Killer Aboard: A John Otter Novel

by Sean Blaise

  Chapter 34

  The next day John saw Lubanzi in the chart room filling in the logbook before going on watch and he approached him.

  “Lubanzi, I need a favor.”

  “Of course, Captain.”

  “Find a reason to send Jennifer down to the chart room for something during your watch. I need to speak to her privately.”

  “Something is wrong with her,” Lubanzi said.

  “I think that’s apparent to everyone.”

  Lubanzi agreed and headed back up to the helm. John picked up the SAT phone and made his weekly call home. Not much had changed back in Miami with his mother. She was a teacher at a local school specializing in deaf and blind children. She went on profusely about how wonderful it was that he was teaching, when Jennifer came down the companionway stairs.

  “I gotta run mom, call you soon,” John said as he hung up.

  Jennifer looked at him, with a smile. For a split second, John saw a rare glimmer of her old self shimmering through the dreadful sadness that had attached itself to her aurora.

  “You still call your mom?” Jennifer asked.

  “Of course, don’t you?”

  “Only when I have to. The further away the better,” she said as she went to the chart laid out on the table.

  “Jennifer, do you have a moment?”

  She looked up at him. He noticed her pupils seemed large again.

  “What’s wrong?” Jennifer asked.

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Are you OK? You’ve been off since St. Helena.”

  Jennifer pretended poorly. “Yeah, just tired. Seasickness still affecting me.”

  “Jennifer, please don’t lie to me. You haven’t been acting the same. Is it Greg? Are you guys going through a rough patch?”

  Jennifer laughed the coldest laugh John had ever heard. “If only it was my love life. No, it's nothing.”

  “Jennifer, I am here to help. I know I can help; but I just have to know what the problem is.”

  “Captain, I know for a fact you can’t help me with this.”

  “Try me. Were you harmed? Did your friends do something?”

  Jennifer’s eyes began welling up with tears. John grabbed her shoulder. “Please, talk to me.”

  “That island changed me. I can’t undo what happened there. Have you heard anything from the island?”

  “No. Why would I hear anything from the island? Jennifer, you have to tell me what happened there?”

  Just then, Jack walked down the companionway stairs and stopped when he saw John and Jennifer. He looked at Jennifer with tears in her eyes and the Captain, looking earnest. Jennifer turned and saw him.

  John could feel Jennifer’s body stiffen at the sight of Jack.

  “Jack, go upstairs now,” John commanded.

  “I came down to ask Jen’s help on something.”

  “Jack, go back upstairs now! This doesn’t concern you.”

  Jack stared at Jennifer for a moment longer before turning and walking back up on deck. John turned back to Jennifer whose tears were now gone. She had gone back to her ghost shell once more and he knew he had lost his chance. Jack had killed his moment and he knew Jack had to have something to do with Jennifer’s transformation.

  “Jennifer, please.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry. Nothing can fix it. But thank you for caring enough to try.”

  Jennifer turned and walked back up on watch.

  On the bow, Jack found Wayland reading. Wayland looked up at Jack as he always did, looking for the next order. Jack sat down heavily next to Wayland.

  “We have a problem. I just saw Jennifer talking to the Captain. I think, she’s ratting us out.”

  “But Greg said.”

  “I don’t care what that oaf said; we have to do something before it’s too late. And Greg doesn’t have the balls to do what needs to be done.”

  Chapter 35

  Five days out from St. Helena, Lubanzi got off watch at 2 am. He waited in his cabin for his watch standers to go to bed. Lubanzi figured that one hour would be enough time for everyone to be fast asleep and not moving about the ship.

  The storm had picked up during his watch and he could feel the seas and winds rising even higher now that Smith had taken the helm.

  At a little after three, Lubanzi left the chart room and quietly opened the door to the galley. It was dimly lit, and Lubanzi could barely see the forward watertight door to the student’s quarters.

