Jason exhaled. “Thank god.”
62
The wait was maddening.
Court Harrington rested on the starboard wall of the Pacific Lion’s accommodations house and cursed the bad luck that kept him topside on the wreck while McKenna and the rest of the crew had all the fun down below. Nothing against Nelson Ridley, who leaned against the starboard deck, eating a sandwich, but Harrington wasn’t used to letting other people do the work for him.
Heck, the way the ship rested, he couldn’t even pace properly. All he could do was stand there and freeze and stare up at the sky, the clouds scudding past overhead, pushed by the gale that still raged on the other side of the island. Stare at the sky, and wait.
Ridley beckoned to him with a half-eaten sandwich. “So, is it true that you can’t remember what happened, lad?” he asked. “The fall, and all that?”
“That’s right,” Court replied. “I got nothing from when I was down bottom with McKenna to when I woke up in the hospital. But everyone seems to think it was bad.”
“It was bad,” Ridley said. “They were saying you might not ever walk again. Hell, they thought you might die.”
“Well, I didn’t die.” Court maneuvered his way over to the engineer. “And here I am walking, but damned if I don’t still feel useless.”
“Useless?” Ridley laughed. “Lad, you’re the most important part of this job—after the skipper, of course. You just have to learn patience.”
He dug out another sandwich. Held it out to Court. “Here, eat up and get comfortable,” he said. “You’ll be back at it soon enough.”
OKURA STARED OUT THROUGH A PORTHOLE, envious, as the two salvage men ate their meal on the Lion’s weather deck. Sandwiches, simple, but to Okura’s hungry eyes, a feast: thick pieces of bread, healthy cuts of meat. Tomatoes and lettuce and plenty of cheese, all of it fresh—or fresher, anyway, than the slim choices that remained in the Lion’s stinking, noxious galley.
Okura had been eating canned food for days, cold tins of beans, soup stock, preserved fruit. He’d polished off the ship’s store of chocolate and candy, a case of Coca-Cola for good measure. He wouldn’t starve on this vessel, no matter how long the salvage crew took to do their work. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t long for a nice steak, some fresh fish, a glass of cold beer or a bottle of wine—or even a decent sandwich, for god’s sake.
The crew moved with less urgency, now that they’d brought the ship into the lee. They weren’t quite relaxed, but the worry that had defined them wasn’t etched so firmly on their faces. Okura supposed he should be happy; the crew seemed to believe they could save the Lion. He wished they would hurry up and get started.
Someone was looking at him. Okura scanned the deck, and locked eyes for an instant with one of the men—the younger one, the one who’d been injured—no more than twenty feet away. Okura flinched, and drew back, down into the stateroom, his hair on end, his heart racing. Dropped as stealthily as he could down the skewed stateroom floor, slipped out into the bowels of the ship.
ON THE WEATHER DECK, Court Harrington frowned. “Hey, you see that?”
Ridley followed his eyes to the porthole. It belonged to a stateroom that stuck out a few feet onto the weather deck, the window looking aft, down the deck toward them.
“I didn’t see anything,” Ridley replied. “Did you see something?”
Court pushed himself to his feet, limped his way down the deck to the porthole, and peered inside. The glass was filthy, stained, almost useless, and the stateroom beyond was dark. Nothing moved inside.
“Thought I saw something in there,” he told Ridley without lifting his eyes from the porthole. “Someone.”
“Could be Matt or Stacey coming back. The skipper, maybe.” Ridley paused. “Mind you, they did pull a body out of the cargo hold earlier. And I won’t say there haven’t been times on this ship I’ve felt like I’m being watched.”
Harrington pressed his face to the porthole. Tried to replay the image in his mind. Whatever he’d seen, it hadn’t been for long; just a shift of the light, a suggestion of movement, and then stillness again.
Still—for the briefest of moments, he could have sworn he’d seen a face.
“I’ll be right back,” he told Ridley, pushing off from the wall. “I’m probably crazy, but I won’t sleep tonight if I don’t check this out.”
Ridley looked at him. “You’re going in?”
“Sure. McKenna isn’t back yet. We have nothing to do but wait.” He grinned. “Why not go hunt us a ghost?”
63
Okura hunched behind a bulkhead and listened to the voices reverberate down the hallway. Men’s voices, at least two of them, inside the ship.
They had seen him. Not good. Not good at all.
He’d left the briefcase in the stateroom where he spent his nights. It was hidden, tucked under the tilt of a now useless bed, but its absence still made Okura’s mind race.
The salvage men could find it. They would take the money. His money. He couldn’t let it happen.
Okura slipped the pistol from his waistband. Listened to the men’s voices, the sounds of their feet on the deck, on the walls, as they descended farther into the Lion.
COURT STRUGGLED AHEAD of Ridley down the narrow hallway and wondered why he suddenly felt so ill at ease.
The freighter’s accommodations deck, after all, wasn’t nearly as foreboding as the very bowels of the ship, the dark corridors beneath the cargo decks, the vast inky abyss of the holds. This hallway was relatively well lit; the air was fresher, and the ocean where it was supposed to be—belowdecks.
But this was a ghost ship. A man had died here. And Harrington was sure he’d just seen a face.
What the hell are you doing here, man?
The men reached the midpoint of the ship, the long central corridor interrupted by watertight bulkhead doors. This corridor was darker, the air still, the sounds from above muted in the stillness.
Court gestured left, toward the stern of the ship. “First stateroom on the left,” he said, whispering now. “That’s where I saw him.”
He let go of his rope and stepped into the central corridor, felt his broken ribs protest, the pain inescapable no matter how tight they had bound his chest. Behind him, Ridley followed, neither man speaking, hardly daring to breathe. Court could feel his heart thudding behind those busted ribs, wondered what he would do if there actually was someone else aboard the freighter.
Wet your pants, probably. And scream like a girl.
Then Court thought about McKenna, decided that wasn’t a very good analogy. The skipper of the Gale Force would probably handle a stowaway—or even a ghost—with a little more aplomb.
The men reached the stateroom door. It opened inward on the wall above their heads, a beam of dusty light falling onto the forward wall. Court reached up, took hold of the doorframe, and tried to pull himself up, couldn’t do it. Not without crying, anyway.
He eased back, wincing, forced a smile at Ridley. “Maybe you’d better.”
Ridley nodded. Pulled himself through the doorframe with a grunt. Court watched the engineer’s feet dangle as he surveyed the room. Waited, tensed, for some confrontation.