Devour (3 page)

“What’s she doing?” Gilly said.

The line started to peel out again. It went slowly at first, then faster, stripping hard-won monofilament back out to sea. The number on the counter, which had been as low as fifty-two, slipped past a hundred. A hundred and fifty. Brian leaned back on the rod a bit, made a small adjustment to the drag.

“Don’t break,” he whispered. “Don’t you break on me now.”

The line picked up speed, hit three hundred. Gilly set the harpoon down and slowly backed to the wheelhouse. Brian looked back at him and nodded, and Gilly put the transmission in reverse. The big props churned, moving them backwards at two knots. Yet still the line stripped out, with no signs of slowing.

“Give it more!”

Gilly pushed down on the throttle and the
Tangled Blue
plowed stern-first into the four-foot waves, seawater splashing up and over Brian. The spool spun faster and faster, now well into the Dacron backing again. It didn’t make any sense. He’d seen the fish, and large as it was he could have sworn he’d broken it. But he had never hooked anything this large, either. He held the rod tip high and reared back, trying to turn the massive fish one more time.

And still the line went out, the spool now half-gone.

At twelve hundred feet Brian yelled for Gilly to turn the boat. They should have spun at a thousand, but he had been so sure, so goddamn certain, that he could turn it.

Gilly turned the Grady-White in a tight circle, costing Brian another hundred and fifty feet on the one-eighty. By the time they were pointed at the fish, he could see metal on the inside of the Penn’s spool. In a few more seconds it was over. There was a sharp snap as the backing popped off the spool, and then the line disappeared through the roller guides and into the sea.

Brian staggered back at the sudden loss of resistance, almost losing his footing on the wet floor of the boat. Gilly set him down on one of the yacht chairs, his eyes watching the seas to see if the massive fish might float to the surface, its heart burst after the long battle. But the seas were empty, even the shearwaters gone.

They looked at each other for a long moment, the exhaust from the engines wafting over them. Brian could not feel any distinct sensation in his arms except the sharp ache from his tendons. All else was a throbbing, burning pressure. He wondered if he was having a heart attack.

“Big fish,” Gilly said.

“Yeah,” Brian said. “Woulda been a keeper.”

Gilly turned back to the wheel. He put the transmission in forward, and after a moment the deck cleared of exhaust fumes. They continued on in silence, moving at a slow troll through the fog-laden chop back to their original mooring. Sometimes at sea there was nothing to talk about. And sometimes, there was so much to talk about that a man couldn’t say anything at all.

* * *

The call came in over the radio twenty-five minutes later.

Gilly reached down and turned up the volume on the marine radio, then picked up the handheld transmitter. They had just finished stowing their gear and were having a rare onboard beer together when the marine radio started talking.

“Mayday-Mayday,
” the voice said again, the panic obvious through the crackle.
“We are a research vessel operating two miles off of Boon Island. We’ve struck an underwater object and are taking on water. The bilges cannot keep up, repeat, the bilges cannot keep up. We are going down fast. Mayday-Mayday-Mayday.”

They looked at each other. If the Coast Guard picked up, the
Tangled Blue
would wait for guidance, perhaps even offer assistance. But the amount of static on the transmission suggested the
Archos
had an undersized marine radio antenna, a common and deadly sin on the open ocean. The
Tangled Blue
had a thirty-foot marine antenna, good enough to transmit for fifty miles or more under the right conditions. After a moment, Brian reached over and took the handheld mike from Gilly’s hand.

He clicked on the transmit key. “
Archos
, this is the fishing boat
Tangled Blue
. What are your numbers, over?”

There was a burst of static, and then the man’s voice came on again, the panic now mixed with excitement.
“Thank God,”
he said, his voice booming and distorted.
“We don’t know what happened, we were just anchored and all of a sudden—”

“Sir, you need to settle down, and hold the mike farther away from your mouth. Give me your numbers, your GPS coordinates. Over.”

The man repeated them, and Gilly reached under the dash and scribbled down the numbers.

“Good,” Brian said. “Now repeat the coordinates. Over.”

“Repeat the numbers,” Brian said. “Over.”

The man swore, shouted at Sarah again, and spit the numbers out. Brian understood the man’s frustration; he also knew more than one rescue attempt had been unsuccessful because of an incorrect latitude or longitude reading. Gilly wrote the repeated coordinates underneath the original numbers:

Gilly ran his index finger across the numbers to cross-check, and then punched the coordinates into the Furuno, which doubled as a chartplotter. The
Archos
appeared as a small blip on the screen, sixteen long miles away.

“We have a fix on your position,” Brian said. “Hold for a second, over.”

He handed the microphone back to Gilly and pointed at the numbers. “See if we can skip those to the Coast Guard.”

