Blackwater Sound

by James W. Hall

  “You have business here, sir?”

  “What do they manufacture?”

  The blank look on her face got blanker.

  “None of the news articles say. Government contractor, that’s the phrase. What’s that mean? Is that defense work? Military? Top-secret gizmos? What?”

  She took a step back from the car. Her eyes were working. She was going over procedures in her head, making decisions about how to proceed. Memorizing his face, the car. On a better day Thorn might have trotted out the charm, tried to win her over, seduce a fact or two. But today he was shit out of charm. It was all he could do to press the accelerator, turn the wheel. Hold one thought for more than a few seconds.

  Thorn put the VW in reverse and backed slowly out of the short drive.

  The security guard stood in front of the steel barricade with her legs spread, right hand close to her holster. Annie Oakley about to shoot the hearts out of silver dollars flung high into the air.

  Thorn took the turnpike south.

  He hit rush hour in Miami. Fifty miles of raging incivility.

  “Did he give you his name?”

  Morgan Braswell was looking at her computer screen, the freeze-frame of the surveillance tape from the front gate. The man from last night at the crash site, the big hero who’d pulled thirty, forty people from the water. Lanky, blue-eyed, tan, tousled sandy hair.

  “No, ma’am. He didn’t say his name.”

  “But he mentioned me? By name.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Morgan ran her tongue along her upper lip. She leaned back in the leather chair. Behind her desk was a large window that looked down into the testing lab. A quiet, sterile space where dozens of men and women in white lab coats spent their days peering into computers, monitoring the sintering furnaces that were located behind layers of tempered steel in a distant section of the plant.

  “Did you get a license number?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m running it through DMV. But there might be a problem. It looked like it was an expired tag.”

  Johnny was standing at the window looking down into the lab. It was empty now. Everyone gone home for the day.

  Johnny wore navy blue shorts and a white polo shirt with their boat name embroidered on the left breast. His long hair was clenched back in a ponytail.

  “He probably wanted a date,” said Johnny. “A little cootchie-coo.”

  “Joyce,” Morgan said.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Print out the best frames of that video. His face from the front, profile. As many angles as you can get. Enhance them, sharpen the focus.”

  Joyce nodded.

  “The pictures and whatever you get from DMV on my desk in the morning.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “He was a smart-ass,” Johnny said. “He said he saw three of us on the boat. You, me, and a guy in a cowboy hat. I should’ve iced him right then. Filled him full of daylight.”

  Morgan swiveled her chair around and looked at her brother.

  “Joyce,” she said, keeping her eyes on Johnny until he finally turned and read her expression, then quickly looked away. “You can go now. But I want those items first thing.”

  When Joyce shut the door, Morgan said, “Johnny?”

  He was staring down at the test lab and wouldn’t look at her.

  “Johnny?”

  He swallowed and stepped back.

  “Come over here, Johnny.”

  He shook his head, mouth clenched, eyes dodging hers. A four-year-old doing his willful routine. Her tone was delicate, coaxing.

  “I just want to talk to you, Johnny, that’s all.”

  He tipped his head back and looked at the ceiling as if conferring with his personal savior.

  “Johnny.”

  He blinked, then stepped over to the side of her desk, bowing his head.

  “Look at me, Johnny. Lift your head and look at me.”

  He drew a breath and met her eyes.

  “What did you do wrong just now?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Yes, you do, Johnny. You know what you did.”

  “I spoke out of turn.” His eyes were half-shut. Shoulders slumped.

  “That’s right. You spoke out of turn. You made a threatening remark in front of one of our security officers. You mentioned a man in a cowboy hat.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Is anyone supposed to know about Roy besides you and me?”

  Johnny shook his head.

  “Is even Dad supposed to know? Or Jeb Shine?”

  “No. Roy’s a secret. Just between us.”

  “So why did you do that, Johnny?”

  He took a breath and his hand went into his pocket.

