A Dangerous Breed

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  In the weeks since Oregon, it had become my refuge. When the apartment grew small and people became loud, I busied myself with scut work aboard or day trips out on the Sound, even sleeping some nights in the shallow triangular sarcophagus of its tiny cabin. The rhythm of the waves eased my restlessness.

  I tied two more fenders as an extra defense between the boat and the dock and had begun checking that each snap of the canvas covering the cockpit was secure when Hollis came rumbling down the ramp. His sole acknowledgment of the foul weather was a canary-yellow slicker thrown over his T-shirt and shorts. Water dripped from it onto his short ruddy legs and sandals. Hollis gave the impression of being ninety percent upper body, all chest and shoulders with a hard round belly and ape-like arms. Even his hair under the slicker’s hood was a shade an elder orangutan would admire.

  “Hullo,” he said as he hurriedly closed the last steps. “It’s something when the Sound gets angry, isn’t it?”

  “Easy to enjoy a storm when you’re in the harbor.”

  “Now that’s a bit of truth. But this is the exception that proves the rule. I’m damned glad you’re here.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Best I explain where it’s dry. If your hatches are sufficiently battened, let’s get the hell inside, shall we?”

  We walked through the mounting rain to his dock, Hollis taking every third step double-time, as if to urge me to move even faster. Something was chipping away at his normally carefree façade. By the time we boarded the Francesca, he was practically jogging.

  Hollis’s home was a fifty-foot Carver, outfitted for comfort and modified to hide many things that were better left unseen by harbormasters and customs officials. Hollis was a smuggler, an expert one. He’d been a frequent accomplice of my grandfather’s as well as his closest friend.

  I hung my dripping coat in the enclosed aft section as Hollis opened the door and almost rushed into the main cabin, leaving a trail of rainwater across the faux teak parquet.

  “Hollis—” I began, and then I saw what held his concern.

  A tall heavyset white man with bristly brown hair lay on the main settee. He was shirtless, his left rib cage covered with a flat rectangle of folded cloth. Blood had seeped through at least two spots at the lower edge of the thick pad. He didn’t stir at our approach.

  Hollis grabbed a waterproof first aid kit from the table and unlatched it to take out a roll of clean gauze, winding it rapidly around his hand to make another pad.

  “The damn wound’s still bleeding,” he said. “I’ve tried taping it shut, but no.”

  “I’ll look. You start talking sense. Did you do this?”

  “Hell no. The man’s a friend of mine.”

  I knelt down beside the wounded man. His airway and breathing both checked out normal, and his pulse was steady. Pupil reaction when I lifted his eyelids looked fine, too. I didn’t see any sign of an injury to his head.

  “How long’s he been out?” I said.

  “Almost since I found him. He was more asleep than awake. I managed to get him up and walk with him onto the boat, but then he went out completely. That’s when I took off his coat and saw how much he was bleeding. Scared the hell out of me.”

  I set the man’s arm carefully to one side. The cloth pad turned out to be two of Hollis’s undershirts, folded and held to the man’s abdomen by strips of athletic tape, which I peeled away. Underneath, more tape and wads of gauze made a red clotted lump. A sharp smell and yellow streaks on the skin underneath were evidence that Hollis had done what he could with iodine as antiseptic. As I looked, a drop of blood escaped the sodden bandage and fell onto the settee’s blue upholstery.

  “His name’s Jaak,” Hollis said, “a sailor on the Finnish freighter Stellar Jewel. I sailed out on the Sound earlier this afternoon to meet him. Just a bit of information and a sample product to show me, nothing major. He was supposed to borrow a boat and meet me in Smith Cove. Instead I found one of the freighter’s launches drifting near shore, with Jaak lying inside. Out cold. It took all I had to drag him aboard.”

  Pulling back the bandage with a finger, I saw a long seeping cut across Jaak’s side, with a wider puncture at one end. A blade had stuttered along the hard ribs until it found the softer flesh below.

  “Stab wound,” I said.

  “That much I know.”

  “So why aren’t we talking to paramedics right now?”