Gilly repeated the distress call to the Coast Guard while Brian did the math in his head. Top speed was about twenty-seven knots in these seas if the
Tangled Blue
was unloaded, with their current half-full fuel tank. With well over a ton of ice and giant bluefin tuna in the hold, they would do no better than sixteen or seventeen knots, tops. It was the difference of a half hour to get there unloaded, versus an hour loaded.

Brian turned to Gilly. “Tell me good news.”

Gilly shook his head, “Still up in Fundy, looking for floaters from the
Margaret Jane
.” The
Jane
was one of the three ships that had gone down in the Bay of Fundy in the past week. “They’re out ninety minutes, two hours. No chance of air assistance with this damn fog. Can’t raise anybody on Boon, either.”

Brian rubbed his forehead, then held out his hand for the mike. “
Archos, Archos, Archos,
this is
Tangled Blue
. Do you copy, over?”

“We’re here, Tangled Blue
.
Did the Coast Guard answer you?”
The
Archos
could hear the transmissions from the
Tangled Blue
, but not any responses.

“We’re coming to your assistance,
Archos
. But we need to know your
exact
situation. Do you understand, over?”

“How much water is in the boat? How long will you stay afloat, over?”

There was shouting from the other side, at least three or four different voices. All of them filled with panic.
“It won’t be long,”
the man said.
“Ten minutes, maybe fifteen. We don’t have a lifeboat.”

“Do you have life jackets, over?”

There was a pause.
“We do,”
the man responded slowly.
“But the water is very cold, Tangled Blue
.
We won’t last long.”

“Hold on as best you can,” Brian said. “We’re on our way.”

He tossed the microphone on the dash and walked back to the hold. He leaned down and popped the lid, uncovering four massive bluefin tuna, the first of the year for any boat in the region, the thick bodies covered in the ice from their onboard machine. That ice allowed them to achieve the top market price, well worth the extra costs for the machine and lower fuel mileage the weight of the ice caused. Each tuna was worth thousands of dollars, just one of them enough to cover his operating costs for most of the season. He reached over and pulled a stainless-steel hook from the gunnels.

He looked up at Gilly. “Come on, give me a hand.”

Gilly stood, spit over the side of the boat. “They better be worth it.”

Brian sunk the tip of the hook deep into the rich, red meat of the nearest bluefin. “They won’t be.”

C
aptain Donald Moore stood on the deck of the
Nokomis
, watching passengers stream along the boarding dock, forty feet below him. It was a calm, gray day with a light west wind. He held the fax from his first mate in one liver-spotted hand, the paper fluttering in the light offshore breeze.

The passengers moved steadily on the boardwalk below him, mostly middle-aged couples, some younger people, even a few children. Some of the passengers carried their own luggage; others walked with bellmen pushing their carts behind them. Moore watched with interest. He liked to see the people he was going to spend the next week with, not the individuals but the general type. Sometimes you could tell they were all going to be assholes; sometimes it was just the vast majority. Now he saw the low ratio of people carrying their own bags and figured it was going to be a typical voyage, heavy on the assholes.

The complaints would be endless.
The sea is too wavy. It’s too cold. Too hot
.
Captain, there’s a lady on C-deck who is suffering from motion sickness and wants to return to port.

Moore leaned against the railing, the cool rounded brass pressing against his belly. Sheep, he thought. They go into a floating hunk of metal, head into one of the deadliest oceans in the world, then complain when it’s bumpy.

Well, maybe this would be different than the cruise ships, where all anybody wanted to do on those trips was relax, get drunk, get laid. Plenty of time to bitch about what was wrong in the downtime. This was different, all the bells and whistles of the slot machines, the cards spinning out onto the felt, the chips coming and going. Maybe it would be different, maybe not.

He glanced back at the wheelhouse, at the Zeiss binoculars that had been a present from his first wife, Chanterelle, twenty-nine years ago. The glass was still unscratched, the optics superb. Sometimes, when he put the binoculars up to his eyes, he thought he caught a trace of the light perfume Chant used to wear.

Moore considered getting the binoculars, then dismissed it. He didn’t need to look down there and see their faces. And he didn’t need the ewes to look up—as they always seemed to do just before boarding—and see their captain peering down on them with binoculars. Some dirty old man in a clean white uniform.

Below him, a couple was arguing about something, probably the weight of the woman’s luggage. He thought back to his inaugural captain gig, standing on the deck of the cruise ship
Santa Barbara
, watching and listening to a short, well-groomed passenger hurling abuses at one of the baggage carriers on the boardwalk below them. Moore had been nervous, excited about the imminent voyage, the gravity of their charge. He had been a bit dismayed at the passenger’s lack of couth, and said as much to his first mate.

Know what’s the difference between a cruise ship and a cucumber, Captain?
the first mate said.

What?
Moore’s voice was sharp. He was nervous, and when he was nervous he was snippy. He also felt the distinct urge to have a stiff drink.

