Regan, simply thrilled to see him again, shook her head, rainwater streaming down her face. “I haven’t had this much fun,” she shouted, “since I totaled my second Jaguar!”
The sea smacked the starboard topside abaft the main chain plates, lifted a human’s height above the combing, and crashed onto the house. As water coursed over the companionway hatch and into the cockpit, Regan freed the winch handle from the port-side winch. “Ready about?”
“Wait! Switch sides!”
They did so. Regan took the winch handle, sat to starboard, and disentangled the new sheet from the lines on the cockpit sole.
“Take the helm!” Ron shouted, and she did so. He clipped to the genoa track and crawled forward to the conjoined jury rig. “Ready about!”
“Helm’s alee!” Keeping an eye on the little Turk’s head rove onto the rim of the helm, which marked its centerline, Regan rolled the wheel fifty degrees to starboard.
Boy Toy responded immediately and turned her bow through the eye of the wind. The mizzen boom clanged over. The jib backed with a smack.
Ron hacked the port sheet forward of the klemheist knot and the working end shot ahead, into the darkness. “Jib’s away!”
Regan hauled the slack of the starboard sheet till she met some resistance, took three turns about the winch, belayed the after end of the rope under the away horn of the cleat, and inserted the winch handle. Ron appeared in the cockpit to center the helm. Cranking the winch, she made fast.
“Okay,” Ron shouted, “close-hauled on port! Good job! Sit to the high side!”
As Regan sat to port and took the helm, Captain Ron unhanked the second length of line, threw in a stopper knot, took a deep breath, and clambered to the port side. “Steady as she goes, boss.”
“Aye aye, captain.” Ron disappeared up the port side of the vessel, now the high and windward side, clipping and reaving and crawling and holding on and achieving weightlessness as he went.
Regan fed the new line into the block on the after car. Ron reappeared in the lurid red of the port running light, crawled across the foredeck, into the glare of the green starboard light, then hauled himself up the shrouds, his seaboots braced against one corner of the house and the lower turnbuckles, in and out of water up to his knees, one hand lifting a knife into the night. This point of sail was much like the previous one, rough and wet. Boy Toy pitched through waves and swells, bucking both wind and tide. A wave smacked the port topside and lifted perhaps ten feet above the deck, its underside rendered as ruby as the throat of a giant trout, before neatly dividing itself about the shrouds and collapsing across the foredeck, seething along the decks and the roof of the house with the sound of big surf eagerly coming ashore.
Athwart the helm, feet planted wide, Regan’s other boot filled with seawater. Above all the noise she couldn’t hear Ron grunt as he crawled back along the port side of the house in the dark, clipping, holding on, unclipping, as he came one or two feet at a time. Arriving at the cockpit, he clipped to the turnbuckle at the foot of the forward mizzen shroud and rolled over the port combing onto locker, streaming brine.
“I’m blowed,” he croaked, scrubbing the palm of a sopping glove over his glistening face. “Son of a bitch.” He pushed himself into a sitting position and took the helm with one hand and the mizzen sheet with the other. “Ready to fall off?”
Regan freed the working sheet, leaving the standing part captured under the away horn of the cleat. “Ready!”
Choosing his moment, Ron eased the helm to leeward as they both eased sheets. It felt as if Boy Toy were pivoting about her righting moment, and soon enough, she was creaming along on a broad reach, making for the green and red lights that mark the entrance to Raccoon Strait, with rain, wind, and tide at her back.
Ron belayed the mizzen sheet and sagged against the port shrouds, one foot working a spoke of the wheel, breathing heavily. “Time for a whiskey, boss.”
Without a word, Regan slid back the hatch and dropped below, to quickly reappear bearing two glasses half filled with whiskey. She stood on the companionway steps, and they touched glasses.
“Cheated death again,” Ron said, as he downed half his drink. Adding, “More or less,” he quickly finished the other half.
Regan watched him without tasting her own drink. “Hey.”
“Hey what?”
“What happened to your eye?”
Ron flattened the fingers of his free hand over his left eye, then looked at them with his right eye. Regan waited. Ron made a correction to the helm with his foot.
“That parted sheet was whipping around like a snake on amphetamines. I could hear it but I couldn’t see it. As I climbed up the shrouds I figured I’d keep my back to the wind, plus or minus the odd ton of brine boarding the vessel. I was just getting the blade inside the loop when goddamn if the bitter end didn’t come from dead aft and pop me in the eye like it was born to the task.” Ron circled his empty glass. “What are the chances?”
Regan frowned. “Wait a minute. You were cutting away the parted sheet? Are you telling me this happened on your first trip forward?”
“Correct.” Ron angled his good eye. “You gonna use that drink?”
They traded glasses.
Ron downed his second drink at one go. “You’d think it would help a little,” he scolded the empty.
“Can you see out of it?”
“No.”
“Let me—”
Ron peered forward.
“Hey.” She touched his cheek.
Ron turned to face her. “The lens is gone,” he said. “Not that I’m an expert.”
A band of rain swept the boat, southwest to northeast, blown horizontal by the wind. Regan looked north past Ron and toward the lights of Sausalito. She looked south toward the lights of San Francisco. Far to the east, obscured as they were by a vast density of airborne water, she could barely see the lights of Berkeley. Making landfall in the present conditions was out of the question. However they worked it, they were hours if not an entire day from any sort of medical attention.
“What are we going to do?”
Captain Ron shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Goddammit,” she said softly.
“One eye for the boat,” he said, “one eye for me.”
An hour later they dropped the hook in the quiet shelter of Paradise Cove. Fourteen hours after that, just after sunset, Boy Toy tied up in the Berkeley Marina. A month later, Boy Toy was rechristened as Sedna, an Inuit goddess of the sea. Not quite one year after the events related here, Sedna headed out the Golden Gate and took a left. Less than a day later, a big winter storm roared down the coast.
Neither the ship nor her crew was seen again in Berkeley.
Part III
Company Town
The Law of Local Karma
by Susan Dunlap
Gourmet Ghetto
When Sergeant Endo Maduri talked about the case later he’d start off, “That was the last time Shelby and I rode together.” It made the guys on the force uncomfortable, but Maduri didn’t care.
“Where’d you nab him?” Maduri had asked Callahan that night.
The patrol officer had the suspect on the ground. She jutted her chin toward Walnut Square. “On the walkway.”
Maduri raised an eyebrow. The original Peet’s Coffee and Tea sat at the corner of Walnut and Vine. The walkway looped behind it. “He the perp?”
“Witness said perp was in a brown hoodie, mahogany color.” She eyed the suspect’s puffy black jacket. “Close enough in this light?”