Devour (5 page)

The man’s nostrils flared. He took another step forward, his hands empty, no evidence of a weapon. It gave Frankie minimal comfort; the man was radiating coiled tension. His irises were so pale they appeared silver, swimming in the bloodshot sclera. His lips were bloodless in contrast.

“We’re on the same team, friend.”

The man took another step forward, then paused as Adrian came out the door behind him. Adrian’s shirt was untucked and he was sweating, breathing hard from the climb up the stairs.

“Yeah, that’s the g—” Adrian started to say, and then the man with bloodshot eyes swiveled, his arm flickering out, the index and middle fingers jabbing Adrian just below his Adam’s apple. Adrian fell backwards, his eyes blooming wide in surprise, his hands coming up to cover his throat. He coughed weakly, tried to draw in another breath, and his eyes opened wider when he realized he couldn’t inhale.

“Jesus,” Frankie said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

The man turned back to him, his expression unchanged. Behind him, Adrian wheezed out another weak cough and sank to his knees, his eyes bugging as he fought for breath.

“What the hell?” Frankie said. “Help him, Thor.”

Thor went to Adrian and began prying his hands off his throat. Frankie made a conscious effort to check his anger. The man was Latham’s head of security, probably cherry-picked from dozens of mercenary types.

“Tough guy,” Frankie said, nodding. “Bet you were popular at recess when you were in grade school.”

The man’s lips peeled back slightly, revealing small and even teeth. “Go,” he said in a slight Eastern European accent. “Or you will be hurt. Not like this.” He jerked his head toward Adrian, who had finally managed to draw in a breath and was hacking it back out. “Hurt for real.”

“When I said grade school,” Frankie said. “I meant the one at the orphanage.”

The man tensed, and Frankie started to duck, realizing his humor wasn’t going over real well on the
Nokomis.

“Kharkov.”

The man froze, and then let his arm drop. A tanned, well-dressed man in his late forties stood in the doorway, his dark hair combed in a stylish wave, wearing an expensive-looking sport jacket over a white shirt open at the collar. His face was long and angular, the lips wormy.
Richard Latham
, Frankie thought.
My hero
.

Kharkov moved to the side and Latham stepped forward, surveying the room, batting his eyes once as Adrian drew in a choked breath, and turned his eyes to Frankie. Heavy eyebrows over dark and active eyes, a big, bent bird-of-prey nose, but there was a sagginess to his face, a slight hollowing-out to his frame. Eyes too small for the sockets, lips pulled back over his teeth. He looked, Frankie thought, like a starving eagle.

“What’s the problem?” Latham said.

Thor spoke up. “No problem, Mr. Latham. I screw up, Mr. Frankie straighten out. We are good.”

Latham glanced at Thor, then turned back to Frankie. “No problem?”

“Communications glitch,” Frankie said. “Some asshole forgot to tell them I had clearance.” He jerked his chin toward Thor. “Your boys better get his foot looked at. Terrible toenail clipping accident, you shoulda seen it.”

Latham took a deep breath and steepled his fingers, rubbing the pads against each other, then laced them together and rested them against his chest.

“Kharkov?”

“Sir.”

“Is this okay? This type of situation?”

“No, sir.”

“This sort of... chaos?”

“It won’t happen again.”

Latham reversed his laced fingers, cracked his knuckles, and pointed at the floor. “Get Doc Perle down here to look at his foot, then mop that blood up off the floor. Make it shine, Kharkov. You know how I feel about cleanliness.”

“I’ll get the doctor down here right away. A janitor, too.”

Latham cocked an eyebrow. “Did I say I wanted a janitor?”

Kharkov’s lips tightened. “I’ll take care of it personally, sir.”

Latham nodded. “Wonderful, just wonderful.” He started toward the back door, then turned to Frankie. “You coming, or you want to help swab the decks?”

Frankie followed him, patting Adrian on the shoulder as he went past. There was a slight hum of conversation below him, the tinkle of ice in glass. The sound of a girl’s voice, bright and pleasant. He could already tell he was going to like D-Deck better than the rest of the ship.