  “You need to think, Johnny. You have to organize your thoughts, deliberate before you say or do things.”

  “I’m too reckless,” he said. “I have low impulse control.”

  “Johnny, listen to me. You’re a fine brother. I’m proud of you. You’ve been a great help to me lately. But we’re at a crucial juncture. No rashness allowed. Self-discipline, restraint. We have to be very careful, Johnny. Very very careful with everything we say or do.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I let you down.”

  He drew the knife out of his pocket and opened it. His mouth was crimped. He blinked his damp eyes.

  “No, Johnny, wait. You don’t need to do that.”

  Morgan stood up, came quickly around her desk. But he’d already peeled the bandage off the thumb of his left hand. The cap of his thumb was scabbed over.

  Morgan made a grab for his hand, but Johnny swung his back to her.

  He hunched over and pressed the blade against the tip of his thumb. He gritted his teeth, then clamped his eyes and balled his hand into a fist. With a low growl, he shaved off the scab and a layer of bloody flesh beneath it. Blood washed down his hand.

  Morgan groaned and looked away. She took a full breath, then snatched up a wad of tissues from her desk and took hold of his hand, pressing the tissues to the wound.

  “It hurts,” he said.

  “I know, I know.” Morgan put her arm around his shoulder. “I wish you wouldn’t do these things, Johnny. It’s not necessary. Really, it’s not.”

  “I need negative reinforcement,” he said. “That’s the only way I’m ever going to learn.”

  She kept her arm around his shoulder until he stopped trembling. When he grew still, she gripped his chin and turned his face to hers. She leaned close and kissed both his teary eyes, then smoothed a hand across his cheek and stepped back.

  “Now you’re better. Aren’t you? The pain is all gone.”

  He looked at her and nodded.

  “Some of it.”

  “I want you to stay here,” she said. “Pull yourself together. I’ll be back in a minute and we’ll go home. You can choose what you want for dinner. Burger King, pizza, anything you want, Johnny.”

  As Morgan approached her father’s office, Jeb Shine stepped from his doorway and peered at her over the frames of his reading glasses. He was a tall, hump-shouldered man. Bald, with a half-assed ponytail he plaited together from his stringy fringe hair. He was wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt printed with yellow hula girls and pink flamingoes. His khaki shorts were rumpled and he wore his usual pair of rubber sandals. Same age as her father, but dressed like a college kid on perpetual spring break.

  “Got a minute, Morgan?”

  “Not really.”

  “It’s important. Quite important.” He stepped aside, bowed at the waist, and motioned her into his office. But she held her place in the hallway.

  “If it’s about payroll,” she said, “we don’t need to cover that again. Just find another creative solution, stretch us out a little longer. A week, ten days, that’s all we need. Things’ll be fine.”

  “I’m fresh out of creative solutions, Morgan. There isn’t a bank left in South Florida that hasn’t turned us down. We’ve depleted
our rainy-day fund. We’re a dime away from being flat broke. Short of a bag of money showing up on my desk by next Friday, all the payroll checks are going to bounce.”

  “One week, Jeb. That’s all I need. Seven days. You’ll see. I have a deal working.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Jeb. Have I let you down yet?”

  He looked at her for several moments. When he spoke, his voice was as gloomy as the haze in his eyes.

  “It’s more than the payroll, Morgan. And I think you know that.”

  He walked over to his desk and pushed aside a pile of folders and took a perch. His thick, white, hairless legs dangling. Despite his island-boy clothes, Jeb was as pasty as a hibernating mole.

  “On top of everything else the spark plasma furnace went down again.”

  She sighed and came into his office and shut the door behind her. Lately, Jeb had developed a nodding habit, as if he were constantly consulting some inner voice. He nodded now as he stared down at the weave of the carpet.

  “It was working fine, DC voltage pulses steady. We were getting excellent results. Better than the liquid phase sintering oven, all that microgravity stuff. This is much better. Good deflection temperatures, dimensional tolerance, the tensile elongation modules all running fine. Ran perfectly for the last few weeks, no sign of anything wrong. Then suddenly it shut down. We’re trying to track down the problem now. Should have it back on-line by morning.”

