“I think you’re like your brother. You’ll risk the whole damn boat to catch a full pot of crab.”
Although Harley didn’t say anything, he knew Lucas was right — at least about his brother. And about his dad, too, for that matter, may the old bastard rest in peace. There was a streak of crazy in those two — a streak that Harley liked to think he had avoided. That was why he was skipper now. But it didn’t mean he liked to be told what to do, much less by some college-boy deckhand who’d done maybe two or three seasons, max, on a crab boat. Harley stayed the course and waited for Lucas to dare to say another thing.
But he didn’t.
Down on the deck, Harley could see Kubelik and Farrell pulling up another pot — a steel cage ten feet square — this one brimming with crabs, hundreds of them scrabbling all over each other, their claws flailing, grasping at the mesh, struggling to escape. This was the first full pot Harley had seen in days, packed with keepers. When the bottom was dropped open, the crabs poured out onto the sorting counter, and the crewmen quickly went about throwing them into buckets, down the hole, or — in the case of those too mutilated or small to use — whipping them back into the ocean like Frisbees.
Harley didn’t care how close to St. Peter’s he got. If this was where the damn crabs were, this was where he was going.
For the next half hour, the Neptune II steamed ahead, throwing strings of pots and bucking the increasingly heavy seas. A chunk of ice broke off the crane and plummeted onto the deck, nearly killing the Samoan guy he’d hired in that waterfront bar. But every time Harley heard one of the deckhands shout into the intercom, “290 pounds!” or “300!” he resolved to keep on going. If this could just keep up, he could return to Port Orlov in a couple of days and not hear a word of bitching from his brother.
And then, if things really went his way, maybe he’d be able to convince Angie Dobbs to go someplace warm with him. L.A., or Miami Beach. He knew that he wasn’t enough of a draw all by himself — ten years ago, Angie had been runner-up for Miss Teen Alaska — but if he could promise her a free trip out of this hellhole, he figured she’d take it. And maybe even give him some action just to be polite. It wasn’t like she hadn’t been around — Christ, half the town claimed to have had her, and Harley had long felt unfairly overlooked.
“Skipper!” he heard over the intercom. Sounded like Farrell, probably about to complain about the length of the shift.
“What?” Harley said, unhappy at the break in his reverie.
“We got something!” he shouted over the howling wind.
“Yeah, I’ve been watching. You got the best damn catch of the season.”
“No,” Farrell said, “no, take a look!”
And now, lifting himself up from his seat to get a better view of the deck, Harley could see what Farrell, the hood thrown back on his yellow slicker, was wildly pointing at.
A box — big and black, with icy water cascading down its sides — was tangled in the hooks and lines, and with the help of a couple of the other crew members, it was being hauled over the railing. What the hell …
“I’ll be right down!” Harley called before turning to Lucas and telling him to hold the boat in position. “And do not fuck with the course.”
Harley grabbed his anorak off a hook on the wall. As he barreled down the narrow creaking stairs, he pulled a pair of thermal, waterproof gloves out of the pocket and wrestled them on. Just a few minutes out on deck unprotected and your fingers could freeze like fish sticks. Yanking the hood up over his head, he pulled the sliding door open, and was almost blown back into the cabin by the driving wind.
Forcing his way outside, the door slamming back into its groove behind him, he plowed up the deck with one hand clinging to the inside rail. Even in the gathering dusk, he could see, maybe three miles to starboard, the ragged silhouette of St. Peter’s Island sticking up out of the rolling sea. That one island, with its steep cliffs and rocky shoals, had claimed more lives than any other off the coast of Alaska, and he could see why even the native Inuit had always given it a wide berth. For as long as he could remember, they had considered it an unholy place, a place where unhappy and evil spirits, the ones who could not ride the highways of the Aurora Borealis up into the sky, were condemned to linger on earth. Some said that these doomed souls were the spirits of the mad Russians who had once colonized the island, and that they were now trapped in the bodies of the black wolves that roamed the cliffs. Harley could almost believe it.
“What do we do with it?” Farrell shouted as the great black box swung in the lines and netting overhead.
It was about six feet long, three feet wide, and its lid was carved with some design Harley couldn’t make out yet. The other crewmen were staring at it dumbfounded, and Harley directed the Samoan and a couple of others to get it down and onto the conveyor belt. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to lose it, and whatever might be inside it, he didn’t want the deckhands to find out before he did.
Farrell used a gaffing hook to pull the box clear of the railing, while the Samoan guided it onto the deck. It landed on one end with a loud thump, and a crack opened down the center of the lid. “Quick!” Harley said, lending a hand and pushing the box toward the belt. Harley guessed its weight at maybe two hundred waterlogged pounds, and once they had securely positioned it on the belt, Harley threw the switch and watched as it was carried the length of the deck, then down into the hold below.
“Okay, show’s over,” he shouted over the wind and crashing waves. “Haul in those pots! Now!”
Then, as the men cast one more look over their shoulders and returned to their labors, he went back toward the bridge. But instead of going up to the pilot’s cabin, he stumbled down the swaying steps to the hold, where he found the engineer, Richter, studying the box.
“What the hell is this?” Richter said. “You know you could have busted the belt with this damned thing?” Richter was usually just called the Old Man, and he’d worked on crab and cod and swordfish boats for nearly fifty years.
“I don’t know what it is,” Harley said. “It just came up in the lines.”
Richter, pulling at his bushy white eyebrows, stood back and surveyed the box, which had come to rest at the end of the now-stationary belt. Mutilated crabs, most of them dead but some of them still twitching, lay all over the wet floor. The overhead lights cast a sickly yellow glow around the huge holding tanks and roaring turbines. The air reeked of gasoline and brine.
“I’ll tell you what I think it is,” Richter said. “This damn thing is a coffin.”
Harley had reluctantly come to the same conclusion. It wasn’t built in the customary shape of a coffin, but the general dimensions were right.
“And you don’t want to bring coffins aboard,” Richter grumbled over the engine noise. “Didn’t your father teach you a goddamned thing?”
Harley was sick to death of hearing about his father. Everybody from Nome to Prudhoe Bay always had a story. He ran a hand over the lid of the box, brushing off some of the icy water, and bent closer to observe the carvings. Most of them had been worn away, but it looked like there was some writing here. Not in English, but in those characters he’d seen on the old Russian buildings that still remained here and there in Alaska. In school, they’d taught him about how the Russians had settled the area first, way back in the 1700s, and then, in one of the colossal blunders of all time, had sold it to the United States after the Civil War. This looked like that kind of writing, and in the dim light of the hold he could also make out a chiseled figure. Bending closer, he saw that it was sort of like a saint, but a really fierce-looking one, with a long robe, a short beard, and a key ring in one hand. He felt a sudden shudder descend his spine.