Cold Water Burning

by John Straley

  “Everything was working fine until you came on the scene, Cecil. You and George Doggy show up and people start dying. I don’t get it. But you are out now . . . you understand me? You are off this case.” His eyes narrowed and he pulled back the hammer on the gun once more. “I’m going to find Jonathan, and I’m going to take this retard with me. You follow me, or I get wind of you doing anything about me, the money, or Richard Ewers, and I’ll kill your roommate here. Nod your head so I know you under­stand.”

  Todd’s expression didn’t change appreciably. I don’t think he was offended by the term “retard.” I’m not even certain he knew to whom it referred.

  I lifted up my hands to Kevin. “Listen, please. Todd is innocent in this, Kevin. We . . .”

  Kevin lunged forward, jutting the barrel of the gun up under my chin. He pushed it so hard it forced my tongue back into my throat. His voice was a tight vent of steam. “Don’t even say the word ‘innocent.’ Sean is dead. You were snooping around our trailer the day before he got shot. My neighbors saw you. You got their dog barking when you crawled out from under my trailer. I know you know about that gun, Cecil.”

  The barrel of Kevin’s pistol was long enough that I could clearly focus on his hands around the grip as he pressed the gun into my throat. His knuckles were white, his index finger tight around the trigger. I thought I saw the hammer lift from its position. A forty-four slug would push a large chunk of my head onto the back wall of the stairwell, leaving my face a flabby Halloween mask. I cleared my throat.

  “That was Sean’s gun, Kevin. You know that,” I whispered.

  Kevin’s eyes narrowed to black beads. I could smell the stale to­bacco on his breath. “That wasn’t Sean’s gun and you know it. You fucking well know it. Sean was taking that gun to the police. That’s why he was killed. All I need is for you to keep out of it. I just have to get to Jonathan and get back the money and the rest of it.”

  “I have no idea why you think I’m in on this.” I was stammering now, trying to get my mind on some soothing subject, something that would relax the mechanism on the forty-four.

  “I’ll help you, Kevin. Don’t take Todd anywhere. I’ll help you.” I was having a hard time breathing.

  “Like you helped Ewers?” Kevin spat out.

  I could hear every movement in the house, the fan in the heater, the ticking of rain on the tin roof. Jane Marie stepped out of the bathroom and I heard her voice just around the corner. “Cecil . . . ? What the hell is going on?”

  “We’re just working some things out,” I called up to her. “Just wait there, okay? Don’t come down just yet.” I heard the bathroom door shut and the flimsy door lock click again.

  “I don’t need any help from you. I need the money and I need that old cop off my back. It’s just between us, the old cop and me. You have to stay out of this, don’t you see? You have to stay out. You are off the case.” Kevin grabbed Todd by the elbow. “You can come with me. You’ll be fine. We’re going on a boat ride.” He was speaking to Todd, but was looking at the gun.

  Todd took several steps forward. Our rubber boots were piled on the floor and Todd dutifully put on his red rubber boots and then his parka with the attached hood. Then he stood flat-footed and ready to go. He was staring straight into my eyes, looking for reassurance that he was following the rules. Kevin lowered the gun to waist level.

  The bore of a forty-four is so huge that when it’s pointed at you it seems like a weird flashlight that only casts a shadow. I tried to will my body to lunge at Kevin as he opened the door, but I felt the shadow of a gaping hole in my chest.

  Todd stood out in the street. It would not have occurred to him to break and run. He put his hood up to the wind. I could see a piece of newspaper blow past. Kevin waved the gun in my direc­tion before he forced it into an inner pocket of his fisherman’s coat. “You call the cops, I’ll kill him. You follow me, I’ll kill him. I’m serious. I’ve got no family left. I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m going to get all of it back. If I don’t, I’ll just have to kill George Doggy. But you stay out of it. Don’t choose this time to make believe you’re a real detective. People die when you play detective, Cecil.”

  Kevin shut the door and I was left standing alone. Upstairs I heard the bathroom door open tentatively. “Are you all right, Cecil?” Jane Marie’s voice was reed thin.

