving more quickly than Kate had ever seen him move before, had a boat hook over the side and hooked on to the buoy before it passed out of reach.

When it proved to be a buoy belonging to the Daisy Mae, the deck crew could hear Harry's shriek of triumph right through the walls of the bridge.

When Seth pinched a section of the rope and started the winch to pull the pot, Kate knew enough to keep her mouth shut. Andy didn't.

"Wait a minute," he said, "those aren't our buoys."

When Ned ignored him, he caught his arm. "Hey, Ned.

I said we aren't picking our own pots."

"I heard you," Ned grunted, shaking him off. "Sort that goddam crab, blondie."

Andy stared from Ned to Seth, and lastly to Kate, who was coiling the incoming line into a wet pile at her feet.

He opened his mouth to say more. She gave her head a small, single shake. Her steady gaze held a clear, silent warning, and Andy, if naive, was not stupid. He shut his mouth and stepped forward to help pull the pot on board.

It was only the beginning. For five hours they picked pots that weren't theirs. On the bridge Gault worked the spotlight, picking the next set of buoys out of the fog, while he watched the radar for approaching vessels.

On deck, with a grin of pure enjoyment on his face and a knife in his hand, Ned slashed through the pot webbing. His face expressionless, Seth cut bait jars loose and pitched them over the side, and then cut the shots of line, once where it attached to the bridle of each pot and again below the buoys. They were good solid pots, one-and-a-quarter-inch mild steel, with zinc anoids to retard rusting. When the pot did go overboard, it was a seven-by-seven-by-three-foot 750-pound piece of junk. Even if it could be salvaged, it would have to almost entirely be remade before it was fishable again.

Kate, working silently and efficiently alongside the rest of the crew, was sickened, both at the display of spite and at the waste of equipment. She worried about Andy, who worked next to her mechanically, a strained look on his pale face. "You okay?" she asked him in a low voice. He nodded without replying and she had to be satisfied with that.

They pulled pots, they sorted crab, they slashed webbing, they cut line, they punctured buoys, until their backs ached and their heads hurt. They hurried for fear of discovery, and spoke only seldom, and then in whispers.

What made it worse was that Johansen wasn't on the crab at all and the pots coming up were mostly garbage.

One had what Kate would have sworn was at least a thousand pounds of females in it, another only a couple of chicken halibut. If she'd known how hard thieving was, and how unrewarding, she might have made more of a protest in the beginning.

Straightening her back and groaning a little, she noticed that the sound of the Avilda's engine had changed. A loud whisper floated down from the catwalk in front of the bridge, and she looked up to see Harry Gault motioning to her.

"Got a boat coming up on us on the screen," he said in a hoarse whisper. "Tell Ned we're taking off."

They stripped the deck bare of any shred of the Daisy Mae's gear, pitching it all over the side. In his haste Andy pitched over a couple of their own knives and a twenty-five-fathom shot of their own line, too. He gave Ned a fearful look.

Ned was feeling very pleased with life, and shrugged in response to Andy's look. "No problem. Plenty more where they came from."

The rumble of the diesel increased and Kate sent up a fervent hope that the old girl's engine held together long enough for a clean getaway. Sound carried over water, and the other boat undoubtedly had its own radar.

They had to know the Avilda was there, and if the pots belonged to them, they had to know what the Avilda had been up to. Kate just hoped they didn't have a rifle.

Their luck held. The Avilda was unpursued. They ran flat-out for eight hours through the fog to the beginning of their own string. There followed a grueling twenty-four hours with no stops of pulling pots, rebaiting and resetting them. Toward the end of the string the pots suddenly began coming up loaded, which meant they had worked their way beyond where the pot robbers had stopped or been scared off by the approach of another boat. More crab went in the hold and the atmosphere on deck improved. This trip out the weather was infinitely better, fog or no fog, and the crew worked much more swiftly and efficiently. Although Kate did miss the big swells when it came to shoving pots that outweighed her by 630 pounds across a deck that seemed to have increased considerably in width between this trip and the last.

