Dead in the Water (7 page)

“Yo,
Salty Mist
here,” someone on the boat responded. He sounded annoyed.

“Hi, it's
Jeopardy
. Switch to sixty-eight.” Patrick's voice was tense.

Olivia shot me a startled look. There was a pause while the man changed his VHF to channel sixty-eight; then I heard Patrick's voice again.

“Hi, guys. Look, I've got a bit of a problem here...I woke up to take a leak and found a couple of my crew missing. They've taken the dinghy. Damn teenagers...Don't suppose you've seen them?”

My heart practically stopped. There was a click, and bright light suddenly spilled out the window. “Christ. What time is it?”

“Midnight. Look, I'm sorry I woke you but...”

I heard someone shuffling around inside the cabin and hoped like hell he wasn't going to come out here. If he saw the dinghy, we were screwed.

“Let me guess,” the man said sleepily. “A girl and a guy, right?”

“Yeah.” Patrick sounded worried, and I felt a flash of guilt.

The man laughed. “They're probably making out somewhere.”

“They're the ones who rowed by your boat last night,” Patrick said.

Right above our heads, the window slammed closed and we couldn't hear anymore. We stared at each other. “What now?” Olivia mouthed.

“We wait.” My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my whole body. I tried to breathe quietly. We kept looking at each other, eyes locked together, and for some stupid reason I noticed that Olivia was actually quite nice-looking under all that black hair.

Obviously, stress does odd things to the brain.

I heard the cabin door open, and I held my breath, waiting for the outraged shout of discovery when they saw the dinghy. But nothing happened. The door slid closed. After a minute, I started to breathe again. We must have left the towrope long enough that the dinghy had drifted back and been hidden by the runabout.

Finally, the light went off and all was still. I looked at Olivia. She held up five fingers. We waited—the longest, slowest, most agonizing five minutes of my life. Then we both crawled back to the cockpit, staying low enough that we wouldn't be seen in a casual glance out the tinted windows. As I untied the dinghy and tugged on the rope, I heard Olivia gasp.

Patrick was sitting in the dinghy, soaking wet and absolutely furious.

I jumped down into the dinghy.

Olivia crouched on
Salty Mist
's stern. “Patrick, I'm so sorry,” she whispered. “I'm really, really, really...”

“Did you swim over?” I asked, staring at him. “The water must be freezing.”

His face was stiff with anger: his mouth a thin line, his eyes cold, his brows low. “Get in the dinghy, Olivia. What the hell are you two playing at?”

“Just listen,” I said. “We can explain...”

“I woke up to take a leak, decided to go outside for a smoke and saw the dinghy gone.” He pushed his wet hair off his face. “Thought one of you guys had tied a crappy knot and we'd lost it. Then...just in case...I checked your beds.” He shook his head. “You have any idea how worried I was?”

“How'd you know where to find us?” Olivia asked.

Patrick stared at her like she was an idiot. “You've been like a broken record, going on about this boat. I figured it was worth checking. Swam halfway here, and then I spotted my dinghy.”

“Look, we really are sorry,” I said in a low voice. Please let me pass this course, I thought. I felt sick. If I failed...after all my saving and studying and planning...I couldn't even imagine telling my parents. I'd flunked enough at school, but sailing was supposed to be different.

“We didn't mean to worry you,” I told him. “And we weren't just, you know, just goofing off. The thing is, we were pretty sure, well, Olivia was anyway, that those guys
were poaching.” I fumbled in my pocket and pulled out the shell. “See? It's abalone.”

He ignored me. “Get in the dinghy, Olivia.”

Olivia didn't move. “They've got bags and bags of it hanging over the sides of the boat. Hundreds of abalone.” Tears sparkled in her eyes. “It's so awful, Patrick. To do that... knowing a species is on the verge of extinction and to do that anyway, just to make a few bucks...”

“More than a few bucks,” he said. “A lot more. On the shell, live abalone—well, they're probably getting forty or fifty dollars a pound.” He shivered and wrapped his arms around himself. “Come on, Olivia, get in the damn dinghy. We should get out of here.”

