Seize the Storm Read online

In answer to how things were going, Martin replied, as always, with that casually reassuring “Things are good,” but now as he heard the words, what he wanted to ask was Have you seen the weather map this morning?

  His dad answered the question before he had to, because he had in fact seen the weather chart on the Web, and he said that it did look like some serious weather.

  Serious weather. The word serious was a significant part of his dad’s vocabulary. A garden could be seriously good-looking, and an athlete possess a serious throwing arm.

  His dad added, after a split-second hesitation, “But I know that Leonard will sail away from trouble.”

  Martin thought about this.

  “Uncle Leonard’s eager to dive right into the storm,” said Martin after a pause. He made this remark sound offhand.

  “Eager?” asked Dad thoughtfully, as though Leonard’s eagerness was not always a characteristic to be admired or relied on.

  “Enthusiastic, maybe,” said Martin.

  “Well,” said Beatrice, “I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.”

  She had stopped stapling.

  Perhaps Martin expected a blanket dismissal of his worries, but what he got was strangely unsettling, even as it showed his dad’s faith in him.

  “Use your head, Martin,” Dad said.

  His father hesitated to say more. Martin could sense his father’s conscience working through family politics, his knowledge of his brother’s history, and his desire not to unduly alarm either his wife or Martin.

  “You go right ahead,” said Dad, “and give Leonard hell if it looks like he’s about to get you all drowned.”

  THEIR AIRSPEED was one hundred and ninety-eight miles per hour, about as fast as the de Havilland could go. The heading indicator showed that they were traveling east-northeast, outrunning the storm, which the aviation weather radio channel had defined as a “very well-formed depression heading in a northerly direction.”

  Jeremy imagined the storm as a creature shaped like a timber saw, a wheel with ragged blades. You could see it on the radar screen, hovering over Witch Grass, swallowing the pulsing zit of light, coming right after Jeremy.

  Jeremy handled the stick himself, piloting the plane. It was not actually a stick so much as the portion of a wheel, padded and shaped like half a Frisbee.

  “Watch the artificial horizon,” said Elwood, leaning forward to tap the attitude indicator.

  The display showed whether the aircraft was level from side to side and whether the nose was angling too high or too low. They were heading slightly downward, and Jeremy eased the nose up until the plane was level again, and then overcompensated. The engine changed its timbre, taking on a lower note, the machinery somehow recognizing that a new pilot was in command.

  As Elwood had reached out to touch the cockpit display, Jeremy had once again noticed the scar on his right hand. Someone had bitten Elwood years ago, between his thumb and forefinger. Maybe a man, maybe a dog.

  “Is it true,” Jeremy asked, “that you tried to kill Laser when he was a pup?”

  “I tried to drown him,” said Elwood smoothly, as though this was a perfectly reasonable answer.

  “Why?”

  “He chewed up a new pair of Corcoran combat boots,” said Elwood, “and Kyle wouldn’t shoot him like I wanted, just offered to buy me a new pair. Which he did—these are the ones he bought me.”

  “So it all worked out.”

  “Not really. I took the dog out to the Hanalei River in a garbage bag and would have thrown him in but Kyle stopped me. The dog hates me ever since. He got big and ugly, but he didn’t change toward me.”

  “I’d hate you, too,” said Jeremy.

  Elwood gave him a you-can’t-please-everyone smile. “I have to work at it,” said Elwood.

  “At what?” asked Jeremy.

  “At being a human baseball bat,” said Elwood, rubbing his eyes and blinking. “I have to keep inventing ways to impress your dad, making sure the dealers don’t cheat him, rejecting counterfeit bills and phony artifacts, picking up heavy stuff and loading it myself.”

  “Who taught you to do all this?” asked Jeremy.

  Picking up heavy stuff was probably a euphemism for murder.

  Elwood dug into his hip pocket and brought out his wallet, a thin, black leather fold. He slipped out a small photo and showed it to Jeremy without giving it to him. A young woman in a halter top smiled at the camera, one hand up to keep the sun off her face. She looked way too young for Elwood, the kind of person you see with other young women, talking and laughing. The shadows of her fingers fell across her forehead. The photo was slightly tattered and the colors had grown dim.