T
hey saw it on the radar when they were ten minutes away, the single blip separating into two distinct marks on the Furuno’s screen. Gilly pulled the throttle back
,
dropping down to twelve knots, just fast enough to keep them on plane. The fog had grown thicker as afternoon slipped into evening, the saturated air coalescing into raindrops on the windshield before being slicked away by the wipers. A hundred yards’ visibility, maybe fifty; it was hard to tell. According to the radar, they were two miles east of Boon’s Island, a little less than a mile from the
Archos
’s coordinates. They’d lost radio contact ten minutes earlier, and the Coast Guard reception was getting scratchy.

Gilly tapped the second mark, his jaw muscles clenched. “You see that shit?”

“Keep going,” Brian said. “Might be another boat, might not. No reason to turn around now.”

Gilly brought her back up to twenty knots, adjusting their bearing to account for the strong current sweeping the
Archos
south. “ETA is five minutes,” he said. “That other blip is right on ’em. If we dumped those fish for nothing . . .”

“Leave it,” Brian said. “Concentrate.”

“Aye, aye, grandmaster of the high seas. If it’s okay with your eminence, I’m gonna swing southeast on one-thirty and then work back up. Might have a floater who lost hold of the ship.”

“Good plan.” Brian went down to the cuddy, bracing himself with one hand as
Tangled Blue
crashed through the waves. It was a noisy boat on big water, the big inboards growling, the hull creaking. He could just imagine the microfractures blooming in her ribs, the piston walls pitting and gouging at the higher RPMs. Smitty, the owner of the marina garage, would probably like those sounds. Like so many coins falling into his bank account.

Brian gathered up the two life rings and the extra life jackets from the cuddy, then opened up the emergency kit. The flare gun was a converted Ithaca single-shot twelve gauge, its retrofitted barrel modified to take a huge eight-inch Thompson flare. He took the shotgun out, thinking of long-ago autumn days of grouse hunting with his old man, a similar Ithaca held lightly in his father’s hands.

The Meat-getter. The old man had missed with it, but not often. For Brian, who could shoot minute-of-angle groups with most rifles but shotguns with only a modicum of success, the Meat-getter had been a venerated, almost mystical weapon. Seven months after his father died he’d taken the Ithaca out, oiled it, and loaded it with seven-and-a-half shot low base, and proceeded to miss three grouse (except they weren’t called grouse, they were partridge, or
pahh-tridge
in northern Vermont parlance) in a row, easy going-away shots, the partridge flying low and straight down the clover-filled tote road that bordered his parents’ back forty. When he returned home, he oiled the shotgun and placed it in storage. There would be no more sullying of the Meat-getter’s legacy.

Gilly hollered from above, and a moment later the
Tangled Blue
slowed again. Brian grabbed two flares from the box of eight, slipped them into the shell holder on the Ithaca’s barrel, and snapped the shotgun into the clips alongside the stairwell. He unhooked a coil of floating rope from one of the pegs and looped it over his shoulder, shaking his head to clear it. It was the fish, he supposed, those big early-season bluefins. Anytime he had a good day on the water he wished his dad was there to see it, to nod and smile. To approve, he supposed, although on bad days he thought of his father even more, knowing he would have got the same nod, a bigger smile.

“Cap?”

He climbed the stairs. “What is it?”

“There she is,” Gilly said, pointing toward the horizon. The swells were five- and six-footers, with an occasional eight mixed in. Big slow-moving rollers, and as Brian watched the next set appear out of the fog he saw a rainbow sheen from spilled fuel on the side of the swell. There was a section of hull riding the wave, ten feet across, double-walled with foam insulation sandwiched between the fiberglass. It drifted past them, a crimson streak of blood smeared across the shredded fiberglass.

Gilly said, “What the hell?”

“Nothing out here to break her up,” Brian said. “An explosion?”

“You’d think. But no burn marks.”