They were clearing the deck and covering the hold when a hammering on the bridge window made the deck crew look up. Harry was circling his extended forefinger in the air. He went so far as to open a window and yell,

"I'll bring 'er in, the rest of you get some shut-eye."

As before when the skipper had given the signal for home, Ned trotted astern and tossed a short length of one-inch manila line overboard, its bound end looped around a cleat on the stem rail, its free end trailing behind, twisting and turning in the wake of white foam.

Andy watched covertly from amidships, and nudged Kate when Ned passed forward. "What's that line for?" he asked in a low voice. "It's not connected to anything, it's just dragging behind us."

Kate was standing at the railing, her face into the wind, as if the cold, clear sea air could scour her clean of the taint of the night's activities. Following his gaze, tired as she was, she smiled and replied in the same low voice, "It's the lady's line."

"The what?"

She opened the door into the galley. "The lady's line.

It's an old sailors' custom, dates back before the whalers, I think."

"What does it mean?" he said, following her down the passageway.

"When it comes time to turn for home, they toss a free line in the water, so the ladies they left behind can pull their loved ones home."

Andy thought it over, his face brightening a little. "I like it. It's got tradition."

"Don't say anything about it," Kate told him, still in a low voice. "It's not talked about, it's just done."

He grinned a tired grin. "Don't want to break the spell, huh?"

"Do you walk under ladders?"

His grin faded and he paused, the door to their room halfway open. "Do you let black cats cross your path?"

Kate asked him. "When you spill salt, do you quick toss a pinch of it over your shoulder? Do you knock wood when you say something that might tempt fate?" He didn't answer, of course, and she smiled again, following him into their room. "Don't say anything about the lady's line. Nobody likes having their superstitions made fun of."

"I don't care what they do on the Avilda anyway," he said, his momentary animation passing off, leaving his face white and weary. "I'm getting off this boat, Kate. Anybody who could do that to somebody else's livelihood… how much does a seven-by cost?"

"I don't know. Three, four hundred, something like that."

"And all that polypro, and the buoys, and the bait jars.

Not to mention the time lost fishing." He closed his eyes and repeated firmly, "I don't know where I'm going, but I'm getting off this boat."

She put a comforting hand on his shoulder. "That's life in the big leagues, Andy."

"It's not my life," he declared. "And I bet I can find me a skipper who feels the same way. When I do, I'm outta here." Without another word he stripped down to his longies and climbed into his bunk. The snores that almost immediately issued from the top bunk made Kate wish for as clear a conscience.

So completely had she been immersed in the role of able-bodied seaman cum apprentice pot pirate that she was halfway out of her own clothes when she remembered why she had signed on the Avilda in the first place.

Simultaneously she realized that with the rest of the crew in the sack and the skipper on watch, now was the perfect time to toss Harry Gault's stateroom.

Andy didn't skip snore when she cracked the door and slipped into the passageway. The snores coming from behind Ned and Seth's door were so loud she wondered how either of them could sleep. At least she didn't have to sneak. She wasn't up to it.

The skipper's cabin was the one closest to the galley.

True, it was only a step from his door to the stairs leading up to the bridge, but Kate disapproved. The truly conscientious skipper, in her experience, slept in the chart room bunk at sea so as to be close to the bridge, not the galley. Still, it made it easier for her to break and enter, and she was grateful for that if for nothing else.

Not that there was much breaking to the entering. The door to his cabin was unlocked and swung smoothly and noiselessly inward, closing with a silent click behind her.

She flicked on the light.

It was the same stateroom repeated twice on each side of the passageway, a small square room with over and under bunk beds built into the bulkhead. A single porthole was set between the bunks, drawers beneath the bottom one. What wasn't standard issue was an old steel desk that had army surplus written all over it jammed in next to the beds, and a two-drawer filing cabinet next to it, same lineage.