  Elwood glanced into the back. Shako was awake after all, leaning forward so he could hear.

  Elwood gave Shako the photo for a moment.

  “She was my fiancée, twenty years ago,” said Elwood. “Her name was Zeta Durant.”

  “She looks like a very nice person,” said Jeremy.

  Shako gave the photo back and stayed as he was, leaning forward, so he could hear what Elwood was saying.

  “She worked at the airstrip where I used to have a job,” Elwood continued. “She ran the office, payroll, accounts. I fueled Cessnas and kept the padlock on the gate.”

  Jeremy was surprised. “You had a regular job?”

  “They never caught the guy who killed her in Fremont, California,” Elwood continued, “the day before Halloween. She was walking home on payday, got mugged, fell and fractured her skull, and I hunted down bad guys for a long time after that. The wrong bad guys, but they were better than nothing.”

  And dogs had gotten to her body, Elwood did not want to add. No need to upset Jeremy with the heartbreaking details. But the reports in the news said that a feral pack had meant her remains could not be identified for a week after her bones were in the coroner’s fridge.

  “That’s terrible,” said Jeremy, meaning more than he could say.

  Elwood put the picture back into his wallet. “I realized I would make a better bad guy than every single one of the criminals I snuffed, so here I am.”

  The main fuel supply was fourth-fifths empty. Jeremy could feel how much lighter the aircraft was, nearly one hundred and fifty gallons more buoyant. The auxiliary tank held a comparable amount, and Jeremy tried to calculate how much search time they had before they had to head back to Kauai.

  The aircraft leaped and shuddered, the wings banking without any command on Jeremy’s part. He kept his feet on the rudder pedals and eased the aircraft back to horizontal flight.

  Not bad, thought Jeremy. I’m not doing that badly.

  Elwood was on the radio, his singsong, laid-back radio voice the stuff of aviation cliché. “Witch Grass, this is Red Bird, do you copy?”

  The airplane was hitting turbulence, outlying eddies of air that were invisible and smacked the aircraft hard. Very hard—the cockpit jostled and shook, and Jeremy’s teeth snapped together.

  All of this would have been fun, except that there was nothing sporting about it from where Jeremy was sitting, his eyes on the altimeter, a digital device with numbers that kept changing, adding and subtracting feet as the invisible torrents in the atmosphere grabbed at the aircraft.

  AXEL OWEN STOOD at the helm, and as he gripped the spokes of the wooden wheel and felt the vessel respond, he knew that this, exactly this, was what he was made to do.

  Axel did not think that he was a very complicated guy. He was simple the way a thumb is simple. He loved the yacht and he was in love with Susannah.

  He loved Athena’s Secret because never, in his entire life, had he ever awakened in a place that was designed to be beautiful. And every cleat and wale on this yacht had been conceived and crafted to be a thing of loveliness.

  This made the yacht unique in his experience. Axel had lived, at various times in his life, in apartments in Oakland, one- and two-bedroom duplexes with cockroaches like freeway traffic and rats like railroad cars, hurrying nonstop. His wi
dowed mother had paid rent for illegal basement crannies with aluminum foil over naked lath and plaster, places where you were happy to have a mouse race his four scampering paws across the kitchen floor—at least it was company.

  So he loved the yacht and would mentally say it was four stars.

  His budding relationship with Susannah, however, could not be rated so highly. He was attracted to her because she was unlike any young woman he had ever known. He had played liar’s dice with the women in the bars along San Pablo Avenue, places where it was illegal for an eighteen-year-old to sit and order beer, but Axel had always looked older than he was. Susannah was not like them.

  Right then Martin climbed out on deck, looking fit and healthy and just that much of a rival.

  “Is your uncle serious about gaffing that shark?” asked Axel.

  Martin smiled. Martin was what everyone would call a nice guy, and Axel knew that he himself was not. But Martin was not only nice. He was other things, too. Martin was knowing and uncompetitive, as though life had already held a speed trial and Martin had won.

