I couldn't believe it. “Jesus, Bart! We don't want to talk to these pricks.”
“Boone said we were supposed to create a diversion, didn't you hear him?” Bart cupped his hands and hollered, “Hey! Anybody up there?” I slapped my hands over my face and commenced deep breathing. I might get noticed, but my description didn't match the old S.T. anymore. No beard, different hair.
The deckhands murmured on for a few seconds, finishing their chat, and then one leaned over to check us out: a young guy, neither corporate exec nor ship's officer, just your basic merchant marine, standing on the rail having a smoke. With the cargo this ship carried, they probably weren't allowed to smoke below decks.
“Hey! How fast can this thing go?” Bart shouted.
“Ehh, twenty knots on a good day,” the sailor said. Classic Jersey accent.
“What's a knot?”
“It's about a mile.”
“So it can go, like, twenty miles in a day? Not very far, man.”
My roommate had left me in his dust. I just leaned back and spectated. Technically he wasn't my roommate anymore, our home had been exploded by its owner. I guess that meant we were now friends; kind of terrifying.
“No, no, twenty miles an hour,” the sailor explained. “A little more, actually. Hey. You dudes partyin'?”
Bart was getting ready to say, “Sure!,” always his answer to that question. Then I imagined this sailor asking to go along, and me spending a couple of hours waiting for them to work their way to the bottom of that garbage can. So I said, “Naah, the cops came and started to bust it up, you know.”
“Bummer. Hey, you guys know any good bars in this town?”
“Sure,” Bart said.
“Are you Irish?” I asked.
“Bohunk,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“Hey, we got some Guinness down here. Can we come up there and check out your boat?”
“Ship,” the sailor blurted reflexively. Then a diligent pause. “I don't think Skipper'd mind,” he concluded. “We're under real tight security when we get into port. 'Cause of terrorists. But this ain't in port.”
If Bart had proposed, back on Spectacle Island, that we board in this fashion, I'd have laughed in his face. But that was Bart's magic. The sailor unrolled a rope ladder down the side of the ship and we climbed up over the gunwhales.
“You know, in your own utterly twisted way, you've got more balls than I do,” I said to Bart as we were climbing up. He just shrugged and looked mildly bewildered.
The sailor's name was Tom. We handed him a Guinness and did a quick orbit of the deck, checking out such wonders as the anchor chains and the lifeboats and the bit hatches that led down into the toxic holds. The whole ship stank of organic solvents.
“Fuckin' water sure stinks tonight,” Bart observed. I kicked him in the left gastrocnemius.
“Yeah, don't ask me about that,” Tom said with a kind of shit-eating chuckle.
After we'd checked out the butt end of the ship, examined the controls of the big crane, they headed up toward the bow and I couldn't resist leaning out over the aft rail and trying to nail Boone with a loogie. He was there, all right, though I wouldn't have seen him if I hadn't been looking. He was totally black, there weren't any lights back here, and when he saw someone above him he collapsed against the hull and froze. I missed by a yard.
I took out a flashlight and shone it over my face for a second. Then I shone it down on his face. I'd never seen utter, jaw-dropping amazement on Boone's face before and it was kind of fulfilling. Then I just turned around and left. He was doing pretty well; he was over halfway up.
Tom showed us the bridge and the lounge where the rest of the crew was sitting around watching “Wheel of Fortune” and drinking Rolling Rock. They all said quick hellos and then went back to watching the tube. We were in your basic cramped but comfy nautical cabin, with fake-wood paneling glued up over the steel bulkheads, a semi-installed car stereo strung out across the shelves, pictures of babes with big tits on the walls. Up in one corner, a CB radio was roaring and babbling away for background noise.
We watched the show a little, worked on our beers, exchanged routine male-bonding dialog about the wild scene on Spectacle Island and the fact that women were present, some good looking. I let Bart handle most of that; a cutaway blueprint of the Basco Explorer was tacked up on the wall and I was trying to memorize its every detail.
The world's strange. You plan something like sneaking onto a ship and then you get completely paranoid about the chances of being noticed; you figure watchmen are spaced every twenty feet along the rail. But hanging out in that cabin, drinking bad beer and watching TV, surrounded by total darkness outside, I knew these guys never had a chance of noticing Boone. We might as well have dropped him on the deck with a helicopter. I just hoped he'd find a nontoxic hideaway.
They say that parents can pick out their babies' cries in the midst of total pandemonium. Maybe it's true. In Guadalajara, I've seen evidence to support the notion. Anyway, it seems some of those parental circuits were wired into my brain, since I caught Debbie's voice right in that cabin.
My heart was beating so hard it threw me off balance and I had to grab a bulkhead. I thought she was somewhere on board. I thought they'd taken her prisoner, then I traced the sound to the CB in the corner.
A powerful transmission was breaking through the clutter. I heard the sound of an outboard motor, the chuff of waves against a fiberglass hull and a man's voice, high-pitched and strained: “Explorer . . . Explorer ... come in.” Debbie's voice was in the background, on the same transmission. I couldn't make it all out, but she was issuing some kind of death threat, and she was scared.