  “Kevin Sands has taken Todd. He says he’s going to kill him if I follow,” I said, as I slumped down on the stairs.

  “You’re joking.” She stood with Blossom in her arms at the top of the stairs.

  “No. I’m not.” I rested my face on my knees.

  She came charging down the stairs and stepped past me. “If I catch that little shit, he’ll be dead.”

  She was halfway out the door in her robe, still holding Blossom in her arms. I grabbed the hem of her robe.

  “Cecil, we can’t let him take Todd out of here! I have plenty of sympathy for Kevin. But I’m going to rip his heart out for this.”

  The woman I love does not mince words.

  I walked with Jane Marie back upstairs and called Lieutenant Pomfret. The storm was reaching its full peak now. I saw some lightning to the west and powerful gusts of wind pounded against our poor wooden house, rattling the plates in the cabinet and twisting the house’s frame on the pilings, causing ancient dust to sift down from the upstairs floorboards into the living room. No boats were in the channel, which was lathered with whitecaps.

  Pomfret was hard to reach, and I kept getting jockeyed back and forth to the desk officer. I was told Pomfret was in a “task force” meeting, but no one would offer any explanation of what that meant or why he couldn’t take my call. By the time Pomfret did answer, he sounded tired, and he was more polite to me than I was expecting.

  He took all the information about Todd’s kidnapping, from the events of the morning down to the caliber of Kevin’s gun, the threat against Doggy and the direction I thought they might have been headed. Pomfret was alert and his voice showed concern. He also started recording our conversation, which I knew because of his clumsy pause and the plastic rattle of his fumbling for a tape in the background. He interrupted himself several times and spoke to the dispatch sergeant, playing this like the hostage situation it was, but still I had a hard time knowing if he was taking my call seriously or not. He came back to me and took down more background infor­mation about Todd. He needed an exact physical description: age, height, hair color, clothes and such. Then Pomfret asked me if Kevin was alone, which he had been. But the next question stuck in my mind for many hours. A gust was rattling the town and interference blew through the phone’s connection.

  “When was the last time you saw George Doggy?” Pomfret asked. His voice had a forced casualness to it. I told him I couldn’t remember.

  “Do you know where he might be right now?” Tension started to bubble up in the lieutenant’s professional tone.

  “Home, I expect” was all I could offer.

  I heard Pomfret speaking to someone in the background about sending a unit out to Doggy’s address. He was on the radio and was about to come back to me when Jane Marie turned pale and raised her arm toward the window. She looked stricken, and I fol­lowed the trajectory of her slender arm out into the channel, then hung up the phone.

  Kevin Sands’s fishing boat was churning through the channel. It was a Bristol Bay-style bowpicker. He had bought it for long-lining. It was aluminum with a low stern house and two massive engines. It could make twenty-five knots in good weather. I could see Kevin in the wheelhouse with the sliding hatch open to the foredeck. In the bow, pulling in the bag buoys, stood Todd. He was wearing an old-fashioned life preserver bunched around his neck. Back in the wheelhouse, Kevin was gesturing with some­thing shiny in his hand. He was still holding the forty-four-caliber and probably telling Todd exactly how he wanted the buoys se­cured.

  Jane Marie i
mmediately called the Coast Guard. After several heated exchanges and transferring of her call, she was told that the Coast Guard would not intercept Kevin’s vessel. She would need to talk to the Sitka Police or the Alaska State Troopers. There was a container ship and a commercial fishing boat foundering off the coast, and all their helicopters were en route to evacuate the crews. If the boat in question was in danger, they would have been able to get some resources to her, but they were not responding to any law enforcement matters when they had to deal with loss-of-life situations.

  Jane Marie slammed the phone down. In three minutes Kevin would be beyond the breakwater; in ten minutes he would be moving past the sheltering islands; and in fifteen minutes Todd and Kevin Sands would be in the mouth of the biggest storm in recent history.