  “And that’s what you wanted to tell me.”

  He looked up at her and nodded to himself.

  “You know, Morgan, I was never much of an accountant. This CFO thing, it’s always been a joke. Me and A. J. were just a couple of tech guys, lab rats. We didn’t give a shit about money. Only reason I got stuck taking care of the books was because A. J. was so damn bad at it. But it’s never been something I relished.”

  She kept her tone relaxed, working up a little smile.

  “But you do it so well, Jeb.”

  He scratched at his bare knee, avoiding her eyes.

  “So today, I was going over the quarterlies, looking for expenses to trim, some way to get beyond this crisis.” He nodded at the far wall. “It’s been a while since I took a good look at the books. I’ve been a little lax, letting you and the real accountants run the show. I’ve been so involved with setting up the new furnaces.”

  “Is there a point here, Jeb? I’m really very tired.”

  Jeb closed his eyes and nodded gravely.

  “I found an item I couldn’t explain, Morgan. A distressingly large item tucked away in the fine print.”

  She felt the air harden in her lungs.

  “What exactly is a TP3 hybrid fuel cell, Morgan? Could you explain that to me? Could you tell why in the last six months we’ve devoted almost half a million dollars of research and development money to a battery?”

  He lifted his eyes and settled his gaze on hers. The nodding had ceased.

  “Are we in the battery business, Morgan? Because if we are, I think somebody should explain why that is.”

  “We’re not in the battery business, Jeb.”

  His eyes drifted up, holding onto a spot a few inches above her head.

  “Well, maybe we should be. I tracked down the specs, looked over the tests you’ve been running on this TP3. I must say, Morgan, it’s got a very impressive performance history. Packs one hell of a wallop.”

  Morgan strained to keep the smile on her lips.

  “I’m going home now, Jeb. If there’s anything else, it can wait till tomorrow.”

  “So, if we’re not going to manufacture these batteries, why’re we doing all this fuel cell R and D, at a time when our resources are strained to the limit? You mind telling me?”

  “Good night Jeb.”

  “Is this another one of Andy’s ideas? Something else you found in his notebooks?”

  Morgan felt the smile die on her lips. She drew a calming breath.

  “No, it’s not Andy’s idea. It’s mine. All mine. Is that so hard to believe? That I would have an idea once in a while.”

  “Nothing personal, Morgan, but it’s been my observation that your strength lies in marketing products, not creating them.”

  She turned to go but Jeb Shine slid off his desk, angled in front of her, and blocked her way.

  She kept her tone relaxed.

  “Maybe it’s time you started thinking about retirement, Jeb. Take up golf, shuffleboard. Maybe a nice long cruise around Polynesia. You’ve served your time in the salt mines. What you need to do is kick back a little, take a few deep breaths, you know, before it’s too late.”

  He squinted at her.

  “Too late?”

  She reached out and touched the point of her fingernail to one of the hula girls on the belly of his shirt.

  “Good night, Jeb. We’ll talk again soon, I promise.”

  When she opened the door to his office, her dad was at his desk staring into his computer screen. He wore a green polo shirt and a pair of khakis, leather sandals. Gray was creeping into his sandy hair, but otherwise he was still trim and youthful. His office walls were bare except for a single photograph that hung across from his desk. Andy and A. J. stood by a seven-hundred-pound blue on the docks in Venezuela, her dad with his arm over Andy’s shoulder. A golden light suffusing the sky behind them. Eleven years ago, back when beautiful sunsets were still possible.

  On her dad’s computer screen she saw the wavy blue lines, the circles and swirls of a tidal chart.

  A. J. was running the program he’d written that attempted to plot the movements of Big Mother. Using her last known position, two hundred miles southeast of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, he was computing the effects of tidal shifts on her migratory pattern.