My mouth was open. Man, no kidding these guys didn't want anyone to know what they were doing. This was big business. Criminal, obviously, but big business nonetheless. I had to agree with Patrick—hanging around was not a good idea. “Yeah,” I said, “let's get out of here.”

She shook her head. “We should take the live abalone with us. Maybe it could still be saved.”

Patrick's voice was low and urgent. “Olivia, these guys are making a small fortune off this. You don't want to mess with them.”

Still squatting at the stern, Olivia struck her knees with her fists. “How can you put a price on the survival of a species?”

“It's not my price, honey. I'm just telling you what the market pays.” He looked up at
Salty Mist
. “Mind you, they'll get a lower price for the meat they've already shucked and frozen.”

“You think they've already...killed some of them?” she asked.

“I know they have. They've got a massive freezer.” He sighed. “Here's how it works. They take their runabout out to dive for abalone to shuck and freeze. They spend a few days doing that—it's faster than trying to keep them alive, because they don't have to worry about damaging them.”

“That's sick,” Olivia breathed. She looked up at me. “Abalone are hemophiliacs,
you know? If they're cut, they'll bleed to death.”

“I didn't know,” I said. I was feeling stunned, like things were moving too fast, like there was some important piece I hadn't quite figured out yet.

Patrick shrugged. “Then they spend a couple days diving and taking live abalone. The restaurants prefer it and it brings a higher price.” He stood up and tried to grab Olivia's wrist, but she stepped backward. “Olivia, get in the goddamn dinghy,” he hissed. “I'm not kidding around.”

Olivia was staring at him. “Do you really know all this? Or are you just guessing? How do you know so much about it?”

I had a sudden flashback to sitting in that restaurant our first night in Port Hardy: Patrick's family's restaurant. Olivia spotting the abalone on the menu and Patrick saying, “Relax, it's imported.”

“You buy it, don't you?” I said. “That aba-lone at your restaurant...it wasn't imported.”

Olivia gasped. “Simon! That's an awful thing to say.”

Patrick shrugged and his eyes slid away from us. “Lots of people buy it.”

“How could you?” she said, raising her voice. “How could you do that?”

“Abalone sells,” he said. “People don't ask where it comes from. And believe me, it's a whole lot cheaper to buy from Keith and Victor than to buy imported.”

Above us on
Salty Mist
a light turned on, and the cabin door opened. A beam of light swept across the cockpit and landed on our dinghy. “I see you found your little runaways,” a man's voice said. Then he laughed. “Did you swim over, Patrick? You'd better come aboard. I'll give you some dry clothes.”

Patrick shook his head. “Thanks, Keith, but we'll just go. Sorry we disturbed you. Come on, Olivia.”

Keith reached out and grabbed Olivia's arm. “I think you'd better all come aboard. I'd like to have a little talk with these two.”

Olivia tried to pull her arm free, but the man held her tightly. “You're not going anywhere,” he told her.

My heart was pounding. Patrick gave a resigned shrug, turning his hands up at his sides like there was nothing he could do now. He climbed up into
Salty Mist
's cockpit and reached out a hand to me. I held back for a moment. I didn't want to go back onto that boat. Patrick and Olivia stood there, waiting for me. What else could I do? Jump overboard? Besides, I couldn't just abandon Olivia. I shrugged, and against all my instincts, I stepped aboard
Salty Mist
.

Olivia and I sat in the cockpit, side by side. My heart was racing and I felt shaky—anger, or nervousness, or both. Keith sat across from us, tugging on his short blond beard and not saying anything. He lit a cigarette and smoked, watching us.

“Go on in, Patrick,” he said. “I'll keep an eye on your runaways.” He raised his voice. “Victor! Get Patrick some dry clothes.”

Patrick nodded and stepped inside, closing the door behind him. The lights in the cabin
were dim compared with the deck light outside, and I couldn't see a thing through the dark Plexiglas doors. Keith stared at me, unsmiling. Beside me, Olivia's eyes were fixed on her running shoes. I hoped she wouldn't say anything that would make matters worse.

