“Yeah, well, it’s wet out there,” Lucas said. “You oughta try it sometime.”
“I tried it plenty,” Harley said. He’d worked the decks since he was eleven years old, back when his dad had owned the first Neptune and his older brother had been able to throw the hook and snag the buoys. And he remembered his father sitting on a stool just like this, ruling the wheelhouse and looking out through the row of rectangular windows at the main deck of the boat. The view hadn’t changed much, with its ice-coated mast, its iron crane, its big gray buckets for sorting the catch. Once that boat had gone down, Harley and his brother Charlie had invested in this one. But unlike the original, the Neptune II featured a double bank of white spotlights above the bridge. At this time of year, when the sun came out for no more than a few hours at midday, the lights threw a steady but white and ghostly glow over the deck. Sometimes, to Harley, it was like watching a black-and-white movie down there.
Now, from his perch, where he was surrounded by his video and computer screens—another innovation that his dad had resisted—he could see the four crewmen on deck throwing the lines, hauling in the pots with the crabs still clinging to the steel mesh, then emptying the catch into the buckets and onto the conveyor belt to the hold. An enormous wave—at least a twenty-five-footer—suddenly rose up, like a balloon inflating, and broke over the bow of the boat. The icy spray splashed all the way up to the windows of the wheelhouse.
“It’s getting too dangerous out there,” Lucas said, clinging to the back of the other stool. “We’re gonna get hit by a rogue wave bigger than that one, and somebody’s going overboard.”
“I just hope it’s Farrell, that lazy son of a bitch.”
Lucas took a sip of his own coffee and kept his own counsel.
Harley checked the screens. On one, he had a sonar reading that showed him what lay beneath his own rolling hull; right now, it was thirty fathoms of frigid black water, with an underwater sea mount rising half that high. On the others, he had his navigation and radar data, giving him his position and speed and direction. Glancing at the screens now, he knew what Lucas was about to say.
“You do know, don’t you, that you’re going to run right into the rock pile off St. Peter’s Island if you don’t change course soon?”
“You think I’m blind?”
“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.