by Dale Mayer
Mason grinned. “Worth every moment of it,” he said with a laugh.
As they all headed out, she looked back at the other men. “Are they staying here?”
“They’re guarding the rest of the drills,” he said. “None of us want to end up dead before this scenario is over.”
She nodded. “If you say so.”
Troy looked at her, surprised.
She shrugged. “It all just seems so odd, this whole scenario. I don’t know what is proper or what to think anymore.”
“Not sure anything proper is to be done about any of it, but Mason is the one who pulled strings to get us all here, based on your SOS,” Troy said quietly. “We’re in international waters, and that can cause all kinds of chaos. We don’t know who’s responsible for the sabotage or the aftermath, all those unrelated deaths.”
She thought about it. “Not needing to be said, of course, but it’s an American oil company that clearly has military ties.”
“That it does,” he said grimly. “That it does.”
They went back to the dining area, where everybody was gathered. The crew stopped and glared at her as she walked in.
“And here I thought you were going to bed,” Jonesy said with a sneer.
She stared at him in surprise, as that wasn’t his usual attitude. “Well, I was,” she said, “until I heard that Bruce’s been hurt.”
“If that’s what you call it,” he said, staring at the men behind her. “For all we know, it’s these assholes. We didn’t have any trouble until they showed up.”
She looked at the two men behind her, realizing he meant Axel and Troy. “These two who arrived this morning? You call the explosion two days ago as no trouble until they showed up? I beg to differ about that. Nevertheless I highly doubt these men have anything to do with any of it,” she said calmly.
Jonesy glared at her. “If they hadn’t shown up,” he said, “I doubt any of this would have happened.”
“Well, that’s possible,” she said, “but that’s hardly a reason to blame them for somebody else’s reaction. They certainly didn’t attack Bruce.” She sighed in frustration. “Jesus,” she said, “this place is a mess. How soon can we get off this rig?” She looked around at the gathered men, realizing they weren’t all there. “Where’s Denny?” she asked suddenly.
“You know exactly where Denny is. He’s right where he always is at this time of night,” Jonesy said. “He’s in his room.”
“Do we know that for sure?” she asked. “If Bruce is dead, how do we know Denny is okay?”
They just stared at her.
“There’s no reason for him not to be okay,” Jonesy said, with the same condescending attitude.
“Then what logical reason is there,” she asked, “for Bruce to be dead?”
“I imagine he was digging into things he shouldn’t have,” Jonesy said. “Did you not know he has a history as a hacker?”
“Jesus,” she said, reaching up and rubbing her temples.
“And, of course, you didn’t even notice, and you’re supposed to be the IT guru,” Jonesy said.
“Wow,” she said, noting a very drunk Idiot was hanging on to Jonesy. “Have you guys been drinking all this time?”
“Why not?” Jonesy said. “Nothing else to do here.”
“I thought this was mostly a dry camp.”
“Under normal circumstances, it probably is,” Jonesy said, “but who cares?”
“A lot of people care,” she said. “What if we need your help?”
“Cry me a river,” he snarled.
Berkley glared at Jonesy. “That’s not helpful at all.”
“Who gives a shit?” Idiot said, and, with that, he started to laugh like a loon.
She stepped forward. “Did you hurt Bruce?”
Idiot looked at her, and all pretense of being drunk fell away. “Why would I hurt Bruce?”
“Maybe he got into things you didn’t want him to,” she said, getting into his face.
“I don’t have anything to hide,” he said, “so don’t even bother trying to make it look like I do.”
“Good,” she said, “but somebody hurt Bruce, and nobody else is on board but us.”
“I wonder about that,” Troy said, from behind them all. “Just because nobody new has shown up here today in this room doesn’t mean that someone else isn’t on the rig still.”
She turned to look back at him. She knew they’d been doing nothing but searching, but, of course, the rig was a huge place, and it was pretty easy for somebody who knew the layout to hide or to stay one step ahead. She looked back at Jonesy. “Have you seen anybody else?”
He immediately shook his head. “Hell no. Just these new guys.”
“Well then, you might as well say the same thing about the company men,” she said quietly. “Do you suspect them too?” She waited for an answer but didn’t get one. “But we need to check and make sure Bruce’s actually dead,” she said, out of the blue.
The crewmen looked at her, and Idiot snorted. “What? Now we can’t tell if a man’s dead or not?”
She stared at them. “I’d like to know for sure that nothing could be done for him.”
“I’ll take you,” Troy said suddenly.
She knew that he understood what she meant, and she nodded. “Where is he?”
“He’s in the medical room,” Chucky said, suddenly breaking his silence. “I’ll come with you.”
She looked at him in surprise.
He shrugged. “I haven’t seen him either. Bruce was a good person, and he didn’t deserve this.”
“Any chance it was an accident, Chucky?”
“I don’t think having your head smacked makes it an accident,” he said. “But, if he managed to fall down the stairs and then stumbled toward his room or something, I guess that’s a potential as well.”
“I never thought of that,” she said, “but you’re right. It is a possibility.”