  “Because the man’s got no sailor’s card on him, no visa to be onshore. If I take him to a hospital he’ll be reported as illegally entering the country. At the very least he loses his job, and maybe the poor fool spends some time in jail here and in Helsinki to boot. But if we can get him back to the Stellar Jewel in one piece, his mates can cover for him. I’m sure of it.”

  “Well, I’m sure that he needs surgery. Soon. Look here.” Hollis stepped forward, and I showed him a purplish blotch where blood was pooling below the puncture, blurring the skin down almost to Jaak’s kidneys.

  “He’s hemorrhaging inside,” I said, grabbing latex gloves from Hollis’s kit. “We have to staunch the bleeding as much as we can. I need clean sponges. And duct tape.”

  “Tape’s with the tools here,” Hollis said, removing a small tackle box from shelves in the galley. “I think I’ve some new sponges in the cleaning supplies.”

  “Tear them up into pieces. About the size of a marble. Wash your hands well first.”

  He hurried to comply.

  “I can patch him, but field medicine doesn’t cover sewing up whatever’s sliced inside.” Keeping light pressure on the wound, I used my other hand and my teeth to tear off strips of duct tape, setting each one aside. I couldn’t figure why Jaak was unconscious. He wasn’t especially pale, and his pulse was solid. Not so much blood loss that a man his size should pass out. “He needs a doctor.”

  “I have an alternative to visiting an E.R.” Hollis nodded. “I was about to give up on the idea, but then you arrived. Evidence of a grand design.” He brought me a cereal bowl filled with small ragged chunks of orange sponge.

  “Hold the towel there,” I said to Hollis, indicating below the wound. “This will be messy.”

  When I took pressure off, the stab wound opened again. Blood flowed down Jaak’s stomach, even as I swiftly began packing the puncture with pieces of sponge. The orange bits immediately swelled and grew saturated with blood. I pressed each of them gently into Jaak’s body, counting on the swollen weight of the massed sponges to slow his internal bleeding. Six pieces, seven, and then the wound would take no more.

  I pinched the two halves of the puncture together and used the last chunks of sponge to mop most of the blood from his skin. The last of the gauze went on next. It would keep the wound clean of duct tape residue. I layered the strips of tape in Xs, counting on them to keep the skin over Jaak’s ribs from pulling apart. If the injured sailor was going to have surgery within the next couple of hours, I didn’t want to attempt suturing the wound and risk tearing his lacerated skin further. My makeshift bandage would stem the flow. If it held.

  Hollis climbed to the helm on the flybridge above the cabin and started the Francesca’s engines. A moment later his VHF radio began blaring the same weather broadcast I’d heard only an hour before. I looked out the cabin window. Between the rain clouds and the dusk, the sky was already a step beyond black. Wind buffeted the masts outside, making their halyards clang like muffled gongs.

  “Hollis,” I called.

  “I know, I know. But we only need to sail as far as Vashon Island.”

  “In a gale.”

  “If you don’t want to get involved—”

  “Come on.” Hollis and I had known each other long enough that the question was insulting. “What’s on Vashon?”

  “A physician called Claybeck, in a lovely beachfront home with its own dock.”

  “Tell the doctor to get ready,” I said, peeling off the gloves. Jaak’s blood had changed the latex from sky blue to deep violet.

/>   “Thanks,” Hollis said. “I’ll cast off.”

  “I’ll cast off. You get us moving. The faster we get across the Sound, the less chance we’ll all finish this day by drowning.”

  Four

  It took an hour to cross the furious Sound to Vashon Island. A full sixty minutes, as each ten-foot swell coming from the north lifted the Francesca like a bubble to speed beneath us, leaving the boat heeling precariously to starboard as it fell into the trough behind. Hollis did what he could to follow a course that kept the stern at an angle to the current. Allowing the looming walls of water to slam straight into the transom might have swamped us.

  “How’s he doing?” Hollis shouted from the flybridge above. I caught the gist more than his actual words, smothered as they were by the laboring of the diesels and the latest wave’s reverberating boom against the hull.

