Fisherman's Bend Page 9

  “Good ol’ Quas. He’s a very sympathetic guy,” explained Dane, as if he felt the need to apologize for his friend. “Sometimes his feelings make it hard for him to make wise business decisions. He can be very irritating. I’m sorry. He makes me insane most of the time.”

  “Why do you continue to work with him?” I asked, glad to be drawn out of my fantasies. (Though I couldn’t help smiling when it occurred to me how cute it would be to be part of a couple called Dane and Jane.)

  Without any hesitation, Dane looked me square in the eye and said, “Because he’s the best there is. I guaranteed the Alley family we’d come back with a body. And we will. We will because Quasar never misses. He’s a genius. The only problem is that the genius has a conscience and acute sense of social justice. He’s ready to back out of this project. I can tell. The only reason he’s aboard now is to find closure for the grieving family.” Then, as an afterthought, he added, “Well, that, and the fact that he wouldn’t leave me holding the bag. We were college roommates, so we’ve been butting heads for a long time. We’ll survive Cobble Harbor and be off to our next contract. I guess you could say he’s my best friend, even if he drives me crazy.”

  Well, maybe I was a better match for a guy like Quasar, I thought. Smart, good at what he does, a real sense of what’s right, and he follows his convictions … Too bad he’s so funny-looking, I thought. No, too bad I’m so shallow. Dane continued. “He’s brilliant, really. I’ve yet to stump him on any topic. Even Spartacus…” Oh no, my worst nightmare was coming to life. The object of my budding romantic interest was interested in me only as a possible mate for his nerdy best pal. I had to stop him before he got to the part about what a wonderful father Quasar would make.

  The thought of giving birth to little Quasars did not appeal to me. What if they were girls? Little Quasar girls. “So, we don’t yet know who tried to run us ashore,” I said, scrambling for the safety of a comfortable topic. “But we do have plenty of people with motive.”

  “Yeah. It’s becoming clear that there is a lot of opposition to this aquaculture project. People can get pretty emotional when they come up against new enterprises. Progress is the enemy, you know? They see change as dumping on their heritage, and in a place like Cobble Harbor heritage is worshipped like a god.” I knew this was true. I had experienced the identical situation in Green Haven with a proposed wind farm. But, I thought, it wasn’t quite as simple as Dane suggested. There were folks like George Paul, whom I had just met, who would embrace some change, like a casino. There are always two sides, and sometimes three.

  Quest was sliding along easily in the calm water; the gently rolling waves provided a slight, shallow dip from port to starboard and back, just like a hand on a cradle. The sloshing sound of her blunt bow, plowing rather than cutting a path, was a peaceful accompaniment to the tranquillity all around. The captain covered his mouth with a hand to conceal a huge, silent yawn that I hoped was due to the temporary lull and not indicative of the quality of my company. “Oh, excuse me,” he said. “I’ll go put on a pot of coffee if you’re okay keeping a lookout for a few minutes.” Impressed that he had not suggested that I make the coffee, I happily volunteered to do so, saying that I needed to learn my way around the boat. I asked to borrow his phone again, as mine was in my car, and he gladly lent it.

  As I stepped out, I admired the way the sun had transformed the day so completely. Harbor seals stared, their heads like pears sculpted in black marble, and then quickly dropped beneath the surface as if through a trapdoor, leaving behind concentric rings of ripples. A night or two at sea in these conditions would be delightful, I thought. It had been years since I had had the pleasure of darkness offshore. Well, I had spent some time hiding in a bilge this past June, I reminded myself. But this would be different. This would be like old times fishing with Archie in the Gulf Stream, when we would go offshore far enough to escape any trace of the bright city. Arch would douse the deck lights, and we’d sit on the fish hold hatch, dangling our legs and marveling at the greatest show on Earth. He’d be up for parole in another year. He’d been framed. Though I couldn’t prove it.