  He made his way carefully through the galley, trying to minimize the creaking of the wooden floorboards under his large feet. Lubanzi was startled when he saw Monica, lying down at the galley table her iPad in hand.

  Fuck, Lubanzi thought.

  It would be unusual for him to go forward into the student’s quarters at this time of night, but he didn’t have a choice. He had to get the gun out of the crash bulkhead compartment before the morning.

  John had noticed some rust streaks on the outside hull and was going to inspect the crash bulkhead the next morning to see if there was rust inside as well, which would indicate steel rot. And John would see the gun. Lubanzi couldn’t risk it.

  Lubanzi began to walk past Monica toward the forward watertight door when she looked up.

  “Hey Lubanzi.”

  “I didn’t see you there. Monica, why are you up?”

  “It’s getting rough, and my stomach is a feeling a little off. The cabin makes me queasy. The top bunk rocks so much.”

  “Did you take something?” Lubanzi asked, secretly wishing she would end the conversation. He knew he was sweating profusely for the cool ship, but the anxiety was getting to him. He had to get the gun.

  “Some seasickness pills, but I’ll just sit up a little longer before I try to go back to sleep.”

  “Good idea,” Lubanzi said, finally getting his hand on the forward watertight door to the students’ quarters.

  “What are you doing up?” Monica asked.

  Lubanzi swallowed hard. Students and their questions.

  “I think I heard the anchor banging. Just going to check on it.”

  Monica smiled. “Thank you for doing that. It keeps me up at night.”

  Lubanzi smiled back and made his way through the watertight door. He closed the door behind him and looked back at Monica. She hadn’t moved and remain fixated on her Ipad.

  He moved quickly toward the forward part of the student’s quarters and climbed up the empty V berth in the bow. He opened the crash bulkhead while he looked back down the hall for any signs of life from the student’s cabins. A student taking a night piss would discover him and that would open up questions he didn’t want to answer.

  Seeing nothing but silence, Lubanzi fished his hand into crash bulkhead to its familiar spot, looking for the gun. Nothing. His large hand swept around the compartment, looking in vain for it. Still nothing. Lubanzi’s blood-pressure spiked as he continued to feel around for it.

  Lubanzi didn’t dare turn on the light in the crash bulkhead but he didn’t have a choice. He knew Monica could come through the galley door any minute and he was running out of time. He flipped the switch and light flooded the small compartment with impossible brightness.

  Lubanzi thrust his head into the compartment, blinking his eyes quickly in the glaring light. His eyes went to the wall where his duct tape now hung forlornly and empty. It was gone. He moved the hanging lines in the locker to search below them. Maybe it had fallen to the bottom of the compartment.

  After ten minutes of searching to no avail, Lubanzi shut off the light, closed the compartment and slipped down into the V berth. The compartment was empty. His gun was gone. And someone on board had taken it.

  What the fuck should he do now?

  He was screwed. Someone had taken the gun. Was it John? Had he known all along? Or Smith? That gun was his insurance plan and he needed it back. Without it, he had nothing on Junior.

  Junior.

  Lubanzi swallowed hard at the thought of him. He had n
o doubt Junior would be waiting for him in Brazil, and now he had no protection.

  Another thought poured into his mind--what if a student had taken it? Why? What if there was an accident? He would go to prison for sure. Lubanzi could feel his anxiety rising.

  He had to find the gun. There was no other option. One at a time, he would search the students’ bunks. With his mind made up and now having at least some sort of a plan, he began to calm down.

  Lubanzi watched Monica enter through the watertight door from the galley and then open the door to her cabin. She froze in place and didn’t move.

  It was odd.

  Then she screamed.

  Chapter 36

  John was awakened when the ship changed directions violently. Beagle had turned into the wind suddenly, causing the ship to level out, while the sails were luffing in the now heavy and building wind.

  John was out his cabin door in a flash and into the chart room when he heard a scream from the students’ quarters. Rather than running up the stairs to the helm, he ran forward toward the screams.

