Amber Beach (19 page)

“Why?”

“If something happens to me, you’ll have to run the
boat. Deal?”

Honor took a shaky breath and held out her right hand.

“Deal.”

The hand that took hers was slow, male, and very warm.

So was Jake’s smile.

“Congratulations, honey. You just hired yourself a fishing guide and boating instructor. Again.”

This time Jake took the helm. Honor didn’t argue. But that didn’t stop her from asking questions. “Where are we going?”

“A place called Secret Harbor.”

“Why?” she asked, intrigued by the name. “Do you think Kyle might be there?”

“Doubtful.”

“Then why are we going?”

“To fish.”

“What!”

He almost smiled. “I thought you wanted a salmon dinner.”

“I can buy it at the grocery store.”

“This is better. Trust me.”

“I don’t have much choice, do I?” she asked evenly.

Jake’s hands held the wheel too hard. He didn’t like to think about that part of what he was doing. Honor was damned if she trusted him and damned if she didn’t.

And so was he.

He wished he had a soothing, charming, amusing response, but he didn’t. All he had was the cold comfort of knowing that, like Honor, he didn’t have much choice.

“We’re going to Secret Harbor because the trolling line there is a long ellipse that will give us a chance to look over the competition”, he said. “Since Secret Harbor is also one of the places Kyle mentions in his log, we’ll scan the shore for anything that might have… washed up.”

“Like what?”

“The missing Zodiac, dive tanks, an anchor, anything that
shouldn’t be there.”

“What if we don’t find anything?”

“Then we go on to the next place Kyle mentioned in the log. And the next. And the next. Unless you have a better
idea?”

“No. It’s what I was going to do once I learned how to
drive the boat.”

Jake grunted. “The good news is that no one else has a
better idea.”

“How do you know?”

“If they did, they wouldn’t be following us.”

Honor blinked. “So if we look around and no one is following, we know we’re on the wrong trail.”

Jake wondered if he should tell her about his near certainty that Kyle had altered the chart plotter enough to hide or add routes. There was also a good chance that Kyle had decided to hide the route in plain sight and had wired some useless stuff into the computer to confuse anyone who came looking. It was the sort of double reverse that would have appealed to Kyle’s sense of humor.

After
a
moment Jake decided to
spend the day going over the stored routes and another night trying to hack into Kyle’s plotter by himself. He should have more than twenty-four hours before Ellen started whispering
in Honor’s ear. If Ellen kept her word…. He smiled cynically. Ellen’s word wasn’t exactly cast-iron.

“We’ll do the close-in spots first”, he said. “That way we’ll waste as little time as possible just getting from here to wherever.”

The
Tomorrow
sped across the blue-green sound. A white surprisingly flat wake unfurled behind the SeaSport. The other boats followed. Honor kept turning around to check on them. Jake didn’t. He was watching the radar screen for a fourth boat. One way or another, he really wanted to get a good look at the driver.

“Rest your neck”, he said to her after a few minutes. “The radar will keep track of our escort.”

“Good for it. I’d rather do it the old-fashioned way. Then I know what I’m looking at.”

“I’ve set the radar screen at a quarter mile. That means each of those three rings on the screen covers about eleven hundred feet.” He began pointing to the radar screen mounted above the dashboard. “That ragged chunk of green to the port – left – is an island. That bright spot over there is a channel marker. That big ellipse is a freighter headed for the docks to pick up logs for Japan. Those three specks behind us are our admirers. The ferry off to the starboard – right – doesn’t show yet, but it will as soon as it gets closer.”

Honor glanced from the screen to the water and back
again.
It took a little practice, but soon she began to associate the electric green blobs on the screen with the reality outside.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the screen, where it
appeared
as though the freighter was separating into two uneven pieces.

“Looks like another boat was in the
radar
shadow of the freighter but is pulling away now.” He glanced outside. “A purse seiner. See it?”

She stared out the side window and saw a ratty-looking commercial fishing boat pulling away on the far side of the freighter. The seiner’s paint sat on rusting metal like
gangrene
on flesh. The freighter itself was no prize in the glamour department – streamers of rust spilled down its sides. The name
on it was Japanese. The name on the fishing boat was Russian.

“Don’t we have any American boats around here?” she
asked.

“You’re riding in one.”

“I mean commercial boats.”

“There are a few, but most of the nonpetroleum haulers that go out of Anacortes these days are foreign.”

Honor looked at the freighter and tried to forget she was in a small boat heading out into the San Juans in search of answers that she might not want to know.

It didn’t work. She couldn’t forget. Kyle was a knot in her stomach and an ache across her shoulders that didn’t go away. She forced herself to concentrate on the
Tomorrow,
which might do Kyle some good. Worrying sure hadn’t.

As the boat arrowed through the shipping channel, she compared shapes on the water with the shimmering green blips on the radar screen. Once they were out of the main channel, the number of big ships went down. The number of small pleasure craft soared. She felt like part of an unannounced parade.

“I didn’t think there were that many crazy people, even
in the Pacific Northwest”, she said, waving a hand at little
boats zipping around on the cold water like speedy white bugs.

“Crazy? Oh, you mean boaters. The San Juans are a mecca
for small boats, especially in the summertime.”

“Then Kyle wouldn’t exactly have stood out….”

“No. Don’t be alarmed. I’m going to slow down and get the fishing gear in the water.”

