Dead in the Water (9 page)

Was still frightened.

On the other side of the wall, someone mumbled, stirred. Oh, no, she’d awakened the van Burens. She sat, poised, listening. It was stuffy in the cabin. The air hung in layers that were hard to draw in.

She looked around the room. Nothing. And the feeling of fear was dissipating like a tide pulling itself back into the ocean.

The van Burens made no more sounds. She sat quietly, collecting herself. The mantle of unbelief cloaked her once more, and she told herself that when she met Marion Chang, she would tell her she’d decided not to pursue—

It was so damn hard to breathe! No wonder she was upset. She laid a hand over her chest and climbed onto the bed. Lifting her nightgown, she walked on her knees to the head and pushed the curtain away from the porthole. Some fresh air would clear her head. If the van Burens came to her door to see how she was, she’d say she’d been cursing at the porthole, trying to get it open. That it had been stuck …

It swung open at her light touch.

The closet door rolled and cracked, rolled and cracked. Outside, the sailors tromped and cursed and jangled their ghostly chains.

A Spirit propelled the ship, she found herself thinking, with no idea why. It sailed the Ancient Mariner straight for perdition. He had wanted to round the Horn, and boasted to God and the devil that he could do it. His pride had lured him to his doom.

The dream, the person in the water. Could that have been Stephen? Had she dreamed that her love was luring her to
her
doom?

“Good grief,” she murmured, and thrust her head out the porthole.

Surrounded by the night, Donna and John stood beside Ramón Diaz on the bridge. Clad in a dark blue jumpsuit, he pointed to various instruments and droned on about what they were, a very dry textbook visit for tourists. When he’d invited her up, Donna guessed, he hadn’t expected her to bring someone else along, especially not another man.

As Kevin would say, Bummer, dude.

She checked her watch. It was eleven-fifteen, but it felt like o-dark-thirty. Well, she’d told Ramón that sea air made her sleepy, hadn’t she? Not realizing, of course, that it was true.

“Okay, now, this is our LORAN system. We navigate using this device,” Ramón instructed them, as if there would be a quiz at the end of the visit.

Donna shifted her weight and surveyed the bridge, idly wishing she’d worn a sweater over her shorts and white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt. It was dark, save for a muted overhead light fixture that basically gave you a fix on things, but not a very good look. In the aft section of the room stood a large light table, now turned off, where they could lay the charts and study them, triangulate, all that jazz. A dozen charts rolled like house plans hung out of pigeonholes beneath the table, and thick books, of more charts, she assumed, leaned against each other drunkenly on a shelf above the pigeonholes.
The colors of their covers had bled into the darkness; they all looked a sickening shade of mustard-yellow.

Donna noted the wheel, small and made of gray plastic, like the kind of thing you used to find on an infant’s car seat, beep-beep, baby driver. At least it was a wheel. Ramón told them some ships were operated with joysticks.

Glenn would have said something crude and dumb about that.

She rubbed her nose. The circular windscreen on the upper left quadrant of the panorama window whirled around and around, a windshield wiper gone amuck. Talk about your symbols; that was how her mind was, too, trying to make a decision about Glenn. Maybe she could get it taken care of early so she could enjoy her vacation, goddamn it.

So. The smartest and best thing to do was also the most obvious: transfer. Get another partner. There were plenty of good officers on the force who wouldn’t have a spasm over working with a woman. Not, frankly, that
she
wouldn’t.
Cagney and Lacey
had been a TV show, hon, not a rational life-style for a female person trying to survive in Macholand. How’d
you
like to put your life on the line for some stupid bitch mooning over a guy?

Her throat hurt. Surreptitiously she touched her face—no tears—and wandered toward the back of the bridge. An out-of-date calendar advertised Mei Nin Chinese Foods with a large-breasted Chinese broad seated beside a waterfall. Glenn would say something stupid about that, too, like Nice melons, or I’ve got a nice big banana for her. Idiot.

“… and if we have any trouble, the Coast Guard will pick up this frequency,” Ramón was saying. You had to give the guy credit for sensitivity: he was promoting the safety features heavily. It was clear to everyone John was concerned about the voyage vis-à-vis his son—

—floating like a little planet, a precious lifespark comet—

Donna furiously rubbed her eyes. Damn, she must be getting PMS or something. Overtired. It wasn’t like her to whine and sniffle.