  John found Lubanzi with a terrified look on his face, holding a shaking Monica to his chest.

  “Lubanzi what is it? What’s wrong?” John asked.

  Lubanzi pointed toward Jennifer’s cabin. John pushed past Lubanzi and Monica and into Jennifer’s cabin. He stopped short.

  Jenifer’s bunk curtain was pulled back. Her head was listing in an awful direction. Jennifer’s eyes were blood red, open and unseeing. A rope was wrapped neatly around her throat with a perfect bowline loop. The same loop John had taught the students during marlinespike class yesterday.

  The rope looked thick around Jennifer’s fragile neck. Her delicate skin now possessed a red hue where the rope had bit deeply. Whoever had pulled on the rope had pulled very, very hard.

  Even though he knew it was pointless, John checked Jennifer for a pulse. She was still warm. He had no idea what that meant regarding her time of death. John closed the curtain on her bunk. He grabbed Lubanzi who still hadn’t moved.

  “Snap out of it Lubanzi!” Lubanzi looked up. “I need you to get a notepad right now, and go to every bunk on this ship, and find out who is still asleep. Tell me who is on watch. Do it now and come back.”

  John turned back to Monica.

  “Monica, I need you to come with me.”

  She complied while trying to stifle her sobs as John led her to his cabin. Once she was locked inside, he rushed up to the helm station. Beagle was still flogging her sails head to wind. Smith was on the helm and doing nothing about it.

  “What are you doing, Smith?” John asked.

  “I heard a scream, I thought, wait, is everything all right?”

  “No, it isn’t. You are on watch; the ship is your priority, and you are tearing our sails to pieces. Fall off, get us back on course. If you shred our sails our problems will increase. Do it now!”

  “But.”

  “Now!”

  Smith turned the helm and filled the sails once more. The Beagle began its list to port again when John realized with horror that Jennifer’s body was on the starboard side-- the high side.

  He ran back downstairs to her cabin, just in time to catch her body as it was rolling out of the bunk onto the floor. He picked her up gently and laid her back inside her bunk. John grabbed the body strap the students used to keep themselves in their bunks at night, and fastened it around her body to hold her in place.

  Lubanzi came back to Jennifer’s cabin with the list.

  “Is that everybody?” John asked, taking the list.

  “It’s where everybody is right now. Who’s still asleep and who’s awake.”

  John grabbed the notepad out of Lubanzi’s hand. He used his other hand to pull the ship's General Alarm.

  Chapter 37

  The entire ship came alive. Although Monica’s scream could be drowned out by the ship’s natural noises, there was no disobeying the ship's General alarm. One hundred and twenty decibels of ringing was impossible to ignore.

  Groggy kids woke from their bunks, donned their big orange lifejackets, and made their way toward the emergency escape hatches and onto the deck of the ship.

  Bill and Charlie woke as well and formed in the chart room.

  “Charlie, I need you to keep everyone on deck until I get there,” John said.

  “What’s going on?” asked Bill.

  “I'll tell you in a minute, but I need to call shore first. Keep the kids on deck.”

  Charlie and Bill started moving the kids toward the companionway. John opened the door to his cabin and saw Monica sitting on his bunk, still shaking.

  “Monica, listen to me. I need you to stay here. Don’t worry about the drill. Stay here.”

  Monica stayed seated. John climbed the stairs and spoke to Smith on the helm.

  “Do the count off, then have them sit down. Monica and Jennifer are excused.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “For once stop second-guessing me. Do it!”

  Smith capitulated. “All right guys let’s start the count off,” she said to the assembled kids on deck.

  John went below to the chart room and reached for the satellite phone. He yanked his hand back from the phone, his palm badly burned. The Sat phone screen was melted. John could feel his heart rate spike.