  The clanging of steel on steel from a wrench dropped on deck shook me from my thoughts and brought me back to the mission at hand. I made a quick call to the Sheriff’s Department to request they run a check on Spartacus and learned that the folks of Cobble Harbor are a bit more sophisticated in their criminal activity than I had imagined. The boat had been reported stolen just a few short hours ago by its owner, Willard Kelley, the tipsy pilot Cal and I had taken ashore from the Asprella. Buyer’s remorse; I wish I hadn’t bought into this trip now that there was a concrete lead and a place to begin my investigation ashore. Too late, I thought. I would just have to make the best of it. On the other hand, I realized if I hadn’t made the trip then I wouldn’t have been aboard to witness the ramming and get the lead. So it was all evening out.

  An open can of Maxwell House was in the cupboard directly above the automatic drip machine. Secured to the bulkhead with a bungee cord, Mr. Coffee appeared to be safe in any sea conditions. I knew from my various fishing experiences that caffeine is one of the two most important ingredients for maintaining crew morale—the other being nicotine. Of course, bountiful catches and great weather help, too, but since these aren’t sold at any chandlery, smart cooks stock up on java and butts. I dumped coffee into a paper filter and filled the pot with water from the tap at the galley sink, both in amounts to make a full, strong pot.

  After pushing the button to start the brewing, I walked the length of the gangway toward the bow, opening doors as I went. Three double staterooms and a large bathroom with head and shower completed the tour. The stateroom closest to the bow appeared to be unoccupied, so I assumed that was where I’d lay my head when the time came. I hadn’t had any warning, so of course I had no pillow or sleeping bag. Hell, I had no clothes—not even a toothbrush. I had been in worse places with less, I thought, as I closed the door and went back to the galley to check on the coffee. The machine was working, but ever so slowly. Rather than stand and watch, I joined Quasar on the work deck. “How’s it coming?” I asked as I approached.

  “All done! Just finished! A lot of the damage was superficial. We’re in business now. We’re good to go. I’m just waiting for the captain to give me the word that we’re on-site and I’m ready to get this show on the road.”

  “Dane is very confident that you’ll find the body of Parker Alley. Do you search for bodies often?” I asked. Why did I phrase it that way? I worried that my question sounded like a cheesy pickup line. I turned away from Quasar and inspected a hydraulic winch that appeared to be used to launch the ROV (remotely operated vehicle).

  “Most of our work is in surveying bottom and doing water-quality tests. We measure and chart tide, current, and salinity, and note sea life—stuff like that. We get a lot of jobs through the Army Corps of Engineers. When someone applies for a permit to build a dock or dredge a channel, we put in a bid for the survey.”

  “But you have done searches for missing people, haven’t you?”

  “Oh yes. We have been hired to find drowning victims, and we’ve been quite successful. Very successful, in fact. Eight for eight. Perfect score.”

  I relaxed with this information. “Wow, Dane said you were good. One hundred percent success rate on eight assignments? Here’s hoping for number nine.” I crossed my fingers.

  “Of course, two of the victims were trapped in a plane that went down off Cape Hatteras. That was an easy one. But still, we’ve had seven successful missions of this type. I shouldn’t take much of the credit. It’s the captain’s expertise in narrowing the field of search. I’m just the technician. Dane is the man. He’s very well respected in the world of oceanography, marine biology, and marine salvage. He may come off as a bit gruff, but his bark is worse than his bite. He’s a great guy, really. I’ve known him for a long time. He’s a wonderful friend, and…” Oh no, I thought. This can’t be happenin
g. The nerd isn’t the slightest bit interested in me. He’s talking up his friend. If it wasn’t so depressing, I’d have to laugh. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about locking my stateroom door tonight.

  “Coffee?” I asked. Quasar wasn’t ready for caffeine just yet, he said, but he was certain that Dane would love a cup, black. So I left him on deck surrounded by his machinery to bring coffee to the bridge. After delivering to the captain and returning his cell phone, I was sent by strong suggestion back down to the deck, where I might be useful to Quasar when it came time to launch the ROV. I wasn’t there five minutes when Quasar thought of a reason to send me topside again. Before I could hop to it, I felt the boat slow to an idle. Dane joined us on deck and saved me the humiliation of watching him conjure up another task requiring me to be with his friend.

