The Ocean Dark

7

Angie Tyree had scrubbed her hands with industrial cleanser — the slimy shit that could get off just about anything — then used gritty powdered soap with water. She went through the same process two or three times a day, but could never seem to get all of the grease and oil stains off her skin. As long as they were at sea, her caramel-brown skin would be streaked with black. It would take days away from the engine room, from the pipes and valves she spent every trip maintaining and repairing, before they would fade.

She didn’t really mind. As long as her hands were as clean as she could make them, she viewed the stains like a badge of honor. Angie had grown up poor in Honduras, in a neighborhood where only the men involved in the drug trade had any money. But her father had put food on the table at every meal. Sometimes they didn’t have much to eat, but they never went hungry. He had taught her the value of hard work, and of keeping your head down and knowing when to look the other way.

“I’m tellin’ you, Sal, I don’t know,” Dwyer said, pleasant as anything.

He sat next to Angie, their knees touching under the table. Most of the crew were Neanderthals, so whenever the company added someone new to the crew, Angie scoped them out. This time out, they had five new bodies on board. The cook, Josh, kept himself fit and the man was damn pretty, but Angie didn’t like them too pretty. On top of that, it had been obvious from the second Josh spotted Tori Austin that the two of them would hook up eventually. And aside from Josh, the pickings had been slim — except for the skinny Irish guy. But Dwyer had the benefit of youth and enthusiasm. His techno-geek qualities — apparently he had a magic touch with navigation and communications equipment — had gotten him the job as third mate, but it had been pure luck and a slanted grin that had landed him in Angie’s bed.

Now she playfully brushed his hand away.

Across from them, Sal Pucillo rolled his eyes. Also a new guy, Pucillo had to be in his early fifties, with a weathered face and gray hair, but he kept fit, and his body was lean and powerful. He had something about him that said ex-military, but when Angie had asked, it turned out he’d just been born with a stick up his ass. Once a dock foreman in Baltimore, he’d gotten divorced and decided on a change of scenery. That was all Angie knew about him. Pucillo didn’t care to say any more, and she sure as hell didn’t care enough to ask.

“Come on, Dwyer,” Pucillo said. “You’re on the bridge half the day. The captain and his brother have been acting squirrelly all morning. Something’s wrong, and we’ve got a right to know, don’t we?”

Angie kept her focus on her tray. Josh, the magician of the galley, had come up with a stew that was unlike anything she’d ever eaten, with chicken and Cajun spices and soft dumplings and tons of vegetables. Usually when she shipped out with the Rio brothers, the food was barely edible, so she spent most of her time working. As third assistant engineer, and the ship’s best mechanic, she spent a lot of time sweating in the belly of the Antoinette. But with Josh and Tori cooking, Angie thought she might actually gain weight this trip.

“Why do you think something’s wrong?” Dwyer asked, his Irish accent slipping through.

Pucillo sighed. “Are you even listening?”

Dwyer threw his hands up. He tried for exasperated, but with his red hair and freckles, he couldn’t quite pull it off. Angie thought he looked adorable when he was exasperated, and she knew what she wanted to do right after dinner.

“What are you asking me for, Sal?” Dwyer said. “You think something’s wrong, ask the captain or the chief mate. You don’t want to talk to them, ask Suarez. He never leaves the bloody bridge, does he? I don’t know that he ever takes a piss. But I don’t know shit, all right? Besides, what do you care if the boss gets upset? It doesn’t involve you.”

Pucillo laughed softly, his expression dark. They called him the cargo manager, but really he was still a dock foreman. While at sea, he was just another hand — though damned old to be considered an able-bodied seaman — but in port he oversaw the loading of the metal containers at one end, and the off-loading at the other. He had to have heard that there were some things that went on aboard Viscaya ships that the crew were better off not knowing, but Pucillo had a habit of asking questions he shouldn’t. Obviously he wasn’t comfortable with Viscaya’s secrets, but if he didn’t start minding his own business, he was going to be out of a job by the time they made port back in Miami.

Of course, Dwyer asked his share of questions, too, but Angie understood that. The kid had scored a nice gig, and if he wanted to keep it, he had to educate himself, so that he could make himself useful to the Rios if the time ever came when they needed help.

“If the captain’s got trouble, that could be trouble for all of us,” Pucillo said.

Dwyer started to reply, but Angie beat him to it. She dropped her spoon and looked up at Pucillo. “Sal, we’re trying to eat here. Maybe you should man up and say what you’ve got to say to the person you want to say it to.”

