That's what had changed.
That's what made Sandy Keasling a passenger.
She would bide her time.
Meanwhile, she cast a buyer's eye over the vessel. Not that she was planning on financing Lanny's folly — she just couldn't help assessing. The tub showed its age but at least it was operable. She moved to the cabin doorway and examined the afterdeck. The wooden decking was still stained with squid ink. She'd heard about that but this was the first she'd seen it. Sure looked like somebody had hauled a Humboldt aboard. She shook her head. The whole damn deck would need scraping, sanding, re-coating. She moved to look at the anchovy setup. The small drum mounted amid-deck had a net rolled on it, and the winch seemed to have all its parts, and that was just about that. Robbie Donie was a small-time bait fisher making do. No wonder he'd had a go at squid jigging. All in all, the Outcast stank of failure.
And her pathetic brother called himself captain of this tub.
What really got her was the flag tied to the railing, hanging limp and damp in the fog. It was black and red, pirate colors, but instead of the skull and crossbones there was a cartoon in black of a spiky sea urchin with big red eyes.
The Keasling kids flag. They'd had them done at a T-shirt shop. She hadn't known Lanny kept his. She had no idea what happened to hers. She figured Jake had long ago tossed his in the trash.
She knew where she could come up with five thousand. She could cash in a savings bond.
She turned and headed around the cabin to inspect the small foredeck.
There was a pile of dive gear stacked against the cabin wall. For just a moment she thought it must have belonged to Robbie, only why would Robbie have diving gear? And then she saw the name in black marker on the tank: Lancelot Keasling.
She didn't know what made her madder — Lanny bringing dive gear, or seeing that dumb-ass name her father had saddled him with. If she hadn't set Lanny straight as a kid he would have grown up calling himself Lancelot — all the other kids laughing their asses off at her brother. At a Keasling. Every once in a while, though, she found him using it. Like now. Shit. She bet Fred Stavis and his crew had a good laugh, if that was the gear Lanny used on Dive Solutions jobs.
She flushed.
She stomped back to the cabin door and pushed inside. “Why did you bring your dive gear, Lanny?”
He turned. “You're not supposed to ask questions.”
She thought, five thou my ass. She exploded. “The hell I'm not! You steal a boat to go on some secret mission and now I find out it's diving? I don't dive, Lanny. You don't dive alone. You dive with Fred's crew. What the hell are you up to?”
“Nothing that's bad.” He turned his back on her.
She came around beside him and leaned in close. “I'll tell you about bad. My boat got its rub rail dinged up and I don't know how or why. But I did find out who was driving it. Your big brother — the night Robbie disappeared. You know anything about that?”
Lanny ducked his head and stared at his screens. “No.”
“You know what happened to Robbie?”
“No.”
“I call bullshit,” she said. “And here's something else bad, something I know you know about. You stole a red float from that diver we rescued — Joao Silva. The diver who got poisoned. What about that float, Lanny?”
He shook his head.
She thought she was going to scream. “And what about the other float, the yellow float. The one those geologists came asking about on our beach. The one they say Robbie hid.”
Lanny checked some handheld GPS unit and then fiddled with one of the nav screens.
She couldn't get a look at the handheld but she sure recognized the fish finder on the nav screen. She remembered Dad using one to track anchovies, looking for the shadow on the finder that meant a bait ball, back when she gave a shit about finding fish.
She leaned in real close and said, “You tell me what's going on or I call Doug and tell him you stole this boat.”
“Don't.”
She took hold of the wheel. “You're not fit to be a captain. Captains don't lie.”
His mouth hung open. He looked like a gasping fish in a bucket.
She couldn't look at him so she looked at the wheel, their two hands side by side gripping the wheel. She yanked the wheel, hard, and he lost his hold. She snapped, “I'm calling Doug.”
“Don't. If you don't call Doug okay I'll tell you.”
She looked at him now.
He looked a little desperate. “It was a job, with Fred. I messed up.”
“How did you mess up?”
“I broke something.”
“What?”
“Just a… Just a remote controller. Like a TV clicker.”
“That handheld you just checked? The one you put under your shirt?”
“No. I don't have the one I broke.”
“Then what's this handheld for?”
“I'll tell you in five minutes.”
“What happens in five minutes?”
“Maybe a little longer.”
“Damn it Lanny you don't get a little longer — I'm going to call Doug right now.”
“No, don't, okay I'm telling you about the thing I broke. It was a remote and it controlled some switches only that's not what broke the yellow float, that was something else, the yellow float had a bad hook, and I lost it.”
She pressed her fingers to her forehead, where the headache was uncoiling. She dug hard, like she could grab that sea snake and rip it out. Lanny's dodging and weaving was going to kill her someday, just give her a massive stroke.
Lanny said, “Don't be mad.”
“What,” she asked, as calmly as she could manage, “was this job? What kind of switches did your controller control?”
“I can't tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Fred would get mad.”
“Screw Fred. You tell me.”
“I can tell you about the red float, okay?” He put his hand on the wheel again, beside hers. “You wanted to know that. That float came from the job too. I guess it got broken too. When I saw the diver with it… I was afraid, Sandy.”
“Of what? Fred finding out?”
“Jock finding out.”
“Jock?” She rolled her eyes. “You and Jacques Cousteau.”
“He's in heaven. He sees us, when we do bad things to the ocean.”
She went cold. “What bad things did you do?”
He sealed his lips and shook his head.
She put her free hand in her pocket and took out her cell phone.
“Please Sandy. I need to fix it. I need to show you.”
Her heart turned over. And then it hardened. “This thing you broke? This controller? Is this gonna mess me up? Like you messed me up back when you played deckhand on my tug?” She'd been working her dream job at the Port of Los Angeles, the big time for a tugboat master, and Lanny had been living at the hacienda with Jake, and she'd invited Lanny for a visit and Jake had put him on a bus and she would spend the rest of her life regretting that invitation, regretting taking Lanny for a spin on her tugboat, showing off, she'd goddamn showed off for her little brother, and Lanny had fallen in love with her job, and he'd pushed and pushed wanting to learn and she'd given in, just one little lesson, she'd taught him how to throw a line, and he'd 'helped' tying up to a barge and he goddamn screwed up and the line snapped. “The collision with the barge? Cost me my license?”
His face turned red as his beanie. “This won't mess you up.”