  He turned to the SSB, the single sideband radio. It was a long-range radio capable of communicating with shore from thousands of miles away and could be used to radio their situation to the authorities. He found the screen blackened with burn marks as well.

  With increasing horror John turned toward his Loran C and found that it too was fried. Something had surged the electrical power and destroyed his entire communications panel.

  John dropped below and ripped open the engine room hatch. The engine room was silent. It made no sense because the generator was always on at this time of night to recharge the ship's battery bank. He touched the generator; it was still warm. Its alarm panel blinked red indicating that the generator had auto shut down after an electrical short circuit.

  John looked at the electrical panel for the communications equipment. Someone had rigged a plug to the generator's 220-volt outlet and ran it directly into the 12-volt communication equipment breaker. The result was catastrophic. The wires of each piece of equipment were fused to their circuit boards. It was a miracle a fire hadn’t started as a result.

  John realized that Beagle was now cut off from the outside world. Someone had sabotaged their only communications. He had a dead body on board. They were four days from reaching shore. And someone on board was a killer.

  Chapter 38

  In the chart room John met Lubanzi.

  “Since you already know the situation, take the helm from Smith and send Bill and Charlie below too. Keep the students on deck until I get there,” John said.

  Lubanzi relieved Smith, who came down from the helm and joined Bill, Charlie and John in the chart room. John couldn’t think of a way to cushion the blow of Jennifer’s death, so he just blurted it out, “Jennifer is dead.”

  Smith gasped and put her hand over her mouth, shaking her head. Charlie looked like he’d seen a ghost.

  “What? That can’t be!” Smith shouted.

  “Dammit Smith, keep your voice down. It gets much worse. She was murdered.”

  Bill stumbled back, his hand grabbing out at the chart table for support. Smith stood stock still, barely moving now.

  “What do you mean?” Smith asked, not fully comprehending the information.

  “Someone went into her cabin and put a rope over her neck. I know you have questions but what we don’t need is those kids upstairs hearing it. We have to tell them she died--that’s it. The last thing they need to know is that someone on this ship is a murderer.”

  “Oh my god. Oh my god! We have to turn around and head back to St. Helena. I have to call the school!” Smith turned toward the phone.

  “That’s the other bad news. The communication e
quipment on this ship has been sabotaged. We have no means of contacting shore at the moment.”

  “What?” Bill asked as Smith ran to the burnt-out satellite phone.

  “It all worked for midnight weather downloads. Then someone fried it between midnight and now.”

  “Could it have been a short circuit?” Bill asked.

  “No. I found the cord they used. They loaded the 220 Volt generator output into the 12-volt panel.”

  “Wait, what communications equipment do we have left?” Charlie asked.

  “Everything in the chart room communications circuit is gone. That’s the Loran C, Sat Phone, as well as the SSB and the AIS. The radar is luckily on its own circuit, so we still have that. Thankfully, the VHF radio and GPS receiver on the helm is on a separate system. Since someone is always on watch, they couldn’t disable that. But that VHF is line of sight. We’d have to get within say 5-10 miles of somebody to get word off. We still got the chart plotter on the helm too.”

  “The EPIRB?” Smith asked.

  The EPIRB stood for Emergency Position Indicating Radio beacon. It used a satellite uplink to give position reports on a ship in distress. It would signal shore that something was wrong, but it didn’t allow for any actual two-way communications.

  “Charlie, when I talk to the students, I want you to go get the EPIRB from its case and bring it to my cabin. I was very specific to the students about what the EPIRB does before we left Cape Town and if any of the students sees us grabbing it, they will know something is wrong and will panic. So, grab it without them seeing.”

  “This is a nightmare! We have to go back to St. Helena, we have to!” Smith shouted.

  “Smith, listen to me, we can’t go back. That storm is now between us and St. Helena. We could beat into it for a week and get nowhere. You know that. Or we can continue to surf in front of it and get to Brazil in a few more days. Plus, there is no police force we can count on to investigate this on St. Helena.”