“Oh joy. I can’t wait. Be still my beating heart.” She gave him a sideways glance. “How’s my enthusiasm index?”

“Right off the bottom of the scale.”

Carefully, slowly, Jake brought the boat down to idling speed and put the shifter in neutral. The wake swelled up beneath them very gently. He didn’t want to make Honor
nervous. Just because he had to use her to save himself didn’t mean that he had to torture her in the process. It wasn’t much of a sop to his conscience, but it was all he had.

Silently Honor watched while he set out the fishing rods. He kept up a running commentary about down-riggers, rod holders, cannonballs, flashers, spoons, and other words she let pass right out of her mind. Then he started in on the difference between fishing with cut plug herring versus whole herring versus artificial lures. Then he went on about trolling versus mooching versus buzz bombing.

His enthusiasm should have been catching. It wasn’t. She tried not to yawn in his face, but she didn’t try hard enough. When he got to the part about how many “pulls” behind the boat the lure should be positioned to catch silver versus coho, and what the trolling speed should be in order to avoid getting dogfish, she held up her hands in surrender.

“Enough”, she begged. “You’ve made your point.”

He looked surprised. “I have?”

“Yes! Fishing is a lot more complicated than squeezing eight inches of worm onto a one-inch hook and dunking the mess over the side.”

“I just kept talking because I didn’t want you to be nervous.”

“Nervous? I’m comatose. Why would I be nervous?”

“No reason.”

Jake hid his smile by bending over to fire up the small trolling motor. If Honor hadn’t noticed that they were adrift and the wind was starting to chop up the surface of the water, he wasn’t going to point it out. Not that there was any danger – the SeaSport could ride out a gale, much less the refreshing breeze that had come up – but Honor wasn’t at home on the water yet.

As soon as he was satisfied with the trolling speed, he checked the two rods in their separate holders and went back into the cabin. He picked up the remote throttle control for
the kicker, climbed into the helm seat, switched the computer display from the chart to the depth sounder/fish finder, and took his place in the long, elliptical line of boats trolling for
salmon.

The two Bayliners that had followed the
Tomorrow
swung into place muc
h farther back. Jake had brought the SeaSport into line just behind the only Olympic he could see. He doubted it was the elusive fourth b
oat; the fish landing net was a faded blue and the driver was old enough to be Honor’s grandfather. Not the sort of person who would be playing tag in the dark with a speeding boat and then racing off to start fishing at Secret Harbor while the Coast Guard practiced climbing on and off the
Tomorrow.

“Take the helm and keep us in line with the boat ahead”, Jake said.

“What are you going to do?”

“Use the binoculars.”

“I can do that.”

“I know what the shoreline should look like. You don’t.”

Warily Honor took over the controls. She soon discovered that the boat responded very slowly when it was on the trolling engine. In fact, it was a pig to hold in line.

While she learned the rhythm of steer, correct, overcorrect, oversteer, repeat as necessary, Jake picked up the binoculars and scanned the shoreline. He didn’t see anything unexpected. There was a small settlement tucked way back at the mouth of the harbor, plus some salmon pens farther out along the edge of the bay. None of the small craft he saw matched the specifications in Kyle’s registration papers for the Zodiac. No dive equipment was lying carelessly about on the shore. No anchor was stranded on the rocks. No unusual debris decorated the beach.

When Honor managed to bring the SeaSport about and begin the return leg of the troll, Jake switched to watching the other boats as they passed by thirty or forty yards away.

They couldn’t escape from his scrutiny, because the SeaSport was between them and the open sea.

Jake smiled. It was the nervous-making kind of smile.

“Well?” Honor asked.

“Well what?”

“What do they look like?” she asked impatiently.

“Idiots. They don’t have any fishing gear in the water.”

“I’d say that speaks highly of their intelligence”, she retorted.

He didn’t answer. He had just spotted a double-dealing Lithuanian trying to look like a salmon fisherman. As though realizing too late that he was on center stage with a spotlight in his face, Dimitri Pavlov turned away from the passing boat.

“Snake Eyes”, Jake said distinctly.

“What? Let me see.”

“Keep steering. He’s not going anywhere. I want a look at the other boat that was following.”

Honor stared over the distance separating the two boats. She couldn’t make out the features of the man who was driving the boat. To her eye, he seemed to be bouncing around a lot.

“Why is his boat wallowing around on the water more than we are?” she asked.

“Bad hull design, bad trim, bad driver, or any combination thereof.”

“What difference does… never mind. I passed my limit on useless facts for the day somewhere between dogfish and buzz bombing.”

“You sure?” he asked.

She looked at the smile spreading on Jake’s mouth beneath the binoculars. Her pulse kicked. That slow grin of his was deadly.

“Positive”, she said. Her voice sounded husky. She
cleared
her throat. “Recognize anyone in the second boat?”

“Two men. One woman. Two fishing rods.”

“Why just two?”

“Only two fishing licenses on board would be my guess.”

“His and hers?”

“His and his. Most fishermen are…”

“Men?” Honor interrupted dryly.

“Yeah.”

He didn’t say that the woman in question was Ellen Lazarus, who had a mind like a bear trap and thighs to match. He didn’t recognize the men with her, other than that the guy driving the boat was a clean-shaven, close-cut, squared-away generic military type. And Conroy was right – the driver looked too young to be a captain in anyone’s navy.