  “You never know with Uncle Leonard,” said Martin.

  “Well, if you want the job done,” said Axel, “just tell Mr. Burgess to say the word.”

  Martin just laughed. Not an all-out laugh, but a brainy chuckle.

  “I mean it,” said Axel.

  “Sure you do,” said Martin.

  Martin was letting Axel know that he got the fact that Axel would love to show off, clubbing a sea predator to death. It was all about Susannah. But it was hard to get Susannah’s attention, Axel knew too well.

  She was one of those people completely wired up to their own nervous systems. Even now she was probably in her cabin, tapping her impression of the voyage into her computer. All about her feelings, and birds. No mention of me at all, probably, Axel thought.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, Axel was losing money in a big way, playing online Texas hold ’em right here on the yacht every night. He had an account at GamblingPlanet, gaming 24/7. He had already lost more than he would make on this voyage, and Leonard was a generous employer.

  Plus, he had to eat Leonard’s food, and the man could cook well enough to please his own family, but Axel had been a cook’s mate on a freighter from Oakland to Vancouver. This had been one week after his sixteenth birthday, a fresh high school dropout working for a retired navy cook with no teeth and a glass eye, a man who could serve osso buco or bananas Foster right out of his cramped, neat little galley.

  Axel had learned how to make mushrooms in white wine and Boeuf à la Catalane, and all the sauces from béchamel to curry, and the men on the Brazos IV loved it, scarfed it right up, a crew you’d think would be about equal to pizza.

  He had learned how to tie a granny knot and a timber hitch and a dozen other knots, and he had learned how to act sober when he was drunk, returning to Oakland with a case of crab lice and a paycheck from DaCaspar Shipping. He found work steadily after that, too young to be legal but cheap as a result. He had worked up and down the Sacramento River on dredging barges, and troll and salmon fishing trips, crewing outside the Golden Gate with rich people, which was how he had met Mr. and Mrs. Burgess. He liked the Burgesses. He really did.

  But even now he had to say, “What have you ever had to fight for, Martin?”

  He knew he was acting like a macho jerk, but the challenge was in him and it had to come out somehow. Martin was destined to be a scientist or a TV personality and Axel could see himself standing at the helm of someone else’s yacht for decades, until he was toothless and had a glass eye himself. Two glass eyes, probably. It rankled.

  “What have I fought for?” said Martin. “Oh, I don’t know. I think maybe fighting is overrated.”

  He was not even troubled by the question, he was so unintimidated and so completely commonsensical. Axel recalled, a little too late, that Martin had witnessed a regrettable event on a BART platform, and maybe talking about combat was not a friendly course to take. Axel also recognized that although he had once nearly stomped a rat to death on Fruitvale Avenue, the rat had escaped—rats turned out to be acrobatic as well as tough. Axel was not really any more dangerous than the next person, although he would like to be thought so.

  “How about you?” Martin went on to ask. “I bet you’ve been a terror up and down the West Coast.”

  Joking about it, thought Alex. Rich people, they’d laugh about anything.

  Axel’s late father, Billy Owen, had been a gambler, playing pai gow card clubs all night and Golden Gate Fields horse racing all afternoon, and making money at it, too. His friends in Vegas had called him “Billy Owe ’em.” This had been a humorous name, rather than accurate—he had actually lived debt-free and had filed a tax return every year as a professional gambler.

  His mom, Dixie Owen, played along, too, and successfully, until Billy dropped dead from heart failure holding a winning Trifecta ticket on California Derby Day. Dixie cashed in the ticket, married a man from El Centro who sold guns from the trunk of his vintage Trans Am. The man was named Sol Capo, and he was a good hand at restoring old weapons. Axel had liked Sol, and the experience of seeing how he made a living—showing guys how to blow targets to confetti with military surplus on full auto. But basically Mom had moved out of Axel’s young life.