Hey, maybe she should go get her presents and play spin the bottle with these guys. Le Bouf! It would cheer John up
and get Ramón off Ruth’s back, ho-ho. And it might shut off the Poor-Me’s, ’cuz that’s all this was, nothing wing-ding-ding cosmic—you could make a career out of singing about Mr. Wrong, but that was about the only instance where brooding about it made any sense; and there weren’t going to be any good decisions made tonight, officer ma’am, sorry gee.

So. What about humping one of these guys? Sorry there, too, girl, because the old bump and grind was not much more than that without the love factor, witness Daniel.

Yeah, witness him for involuntary manslaughter, but the parents weren’t interested and she was out of her territory; and his parting shot was that she should see a shrink about her hostility toward men.

She took a deep breath and slid her hands under her arms. Maybe she shouldn’t have come on this cruise. Damn straight she should’ve; she was in no condition to work. Maybe Randolph, her big boss, had known that. Hadn’t he told her she’d logged too much vacation time? Sometimes the subtleties were lost on her. Sometimes not.

“Hey, what’s that?” John asked. He was hovering over a gray box with a screen in the middle. Donna recognized it as the radar, chocked up a point on the quiz for herself and a demerit for John.

“
Hijo
,” Ramón murmured, standing beside him. The green on his olive face made him look ghastly. The hollows beneath his eyes lengthened into diamonds as he glanced up, at the window. “Big fog bank, dead ahead.”

“Wow.” John left the box and walked to the front of the bridge. “You see, Donna?”

“Excuse me,” Ramón said. “I’m going to make sure they know about this.”

He left. John said, “Don’t they have some kind of communications in here?”

She shrugged. “Yeah, a couple of cans and some string.” She traced a circle on the unlit light table. “Listen, have you heard anything about this Cha-cha character?”

“Look.” John pointed at the windows.

Donna looked. Blinked. One moment there’d been nothing but black, rocky water; now, a swirling line of fog rose like
steam. It floated in the air, spotlighted by the moon, rolling and churning like a whirlpool. It glowed bone-white in the moonbeams as it thickened and expanded. Curls fanned outward, grasping upward, east, west, looping back into the water. Like a long, huge log on the water, or the white curl of a monster surf wave. For ghosts.

“Weird,” Donna said.

“It just came up on us. Ten seconds ago, there was nothing there. I was watching the radar screen.”

Donna heard the tension in his voice. His eyes were wide, uneasy.

The lights on the
Morris
’s king posts cast glowing spheres like disembodied heads along the waves of mist.

“There sure is a lot of it,” he said.

Hey, I saw this one, she wanted to tease him. John Carpenter directed it and Adrienne Boobeau (as Glenn called her) starred in it. There’s this evil fog, see, and it takes over a town. But everything ends okay. Trust me on this one.

’Course, a whole lotta shakin’ goes on first, heh heh …

But she wasn’t sure he could take a joke. He was worn out, too, didn’t look so hot; and people in that condition sometimes forgot to laugh. So she put a hand on his shoulder and said, “We’ll probably go right through it. You’ve got to expect fog on the ocean, John.”

“It looks dirty,” he said, not listening to her.

Donna peered out the window. Streaks of moisture ran down the glass. The windscreen caught some of them and flung them in strips back into the night.

And when they went, they were tinged with a gray cast, like some kind of sea-smog pollution. The moon must have shifted behind some clouds, she reasoned; and the fog that hung a few miles from the bow was colored the same unwholesome mustard as the charts.

Beyond it, the inky ocean lay untouched.

Blackness
.

Donna distinctly heard the word and turned her head expectantly toward John. He stared at the fog with his hands in his pockets.

“Did you say something?” she asked. He shook his head. “Well, then, did you hear something?”

The door opened and Ramón strode back into the room, looking unhappy. He slammed it behind him and muttered something in Spanish.

“Something the matter?” Donna asked.

He waved his hand. “No. It’s okay.” His face belied his words.

“It’s coming toward us.” John crossed his arms and held his body stiffly as if bracing himself for impact.

