I raced the rapidly setting sun toward the west. About as far west as it was possible to go in Seattle, to the big marina at Shilshole Bay. The gale warning on the NOAA broadcast meant enough wind after nightfall to bang boats against docks and maybe shake them free from their moorings. My speedboat was one of the last possessions of my grandfather’s that I still owned, and I didn’t want it sunk by a storm.
The wind wasn’t waiting for darkness, already pushing the rain half sideways and the Barracuda insistently to the left, as the muscle car’s wide tires sluiced through the streams flowing across Leary Way. The copper-colored Barracuda was a recent acquisition. It still felt disconcertingly low to the ground compared to Dono’s old Dodge pickup, which time and wear had finally forced me to set out to pasture, if an exorbitantly priced space in a long-term garage could be called pasture.
I parked in the marina lot and dialed the number written in purple pen on the letter.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice, sounding rushed, like she’d snatched the phone up while dashing between rooms.
I explained who I was and about how the reunion letter had found its way to me. The voice belonged to Jo Mixon. She made appropriate sounds of dismay when I informed her that Moira had died long ago.
“Why I’m calling,” I said, when her torrent of words slowed, “I was wondering if you could put me in touch with anyone who knew Moira then. A school friend, or even a teacher.”
“Oh. Let me think.”
The noise of rain on the car roof and kids arguing in the background on her side provided a strange kind of hold music.
“Here we are,” she said finally. “I had the yearbook out as part of all the work for the reunion. This is who I was trying to remember. Stasia Llewellyn. She and Moira were joined at the hip, you know?”
“A yearbook? Is there a photograph of Moira?”
“With the seniors?” I heard her flipping pages. “No, I don’t see that. She was in school.”
But maybe she had been pregnant with me when class-picture time came around. Not keen to capture the moment.
“I don’t have any contact information for Stasia,” Jo Mixon said. “I’m sorry.”
I told her that was fine and asked her to spell Stasia Llewellyn’s name. As we said goodbye, I was already pulling up a browser to search for Moira’s friend.
Luck was with me: a Stasia Llewellyn-Wiler on Facebook, from Seattle and now living in Philadelphia. Her family pictures focused almost exclusively on a flock of children who ranged from grade school to college. A job profile on two networking sites listed her as a senior comptroller, whatever that was.
I sent Stasia a message, repeating the basic information I’d given to Jo Mixon and asking her to call me whenever it was convenient.
At dusk on a wet Sunday the marina was nearly deserted. The floating docks bobbed well below the parking level. I had to watch my step on the wet ramp. Cabin lights of a few liveaboards gleamed through the masts and radio antennae like lanterns in a forest.
One bright cabin belonged to Hollis Brant on the Francesca, two docks over. I’d just reached the speedboat when he stepped out from the aft door and waved one broad hand in greeting. He may have shouted something as well; it was hard to tell from a hundred yards away over the drumroll of rain pelting on my jacket hood. I waved back, aware that I’d been avoiding Hollis as much as I had Addy and Cyndra lately. He’d broken things off with his latest girlfriend, Gloria, too. Small wonder he might be craving any company, even as lousy as mine was these days.
The narrow spearhead bow of my twenty-foot speedboat rode high at rest. A consequence of the big Mercury outboard weighing down its stern. Dono had installed the engine and its muffled exhaust not long before his death. The boat had no name, only the registration numbers on the sides. It was painted shark-gray and originally intended for very fast and quiet runs across the Sound and up into the San Juan Islands, usually in the dead of night.
In the weeks since Oregon, it had become my refuge. When the apartment grew small and people became loud, I busied myself with scut work aboard or day trips out on the Sound, even sleeping some nights in the shallow triangular sarcophagus of its tiny cabin. The rhythm of the waves eased my restlessness.
I tied two more fenders as an extra defense between the boat and the dock and had begun checking that each snap of the canvas covering the cockpit was secure when Hollis came rumbling down the ramp. His sole acknowledgment of the foul weather was a canary-yellow slicker thrown over his T-shirt and shorts. Water dripped from it onto his short ruddy legs and sandals. Hollis gave the impression of being ninety percent upper body, all chest and shoulders with a hard round belly and ape-like arms. Even his hair under the slicker’s hood was a shade an elder orangutan would admire.
“Hullo,” he said as he hurriedly closed the last steps. “It’s something when the Sound gets angry, isn’t it?”
“Easy to enjoy a storm when you’re in the harbor.”
“Now that’s a bit of truth. But this is the exception that proves the rule. I’m damned glad you’re here.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Best I explain where it’s dry. If your hatches are sufficiently battened, let’s get the hell inside, shall we?”
We walked through the mounting rain to his dock, Hollis taking every third step double-time, as if to urge me to move even faster. Something was chipping away at his normally carefree façade. By the time we boarded the Francesca, he was practically jogging.
Hollis’s home was a fifty-foot Carver, outfitted for comfort and modified to hide many things that were better left unseen by harbormasters and customs officials. Hollis was a smuggler, an expert one. He’d been a frequent accomplice of my grandfather’s as well as his closest friend.
I hung my dripping coat in the enclosed aft section as Hollis opened the door and almost rushed into the main cabin, leaving a trail of rainwater across the faux teak parquet.
“Hollis—” I began, and then I saw what held his concern.
A tall heavyset white man with bristly brown hair lay on the main settee. He was shirtless, his left rib cage covered with a flat rectangle of folded cloth. Blood had seeped through at least two spots at the lower edge of the thick pad. He didn’t stir at our approach.
