“Squab with lettuce,” Tran said, eyeing them. He began to make little cooing noises, and the birds checked the deck for an attractive bird of the opposite sex,
'I’ll fix you a burger," I said.
“Wait,” Eleanor said, fascinated. “Can you actually catch one?”
“Stupid, them,” Tran said. “Sure.”
“Burgers,” I said firmly.
“I want to see,” Eleanor said.
Tran lay down on the edge of the deck and summoned sounds from his throat that sounded like muffled yodels. His shoulder blades stuck up through my shirt. “No moving,” he said to us.
“Still as stones,” Eleanor commanded me.
There were four gulls clustered on the deck now, facing each other as though they were waiting for one of them to come up with an interesting conversational gambit. Tran cooed his little yodels, and the birds gradually drifted in his direction, heads bobbing forward and back with every step. I developed an itch in the middle of my back.
Just as I was about to reach back and scratch, one of the seagulls spread its wings and puffed up its breast, and took another step toward Tran. I didn't even see his arm move, just heard an astonished squawk and a beating of wings as the birds took off. Three of them, anyway. The fourth flapped its wings frantically, its legs imprisoned in Tran's fist.
“Oh, my gosh,” Eleanor said.
The bird in Tran's hand stretched its entire body skyward, wings pumping madly. It squealed and snapped its head down to sink its beak into Tran's wrist. A bead of blood appeared, and the head came up and then down again.
“Let it go,” Eleanor said over a sound I didn't recognize as I watched the beak sink into skin again, and then I did recognize it: Tran was laughing.
“Squab,” he said, grinning, impervious to the bird's repeated strikes against his wrist.
“Let it go,” Eleanor said again, and Tran looked from her to me and opened his hand, and the bird soared skyward, emitting indignant yawks. Little globes of blood dotted Tran's brown arm.
“No problem,” he said. “Catch two or three.”
I got up. “Burgers,” I said.
At seven, Dexter called. “Everybody gone. Everybody except the fat guy.”
“Tiffle's fat?”
“Make some little country a fine dinner.” Dexter said. “And one teensy Chinese snack, real pretty, arrived about two minutes ago. You want me to wait?”
They deliver them like pizza, Lau had said.
“No. Meet us at Topanga and the Pacific Coast Highway. Eight-fifteen, okay?”
“More people than I figured,” Captain Pat Snow said, looking at Tran, Dexter, Everett, and me. Captain Snow looked surprised at the fact that Everett was handcuffed, but not as surprised as I was.
Captain Pat Snow was a black woman.
She caught my stare and lifted an affronted eyebrow. She was about thirty-five, with extremely curly black hair fluffing out beneath a dark cap, mocha-colored skin, and a vulnerable-looking pug nose, but there was nothing vulnerable about her hazel eyes. They flayed and filleted me and tossed the waste to the gulls.
“You're younger than I expected,” I said lamely.
“Yeah, right,” she said. Then she chuckled, but the eyes didn't forgive me any. “Get laddie there on board if you don't want no one to see the cuffs.” We obeyed, the boat sagging alarmingly beneath our weight. It was a small cruiser, maybe twenty feet long, with a cabin belowdecks, reached by a small door to the left of the wheel. The decks were littered with automobile tires.
“Nobody going to get killed, right? And I mean him in the handcuffs. You're a big one, aren't you?” she asked Dexter. She was up on the dock now, unwinding the rope that moored the boat to the pier. “Cause I'm not going to be no kind of accessory-”
“Nobody's going to get killed,” I assured her, hoping it was true. “We're all going out and we're all coming back.”
“Yeah, yeah. Catch.” She threw the rope at me, too fast, and Tran stepped in front of me and caught it. Okay, so he had fast hands. Captain Pat Snow stepped back onto the boat and pushed it away from the pier. “This a pickup or a delivery?”
“Maybe neither,” I said. “We're going out to look. If we bring anything back, it'll be a person.”
“Caroline B., right?” She negotiated the rocking deck toward the wheel.
“That's it.”
“Bad ship,” she said, turning a key. Engines coughed beneath the deck. “Class B freighter, draws maybe thirty feet, so they got to keep it out a ways. Seen it before.”
She did something to the controls, and the boat began to back up through the greasy water. “Why bad?” I asked.
“Folks, right? Delivering folks.”
I'd been looking out to sea, but now I turned to her. “How would you know that?”
“Girl's got to keep her eyes open. Hold on a minute.”
She glanced left and right, guiding the boat out between fragile-looking hulls. “Out here, probably lots of people know,” she said, eyeing the nearer boat. “Caroline B. comes in every few months. First they unload her out there, then they bring her up the channel and unload her official.”
“Anyway, she's empty now.”
“I don't think so,” she said.
Everett looked very apprehensive.
“Or maybe we've been lied to,” I said, glaring at him.
“No truth in this world,” Captain Snow said, twirling the wheel and making the boat spin around. I sat down without planning to. The lights on shore swam away behind us and reemerged on our left, so we were headed south. “You know anything about ships?”
“Nothing at all. They, um, seem to move a lot.”
“And you think you're going aboard?”
“We both are,” Dexter said, surprising me.
She zipped up her black windbreaker and gave him a skeptical grin. “Hope you can climb a rope.” She angled the boat toward the right, in the general direction of the open sea, and the wind was wet and cold. “Shoes?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“High-tops,” Dexter said, lifting a large white-clad foot.
“Boots,” I said.
“With leather soles,” Captain Snow said, sounding irritated. “What size?”
“Um, nine and a half,” I said.
She cast me a glance. “What're you, six feet? Little for such a big guy.”
“You know what they say bout the size of the foot,” Dexter contributed. “Little feet, little dong.”
“And you're what?” Captain Snow asked him.
“Twelve.”
“In your dreams.” She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her dark windbreaker and shook the pack over her mouth. One dropped out, and she caught it between her teeth.
“Wo,” Dexter said.
“You and me,” she said to me, flipping open an old military Zippo. “We change shoes. I got big feet.” She crinkled her eyes at Dexter over the flame. “You got anything to say?”
“Tide fallin,” Dexter observed.
“Norman's a mutant,” Captain Snow said, kicking off her shoes, “but Deirdre's okay. Still, even if Deirdre was Our Lady of Fatima, I wouldn't take you out tonight if it wasn't for the money. And the fog.” We were well offshore by now, and she pointed a finger toward the southwest. I followed it and saw something that looked like a white sheet lowered from the sky into the water.
“Is that fog?” I asked, leaning against the railing to pull off my boots.
“Thick as linoleum,” she said. "The nautical asshole's best friend. Cuts off sight and sound. Give me enough fog, and I can steal Catalina." The engines beneath my feet leaped eagerly toward the fog.
“Like when we leave Vietnam,” Tran said, leaning into the breeze. “But colder.”
“I'll take Simon Legree here downstairs,” Dexter said. Twelve or not, he didn't look very happy about being afloat.
“Good idea.” I wasn't actually very happy myself. Dexter trotted Everett past Captain Snow and through the little door. A moment later, I heard Everett go Whoof.” He'd been pushed onto a bunk.