  I felt Jaak’s throat for his pulse while keeping a tight grip on the rope I’d used to lash the unconscious man to the settee. One hand for yourself, one hand for the ship, always. Especially when the weather was trying its hardest to toss you on your head.

  “The same,” I yelled back. I checked Jaak’s pupils one more time. No dilation. His leg had twitched against the rolling of the boat a moment before, so I was halfway sure the sailor wasn’t about to slip into a coma. But there was no way to know how much blood he might be losing inside. Small blessing that he was out cold. The boat’s rocking was almost painful even without a knife wound in your gut.

  “Five minutes,” Hollis said. “Then we should be ʼround the point and out of the worst of this.”

  “What about the doctor?” I said, leaving Jaak and climbing the step to join Hollis at the wheel. He held his balance against the ship’s motion as if the seas were as smooth as glass. “Can he meet us at the boat?”

  “She,” Hollis corrected. “Claybeck’s a woman. I’ve been trying to reach her. No cell signal way out here but I’ve tried her on the satellite phone, and still nothing.”

  “But she knows we’re coming.”

  “She knows I might turn up with a patient.”

  “Christ, Hollis.”

  “Options were limited, lad. I called Dr. Claybeck straightaway once I found Jaak. She told me she’d be at her house after nightfall. But with the storm and Jaak passed out, I had nearly resigned myself to calling an ambulance and giving them some half-assed story about finding him unconscious at the marina.”

  And then I showed up and Hollis decided to gamble on Claybeck being home. God help the sailor if we crossed the Sound in a storm only to find an empty house.

  “What’s your business with a freighter from Helsinki?” I said.

  “You’ll laugh. Video game controllers. A new model, with built-in memory and some sort of kinetic whatsit for the player’s movements. People will spend thousands on the latest generation to get the edge on their competition. What do they call it?”

  “E-sports.”

  “Right. South Korea’s crazy for those. An acquaintance of mine in Vantaa found a couple of dozen extra controllers lying about their R&D department and got them to Jaak, who was going to show me a sample today. If all looked proper, I’d buy the rest tomorrow. But then—” He shrugged and glanced toward the cabin where the unconscious sailor was secured to his blood-dappled settee. “Fate had other plans.”

  I looked at the indistinct shape of Vashon Island, off our starboard. The scattering of lights onshore helped differentiate the black of the landmass from the dark sea below and clouded sky above. We hadn’t rounded the point yet, but already the waves rolling the Francesca were decreasing in size.

  “Doc Claybeck’s home is just four miles along,” Hollis said, reaching for the satellite phone he’d tucked into the chart holder. He let the phone ring as he nudged the throttle forward. The Francesca responded as if she’d been waiting for the moment, her bow lifting to keep pace with the rapid current. No one answered the call. I went below to ready Jaak to move.

  I guessed the sailor’s weight at about two hundred and fifty pounds. I could conceivably get him off the boat and into Claybeck’s place, but only by lifting his substantial bulk in a fireman’s carry over my shoulders. That would put a lot of pressure on his gut, which sounded like a bad idea. Hollis and I would have to try hauling Jaak using a blanket. I went below to the Francesca’s staterooms and found a duvet that looked thick enough to handle the load without tearing.

  By the time I’d readied the makeshift stretcher, Hollis was easing back on the Francesca’s speed and turning us sharply toward shore. Through the windshield I could see a stubby dock outlined by footlights every few feet along its length. Beyond the dock, a broad house stood at the top of a rise. A lamp glowed from behind one long picture window. The rest of the house was dark.

  “Not promising,” I said, loudly enough for Hollis to hear me.

  “But the dock lights are on.” I could imagine Hollis gesticulating encouragingly. “Tie us off and I’ll try calling the doctor one more time.”

  I stepped out the aft door into the driving rain—the island did nothing to block that—and made my way carefully along the narrow side deck to kick the fenders to hang over the rail before picking up the coiled and sopping bowline. As Hollis brought the Francesca alongside the dock, I jumped down and wrapped the line around the nearest cleat. A surge shoved the ten-ton boat into the floating dock, crushing the fenders between nearly flat. The planks groaned with the pressure. I hurried to tie off the stern. My head was already soaked, hood or no.