The fog unfurled and began to travel at a fast pace toward the ship. It moved faster, running at them, lengthening on either side until it exceeded Donna’s line of vision. Unconsciously, John took a step backward. Donna leaned forward, putting her hands on the base of the window.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s just a fog bank. It can’t hurt us.”

“Absolutely,” Ramón agreed. “Air and water. That’s all it is.” He crossed to a small desk in the left aft corner and picked up a phone receiver, punched a button.

“Sir, thick fog conditions. I, ah, had some trouble with Ruffino. Need a replacement. Recommend we do a search of his fo’c’sle ASAP.”

Donna looked over her shoulder. He reddened and shifted his shoulder as if to shield the phone from her.

“Aye, sir.”

The fog rushed faster, faster, as if it actually would collide with them. John said, “I’ve got to get back to my son.”

As he turned to go, an earsplitting bellow pierced the air. John cried out and Donna grabbed his wrist.

“Sorry.” Ramón pressed another button. A few seconds later, the bellowing repeated, less loudly. A foghorn. Donna nodded to herself.

“We put the horn on for other ships,” Ramón explained, lapsing back into his teacher voice. “No one’s around for hundreds and hundreds of miles. You saw that on the radar, Doctor. But just in case, we start it up. We have our own signal.” He cocked his head, listening, counting like an orchestra conductor. “Three short blasts, one long.”

Who, who, who, whooooo
?

“That’s good,” Donna supplied, straight man to his safety lecture.

He cracked a smile, showing off his dazzling teeth. He seemed pleasant enough, but it was hard to tell if that was his real self or just his bait. But if he didn’t grow out of his superficial gotta-have-you routine, he’d either end up lonely or with some chick (in the worst sense of the word) who married him because she liked his ass or his clothes.

“That
señora
won’t think it’s comforting. The rich one.”

“Oh, you mean the divine Ms. VB?” Donna said, trading a grin with him.

“That’s Ms. VBH. H, you peasant.” John chuckled, seeming a little more relaxed as he resumed his walk to the door.

“You know,” he said, “in the olden days, ships used to sacrifice one of the crew to the gods if there was a crisis aboard. Think we got us a candidate?”

“Unfortunately, a little fog doesn’t qualify.” Ramón put his hands on his hips and cocked his head, watching the thick, white blankets. The foghorn blared as the mists covered the bow and spread over the containers, waves on a giant’s beach spilling over fragile seashells.

“Maybe it’ll get worse,” Donna said, making a show of crossing her fingers. “We can always hope.”

“I’ve got to go back to Matt,” John said. “This might frighten him.”

Donna said, “I’ll go with you.” Ramón opened his mouth, closed it. Glanced back at the radar screen and flicked some switches. Time for him to get back to work, anyway.

“Be careful on the ladderway,” he said. “It’ll be slick from the moisture.”

“Okay. Thanks for the tour.” Donna gave the window one last look.

Beside her, John gasped.

She whipped her head toward him. “What?”

He stood rigid as a statue. Pale, white, his eyes were huge. She shook his arm. “Jesus, John. What?”

He exhaled, shaking his head, and smiled sheepishly at her. “I don’t know why I’m so jumpy. I’m sorry. I thought …”
When he pushed his glasses up on his nose, his hand trembled.

Donna waited. A dull red crawled up his neck and fanned across his cheeks.

“It was just a trick of the light, but I thought I saw a face in the fog,” he said finally, clearly embarrassed. “It sort of dove onto it and pushed itself … but it was just the light.” He shrugged. “Or my own reflection.”

Donna nodded. “Let’s go back downstairs,” she suggested. “I think we’re both pooped.”

The foghorn blared. Ramón waved a hand and said, “
Ciao.
”

Donna opened the door, paused, and turned.

“About this Cha-cha,” she said.

Ramón made as if to ward her off. “Don’t talk to me about that one.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Why not?”

“I filed a complaint on him last trip out. Union won’t let me talk about it.” He checked his watch and picked up a clipboard. “How long ago did we see the radar blip, Dr. Fielder?”

“Is he dangerous?” Donna pressed.

Ramón laughed uneasily. “No. It’s just that, well, he’s a very bad cook.”

“I see.” Moving her shoulders, she gestured to John, who went out the door first. She followed after.

They went down the first two flights of stairs at a steady clip. Then John stopped and pressed his hand into his side, panting. He said, “My knees are wobbling.”