In the galley she stood holding on to the door handle of the refrigerator, her head pressed up against the cold enameled surface, waiting for the shaking in her knees to stop. That had been too close.
The snores from the top bunk didn't miss a beat as she stripped and slid into her own. She was so tired she ached with it, but she tossed and turned, unable to shut down her brain. Eventually she fell into a doze and a series of waking dreams, filled with ruined pots rusting on the ocean bottom and avenging fishermen coming after her with boat hooks and bank statements with overdrawn accounts and bills with red warning notices and pink crabs swimming in green gasoline.
Sleep deserted her in a rush and she sat bolt upright in bed. "Pink!"
"What?" Andy's drowsy, startled voice came from the bunk overhead.
"Pink!" she said. "Old aviation gas used to be pink!
Pink as a tanner's new shell, by God!"
There was a brief silence, followed by a click as Andy turned his reading light on. A tousled blond head peered over the side of the bunk. "I beg your pardon?"
"New aviation gas is green," she explained. "But the old aviation gas was pink. I remember from helping my dad gas up his Supercub."
The befuddled expression on the upside-down face didn't change. "And you think I'm weird."
The head disappeared, the light went off and Kate was left lying wide-eyed in the dark, her mind busy with this new piece of the puzzle.
FIVE
"OLD aviation gas, what we used to call 80/87, was pink,"
Kate told Jack the following afternoon over greasy hamburgers and even greasier fries at the Blow-In Caf‚.
"So?"
"So the gas in that tank on Anua was green." He paused in mid-chew and looked uncomprehending. "Don't you get it? If that gas had been left over from a long time ago, it would have been pink. How long has aviation gas been green?"
Jack's face cleared and he swallowed and said, "Somebody's been using the strip regular enough to need to refuel."
Kate bestowed an approving smile on him and he sat up straighter in his chair. "And the strip was maintained, too," he remembered, "or at least there had been traffic in and out recently. Enough to keep the snow packed down, anyway. Not that there is much out here." He looked at her. "It surprised me."
"What?"
"So little snow."
"The mean winter temperature out here is thirty degrees Fahrenheit," she told him. "And I think the average snowfall is less than two feet. Plus you've got the jet stream just offshore."
Jack looked out the window at the wind blowing fog and a few flakes of snow straight down Iliuliuk Bay and shivered inwardly. "A nearly tropical climate," he agreed. "How'd you do out there, this time? Kill lots of defenseless crabs?"
"More than we should have."
"Oh, my," he said with his quick grin, "do I detect the tone of someone who has been involved in high seas skulduggery? Have you been keeping five-inchers?"
"No, just committing grand theft and malicious mischief," she replied. Her tone was glum; the imp of perverse pleasure she had taken in her first larcenous action had deserted her, and all she could think of was the crew of the Daisy Mae circling round and round, pulling buoys attached to nothing, not even line, and coming into Dutch with an empty hold and an emptier deck.
Jack sat up straight in his chair, hamburger dripping mustard and grease down his hand and into his sleeve.
"Mind telling me what the hell that means?"
Kate told him about the pot robbing. Jack was more amused than outraged, but then Jack wasn't a fisherman.
"Pretty gutsy of Gault," he observed.
"It was dumb," Kate said flatly. "There's forty thousand plus pots in the Bering Sea during any given period and hundreds of boats picking them. Not to mention the Fish and Game. It's a miracle we weren't caught. If we had been, we would have lost an entire season's fishing, and you're talking a gross anywhere between one million to two million dollars." Jack choked over his next bite of hamburger and had recourse to his Coke to wash it down. Kate, unheeding, punctuated her words with a militant french fry. "And Gault had no proof, none, that it was Johansen who robbed our string." She noticed the french fry was getting cold and crammed it into her mouth. Around it, she said indistinctly, "Dumb. If Gault hadn't married into the family, he would have been out on his ear long since."
"How long you in for this time?"
Kate shrugged. "Engine broke down again."
"That happened last week."
"I get the feeling it happened the week before and the week before that, too. Gault's not giving the engine the maintenance it needs. He's not giving the old girl any of the attention she deserves, he just drives her until she breaks, fixes it with spit and baling wire and drives her some more. One of these days she's going to break down for good. I just hope we're not out in the doughnut hole when it happens."
" 'Doughnut hole'?"
Kate gestured in the general direction of the North Pacific Ocean. "Starts around the Pribilof Islands and ends, I don't know, somewhere off the Kamchatka Peninsula. Sort of an international free-for-all area for fishermen from all over."
"Beyond the two-hundred-mile limit," he suggested.
"Way beyond," Kate agreed. "The U.S. and Russia and Korea and Taiwan and Japan have been fighting in the U.N. for years for the rights to fish there. The nations have, anyway. The fishermen just fish, most of them with drift nets that drag the sea bottom and pull up everything that gets in the way. Which the biologists figure is why the crab stocks took such a dive in the mid-eighties."
Jack examined his greasy fingers with rapt attention before beginning to clean them with his napkin, slowly, meticulously, one at a time. "Listen, Kate," he said to his left ring finger, "I don't mean to sound like some nervous granny here, and I trust you to take care of yourself or I would never have set you up in this job, but-" He looked up and caught her eye, very serious. "There are survival suits on board the Avilda, aren't there?"
She gave him a thin smile. "First thing I checked."
"Got one for everybody?" She nodded. "They all in working order?"
She nodded again. "Unlike the Avilda."
"And life rafts?"
He knew how many life rafts there were from the reports on Alcala and Brown's disappearance, but she answered him patiently. "Two, mounted on the roof, one port, one starboard."
"Good. Not that I'm anxious about you or anything."
"Of course not," Kate agreed, still patient. The male instinct to protect was as irritating as it was infrequently endearing, but there was nothing to be done but wait until it had run its course. Probably had something to do with testosterone. There ought to be a test, like one of those early pregnancy tests, only this would be an early testosterone test to detect large buildups of testosterone in male children. They could tattoo the results on every male child's forehead; that way, unsuspecting females could tell at a glance how deep the waters were around this particular island of manly pride. She looked across the table measuringly. It was an idea whose time had come.
Jack, unsuspecting, mopped up the rest of his ketchup with his last remaining fry, regarded it sadly and swallowed it regretfully. "Nothing like a grease-soaked french fry to start your day off right," he observed. Tapping the notes she had given him, he said, "I'll call town and have someone start checking on Harley Gruber and Henderson Gantry."
"Five'll get you ten Gruber, Gantry and Gault are one and the same."
"No bet." He tried out one of his better leers. "Care to join me? I won't be on the phone that long."
"You find a room?" she said, surprised. "I can't believe the state is going to pay for any more three-hundred-dollar nights in the Shipwreck."
He hooked a thumb in the general direction of the harbor.
"I talked one of the processors out of a bunk. More like a little apartment, actually. Manager's on vacation. Come with?"