  Axel decided to change the subject just as Martin was powering up his laptop and getting another good look at the weather map, shielding the computer from the salt spray. Another thing Axel had noticed about people with money: they were always checking their phones and their computers, staying connected.

  “What do you hear from Susannah, Martin?” Axel hated the way he sounded, so needful. He had brought up the subject before, and Martin had usually offered his kindly silent laugh.

  Martin said now, “I have to tell you, Axel, that I don’t think she is really that crazy about you.”

  His tone was sympathetic, reluctant. This was a man-to-man, gentle way of saying: give up on her. Martin was the sort of person who prefaced bad news with I’m sorry, but.

  This hurt Axel’s feelings. He would have to be tough—stoical. Axel had always prided himself on keeping his mouth shut and using few words. If Axel had bad news he would just say it. This was a good policy. Why was he talking so much this morning?

  The sea was choppy, turning to swells. The coming storm made him nervous.

  “Your uncle,” he said, “is out on the prow, doing something. I’m worried.”

  This got Martin’s attention.

  The clouds had piled up to the west, layers of them. A piece of something swept past in the rough water, a slab of shipping container—a floating razor to a wooden hull.

  At times the propellers were forced out of the water, and they made a determined whining noise until the yacht dropped back down into the sea. To be on deck was to be wet, and Axel and Martin had both donned bright yellow waterproof jackets and high black boots. Even so, salt water stung their eyes and lips.

  Axel didn’t bother to say anything more, just gazed out from the helm, keeping them as steady as possible at ten knots per hour, fast enough that seas crashed into and over the yacht, soaking every inch of rigging and making the scuppers overflow.

  And the yacht was laboring. There was something slowing her, forcing her back. Moment by moment she was less nimble, less seaworthy. There was the faintest sensation of trouble communicated through the deck underfoot.

  “You better go forward, Martin,” said Axel, “and see what’s wrong.”

  MARTIN MADE HIS WAY along the yacht, clinging to the rail outside the cabins, heading toward the prow.

  The sun was still bright, but the clouds ahead of them looked like a gigantic chunk of nighttime, ripped out and stuck against the blue.

  “Don’t come out here,” Leonard called into the wind. “Martin, it’s not safe.”

  A great wad of fishing net had plowed into the prow, looking like a giant, diaphanous amoeba that spun out tendrils. Leonard was grabbing at it,
hauling at it, trying to free the yacht from the seaborne mess. Martin joined in the great effort, seizing the netting and trying to drag it to starboard.

  The netting, which had floated in a tangled hairball of filament and sea slime all the way from Malaysia, as far as Martin could tell, was like a living thing determined to make the vessel its new purchase on life.

  Leonard was struggling to stay where he was, hanging on to the rail along the ship’s prow with his bright yellow waterproof gloves, the sea washing over him. He was wearing one of the waterproof jackets, too, and with the hood folded back it gave him a weather-soaked, heroic appearance.

  Martin could see the aspiring football player in his uncle now, not good enough to be a starter but showing up for practice every day. He also looked a little crazy, as though if the water pounded him hard enough it might wash him off and drown him and he wouldn’t mind.

  The two of them attacked the great bolus of fishing filament once again, and this time they made progress. Part of the netting tore and released its grip on the prow. The yacht was still tangled, but the fight was no longer hopeless.

  A wave broke across the prow, and Leonard had to get a fresh grip to keep from being swept away.

  “What would the boat tell you to do?” asked Martin. “If she spoke to you—what would she say?”

  “What?” called Leonard, either not understanding Martin’s question, with the seas crashing, or not wanting to.

  “What would she tell you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Leonard, blinking against the salt water that came from all directions.

  “Ask her,” called Martin against the shriek of the wind.

  Leonard gave a nod and squinted, readying his resolve for a serious inquiry. But what he said surprised Martin. “I never really believed all that, Martin. About talking to the spirit of the boat. I made that all up.”

  Martin was relieved to hear that Leonard was not a superstitious nut, but he was a little disappointed, too. Some small part of him had wanted to believe in such things.

  Leonard saw his nephew’s distress.