She was screaming at Lanny to help, to grab hold of her outstretched hand before the catch was winched out of the water behind him, before that lift overloaded the boat, before they got flooded again.
He reached.
She managed to yank him aboard and slide him onto the deck and she left him floundering there and rushed to the lever and put the gear back into free-wheeling to unroll the net and let the catch go.
They were shivering. Shuddering.
She had helped Lanny strip off his wet clothes and grabbed his wetsuit from the foredeck locker and wrestled him into the heavy neoprene. Her own pants were wet below the knees and clung to her icy skin.
She tried the engine again, and again it refused to catch.
She took out her cell and phoned for help.
Then she turned to her brother and hugged him. He hugged her back. The two of them shivered together, hugging for warmth.
CHAPTER 38
The Sea Spray came out of the fog and pulled up alongside the Outcast.
Sandy used the boat hook to grab lines from her boat and then secured the lines to cleats on the Outcast. For the first time this morning she was glad of the weather. Fog meant calm seas. The two boats now rode the water side by side, bumping fenders. They were both simpleton boats, both small and low to the water although the Sea Spray was lower.
Close enough.
Lanny passed his dive gear across to the Sea Spray.
Jake caught it, with a grin.
Jake already had the safety ladder out of the emergency locker. He was a Keasling, he knew what to do. He opened the bag and unrolled the flexible ladder and tossed the bottom across to Sandy and they each secured their ends to cleats. It made for a shaky bridge. Didn't matter. They were all Keaslings. First Lanny and then Sandy crept the short distance across the ladder bridge and stepped onto the Sea Spray deck. It broke her heart to unlatch the ladder and lines from her boat and toss them into the water. That gear cost money.
Freed then, the Sea Spray drifted off from the Outcast.
Donie's boat was too big to tow without stressing her boat and she was not going to allow Lanny one more shot at ruining her livelihood. Lanny swore he would come back and reclaim his boat. She said, “Leave it for the Coast Guard.”
They were both shivering too hard to argue.
Jake had brought blankets and even a thermos of hot cider and Sandy considered complaining about the time Jake had taken to heat the cider before he drove to the dock and got her boat going, but the drink went down like warm honey.
When she had drunk her fill she said, “Start the damn engine.” As far as she was concerned they couldn't get away fast enough, away from Robbie Donie's doomed tub, away from that net full of abominations. It was already out of sight, sunk, but she had an unreasonable fear of her boat's propeller getting tangled in that god-awful net.
She hated to admit it but she was too shaky to take the wheel herself.
Jake saluted and said, “Where to?”
“Home,” she said.
Now, Lanny argued. He had something more to do, another thing to fix.
She hissed, “Haven't you done enough? Those things.”
He said, voice rising, “They're all here now, in the net, there's none left where we need to go,” and he started in again about the sea bed and canyons and currents and his wonderful tracker with its satellite brain and then Jake got interested and Lanny told his brother about their adventure, and about his mission, and about how he needed to fix what he'd broken.
Jake turned to Sandy. “What's wrong with that?”
All the fight went out of her. Eh, there hadn't been much fight left, after what she'd been through. She was cold. She was tired. And as she watched Jake saunter into the wheelhouse and take her captain's chair, she noticed how wiry and strong her brother was. If it came to a wrestling match, she'd lose.
Jake started the engine and the Sea Spray lurched forward under its acting-captain's hand. Lanny the deckhand stood beside his brother, navigating.
Strange days, Sandy thought.
She got a peek at the chartplotter and saw that they were heading for Cochrane Bank. What's there, she wondered — that needs fixing? Hell, whatever was there could not be any worse than what they'd found here.
She gave a glance back at the abandoned Outcast dead in the water, the wet Sea Urchin flag still hanging from the rail.
Lanny saw her looking. He gave her his big I'm-sorry smile and then he shouted “Sea Urchins forever!” as her boat plowed through the foggy water.
Strange, she thought, the three Keaslings together again at sea.
Jake raised his hand and shook his wrist, fingers splayed.
She might have made the Sea Urchin high sign herself, just out of habit if nothing else, but when Jake raised his arm his jacket shifted and she saw the gun tucked into his pocket.
She pretended she hadn't seen, and Jake pretended he hadn't meant her to see. She told herself he was doing what he'd said he'd do, back in the Keasling game room when he gave her guff about poisoned pizza and showed her their father's gun hidden in the Checkers box. He was keeping it for protection.
Still, the gun had a power of its own. It gave its owner a lot of elbow room.
It gave her call to watch her step around her brother.
In the end she couldn't stay out of her wheelhouse. She crowded in beside Lanny, watching over Jake's shoulder as they neared Lanny's destination.
She was the first to point to the radar screen.
She said, “We got company.”
CHAPTER 39
Something dove into the sea.
I chanced to look up and saw its wake.
The diver left a sheath of deformed water just below the surface, just outside the algal bloom where the foggy day's light illuminated the sea — on a dive path down toward our reef.
I hoped it was a diving sea lion.
I aimed my torch light across the reef but the reef stretched far and my light did not.
I did a quick scan of the dusky world of Target Red: our reef atop the canyon rim, and then the bowl-like chasm, and then the opposite canyon rim, and then back behind us, the ridge with the tunnel that led to Target Blue. And then, to be thorough, I looked once again where I'd seen the diver's wake.
Nothing.
The diver had disappeared into the ghostly kelp forest at the far edge of our reef.
We hadn't been expecting company — who's up and on the water and diving here at this ungodly hour?
Other than us.
After my bouquet breakthrough, Walter and Tolliver and I had hastily assembled at the police dock at the harbor. There were few people out and about and there were no other boats heading to sea when we left. We'd had an uneventful ride through the fog out to Cochrane Bank.
Tolliver had anchored the Breaker at the edge of the bloom and we'd suited up with extra large tanks and made our descent angling down to the reef, to Oscar Flynn's instrumentation cage. We had air enough to do a thorough search and time enough to get back to harbor for Tolliver's ten o'clock with Flynn. Should we find what we sought, Tolliver would have something more than paperwork to discuss.
We'd scoured the instrumentation cage and the surrounding rock walls for red paint. I found a trace on the underside of the temperature gauge, something I hadn't noticed last time. Sometimes you have to look again — and know what you're looking for.