On a cucumber
, his first mate had said,
all the little pricks are on the outside.

Now, aboard the 272-foot-long
Nokomis
, he heard footsteps along the gangway, followed by an exchange between Collins, his first mate, and another baritone voice. A wiry, dark-haired man of medium height emerged from the doorway, somewhat stoop-shouldered, chest hair pushing out of the unbuttoned collar of his white oxford shirt. Moore thought he looked like the kind of man who should be wearing a gold chain, tattoos on his forearms.

Another little prick.

The man looked at Moore, glanced back down the narrow aisle to his right, then strode over, hand outthrust. “Captain Moore? It’s been a while.”

Moore took his hand, paused, and readjusted his grip. He had forgotten; Rollins was missing two fingers on his right hand. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Rollins.”

Rollins nodded. “Frank, Captain Moore. Or Frankie, like my friends call me. I don’t mind.” He reached into his jacket pocket, and Moore took a cautious half-step back.

Frankie withdrew his iPhone, pretending not to notice Moore’s recoil. He tapped the screen a few times, then peered down at the readout with the annoyed squint of a man who needed bifocals. He held the screen out for Moore. “We’re in for some weather.”

Moore glanced at the screen politely, then opened the fax Collins had handed him earlier. He let out a long, measured breath. Despite the calm conditions at the marina, the NOAA marine forecast showed the offshore conditions were predicted to deteriorate quickly. The current five- to seven-foot swells were forecast to double or even triple in the next seventy-two hours, with the potential for larger rogue waves in the mix. Dense fog and intermittent rain would persist, and the twenty-knot north wind was predicted to increase overnight. The only thing missing, Moore thought, was a typhoon. A small boat advisory was already in effect for offshore waters, and a special note had been added to the bottom:

Moore blinked. There had been several capsized craft in offshore waters recently, but this was the first time he’d seen a disclaimer on a marine forecast. Goddamn government.

Frankie leaned over the side of the
Nokomis
. “Well?”

“It’ll be bumpy,” Moore said.

Frankie looked at him. “You prepared for it?” He spoke like he moved, a pause and then a burst.

Moore tapped the brass rail of the
Nokomis
on which Frankie was leaning. “She’s got a shallow dead rise, and that means we’ll ride the swells instead of breaking through them. The passengers will notice it, but it won’t be terribly uncomfortable. If we get fifteen-footers, or breakers on the swells, then it might get rough.”

“And those big waves they keep talking about? If we run into those?”

“Then it’ll be rough as hell.”

“So the tables, they’re gonna go sliding around? Spilled drinks, people hacking up their caviar?”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Rol—Frankie. I’ll run a heading of about forty degrees out to the Line, where . . .” He paused when he saw the frown on Frankie’s face. “Sorry. I’ll head northeast to the international boundary, what we call the Line. Then we’ll ride the waves south, parallel to the coast. Our travels would be a lot rougher if we actually had to reach a specific destination.”

“And the fog?”

“Fog is an old problem,” Moore said. “It’s a modern vessel, Frankie. We have GPS and radar, several redundant systems. We will ride high enough in the water to show up on other craft radar as well. Fog is the least of my worries.”

Frankie pushed himself off the railing, took a step toward Moore. “And what worries you most, Captain?”

“I’m sure you can imagine.”

“The game.”

Moore looked out to the ocean. The seas were bright until they reached the eastern horizon, where they ended in a thin black line. The darkness from the shadows of the waves.

“I understand my obligations,” Moore said. “The seas won’t be ideal, but they’re manageable. It’s the combination I worry about, the game and the weather. When things are rough at sea, people begin to complain. When complaining doesn’t work, some people—rich people, especially—often begin to pry into the matters of the ship. To see what might be done better.”

Frankie turned away, moving in the same abrupt, bird-taking-flight motion. He walked jerkily down the gangway, his diminished right hand trailing along the glass of the wheelhouse. In the distance, the bell tower of Boston’s Park Street Church chimed lightly above the distant hum of traffic, then was lost in the babble of excited voices on the deck below them. Moore glanced back at the wheelhouse, at the traditional steering wheel he only used at the beginning and end of the voyage, and felt the old familiar thrill, the urge to wrap his fingers around the polished felloe and cut into the waves. The ship, so regal and silent this morning, was coming alive.

Moore’s gaze paused on the other casino ship in the marina.
The Have Knots
was moored a quarter mile away, devoid of any activity.
Old Becker knows better than to run out into this slop
, Moore thought.
I wonder what it’s like to do only the things you want to.

Frankie stood, watching the city until the bell tower ceased its chiming, then returned. “I’m a professional, Captain Moore. Like you. So . . .” he brought his hands together in an eight-fingered clap. “I will trust you to ensure that the
Nokomis
tracks along her course in a timely manner, stays there for a certain period of time, and then returns to dock. You’ll trust me that I will take care of business belowdecks. Complaints and any other matters. Understood?”