After one look Kate didn't want to step foot inside the tiny bathroom opening off one side of the room for fear of catching something, what she didn't know, but something unpleasant was definitely growing in the saucer-sized sink. She didn't bother looking in the shower, mostly because she was afraid of what she'd find. The drawers beneath the bottom bunk were the dirty clothes hamper and from the smell had been so since sometime last year. She closed the second drawer hastily without bothering to paw through the contents.

With deep reluctance she turned to the desk. If there was one thing Kate hated more than flying in anything bigger than a Cessna 172, it was paperwork.

At first all she found were fish tickets and delivery statements. As a matter of curiosity she rummaged until she found the ticket from their last run, and was annoyed but unsurprised to find that Harry Gault had shorted the crew on their shares of the last delivery.

The engine beat steadily up through the floor. Yawning, she left the desk for the file cabinet. It was locked, but a few moments with a straightened paper clip had the top drawer open. Each drawer was stuffed with paper, but stuffed in an orderly and alphabetical way that belied the confusion of the desk. Jack Morgan could have learned something from Harry Gault's filing system. She pulled a file and thumbed through it, yawning again and hoping she wasn't going to nod off. Harry Gault coming in off watch to find her dozing at his desk might be more than even Kate could explain away.

The first file she pulled was a collection of lease purchase agreements between a Henderson Gantry of Ketchikan, Alaska, and various sellers of boats. From the physical description of each boat, most of them appeared to be service boats, tenders that ran between fishing grounds and canneries, or between oil rigs and town carrying supplies and crew changes, or ran pilots out to incoming very large crude carriers on their way in and out of Valdez. Kate thought it looked like the beginning of a fair-sized fleet. All of the agreements were dated in April and May of 1989, and all of them were underwritten by the same bank in Ketchikan, Alaska. Interesting.

A fair-sized fleet all bought at the same time and through not only the same bank but the same loan officer.

Henderson Gantry. Harry Gault. If they were one and the same, what was Harry doing with all these boats? "I thought you were strictly a hired hand, Harry old buddy," she murmured. She opened another file, and raised her eyebrows.

A fair-sized fleet that evidently was not making enough money to meet its mortgage payments. This file held warning notices from a bank. Not a bank, she noticed, but half a dozen different banks, and none of them Alaskan. She went back to the first file, puzzled. Yes, the Southeast First Bank had financed the purchase of the little fleet-her eyes widened, and she set the second file down on the desk next to the first and searched farther in the file cabinet.

She found what she was looking for in short order.

Almost immediately upon final signing of the original mortgages, all of the boats had been refinanced through other banks, Outside banks, most of them located in the Pacific Northwest, although two were refinanced through two different banks in San Francisco. This time the boats' owner was listed as a Harley Gruber, with impeccable references and a credit rating that would have made the city of Cleveland gnash its teeth in envy.

Kate made notes of names, dates, boats and banks, lips pursed around a soundless whistle. Harley Gruber, Henderson Gantry, Harry Gault. In her experience, people who assumed aliases almost always used names beginning with the same initials. "What have you been up to, Harry old buddy," she said under her breath, "that you need a new name every time you change business partners?"

She reached for another file and discovered one possible answer.

The latest file held lease agreements with Royal Petroleum Company. Each of the boats purchased in the Southeast had been leased to RPetCo for use in the cleanup of the RPetCo Anchorage, which had run aground off Bligh Reef in March of 1989 and spilled over ten million gallons of North Slope crude oil across the western half of Prince William Sound. The spill had virtually canceled the salmon fishing season that year, wiped out shrimp beds and entire schools of spawning herring, annihilated ducks and geese and terns and murres by the thousands, killed sea otters-in short, with a large and malicious sense of indiscrimination, the spill had spread a path of death and destruction across eight hundred miles of previously pristine wildlife habitat and Alaskan coastline.

