The Ocean Dark

25

In the morning, Tori’s quarters still smelled like the food Josh had cooked her. It wasn’t just the food, though. The room still had the slightest trace of sex in the air.

She propped open her door and sat on her rack, drinking warm pomegranate juice and staring out at the lightening sky. Dawn came early in the islands, but she thought there must be at least an hour before sunrise. She needed it desperately. Not just daylight, but strong coffee and the heat of a Caribbean morning. Her eyes burned, her thoughts were soft and muddy, and her bones ached, but she knew the sunshine would help.

She tried not to think about Josh, both because she didn’t want to worry about him, and because she despised the resentment that surged up inside her when she did. Tori hated the position he had put her in, hated him for making love to her, and for how wonderful he had made her feel. Awful dreams had chased her down into sleep for the scant hours she had spent with her head on the pillow, and now whenever she closed her eyes she imagined him in a bloody heap, neck twisted at an impossible angle, or floating bloated and blue-skinned on the waves. She wanted to scream at him, but she hoped Gabe and Boggs hadn’t killed him, either.

Remnants of her dreams lingered. She’d woken with clenched fists and the feeling that she had to fight off hands that were reaching for her, trying to restrain her. Self-analysis had never been her favorite pastime, but she didn’t need a psych degree to recognize the origins of those feelings. The FBI was lurking somewhere close, just beyond their perceptions, and they didn’t even have their vital cargo. If they returned to Miami without the guns, they might all lose their jobs — though the job wasn’t really what troubled her. She might have just sailed home, but Gabe Rio wasn’t about to do that, which meant that though they were out on the open sea, they were trapped by circumstance. Tori could feel her muscles constrict at the thought.

They needed to be swift, and lucky.

Tori reached up to rub her itchy eyes, and when she lowered her hand, Dwyer was standing in her open doorway, silhouetted in the pre-dawn light, his red hair limned with a golden glow.

Startled, she spilled her pomegranate juice.

“Shit,” she whispered, setting her glass on the floor. “What’s going on?”

Though shadow covered his face, Tori could make out a strange expression on Dwyer’s face. The young guy — she was trying to stop thinking of him as a kid — looked confused and a little antsy. She’d known addicts in her life, and they always seemed lost and desperate when they were craving. Dwyer had a bit of that in him now, though she had a feeling drugs weren’t responsible.

“Captain wants you up top,” he said. He glanced back out the door, looking at something out on the water, in the distance. “We’re here.”

Tori slipped on a pair of rubber-soled deck shoes, then grabbed a face cloth from a shelf in the corner of the room and wiped the juice off the back of her hand.

“Why do you look so worried?”

Dwyer’s soft, dark laugh took her by surprise.

“Aside from the total clusterfuck this thing is turning out to be, y’mean?”

“Yeah. Aside from that.”

Instead of answering he stepped backward, out onto the deck, and once more glanced out over the water, toward something she couldn’t see. “Come and have a look. See if you don’t wanna click your heels and wake up home in bed.”

With his face now washed in the glimmer of imminent morning, Dwyer seemed almost an apparition. The dark water behind him had a kind of haze upon it, a strange condition of the light, like the gauzy texture of the world right before a twilight summer storm.

Tori didn’t want to go out there. Her mind started to manufacture reasons — she needed to change, needed to shower, needed to pee — but except for putting on clean clothes, she’d have to leave her quarters for any of those things.

“Come on,” Dwyer urged. “The captain’s waiting.”

She nodded, feeling foolish. Snatching a thin white hooded sweater, she slipped it on. “No sign of the FBI?” she asked as she zipped it.

“Not yet.”

Tori stepped up to the threshold, stared into Dwyer’s blue eyes. “Show me.”

He only pointed to a spot off the starboard bow, like the silent ghost of Christmas yet to come. Frustrated and dragging from lack of sleep, Tori stepped out onto the walkway, two levels up from the deck, and peered through the slowly dispersing darkness at a tiny island perhaps three-quarters of a mile away. Yet it wasn’t the island that made her blink and catch her breath.

“What the hell?” she whispered, forgetting Dwyer entirely.

She started along the walkway, picking up speed, hurrying toward the stairs. As she turned to start up, she saw Dwyer behind her. At the same moment, she realized that the Antoinette felt quiet and still, save for the gentle roll of the sea.

“We’ve stopped. The engines are idle.”

Dwyer tore his focus from the horizon. “You’re just noticing?”

Tori hurried up the stairs, hands sliding on the railings. “You must’ve seen this on the radar a while ago.”

“The island, yeah. The rest we just figured for rock formations or something,” Dwyer explained, following.

On the third level of the accommodations block she paused on the landing for another look. This high off the water, there could be no mistaking the extent of what she saw. Still, she kept climbing, both because Captain Rio had sent Dwyer to fetch her and because she wanted to see it from up top, to make sense of it in her head. At night the view would have been eerie, and even now, as the horizon began to burn brightly with the impending dawn, it made her want to cross herself and keep sailing right on past, the way she’d always done as a little girl when her parents would drive past a cemetery with her in the backseat.

Only when she reached the metal landing just outside the wheelhouse did Tori stop, and peer, and try to understand. With a bright flash, the sun came over the eastern horizon and the shadows swiftly retreated toward the west. In the warm light of day, there could be no mistake.