  “We’re close to the first track line. I’ll give you a hand with the side scanner first,” Dane said as he twisted the valve on the hydraulic motor that controlled a large winch wrapped full of half-inch-diameter cable. The motor turned slowly, backing wire off the spool until there was a loop of slack on the deck. Dane turned the motor off and joined Quasar in the stern, where he was untying something that looked like a miniature submarine that was attached to the end of the cable. Both men eased the towfish, or “fish” as they called it, out of its bracket and rested it on the rail. “Jane, could you operate the winch?” Without answering, I grasped the brass handle that I had just observed Dane using. “Inboard is up. Please take up the slack until the fish is hanging from that bollard,” Dane said as he motioned to a large block over his right shoulder. I did as he requested, twisting the valve open until the winch moved, slowly wrapping the slack wire back onto the spool until the wire was tight enough to pull the fish off the rail and hold it under the block. “Perfect. I’ll give you the word to lower the fish into the water. We want to tow at twenty fathoms, Quas.”

  Dane quickly vanished back into the wheelhouse, leaving Quasar and me at the winch to wait for his command. “What does the towfish do?” I asked. Quasar, as I had already learned, enjoyed explaining things about the equipment and engaging in any kind of chat that bore no resemblance to normal conversation. He quickly gave a description that I knew represented his best attempt at using layman’s terms, but he still seemed to be struggling with dumbing it down sufficiently for me to understand. I learned that the fish was the housing unit for a side-scan sonar, one of three machines in Quest’s acoustic imaging system. The fish was designed to “swim” as it was towed at different depths through the water behind the vessel. Similar to the depth sounder, which shoots an acoustic pulse straight down from a transducer on the ship’s hull, a side scanner sends pulses across the seabed, covering a wider swath in each pass or along each track line. Pulses strike the seabed and are reflected back to the vessel, where they are received by the transducer and converted to an electrical signal, which is traced on a paper chart recorder and analyzed by the technician. The depth sounder is used to determine the depth of water under the boat so that the operator knows when to lower or raise the towfish.

  Track lines, Quasar explained, were adjacent and parallel imaginary lines that covered the search area. Dane had already determined the area and the distance between the lines to be tracked, so we were about to engage in a systematic search. He’d figured out with the Coast Guard about search parameters for Parker Alley using information from the electronics aboard Eva B. Flawless navigation made possible by GPS meant that Quest would not stray from the lines or leave gaps in the area to be searched. Fortunately, the area where it was believed they would be most likely to find Parker Alley’s body overlapped the area they had been hired to survey for North Atlantic Shell Farms; two birds, one stone—or, rather, one towfish.

  “When do we get to use this other stuff?” I asked enthusiastically.

  “It will take almost twenty-four hours to cover the area with the acoustic gear. Then we should go over it with the proton precession magnetometer. And, ideally, I would like to try a few passes with the sub-bottom profiler over any lines where there’s an indication of ferrous materials.”

  “Oh” was all I could muster with the realization that I really was in this thing for three days. Dane called out for us to lower the fish, and Quasar explained that the wire was marked with spray paint at five-fathom intervals. So I would need to stop the winch when the fourth mark was at the block. He pointed out the brake and asked that I tighten it once the wire was towing the fish at the proper depth. I agreed that I could handle this job, and he ran to the bridge to watch the chart recorder for “anomalies.”

  Manning the winch, as it turned out, was fairly inactive duty. But it took me several hours to figure out that I did not need to stand with my hand on the brake, ready to release it to change the depth of the towfish at a moment’s notice. It was dark by the time I relaxed enough to sit on a basket full of line up by the boat’s exhaust stack, which radiated enough heat to keep me warm well after the sun went west. Every thirty minutes or so, the boat would change direction, making sharp 180-degree U-turns that batted the waxing gibbous moon back and forth over the gallows frame that towered above the stern deck. Boredom with what I was doing and curiosity about what the men were doing finally got the best of me. Under the guise of thoughtfulness, I barged into the wheelhouse with a cup of coffee in each hand and a bag of cookies under one arm.