If Kate lived in the Park, Prince William Sound was her backyard. She had relatives in Cordova and Tatitlek and Valdez and Seldovia and Kodiak and Iliamna who were still hurting from the spill, spiritually and financially, to this day, four years later. If Harry Gault or Henderson Gantry or Harley Gruber or whoever the hell he was had had anything to do with the farce of a cleanup that followed that devastating spill and its many peculiar financial arrangements with a relatively few, select boat owners, she, Ekaterina Ivana Shugak, would personally have Harry Gault's or Henderson Gantry's or Harley Gruber's balls served up on a platter for Sunday brunch. Wide awake now, she went to work with a vengeance.

As she was finishing up her notes and preparing a second assault on the filing cabinet, there was a thump overhead. There were no other sounds, nothing to indicate that Harry was doing anything but checking the chart, but Kate decided she had pressed her luck far enough. And she had enough to go on with. More than enough. She grinned, thinking of Jack's expression when he heard her story and saw her notes. The grin faded a little when she remembered Alcala and Brown, and she gave the files a speculative look. Was this information important enough for Harry Gault to kill two men for? She tried to remember, if she had ever known, the penalties for fraud and embezzlement. Her area of expertise had always been assault and murder; white-collar crime was out of her league. She yawned again, and wondered if collusion in the matter of who got the plum jobs on the spill cleanup could be prosecuted under the RICO statutes.

An involuntary chuckle rippled out of her torn throat.

She was getting sleepy again, and silly with it, and it wasn't her problem anyway. Jack Morgan wanted background on Harry Gault, and background on Harry Gault he would get. Working quickly but not carelessly, she reassembled the documents into their original files and the files into the cabinet. A few more seconds work with the paper clip and it was locked again. Pocketing her notes and cracking the door, she eyed the empty passageway for a moment before slipping outside and pulling the door shut soundlessly behind her.

She turned and bumped straight into Harry Gault.

With great restraint she managed to keep herself from bolting down the passageway in a panic. "Oh. Sorry, skipper. I didn't see you standing there."

His eyes flickered between her and the door to his cabin. Had he seen her come out, or had he just come down the stairs from the bridge? "What're you doing up? I thought I told Ned for everybody to get some shut-eye."

She scratched and produced a face-splitting yawn. "I woke up thirsty," she mumbled in a grumpy voice. The best defense is a good offense, and she gave him an impudent grin. "What about you? What're you doing down here? Who's steering the boat?"

"The autopilot."

"Oh." She manufactured another yawn. "Well, I'm going to get some pop. You want something?"

"No." He added grudgingly, "Thanks."

"No prob. See you in the A.M."

In the galley she stood holding on to the door handle of the refrigerator, her head pressed up against the cold enameled surface, waiting for the shaking in her knees to stop. That had been too close.

The snores from the top bunk didn't miss a beat as she stripped and slid into her own. She was so tired she ached with it, but she tossed and turned, unable to shut down her brain. Eventually she fell into a doze and a series of waking dreams, filled with ruined pots rusting on the ocean bottom and avenging fishermen coming after her with boat hooks and bank statements with overdrawn accounts and bills with red warning notices and pink crabs swimming in green gasoline.

Sleep deserted her in a rush and she sat bolt upright in bed. "Pink!"

"What?" Andy's drowsy, startled voice came from the bunk overhead.

"Pink!" she said. "Old aviation gas used to be pink!

Pink as a tanner's new shell, by God!"

There was a brief silence, followed by a click as Andy turned his reading light on. A tousled blond head peered over the side of the bunk. "I beg your pardon?"

"New aviation gas is green," she explained. "But the old aviation gas was pink. I remember from helping my dad gas up his Supercub."

The befuddled expression on the upside-down face didn't change. "And you think I'm weird."

The head disappeared, the light went off and Kate was left lying wide-eyed in the dark, her mind busy with this new piece of the puzzle.