The island couldn’t have been more than a mile and a half long. The trees were tall and thin near the shore, but thicker toward the hilly inland. The shores were soft sand, except where dark rock jutted out from the land in jagged formations. And in the shallows all around the island were sunken ships.

The prow of a fishing boat thrust from the gentle waves beside the mast of some rich man’s pride and joy. A rusting freighter, a quarter the size of the Antoinette, loomed out of the water like a man-made breakwater. A schooner at least forty or fifty years old lay on its side, one of its two masts snapped off and the other bleached white in the sun, tattered sail drooping, thin and torn as cheesecloth.

And there were others. More fishing boats. Several sleek white cabin cruisers and larger yachts that looked like they ought to have been moored in the marina of some tourist mecca. As the morning sun spread farther, Tori could make out smaller boats washed up on the shore, or jutting half out of the surf — rowboats and little Boston Whalers that must have come off larger ships.

“It’s a cemetery,” Dwyer said.

Tori shivered, eyes scanning the island. A lot of the boats were clustered in the center where there was a natural cove thanks to the jetties created by the formations of dark rock. But there were others all along the shore.

“I don’t get it,” Tori said. “What did this? Storms?”

Even as she said it, she knew it didn’t make sense. The trade winds seemed gentle enough here, and the waves were low and lapped the sandy shores of the island. The rock formations jarred a bit with what she expected from this part of the world, which got her thinking about volcanoes and tectonic plates and weird theories about the Bermuda Triangle causing electromagnetic problems with ships’ instruments.

“Hurricanes, you mean? I doubt it. The rich bastards who used to own those fancy boats wouldn’t have just left them out here. They’d want ’em repaired, don’t you think?”

“Maybe not. They’ve got insurance. This far from anything, they’d probably just radio for help and be happy they got off the island.”

“I’m thinking currents, actually.”

Dwyer stood one step below the landing, and she glanced down at him. “You mean they drifted here?”

The Irishman shrugged. “Could be. Engine trouble, derelict ships. Maybe the currents sort of converge here or something.”

“Derelict ships?” Tori repeated, looking out across the gently swaying masts and wheelhouses and bows. “Then what sank them?”

“Fuck if I know. It’s a mystery, isn’t it?”

But Dwyer’s voice had a little tremor when he said it and she turned to him, eyes narrowed. He didn’t look at her, and Tori had a feeling he was purposely avoiding her gaze. The ship graveyard unnerved her, but it had gotten much further under Dwyer’s skin.

“This has to do with the Mariposa. What aren’t you telling me?”

Dwyer cocked his head. “They were attacked here. Put our cargo ashore.”

Tori’s eyes still burned and her head still felt stuffed with cotton. She blamed tiredness for not making these connections earlier. Trying to wake up, desperate for coffee, she took a fresh look at the island and realized that, in among the trees and the brush and the thicker vegetation of the small island’s interior, there would be plenty of places for people to hide.

“So you think there are people living on the island? Someone attacked them from there?”

“Dunno,” Dwyer said, shrugging. “Could be pirates. Not Johnny bloody Depp, but the real sort, with guns and knives and a buyer waiting back in port. But radar isn’t picking up any ships nearby. Could be people on the island—”

“Or they could be on the boats,” Tori whispered.

Dwyer turned to look at her. “What?”

Tori nodded toward the half-sunken derelicts. “Add up all the space that’s still above water on those boats … cabins and wheelhouses and stuff … and you could have dry shelter for dozens of people.”

They stared at the ships together, and Tori felt like she was seeing the potential there for the first time. Many of them were so close together that a good jump would carry someone from one deck to the next. Some had been tied to others with rope or rotting sail. One large fishing trawler had been plowed right into the side of a little cargo ship, so that they were essentially the same structure.

The door into the wheelhouse opened. Tori turned to see Gabe Rio staring at her, grim and urgent.

“You coming in or what? We’ve got business to take care of.”

“Sorry, Captain,” Dwyer said, hustling up onto the landing.

“All right,” Tori said, following Gabe into the wheelhouse with Dwyer right behind her. Miguel and Suarez were both on the bridge as well. “What’s the story? Is the FBI coming?”

Gabe stared out through the windows at the island and its halo of dead ships. “Not yet.”

Tori felt her skin prickle with the flush of heat. She knew what was coming, and she wished he wouldn’t say it. But she had to ask.

“So, what’s the next move?”

Gabe looked at her. “We’re going ashore to find the guns. And you’re coming with us.”

Tori blinked at him. “Why’s that, exactly?”

Miguel snickered. “I told you, Gabriel. She wanted in yesterday when we went over to the Mariposa, but now that there might be danger, the girl’s all reluctant.”

Captain Rio ignored him, gaze locked on Tori.

“I’m not going to make you come,” he told her, “but a lot is riding on this. You said you were Viscaya’s eyes and ears out here, right? If we can’t find the guns, or this all goes to shit, I want someone to be able to tell them we did everything we could.”

Tori glanced around at the men in the wheelhouse, took in the way they were looking at her, and she understood that this wasn’t just about Gabe Rio. If Miguel lost this job and word got out about what had happened, he might never get another job. Yet the captain’s concern extended further than Miguel for once. Staying out of prison would be cold comfort if they all ended up out of a job. If they brought Tori along, she might be the one person who could speak on their behalf, if it came to that.

“What happens to Josh while we’re on the island?” she asked.

“Nothing yet,” Gabe replied, his voice cold.

Tori nodded. “All right. Then what are we waiting for?”