He nodded, and the three of them looked at the others.
“Anybody else coming?” Troy asked.
“No,” Axel said, “I’ll stay here.”
He nodded. “Sounds good.”
And the three of them headed toward the medical office.
As they stepped outside, she looked at Chucky. “Sure would be nice if the generator would give us the lights back.”
“We had to shut down a lot of it,” he said. “We’ve got the one for essential services, but that’s it. You got flashlights, use them.”
“Got it,” she said with a smile.
He looked at her and said, “You’re awfully calm, considering the situation.”
“No,” she said, “I’m not calm at all. I’m just screaming on the inside instead, and I can’t wait to get away from here.”
He laughed at that. “I’d be screaming too, if I could get away with it,” he said. “This whole thing is just such a bizarre situation, and it makes no sense.”
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Troy asked him.
“Somebody dead? Absolutely. Somebody murdered? Yes, that too.” He shook his head. “But not in a really long time. But not on top of all this other nonsense.”
“Interesting,” Troy said. “Who was it and when?”
“About ten years ago,” he said, “we were in a camp up in the north fields,” he said. “A couple guys got at it after getting murderously drunk. They had a big dust-up bash out. Both of them lived through it, but, the next day, the one guy died. We found out that, while he’d been passed out, sleeping it off, his drunk buddy, the other guy, had come up and stabbed him. He’d been just drunk enough to think it was a good idea and just sober enough to pull it off.”
“Wow,” she said. “You’ve lived an exciting life.”
“I’d like to go back to being bored,” he said. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that one of this group is a murderer?”
She stopped and looked at him, then nodded. “Yes, Chucky, it has. You got any clue which one?
”
“Hell no,” he said. “I can tell you that it’s not me, and it’s not Winslow. But everybody else is fair game.”
On that dark note they headed downstairs. There were no lights once again in the medical center. With all their flashlights on, they found Bruce laid out on an exam table. Troy walked up and immediately checked for a pulse, but there wasn’t one to be found, and the body was still cooling.
“Interesting,” he said, as he held up the flashlight to look at his head. “That’s a decent head wound,” he said. He shifted the man’s neck just slightly and then nodded. “He wasn’t going anywhere.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“His neck is broken.”
“So, even if he did fall down the stairs,” she said, “he couldn’t have dragged himself or gotten up and walked to his room, correct?”
“Correct,” he said. “So it’s very unlikely that he had an accident. This is murder.”
Chucky looked at the two of them. “So who the hell are you?” he asked. “And what the hell is going on with this place?”
She looked at Troy, who looked at her, and they both turned to look at Chucky. “What are you talking about?” she asked.
“I’m not a fool,” he said, “and you sure as hell aren’t any deckhand. You might have been up on one somewhere in the last thirty-odd years of your life,” he said, “but it’s not what you do. So speak up. Who are you?”
She smiled and faced Troy. “You might as well tell him.”
“But then he’ll tell Winslow,” Troy said, his arms across his chest. “How do we know we can trust him or either of them?”
“We don’t,” she said, “but he’s not capable of some of the stunts we’ve seen. I suggest that we start by trusting somebody.”
He nodded at that. “I’m a Navy SEAL,” he said, “and so is Axel. We currently believe that the explosion was caused by navy-issued C-4.”
Chucky’s face blanched, and he stared at him in shock. “Seriously?”
Troy nodded. “So maybe it’s time for you to start talking. Tell us exactly what you know, before somebody else gets hurt.”
Chucky looked at him and shook his head. “That’s the trouble. I don’t know anything.”
Chapter 11
“Are you sure about that, Chucky?” she asked him, her tone gentle and quiet. She’d never seen him be anything other than what he was, a grizzled old grump whose time had come to walk away.
“I haven’t seen anything that I can count on,” he corrected. “There’s been lots of talk, plenty of rumors. You know how guys are. You get twenty of them in a room, and you’ll have people who don’t get along. You get two hundred of them on a rig like this and leave them here for six months with lots of hard work and no way to really blast off their resentment and energy, and you’re bound to have trouble.”
“And do you know anything about the rapes?” Troy asked.
Immediately Chucky’s face turned rigid. And then slowly he nodded. “I might at that,” he said, “but I don’t know anything for sure. It’s all just rumors.”
“Well, we’d really like to hear those rumors,” Berkley said. “My friend will never be the same.”
He turned and spat on the ground. “There is no way for men to do something like that and keep their humanity,” he said, “but, a place like this, it brings out the worst in some of them.”
“Have you worked on rigs before where there were women?” Troy asked him.
“Of course,” he said, “but this is the only place I’ve ever had a problem or seen a problem not be quickly corrected.”
“And do you know any of the men who were involved?” Berkley asked Chucky.
He shot her a veiled look and then shrugged.
“That’s not helpful,” Troy said in an exasperated tone. “I get that you don’t want to be involved and that you might be afraid of repercussions.”
At that, Chucky glared at him. “I ain’t afraid of nothing,” he said. “Guys talk, but that doesn’t mean I know all the ins and outs of the conversation.”