  The stern of our skiff was swamped and partially shifted off the ramp. Jane Marie laid Blossom in bed and came down to drain the carburetors on the engine. She tied safety lines from the stern on both sides of the steering station toward the bow. There is no house or dodger on this skiff, which makes for a wet ride, but the lack of shelter gave the wind less to push around. She took the canvas tarp down and secured waterproof bags with survival gear in the bow. She drilled wood screws into the hatch where our an­chor was stored, secured it with three screws, and then lashed a lanyard to a cleat. This lanyard secured a crowbar and some bolt cutters in case I needed to gain access to the anchor in a hurry. Jane Marie brought two survival suits and an exposure suit and threw them down to me as I mixed the gas and secured straps around the battery.

  I put on the exposure suit, which is a thick pair of coveralls made of flotation material with an inflatable collar to keep my head up if I went in the water. I would wear this while driving the skiff. The exposure suit would keep me warm for a few minutes in the water, but if I was going to be in for long I would have to crawl into the survival suit, a Gumby-style, loose-fitting wet suit with at­tached mittenlike hands and a tight hood. Water trapped in the roomy survival suit would warm with my body temperature, and I could survive for hours in the forty-five-degree water. Without the suit, I could be dead within thirty minutes.

  Jane Marie secured the survival suit bags on either side of the steering station, so I could pull the suits out of the bags by ripping out the tabs without untying the bags themselves. There was one suit for me and another for Todd if it became necessary. There was no mention of the possibility of a suit for Kevin Sands.

  The preparations took more than half an hour. Our skiff could travel at about the same speed as Kevin’s boat, but hopefully be­cause of its narrower beam and smaller area exposed to the wind, our yellow Mexican skiff would be able to overtake him.

  That is if I could find Kevin’s boat. He was after Jonathan and the Naked Horse, and there was no telling where the Naked Horse could have gone. If Jonathan was staying in his manic high but maintaining at least a semblance of good judgment, I was betting he would have gone straight out past the outer rocks off the coast and then set a course to the west-northwest that would take him out into the Gulf of Alaska. Here, his solid old boat could battle the storm on its own terms, far from the rocky shorelines that would splinter her hull like an antique chest of drawers in the surf. Once outside the bay, he could ride out the storm as long as the Naked Horse remained upright and watertight. The Naked Horse could probably even weather a knock-down or roll-over and main­tain her hull integrity. That is, she would stay afloat with an area for the skipper to keep dry. Even in the worst of it, it was possible for the Naked Horse to float like a coconut. The chances of survival for my skiff were much worse. If the engine kept running, I could stay upright in most of the worst winds. But I could not turn off the en­gine without risking being tumbled down the face of a wave, and once upside down, my open boat would float but would not right itself. Once our Amelia turned turtle in the waves, she would be prey to every breaking wave that rolled on top of her. At least I would have some hours to think about it. This was preferable to what Kevin’s aluminum bowpicker could expect. His vessel was powerful and the engines were reliable, but if compromised by taking on water, she would float upside down for a matter of sec­onds, then go down like a brick.

  All of these things kept running through my mind as I worked on tightening the engine bolts and taping down the latches on the engine cowling. The wind in the channel was strong and there was a short chop streaked white by the wind blowing off the tops of the little waves. The sea just behind our house looked like a dirty ce­ment floor being cleaned with a high-pressure hose.

  I wasn’t feeling particularly optimistic about going to sea when Jane Marie brought down the last of our cold-water sur­vival gear.

  “Here is the emergency locator beacon.” She held up the fist-sized packet with strobe light attached to the top. “I’m going to attach this to the top of your survival suit. If you go in the water, pull this tab and flip the switch. It will send the radio signal out. It will be secured to your suit. Stay with your suit.”

  She paused and studied me carefully. Her eyes were strained with worry. She didn’t want me to go, but that not wanting was at the end of a long line of things she didn’t want to happen. She knew I was going.

  “If you are not back by dark, Cecil, I will get someone looking for you. If you are not back by morning, I will look for you my­self.”

  She kissed me. Then she gripped the scarf around my neck in both of her fists and held me there for a moment. She released me quickly and turned to attach the emergency beacon to my survival suit.