“And lots of fuel left on the water. Maybe one of those rogue waves.”

“Hell of a wave.”

They came down one of the bigger swells and the horizon closed in for a moment. Gilly gave the
Tangled Blue
throttle, and they powered up the next swell. As they came up the far side Gilly turned hard to port, narrowly missing another piece of hull, this one shredded along one edge, with bits of fiberglass trailing in the water.

Gilly nodded toward the radar. “Junk’s too small to show up until we’re on ’em. One of those hit the props, we’re on a slow float to Bermuda.”

Brian dropped the rescue gear on the floor of the boat and grabbed the binoculars off the dash. “I’m going up on the bridge. Keep this heading and speed.” He paused. “And don’t scratch my boat.”

“Suck it, Captain.”

Brian climbed up the aluminum ladder, pausing when they crested the top of the waves, continuing when they were in the valleys. He reached the flybridge and moved carefully to the control counter to flip on the inter-boat radio. Normally, he would be able to control the boat from the flybridge, but the hydraulic steering cables had been broken for the past two seasons. It was a pain, but flybridge controls weren’t required by the Coast Guard. If he still had those tuna in the hold, he would have been able to fix the boat up, pay the rest of his loan down. Hell, maybe spring for some new rod and reels....

If, if, if.
His father’s voice came to him, a dry, amused tone.
And if a frog had wings it wouldn’t bump its ass when it hopped.

He keyed the mike. “You got me, Gil?”

“Yeah. What you see?”

He swept the horizon left to right with the binoculars, went down five degrees and swept again. “There’s more debris straight ahead. Take her ten degrees east on the back side of the next swell.”

“Just tell me the heading. I know when to turn the damn thing.”

Brian grinned, scanning the sea as Gilly maneuvered down the next swell. “Okay, she’s clear for a bit, but lots of fuel on the surface. Better turn on the blower motors.” He was thinking about an explosion on the seas that had happened two years earlier, due to a charter boat captain who had run his boat through a slick coming from a disabled merchant ship out in the shipping lanes. When the automatic bilge pump activated there were enough fumes in the engine housing to start a fire, and the charter had gone down like a Viking pyre.

“Blower’s been on for five minutes,” Gilly said. “When you were dicking around in the cuddy. You see anything?”

“Negative. You got a visual on that debris on the port side?”

“Little tiny pieces, yeah. She musta blew, Brian.”

“Roger that,” Brian said. “Surface temp?”

“Thirty-nine.”

“They’re going to be popsicles if they’re in the water. Where’re we at on their original coordinates?”

“Just hit them,” Gilly said. “I’m coming around on a zero heading, and we’ll run back south on a one-eighty. I got through to the Coasties, asked for a bird. Choppers are grounded, but they offered an SRB out of Gloucester.”

Brian scanned the horizon. It would be a waste for the Coasties to send out one of their Small Response Boats. He knew it, Gilly knew it, and he was pretty sure the Coastie officer knew it. Well, hard to know on that last one. A lot of the Coastie officers were kids, smart young men who didn’t always understand the ocean, didn’t realize that sending out an SRB in this slop was a waste of fuel. Air support wasn’t always a godsend, especially in this fog, but Coastie chopper pilots didn’t go out on hopeless missions. Once dispatched, the MH-60 jockeys would fly in coordinated grids, using the surface search radar like a metal detector to sweep the ocean’s surface.

They came up on top of a big swell and Gilly turned hard, cutting into a wave like a surfer. As they crested, Brian saw something dark to the southeast, sliding up and over one of the swells. A second later it disappeared behind the endless series of waves.

Brian keyed the radio. “Bring her to a one-twenty-five,” he said. “We’ve got something in the water, could be the main part of the hull.”

They powered forward, running in line with the waves. He didn’t see the shape again as they crashed through one wave, then another, the bow climbing high into the sky and then crashing down. They crested another wave and Brian saw it again, a jagged piece of flotsam riding the waves hard to the south, farther ahead of them than he’d expected the wreckage would be. The current was strong, as powerful and fast as he’d ever seen on the open seas, running down the western boundary of Gulf current. The Kaala, they called it, a wildcard current rubbing up against the massive North Atlantic gyre.