“Of course,” Moore said. “I only meant—”

“You understand. Good.” Frankie took the facsimile from Moore’s hand, crumpled it up, and dropped it over the side of the boat.

Moore bit his lower lip, hard enough to hurt. A ship full of sheep, and now this man dropping trash over the side of his ship. Twenty years ago he would have thrown the little prick overboard. But that would be bad, or at least bad for business, and . . . imprudent. Moore was sixty-seven, the
Nokomis
a second chance. And second chances were like pretty young wives: They wouldn’t stick around long if you didn’t take care of them.

“I understand.”

“Then bring us out to sea, Captain,” Frankie said, patting the railing. “I’ll tell you if you got anything else to be worried about.”

* * *

Frankie Rollins moved down to the gaming deck, fingernails digging into his palms. Remembering.

The stench of stale smoke, cheap coffee. Six years ago, sweating profusely in the lower level of the security center at Caesars, a memory so vivid he could taste the wintergreen gum he used to chew, the mint pushing against the rising taste of bile. His heart thumping its way up into his throat, watching the man on the far side of the table who would, in approximately seven minutes, send him out into the desert for a slow beating, followed by a quick maiming.

He had met Manny Amato once before, at the annual Christmas Eve dinner, when Coriolos had sold out to the new owners. Both Manny and Frankie had been new to Caesars, but not the business. Manny was polite, interested in Frankie’s background, and drank cups of black coffee around the almost constant smile he wore. The old dago bastard, Frankie thought, he’d probably started the background check before the cocktail shrimp had been cleared away for the main course. Thirteen months later, in the basement, Manny was still polite, still drinking black coffee around his stained teeth, but he wasn’t smiling. Neither was his security detail.

And what was it Manny had said?

Frankie paused on the stairwell of the
Nokomis
, fingers thrumming on the handrail. It wasn’t that they had said the same words, it was how they said them.
It’s a modern ship. It’s a modern casino.
Like Frankie was some ignorant hillbilly, didn’t know there were security cameras at the 7-Eleven, couldn’t understand how the cops found him at his trailer the same night of the robbery.

He took a step and then paused, thinking about the analogy. No, even hillbillies knew about video surveillance.

That was the kind of thing you had to be careful of, dating yourself with a bad comparison, and then having one of the kids give you that weird look. And that was another thing to be careful of, calling them kids. Frank was forty-eight, and for twenty years he hadn’t worked directly for anybody older than him. His paychecks had been signed by kids, the decisions made by kids. But you couldn’t call them that, or the paychecks wouldn’t get signed at all.

Of course, after the desert, there hadn’t been any more paychecks of any kind.

He drew his three fingers of his right hand across his forehead. No need to dwell on it. Hell, the Mojave had been a net positive. He’d healed strong, the way a broken bone knitted together and became more resilient. And now, shit, he was an independent, a major player in a captive market.

He smiled at that, a captive market.

Whatever you wanted to call it, it was lucrative enough that he was ready for retirement. After this he was going to take care of some personal business, trim up the loose ends that were always fluttering around the back of his mind. Then move someplace warm, one of those retiree backwaters where he would be the young guy in town. Manzanillo or Puerto Vallarta, pick up some side action with the trophy wives. And never fucking worry again.

Except...

Except that wouldn’t really be the case. When you had people to take care of, people you cared about, you couldn’t really just hand them a bag of money and wash your hands. His mom with her habits, his sister with her illnesses, both real and imagined . . . neither one was cut out to function alone. Not when they were poor, certainly, even after decades of practice. He had a suspicion rich might be worse. Maybe take them with him . . . no, better yet, figure out a way so the money would come in regular, like a paycheck. His mother would appreciate that after all those years married to an ironworker. His sister could maybe get off the witch doctor prescriptions she was on, herbal pills and supplements, and get some real medicine. Real therapy.

He’d visit, once or twice a year. Like a rich uncle instead of the disappointing son.

Frankie entered the south wing of the main gaming room, occupied by a bartender and a couple of maids running vacuums over the laminate flooring, the headlights reflected in the mirrored ceiling tiles. He went to a line of slot machines, old ones that allowed you to choose between the button and the manual lever. He felt himself calming, settling into the feel of the place. You wouldn’t find this kind of machine in a modern casino. Some Vegas accountant had done the math years ago, figured out the time it took to pull a lever compared to pushing a button, and just like that the one-armed bandits went extinct. But the
Nokomis
’s slot machines were manufactured by Character, the old hulls retrofitted with modern guts. Not as fancy as the rest of the machines on the gambling floor, but solid, dependable. A good place to hide behind if a gunfight happened to break out.