  I loosened the bowline and we shouldered the bow of the boat down the slick log ramp. As the weight of the boat shifted down the ramp, Jane Marie began playing line out on the winch. I held a thermos of honey-sweetened tea in one hand as I teetered down the ramp in the exposure suit. I waded into the water as a gust started to swing the stern back toward the beach. I hopped onto the bow, rowed three short strokes to clear the skiff from the rocks, and started the engine on the first turn of the starter switch.

  “I know you can do this, Cecil. I know you will find him,” Jane Marie called out over a gust rattling down the waterfront. She waved three times, then walked away.

  I listened intently to the outboard motor as I headed out toward the gap in the breakwater. The engine sounded strong and even, no missing or sputtering. I took the rubber plugs out of the stern so the motion of the boat could drain the water out. I also secured a bucket on a line from the stern cleat. The yellow boat twisted and bucked a little in the wind as if she were a young horse who didn’t want to work. I increased the RPMs and she lined out a bit and settled on her course.

  I increased speed and brought the boat on plane just inside the breakwater so we were skimming the surface of the water. As I turned to the west beyond the harbor, the bow was immediately buried in a six-foot wave. Water filled the stern and I gave her more gas, allowing the drainholes to work.

  The wind traced white lines that looked like claw marks across the gray surface of the sea. I found a safe speed and a slightly quar­tering course. This made it a little easier to take the pounding as the skiff blasted over the top of each wave. I stood at the wheel trying to absorb the shock of each drop with my knees. Water began running down the inside front of my suit, puddling at my crotch before running on down to my boots. Both my watchcap and gloves were soaked.

  Beyond the airport, the sea appeared to be an endless gray prairie with rolling hummocks of thatched white waves. A lone merganser jetted past me headed downwind, her short wings pumping furiously to keep altitude. The rocks of both capes to the north and the south broke with acres of white foam. At the crest of each wave the bow of the boat would lift slightly with a brief feeling of weightlessness before crashing down the other side. I could feel the shadow of each wave ease up my back as I sank into the smothering trough.

  From the top of a swell I thought I saw the light of a work-boat off to the west. Just a flicker of some sort of
structure beyond the rocks was all I could make out before the bow shuddered into the wind and crashed down the other side of the wave. I noted the compass bearing and set my course. The boat felt smaller and smaller the farther I went into the storm.

  The waves were two stories high. The sky was a distant ceiling overhead; milky clouds smeared toward the mountains of Baranof Island. At the top of the next swell I saw a flash of light off to the left of my heading. When I tried to correct my course at the top of the wave, I felt the freight train rumble of a gust, and Amelia turned sideways to the wave. I gave her more power and sledded down to the bottom where I buried her again as she clawed her way back on top. Amelia seemed as small as a toboggan, but it was the hills that were moving, sliding over and under me.

  A black curtain of clouds billowed in from the southwestern horizon. Rain hit like pebbles falling from the sky. Now every gray surface was frothing white. The gust knocked hard against the hull of the boat so she groaned over, her rail almost buried. I eased for­ward on the gas, and broke over the crest of the next wave. She slammed down hard on the wave and slid to the bottom, and her bow was buried again. The deck where I was standing was sud­denly awash with water. The skiff didn’t rise as quickly to the next swell. I bailed furiously with my free hand. The rain stung my face like tacks. On the next roll Amelia groaned over to the lee and for an eternity hung on the rail. I pushed myself to the weather rail and reached across to bail where the icy water was gathering in the stern. Just three inches of hull cleared the sea where there should have been fifteen. More gas to the motor lifted her bow and water spilled over the stern.

  Todd would not be liking this storm. I thought of him inside the wheelhouse of the plunging aluminum fishing boat. Todd’s mind could not process this kind of circumstance. He was not particu­larly coordinated, and in his everyday life he was extremely cau­tious. He processed everything in his physical surroundings slowly and deliberately. He walked down the street flat-footed with his gaze directly forward and down, as if he were stalking a small animal in the path ahead of him. He would not register this storm with the kind of fear I was experiencing. The unfamiliarity of it all would cause his brain to short-circuit. He would be entering a state of pure physical seizure. If Kevin’s boat sank, Todd would be found gripping whatever he had been holding on to when he first got in the boat.