Inside the cabin, I could hear muffled voices, but I couldn't make out what they were saying. I wiped my sweaty palms against my pants. They were taking too long in there. And the longer they took, the more nervous I got. I'd figured that Patrick would get dressed, Olivia and I would get a lecture on minding our own business, and then we'd go back to
Jeopardy
. But now I was starting to think that maybe that wasn't what was going to happen at all. I looked at Olivia and wished we could talk for a minute, privately.

I started to do some math, which was something I usually avoided. It didn't make me feel any better. If Victor and Keith were really selling the abalone at forty or fifty dollars a pound, we were talking about some serious money. They were not going to be happy if Patrick told them what we had
discovered. I looked at Keith, sitting silently across the cockpit in a white T-shirt and track pants, and I couldn't help noticing the thick muscles bunching in his shoulders and neck. I swallowed nervously. He didn't look like the kind of guy you wanted mad at you.

Finally the door opened, and Patrick came out with Victor right behind him.

Victor was tall and skinny, middle-aged, with fair hair buzzed short behind a receding hairline. He wasn't as obviously muscular as Keith, but there was something about his face—a hardness around his thin mouth, a deadness in his small deep-set eyes—that made me shiver. “Well, it looks like we've got a bit of a problem here,” he said softly. He shook his head and looked from me to Olivia and then back to me again.

“Look, it's no problem,” I said, thinking quickly. “We're sorry we disturbed you and all that. We just wanted to get off our boat and explore a little, you know?” I nudged Olivia, hoping she'd clue in. “We don't really care what you guys are doing. It's none of our business.”

“Since when are you two minding your own business?” Patrick asked. He sounded resigned. “I think we all know you came over here to snoop.”

Shut up, Patrick, shut up. I tried to think fast, to make up some story about what we were doing, but I didn't know how much Patrick had already told them. He looked just like he always did—the crooked smile, the blue eyes, the easy relaxed posture. But he was standing over us, and beside him Victor was clenching and unclenching his fists.

I backtracked and spoke directly to Victor and Keith. “Okay, I admit that. We were curious about your boat and what you were diving for. Like I said, I'm sorry. We had no right to be snooping around, and we'll stay away now.”

“Bit late for that,” Victor said. His voice was a harsh whisper. He looked at Keith. “Patrick says they saw the abalone.”

My heart was banging away like crazy, and my hands were cold and sweaty. Victor looked like the kind of guy who might decide that smacking us around a bit might teach us
a lesson. I tried to look relaxed, which took some pretty impressive acting. I leaned back and opened my arms wide. “Look, guys, I'm really sorry. But like I said, it's none of our business what you're doing here.”

Olivia looked at me like I was nuts. “It's absolutely our business. It's everyone's business.” She looked at Victor and at Keith. “Abalone is a threatened species. The reason you're not allowed to catch it is because the numbers have declined dramatically since people started diving for them and harvesting them to sell.” She leaned toward them, eyes wide. “There is a real chance of northern aba-lone becoming an endangered species. Surely you don't want to contribute to that?”

I closed my eyes, groaning inwardly. She sounded as passionate as a TV evangelist trying to persuade her audience to see the light. Only this audience wasn't likely to be converted.

Victor started to laugh, and my eyes flew open again at the sound. It was the creepiest laugh I'd ever heard: soft, harsh and utterly chilling. Even under the bright deck light, his
pupils were huge, and I wondered if he was on drugs. “You're going to report us as soon as you get back to Hardy, aren't you?” he said.

I jabbed my elbow into Olivia's ribs and hoped she'd take the hint. “Of course not,” I said. “It's none of our business.”

“Right. That's why you were snooping around our boat.”

I shrugged, feeling helpless. “We won't report you.”

“Do you know what would happen if we got caught?” he asked.

I shook my head, trying to remember what Patrick had said. “Not really. A fine, right?”

Keith answered, “A huge fine, on top of the money we'd be losing by not selling what we've got onboard. We've got a full freezer of shucked meat, plus a couple hundred pounds of live abalone, and we've got buyers waiting for all of it.” He grinned. “Got a wholesale seafood company in Vancouver that'll take as much frozen abalone as we can get.”