  Her last appearance on the global positioning satellite was on April fifteenth of the previous year. So the computer program had to sift through a year’s worth of data to make its current calculation. Tidal shifts were only one of dozens of variables influencing her direction. The ever-changing temperature variants, the snaky course changes of the Gulf Stream and the dozen other tidal currents, the effects of storms, lunar cycles, even the presence of a fishing fleet in a particular zone had to be factored in. And, of course, there were forces he had no way of reckoning. It was, as Morgan had known from the start, a hopeless enterprise. A futile task that nevertheless consumed most of his waking hours. And she was fairly certain it consumed most of the others as well.

  “Where is she, Dad?”

  “Still off the Abacos. South and east. Thirty, forty miles. I’m beginning to think it’s her mating grounds.”

  He continued to click his mouse, adding data, correcting.

  “It’s time to move the boat,” he said. “Marsh Harbor, that’s our best bet. Only a few days before the pod switches on. We have to be ready.”

  “I know, Dad. Only a few more days.”

  “This is the year, Morgan. This is the year we nail her.”

  “Yeah, Dad. This is the year.”

  But she didn’t believe it. No matter how sophisticated his program was, it just wasn’t possible to calculate exactly where the fish would surface next. Too many variables, too much chance. Marlin were the least understood fish in the ocean. They’d never been raised in captivity, never studied up close. Placed in an aquarium at any age, they died in hours. Even the top scientists with the national marine fisheries who spent their careers investigating marlin had been unable to track their migration patterns or understand something as basic as their spawning habits. They were loners, these fish. Mysterious and baffling. Otherworldly.

  Big Mother might reappear anywhere on the globe. No way to be sure. Math couldn’t do it. Black magic wouldn’t either. For all they knew, the transmitter might have broken loose this year somewhere in the marlin’s travels. Or the fish might have died since last year’s ping—caught by a long-liner, or maybe attacked by its only enemy in the ocean, a great white.

 
In the weeks following Andy’s death, Morgan and her dad had created a duplicate pod, programmed identically, so they’d have an idea of the life span of the pod hooked to Big Mother. The duplicate hung on the wall across from A.J.’s desk, its battery still chugging. Morgan’s calculations said it had a ten-year life, but there was no way to predict such a thing with total accuracy. So far, so good. Each spring for the last nine years, the duplicate unit came alive right on schedule and beeped steadily for seven days.

  “I’m going home, Dad. I’ll pick up something for supper.”

  “I’ll be along in a while.”

  “All right.”

  “Tell Johnny he needs to get his gear together. Tomorrow we’re heading to Abaco. We have to be close by when she surfaces.”

  “All right, Dad.”

  “And you’re coming, right? To Marsh Harbor?”

  “I don’t know. There’s a lot of work around here.”

  He let go of the mouse and swiveled his chair around to face her.

  “This could be our last shot,” he said. “That battery’s about to give out. It’s now or never, Morgan.”

  “It’s a busy time, Dad. A lot of things around here need my attention.”

  He reached out and took her hand in his. His palm was roughened from boat work and fishing, the hand of a laborer.

  “Family, Morgan. It’s more important than business.”

  “Is it, Dad?”

  His dark eyes took her in and he gave her a quick boyish smile. The smile her mother must have fallen in love with. This man who had once been so easy and fun-loving, brimming with dreams and self-confidence. Nothing like the dark set of his mouth that dominated his appearance these last few years as his attention to the world dwindled to a fine point. Until all his energy, all his time and intelligence was focused on that one thing, a blue marlin swimming somewhere in the oceans of the world. Big Mother.

  “Family,” he said, a brief light filling his smile. “It’s everything, Morgan. The whole ball of wax.”

  She nodded and said okay, yes, she would go along this one last time.

  “Good. Maybe you’ll be like your mother. She always brought us luck.”

  “Yeah,” Morgan said. “A lot of luck.”

  “It wouldn’t be right if you weren’t there.”