It was obvious that he remembered her, too. He looked her over, an unpleasant grin spreading across his face' and unconsciously her hand took a firmer grip on the knife that was slicing Jimmy Dean's Pure Pork Sausage into neat rounds. "Well now," he said with a geniality as mocking as it was menacing. "Look what we have here." He took a step toward her, and every muscle in her body tightened.
"What the hell do you want?"
Kate closed her mouth and looked around. Harry Gault stood in the passageway, glaring at the shark.
"Why, Harry," the shark said, all his teeth showing,
"I'm just making a neighborly visit." He winked. "How was the fishing last trip?"
"I told you never to come down here," Harry snapped.
The shark looked at Kate. "I can see why," he drawled.
"If only I'd known I'da been after you to share the wealth."
Kate kept her face carefully blank and went back to frying sausage and flipping French toast. The shark strolled over to stand close enough behind her for her to smell his after-shave, which seemed to have been applied with a garden hose.
He sniffed. "Smells good, sweetheart," he said, his voice low, his tone insinuating.
He rubbed up against her back and her eyes narrowed to slits. "I wish I could say the same," she purred.
"You've obviously met," Harry said with awful sarcasm.
The shark heaved a mournful sigh. "At the Shipwreck, week before last. But she ran off with somebody else, didn't you, babe?"
"That so?" Harry said, looking at Kate through narrowed, assessing eyes.
"Yup," the shark said sadly. "Big fucking dude, walks slow, talks slow, but moves pretty goddam fast when it comes to the ladies. Isn't that right, babe?" A hand settled on her waist and prepared to slip down over her hip.
Harry swore. "I told you, Shugak, I warned you, no fucking around on the Avilda! You-"
Kate pried the hand loose and turned. "First of all," she told the shark sweetly, "I am not your sweetheart, or your babe. Secondly"-and she looked at Harry Gault with a straight, level gaze-1 told you that your crew was safe from seduction, and they have been. But what I do off this boat is my business, with or without slow-talking, slow-walking men." She turned back to the stove, feeling the gazes of both men fixed on her, one suspicious, the other lascivious, ignoring them both.
The shark didn't like being ignored and was preparing to say so, but Harry growled, "Let's go up to the bridge."
Contriving to squeeze past Kate when there was more than enough room to walk around, the shark followed.
Kate finished cooking breakfast, loaded two plates and climbed the stairs to the bridge. Hearing voices in the chart room and finding the door closed, she kicked it a couple of times. "Skipper? You in there?"
There was a thump, not unlike the hasty closing of a suitcase, followed by whispers and a dragging sound.
The door slid open and Harry glared at her.
"I brought up your breakfast." She met his suspicious eyes with an expression as guileless as she could manage, and looked past him at the shark, for whom she still had no name, noticing along the way a rectangular object, just the size-surprise, surprise-of one of those shiny silver metal suitcases photographers use to pack their equipment, covered by a hastily tossed, olive-green army blanket. There must have been a locker hidden somewhere in the chart room. "And a plate for your guest."
The shark grinned, employing every tooth back to and including all four wisdoms. A lesser woman might have felt like Little Red Riding Hood but Kate never had intimidated well. "All this and she can cook, too?
Honey, you're the answer to a red-blooded American male's prayer. Harry, old buddy, you've been holding out on me."
Kate set both plates down on the empty chart table, contriving to step on the blanket on the way and expose a corner of the suitcase. Aluminum, shiny, silvery bright.
She grinned back at the shark and wrinkled her nose at him. "My name's not honey, either, handsome," she said, and left the room, swaggering, as the shark gave forth with a long, drawn-out howl.
Harry slammed the door closed behind her and her grin vanished. So that was it. That was the connection.
And Ned and Seth were in it up to their ears. No wonder the three of them were so blas'e about their paychecks.
Their paychecks for fishing, that is. It was a safe bet the extracurricular cash they were pulling down more than covered any losses they took from the crab. She returned to the galley and dished up her own breakfast. She was in a hurry to get to Jack but Kate never neglected her stomach.
"The fact that Harry could find his way between all those reefs off Anua, in the dark tells me he didn't just start doing it yesterday."
"What happened to Alcala and Brown?" Jack asked bluntly.
"I don't know," Kate said impatiently. "Don't you see, it doesn't matter. We can use this to nail them. Gault and the rest of them are-"
He interrupted her without apology. "The hell it doesn't matter. They are why you were hired on the Avilda in the first place. Their families and the board of Alaska Ventures want to know what happened to them, not to mention two law enforcement agencies and three insurance companies. They don't care about somebody dealing a little dope."
"It wasn't a little '-ope, it was a lot of dope!"
"Your first priority," Jack said, raising his voice to match hers, "is to discover the circumstances in which Alcala and Brown disappeared and, if possible, to recover their bodies."
"Their bodies are probably in a crab pot at the bottom of the Bering Sea, probably because they stumbled onto this business just like I did. I'm telling you, Jack, these guys are dealing dope wholesale. We got a chance here to cut their connection off at the knees. Get a warrant and search the boat. I'm pretty sure I know where he stashes the stuff, I saw the suitcase in the chart room, so why-"
Again he cut her off. " 'Pretty sure' isn't good enough in this case and you know it. You're only a hired gun, Kate, you aren't official. Besides, you know and I know that dope wasn't on the boat thirty minutes after it hit port." He regarded her, not unsympathetically. "Find out what happened to Alcala and Brown," he repeated, "and everything else will fall into line."
"I think I have!"
Jack folded his hands across his stomach with an air of humoring her that Kate wanted badly to puncture. "Prove it," he said simply.
"You mean I have to go back out again?" She remembered that Andy was still a member of the Avilda's crew.
With a sinking heart she realized that of course she had to go back out, if not for the reasons Jack was enumerating.
"Yes, you have to go back out again. Probably you're right, probably there was a falling out among thieves, probably this is why they disappeared. But we don't know, and the only people who do are on that boat. Sooner or later, one of them is going to slip, and when they do, you'll be there."
"For how long?" Kate inquired with awful patience.
"As long as it takes." He held up one hand. "And while you're on board they can't take off for Macao."
"Unless they decide to put me with Alcala and Brown," she pointed out.
"There is that," he agreed. "Better be careful."
What the hell happened to Kate's overprotective male watchdog, the one with his testosterone level tattooed on his forehead?
"In the meantime, I'll call in the troops. We'll plant somebody in every bar in this dump and watch for who'd you say?"
"I call him the shark." She described him, adding, "I don't know his name, Harry didn't introduce us."
"Wonderful. 'The shark.' That ought to narrow it down."
"You saw him," she said defensively. "He was trying to pick me up in the Shipwreck when you found me."
"There wasn't anybody in the Shipwreck that day who wasn't trying to pick you up. The entire Russian Merchant Marine was trying to pick you up. Anyway, you"-he pointed at her-"you get your ass back on the Avilda and keep an eye on Gault until we gather enough evidence to return an indictment. I don't want him getting wind of us and disappearing into the doughnut hole. It wouldn't be like it was the first time."