  The wheelhouse was dimly lit by electronics. Quasar sat with his face pressed nearly against a machine that was drawing a graph that resembled the feed out of a heart monitor. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything,” I said as I looked for a spot to put down the coffees. I headed for the light over the chart table, and Dane sprang to his feet. He beat me to the table, closing an open book and turning it over so that I could see only the back cover. “Your brand of pornography?” I teased as I looked at the picture of a sinking four-masted schooner that he appeared to have been embarrassed about me seeing.

  “Yes, sort of,” he laughed. “It’s Unfinished Voyages by John Perry Fish. It’s a history of shipwrecks in the Northeast. I didn’t know whether you were superstitious or not and might regard it as a bad omen or evil talisman.” Then he laughed loudly and added, “After our encounter with Spartacus, I guess I should have known that a book wouldn’t spook you.” He removed the book from the table, motioned for me to set the cups down, and slid the volume into a magazine pocket on the side of his chair. “Oh, thanks. It’s going to be a long night. Why don’t you go lie down and get some sleep? We’ll wake you if we need your help.”

  I know when I’m not wanted, and I realized pretty quickly that they really didn’t want me staying up with or dating them. I said that I wasn’t really tired but would try to get a nap. Quasar thanked me for the coffee without taking his eyes off the graph or his thumb off the remote sending unit button, which was harnessed to the plotter by a thin cord. These men were serious professionals doing their jobs, and I should leave them alone, I thought. But I wanted to contribute what I could. I doubted that I would fall asleep while others were working; it just isn’t my style. But sensing their strong desire to see me retire for the evening, I vowed to try to stay out of their hair until daylight, when I would poke around the galley for something breakfast-like for the three of us.

  Once settled in my stateroom, I rolled my rain pants up to serve as a pillow and covered my torso with my jacket. But I was nowhere near dozing. Upset that I was at sea, wasting time when I could be gathering information on the heroin trafficking, I tossed from side to side, fighting alertness while I assumed the men above waged war with drowsiness. Maybe I could do a shift for one of them. How much coffee could they consume before it no longer did the trick? I could certainly run a boat well enough to follow a line on a plotter. And I’m a quick study. I could learn what to look for on the various monitors, and wake the men when I found something. They could both sleep while I conducted the search. If I didn’t fall asleep soon, I would suggest that.

  I must have
fallen asleep at some point, since Quasar woke me with a knock on my stateroom door. “Miss Bunker, are you awake?” The door opened a crack and Quasar spoke through the opening without looking in. “Miss Bunker, are you awake?”

  I hopped out of the bunk and opened the door the rest of the way. “Yes, I’m awake. I couldn’t sleep,” I lied. “What is it?”

  “We’ve located something that could be your man. I mean it might be. We’re not sure, but it could be. I hate to say probably, but more than likely. I’d be surprised if it’s not him. It’s within a hundred feet of the exact center of the area Dane scoped out for the search. Too much of a coincidence to be a false alarm.… I hope it’s him. Very likely could be. We’re preparing to tow a net over the spot to see if we can scoop it up and thought you would want to be on deck.”

  “I’m right behind you,” I said as I followed Quasar out onto the deck, where the sun was just rising. So I had slept for a fair while, I realized.

  The captain quickly explained what I needed to do to help. First, we needed to retrieve the towfish and secure it in its bracket, which we did. Next we would have to make some adjustments to the net the men usually used for “sea sampling”—that is, for seeing what kinds of fish were swimming in a particular area, a survey requirement of the Department of Marine Resources. “We’ll take up a couple of links on each end of the chain,” Dane explained. “That will keep the net’s lower jaw, if you will, from digging into the mud and rocks. If that’s a body down there, we don’t want to drag it along the bottom and then up to the surface with a bunch of rocks. It wouldn’t be pretty.” I didn’t bother telling the men that I actually had vast experience with net adjustment after years aboard commercial fishing boats. I simply listened and did as I was told, and soon we were setting the net out over the stern. The net’s configuration was one I had never seen before, towed from one wire instead of the usual two. I learned that it was a Skipper Drew design called an OLAK, which they said stood for “One Legged Ass Kicker.” As I backed off the winch, lowering the net into the water, I hoped it would live up to its name this morning.