He brought the binoculars up again, adjusted the focus. “You got anything left?”

“A bit,” Gilly said. “Don’t want to come down too hard on the back side of these swells and swamp her.”

“Better give it to her. I think there’s somebody out there,” he said, waiting for the shape to reappear. It came up another wave and he saw it clearly, a truck-sized piece of hull with someone clinging to a piece of railing, one arm wrapped around it at an awkward angle. The man’s feet swung loosely as the piece of hull slid down the next wave. Two hundred yards away, just to the east of their current bearing. The big Chrysler engines growled as Gilly powered up.

“I got a partial visual, top of the last wave,” Gilly called up a few seconds later. They went down another swell and back up again. “Yeah, I got him, Bri. Come on down.”

Brian slid down the flybridge ladder, pressing the side of his feet against the railings and dropping fast to the pitching deck.

“There,” Gilly said, pointing through the windshield.

They could see the man clearly now, his white hair plastered against the side of his face, his right arm twisted through a piece of railing. His body flopped from side to side as the hull rode up and down the waves.

“How’s he hanging on?” Brian said.

“He’s stuck to that fuckin thing.”

Brian brought up the binoculars. “I think you’re right.”

“Dead?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Brian said. “We’re gonna get him.”

Gilly glanced at Brian, his Adam’s apple bobbing once in his scrawny neck, and then he slid out of the captain’s chair, keeping one hand on the wheel. “Bring me up alongside,” he said. “I’ll see if we can latch on without busting up the boat.”

Brian shook his head. “I got it.”

“Might hafta get wet,” Gilly said, almost gently. “Take the wheel, Cap. I got him.”

Brian hesitated for a moment, staring at the side of the boat, the spray of water splashing over the gunnels. Panic, sudden and frantic, clawed up inside him, threatening to break like the waves. He tried to push it down, but there was no edge to push. It was just there, growing and shapeless and wild. The boat shrank under him, and suddenly he could feel the careless power of the ocean all around him, crowding around the boat.

“C’mon,” Gilly said gently. “Take the wheel.”

Brian slid past him into the captain’s chair. He took the wheel, his hands trembling. Twisted in the seat, checked the gauges. All was good, all was fine. He brought the throttle down and then powered forward at the same speed. He felt the hitch right away, the slight clunk in the drive. They had pushed her too hard coming out here. Smitty had warned him. No time to worry about it now. He was in control.

Gilly moved to the port side of the
Tangled Blue
, a coil of rope in his hand. The old man’s forearm was wedged under a piece of the hull’s railing; the stainless-steel railing had been crushed against the hull, pinning his arm. His face was pressed flat down the side of the fiberglass and his skin had a purplish cast, darker near his neck and around his eyes. Cold seawater splashed up and over his face without visible effect.

Brian sounded the air horn. The man looked like he twitched. Brian hit the horn again and the old man lifted his head a fraction of an inch, then let it drop back to the hull.

Gilly began to shrug on a life jacket. “That hull’s got some wicked edges on her, Cap. Don’t get too close.”

“What are you doing?”

“I gotta get in there.”

Brian started to protest, then fell silent. Gilly was right—the hull could easily puncture the side of the
Tangled Blue
if they didn’t try to control it. He held up a hand. “Wait.”

“Hurry,” Gilly said.

Brian flipped on the Garmin autopilot and raced down into the cuddy. There was a large toolbox underneath the aft cabin’s bed and he searched it quickly, throwing tools to the floor. He found the hacksaw on the very bottom, the handle inked with a faded DL HAWKINS. He took the cuddy stairs back up in two quick leaps. Gilly tied the rope around his waist, and then traded Brian the tag end of the rope for the hacksaw.

“Ready,” Gilly shouted, and before Brian could answer, Gilly leaped over the side of the
Tangled Blue
and into the icy waters.