Hollis grabbed a waterproof first aid kit from the table and unlatched it to take out a roll of clean gauze, winding it rapidly around his hand to make another pad.
“The damn wound’s still bleeding,” he said. “I’ve tried taping it shut, but no.”
“I’ll look. You start talking sense. Did you do this?”
“Hell no. The man’s a friend of mine.”
I knelt down beside the wounded man. His airway and breathing both checked out normal, and his pulse was steady. Pupil reaction when I lifted his eyelids looked fine, too. I didn’t see any sign of an injury to his head.
“How long’s he been out?” I said.
“Almost since I found him. He was more asleep than awake. I managed to get him up and walk with him onto the boat, but then he went out completely. That’s when I took off his coat and saw how much he was bleeding. Scared the hell out of me.”
I set the man’s arm carefully to one side. The cloth pad turned out to be two of Hollis’s undershirts, folded and held to the man’s abdomen by strips of athletic tape, which I peeled away. Underneath, more tape and wads of gauze made a red clotted lump. A sharp smell and yellow streaks on the skin underneath were evidence that Hollis had done what he could with iodine as antiseptic. As I looked, a drop of blood escaped the sodden bandage and fell onto the settee’s blue upholstery.
“His name’s Jaak,” Hollis said, “a sailor on the Finnish freighter Stellar Jewel. I sailed out on the Sound earlier this afternoon to meet him. Just a bit of information and a sample product to show me, nothing major. He was supposed to borrow a boat and meet me in Smith Cove. Instead I found one of the freighter’s launches drifting near shore, with Jaak lying inside. Out cold. It took all I had to drag him aboard.”
Pulling back the bandage with a finger, I saw a long seeping cut across Jaak’s side, with a wider puncture at one end. A blade had stuttered along the hard ribs until it found the softer flesh below.
“Stab wound,” I said.
“That much I know.”
“So why aren’t we talking to paramedics right now?”
“Because the man’s got no sailor’s card on him, no visa to be onshore. If I take him to a hospital he’ll be reported as illegally entering the country. At the very least he loses his job, and maybe the poor fool spends some time in jail here and in Helsinki to boot. But if we can get him back to the Stellar Jewel in one piece, his mates can cover for him. I’m sure of it.”
“Well, I’m sure that he needs surgery. Soon. Look here.” Hollis stepped forward, and I showed him a purplish blotch where blood was pooling below the puncture, blurring the skin down almost to Jaak’s kidneys.
“He’s hemorrhaging inside,” I said, grabbing latex gloves from Hollis’s kit. “We have to staunch the bleeding as much as we can. I need clean sponges. And duct tape.”
“Tape’s with the tools here,” Hollis said, removing a small tackle box from shelves in the galley. “I think I’ve some new sponges in the cleaning supplies.”
“Tear them up into pieces. About the size of a marble. Wash your hands well first.”
He hurried to comply.
“I can patch him, but field medicine doesn’t cover sewing up whatever’s sliced inside.” Keeping light pressure on the wound, I used my other hand and my teeth to tear off strips of duct tape, setting each one aside. I couldn’t figure why Jaak was unconscious. He wasn’t especially pale, and his pulse was solid. Not so much blood loss that a man his size should pass out. “He needs a doctor.”
“I have an alternative to visiting an E.R.” Hollis nodded. “I was about to give up on the idea, but then you arrived. Evidence of a grand design.” He brought me a cereal bowl filled with small ragged chunks of orange sponge.
“Hold the towel there,” I said to Hollis, indicating below the wound. “This will be messy.”
When I took pressure off, the stab wound opened again. Blood flowed down Jaak’s stomach, even as I swiftly began packing the puncture with pieces of sponge. The orange bits immediately swelled and grew saturated with blood. I pressed each of them gently into Jaak’s body, counting on the swollen weight of the massed sponges to slow his internal bleeding. Six pieces, seven, and then the wound would take no more.
I pinched the two halves of the puncture together and used the last chunks of sponge to mop most of the blood from his skin. The last of the gauze went on next. It would keep the wound clean of duct tape residue. I layered the strips of tape in Xs, counting on them to keep the skin over Jaak’s ribs from pulling apart. If the injured sailor was going to have surgery within the next couple of hours, I didn’t want to attempt suturing the wound and risk tearing his lacerated skin further. My makeshift bandage would stem the flow. If it held.
Hollis climbed to the helm on the flybridge above the cabin and started the Francesca’s engines. A moment later his VHF radio began blaring the same weather broadcast I’d heard only an hour before. I looked out the cabin window. Between the rain clouds and the dusk, the sky was already a step beyond black. Wind buffeted the masts outside, making their halyards clang like muffled gongs.
“Hollis,” I called.
“I know, I know. But we only need to sail as far as Vashon Island.”
“In a gale.”
“If you don’t want to get involved—”
“Come on.” Hollis and I had known each other long enough that the question was insulting. “What’s on Vashon?”
“A physician called Claybeck, in a lovely beachfront home with its own dock.”
“Tell the doctor to get ready,” I said, peeling off the gloves. Jaak’s blood had changed the latex from sky blue to deep violet.
“Thanks,” Hollis said. “I’ll cast off.”
“I’ll cast off. You get us moving. The faster we get across the Sound, the less chance we’ll all finish this day by drowning.”