“Okay, so what guy do you think is most likely involved in the rapes?”
He shuffled his feet as he stared at them. “That may not even have anything to do with this mess either,” he said.
“Are there really likely to be that many psychos in a group of two hundred men?” Troy asked.
“Hell, I don’t know,” he said. Then, taking a deep breath, he sighed. “One of them was the doctor.”
She gasped in horror. “Seriously?”
He nodded. “I know he used to drug some of his patients. It’s one of the reasons he was up here.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because I knew him before, from another rig, and he had to leave that company under a cloud. So, when he showed up here, and there started to be some talk,” he said, “I wasn’t so sure what was going on, but I figured he had to be involved.”
She swore and exchanged a hard glance with Troy. But inside she was just wrecked. “Tabitha did go to the doctor a couple times,” she said. “She was definitely having some issues.”
“Before?”
She nodded. “She did say she was really bothered by something but wouldn’t clarify it and said that we could talk next time I got here. But I’d barely arrived when the rape happened, and she was in no shape to talk at all. My goal then was to preserve some evidence and to get her out of here.”
“Have you contacted her since she’s been gone?” Troy asked.
“I was due to leave next week,” she said, “and we would spend some time together. I needed her to physically heal and to see a shrink to begin dealing with the mental issues. The fact that she didn’t know who it was made it so much worse. I wondered if she had any inkling, but she seemed to be completely beside herself, and I couldn’t really get her to talk.”
“And, if the doc is involved,” Troy said, looking over at Chucky, “what about the other guys in the cooler? Winslow did fill you in on that, didn’t he?”
“He did, yes. Well, it is possible,” he said, with a nod. “When you think about it, one of the reasons that maybe nothing was done was because the people that Tabitha reported to were the ones involved.”
Berkley gasped. “Jesus, I never thought of that,” she said. “I just assumed it would be some of the lower echelon groups, some of the men of the type who were angry all the time.” She paused for another moment. “But, if she reported it to the men up above, and it didn’t get any higher up, or at least nobody took anything too serious, then it would make sense that somebody was minimizing the damage to her over all these reports,” she said.
“Or not even so much minimizing the damage, they could have reduced or significantly changed the actual report,” Troy said. “And that’s the three missing division managers and the doc, who served as the fourth division manager, all in the cooler, correct?”
She nodded. “Yes, that’s correct, but I don’t know about the others.” She looked back at Chucky. “Any chance the others could have had something to do with it?”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I didn’t see those bodies, but Winslow did earlier. He told me how the two guys who died in the blast were here. That would account for Roger and Clarence, but that was from two days ago. Add those four remaining managers, one of them being the doc, then that’s six bodies right there. The managers are all friends though. Of course not friendly with Lionel and Charlie. So, if those four are involved, I don’t know at what point in time the rapes would quit. That’s pretty personal shit to share with others, who could tell on you. And it comes with criminal charges and a lot of jail time.”
“Only if they get caught, apparently,” Troy said. He looked at her. “I think we should take a look at their rooms.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Chucky said.
Troy looked at him, studying him for a long moment. “They’re dead now, Chucky.”
“It’s just that it’s their
space,” Chucky said. “It’s creepy, and I ain’t going to be a party to it.”
“You don’t have to be,” Troy said. “I doubt they’ve even left any evidence behind. Surely they weren’t that stupid. Even if they lived to be one hundred, they should hide the evidence for each successive decade.”
“What could any of it possibly have to do with the Jude theory?” she asked.
“Maybe nothing,” Troy said. “We’ve got a lot of ideas and pieces of things to consider here that don’t appear to be necessarily connected. But what we do know is that we have three rapes, eight dead bodies still on the rig because God himself is the only one who knows what’s happened to Lionel, and then we’ve got C-4 taken from a military base.”
“Not to mention the sabotage of the rig itself,” Chucky said. “That’s the big one.”
It really hurt her to think along those lines because those three women would never be the same, yet their shattered psyches and dashed hopes in a just humanity ran second to the damage to the rig—more a case of money out of the shareholders’ pockets—though it could have been much worse and there could have been several hundred deaths.
“I’m going back to bed,” Chucky said.
“Good idea,” she said and headed out toward the hallway as if heading to hers. Troy grabbed her and tugged her up against him, as they watched Chucky disappear into the darkness. With his arms wrapped around her, he leaned down and whispered in her ear, “Do you know where the dead men’s rooms are?”
“No, but I can find out.” She pulled up her phone, logged into the system, and checked for the rooms assigned to them. “I have it here,” she said, “but chances are they’ll be locked.”
“No problem,” he said smoothly. “Take me to them.”
She quickly led him toward the sleeping quarters and stopped to point out the rooms provided to the four now-dead supervisors. “The three guys should be here, and the doctor, as the fourth supervisor, had his own room along here too.”
Troy stepped into the first room. It was unlocked, and it had already been cleaned out. He looked at her. “It’s completely empty.”
