Chapter 64

 

 

Melissa still hadn’t spoken a word to him by the time they reached the outskirts of San Diego. Was it his nixing the idea of another tour anytime soon, or the remark he’d made at the end of his rope, when he said “once a con, always a con”? Maybe she’d taken offense at that. Or maybe she’d been stunned that he didn’t go along with her desires. The woman was accustomed to getting her own way.

He would have to think about all this later. Right now he had his hands full, steering the loaded bus and trailer through heavy traffic. As they got nearer to the bay, he struggled to locate a sign or something identifying Seafarer Shipping in the myriad of office-industrial buildings near the harbor. Programming the address into the GPS was something he’d asked Melissa to do, and which she had ignored. Apparently her hearing had gone, along with her speech.

Finally, he pulled to the side of a street to check the map. He’d no sooner picked up his phone than a text came through. It was from the captain of the Corinthian. Change of departure. Pier 17, 2300 hours. Your container is here. Your cargo is not. The message had been sent two hours ago and he’d missed it.

Holy crap! Instead of having eight hours to load their belongings, they now had three. He frantically checked for the location of Pier 17 and programmed the GPS to guide him through the labyrinth of streets.

“Well, our furniture may not be there,” he muttered, as much to himself as to Melissa.

It was the first thing he’d said in hours that got a reaction. She sent a startled look in his direction, then got on her phone with a call to, presumably, the decorator at the high-end furniture store where she’d done all this online shopping. Foster didn’t care—he just needed to get the bus to the correct pier and prepare himself to scramble like crazy to transfer all the boxes.

He pulled away from the curb and began following the GPS’s verbal directions, going past the office of Seafarer Shipping and out to some kind of arterial street that seemed to service all the various businesses and docks. Melissa’s conversation barely registered, other than the occasional “okay” and “uh-huh.”

Meanwhile, he put his phone on speaker and called the Corinthian’s captain. “I’ve just now received your text,” he said by way of apology. “We are fairly close, heading your way.”

“Whatever, sir. I’m only telling you that the harbor master has set our sailing time forward and there’s nothing I can do about that. If your cargo is aboard, fine. If not, we sail anyway.”

“We’ll be there.”

“Good. No refunds if you aren’t.”

A trickle of sweat ran down Foster’s spine. This was too important to screw up. The edgy feeling that had dogged him ever since Apache Junction closed in on him. They we so close to their dream—it couldn’t be snatched away from them now.

Okay, one thing at a time, he told himself. Find the pier, load the boxes into the container, pray the furniture caught up with them. Get themselves to their cabin and watch the coast of California vanish in the distance. He repeated it like a mantra, and the voice in his head nearly made him miss one of the GPS instructions. He made a sudden turn to bring the bus onto the frontage road.

Ahead, he saw a sign indicating their pier. And there sat Corinthian, a cargo ship with a five-story tower at one end. The bridge, crew quarters, and presumably their passenger cabin would be in there. The rest of the entire ship was nothing but a flat surface, stacked high with metal containers. A massive metal rig spanned the width of the ship and containers were being hoisted by a crane and pulleys, which set them in place with the precision of a kid building a Lego castle.

Foster brought the bus to a halt, having no clue what to do next. A man in a hardhat waved him forward.

“You lost, buddy?” he asked.

“We’re sailing tonight,” Foster said with a nod toward the ship.

“And what—we supposed to hoist this bus up there?” He laughed derisively at his own joke.

Foster tried to shoot him a scathing look, but he felt hopelessly out of his depth. “Our trailer and bus are filled with our household goods. Seafarer Shipping arranged a container for us—it’s supposed to be here already.”

Hardhat guy looked at a clipboard he was carrying. “Yep, okay. I see that. There was some furniture company here earlier. Thought they already loaded all your stuff.”

Foster smiled. “Yes, we were expecting them. They brought the larger items. What we have are boxes of, um, books and bedding and other stuff.”

“Yeah, okay. It’s that green unit over there, number 25740. Pull up beside it and we’ll take it from there.”

Foster put the bus in gear and drove up beside the green container. What had that last bit been about?

Two burly men stepped forward, wheeling hand trucks, and one started to open the back of the trailer.

“That’s okay, guys,” Foster said, as he unlocked the trailer. “I got this. I’ve loaded these boxes so many times I could do it in my sleep.”

One of the men, who was built like a solid block wall, looked up and met Foster’s eyes. “Not on our dock, you can’t.”

“What? No, seriously, I don’t mind. And I’m quick. I won’t make the ship late or anything.”

“It’s a union dock. Nobody touches nothing here but members of ILWU local 15.”

Hardhat guy walked over. “Problems?”

“Nope,” said the stevedore. “Just explainin’ the rules. Guy wanted to load his own cargo.”

The supervisor chuckled. “Sorry, that won’t happen. These guys get union scale and you’re paying it either way. Except that there ain’t any other way. They’ll do the work.”

The two had already begun reaching for boxes and stacking them on the dollies. Foster took the supervisor aside.

“Look, it’s just that we have some valuable things.”

“Books?”

“Exactly. My wife is a collector, and there are some rare first editions. And she’s very picky about how her dishes and glassware are handled.”

The man patted Foster’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. We handle delicate cargo all the time, as long as the boxes are marked. Plus, we’re bonded and insured. Your stuff will be safe or it gets replaced by our insurance. Now why don’t you go on over to the gangway, and a steward will show you to your cabin.”

Foster felt his gut clench. One peek inside a box, and his whole story was blown.