  “Anything?” I called to Hollis. He began to shout a reply from up on the bridge, but my attention was distracted by movement from the rise leading to the house.

  Dogs. Large dogs, running at top speed. Running at me. Their claws made hasty scrabbling clicks on the first wooden planks of the short dock as they lunged, fangs bared.

  Five

  I moved as quickly as I ever had in my life, jumping high to catch hold of the Francesca’s deck rail and vaulting in a single motion onto the boat. Without pausing I reached up to grab the chrome handrail on the side of the flybridge above me and practically ran vertically up the cabin windows, hooking a foot on the handrail and hauling myself upward.

  Below me, the dogs jumped to snap menacingly at the air and ran in circles on the dock. The side deck of the Francesca was only a foot wide—too narrow for the beasts to leap aboard easily, but their jaws could reach just fine. Every jump brought them close enough for me to count their teeth. They looked like some sort of shepherd or Malinois mix, big-chested with pointed ears and tawny fur and black faces. Big enough to tear off a man’s limb if they wanted to. They wanted to. They didn’t bark but instead whined with spine-chilling eagerness.

  I was perched in a crouch with my feet on the slick metal handrail and my arms holding on to the side of the boat for dear life. Like a treed cat. Me on the outside of the flybridge, Hollis gaping at me from the other side of the polyurethane window.

  “Van?” he said.

  “You might have mentioned the damn dogs,” I shouted.

  “I didn’t know,” Hollis said. “They weren’t around the only other time I’ve been here.”

  I risked standing up on the slippery handrail to climb to the aft of the boat for a better grip. I was stuck between the dogs and the pouring rain, but at least I wasn’t in danger of falling to the dock. My escape seemed to urge the hounds into trying to leap aboard, their claws scraping the fiberglass hull with every attempt.

  “I’ve got an air horn,” said Hollis. “And a gun, if we need it. But—”

  “We’re not shooting the dogs. Any other ideas?”

  My phone rang. I wasn’t in a position to reach for it.

  “Look there.” Hollis pointed.

  Another light had appeared up at Dr. Claybeck’s house. The right size and shape for an open door, down at ground level.

  The dogs stopped jumping. In another instant, they were running as fast as they had come, up the dock and the short hill and presumably
into the house. The rectangular light went out. I hadn’t heard a whistle or any other signal.

  After a moment I climbed down to the side deck. Hollis met me outside. We both kept a wary eye on where the dogs had gone.

  “The doctor must have called them off,” he said, turning to put the satellite phone to his ear. “Maybe I can reach her.”

  “No need.” I nodded toward the house. In the dim, a distant figure of a tall person in pale clothes stood out like a phantom. The figure raised one arm and held it aloft.

  “That her?” I said.

  “Let’s say yes,” said Hollis. “Jaak can’t wait forever.”

  We lifted the unconscious sailor onto the duvet and wrapped him like a tamale. Only his face showed from the folds. With Hollis taking his legs and me at his head, we carried Jaak aft—both of us grunting with effort—and down onto the swim platform, from where we could step to the dock and begin making our slow way toward the house. The pale figure stayed where it was. No sign of the dogs. My forearms ached with the effort of gripping the duvet.

  Flagstones in the lawn helped us climb the hill to the house. Hollis’s breath was coming short and fast.

  “We can rest if you want,” he said. Then another two gasps later: “Better than dropping him.”

  I nodded and we set Jaak down gently on the soaked grass. We were close enough now for me to be sure the figure in the cream-colored rain jacket was a woman. Hollis waved exhaustedly to her. In her middle years and over six feet tall, she had curls that might be ash-blond under the jacket’s ivory hood. She hovered outside the closed door, barely shielded from the weather by a stunted overhang.

  “Doctor,” Hollis managed.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” the woman said. “Take him to a hospital.”

  “We’re here now,” Hollis said. Rain dappled Jaak’s slack face. “At least have a look—”