She picked up a piece of bread, tore off a chunk, and popped it in her mouth. Pucillo glared at her, trying to decide how to reply. If he took it seriously, he’d have to tell her off, and the ripples of such a conflict would affect the whole crew.

He looked at her hands, at the oil stains there, and she could see the revulsion on his face. Pucillo had a neat-freak thing going on. The guy was meticulous. He’d probably have starved before he would have eaten with dirty hands. Angie wanted to tell Pucillo that nobody had clean hands, that sometimes it just looked that way, but he wouldn’t have understood.

“You can make jokes all you want, but this affects us all,” he said. “And you’re not funny, Angie.”

She grinned through a mouthful of bread.

Pucillo sneered in disgust and got up, stalking away.

Dwyer slid a hand onto her thigh under the table and whispered into her ear, “You’re sexy when you’re a bitch.”

“So I’m sexy all the time.”

“Pretty much.”

They started nuzzling closer, about to kiss, but then Angie glanced past Dwyer and hesitated. She forced a smile.

“Save your energy for later,” she said.

Dwyer didn’t ask; he didn’t have to. On the Antoinette, there were only a handful of things that could’ve made her hold back from kissing her guy. The freighter wasn’t on fire, and there was no sign of a tidal wave about to swamp them. That just left Hank Boggs.

Maybe forty-three, the chief engineer stood six foot four and was built like a pro football player who’d started going to seed — still plenty of muscle but too much beer to go with it. He kept his head shaved down to about a quarter inch of stubble and only took a razor to his face when it grew longer than that. Sal Pucillo annoyed her, but she liked him all right, since he was pretty much harmless. But that wasn’t a word she’d apply to Hank Boggs.

As he walked to the counter where Josh and Tori had set out the stew, bread, salad, and the rest of the evening’s meal, Hank took several furtive glances at Angie. Whenever his gaze strayed toward Dwyer, the big man got a hateful glint in his eyes, a mixture of jealousy and confusion. The son of a bitch just couldn’t figure out why the skinny little Irishman got to share Angie’s bed, when she’d barely give him the time of day.

“Your boss loves me,” Dwyer whispered to her.

Angie smiled, unable to help herself. Dwyer touched her under the table, fingers dancing along the insides of her thighs, where she was ticklish — and sensitive in other ways as well. She rolled her eyes at him, gave him that coquettish “quit it” look, then caught Hank staring again.

“One of these days, he’s going to start something,” she said, voice low.

Dwyer’s smile slipped. “Why? It’s not like you two ever … wait, you didn’t, right?”

She shrank him with a look. “You better be joking.”

“If I wasn’t, I am now.”

Angie poked him under the table. “I’m serious. Be careful.” She glanced over, saw Hank slopping stew into a bowl. “He thinks I’m his territory or something. Creeps me the fuck out. If the captain hadn’t told him to back off …”

She left the thought unfinished, playing with what little food remained on her plate. As the ship’s chief engineer, Hank was Angie’s boss, but since she’d spoken to Captain Rio about the way Boggs treated her, she didn’t really have to answer to him. Provided she did her job and kept things running, she didn’t answer to anyone except the captain. It drove Hank a little crazy, mostly because of how badly he wanted to get into her pants. You couldn’t be a woman doing Angie’s job without having to deal with assholes with caveman mentalities, but Hank Boggs fairly simmered with repressed violence and sexual tension. Ever since they’d first started working together, he’d made his interest plain in ways implicit and explicit, but Gabe Rio had told him to cool it.

For a while, it had worked.

But then she’d started sleeping with Dwyer, and it blew Hank’s mind. If she was screwing somebody else, he couldn’t just pretend she was a lesbian or an ice queen. That meant she just didn’t want him. Angie could’ve eased the tension a little, put on a work shirt instead of the tight tank tops she favored, but it got damn hot down in the bowels of the ship. And if the guy got off on sweaty, oil-stained girls in sagging blue jeans, what was she supposed to do about it? Change who she was because Hank had the social skills of a brain-damaged sociopath?

Sometimes she let him take a good long look. Angie hated him enough to enjoy tormenting the guy, but she was pretty careful not to get into too many public displays of affection with Dwyer when Hank was around. Waving too much red in a bull’s face was never a good idea.

The engineer sat a couple of tables away, but there were a total of five tables in the room, so that was close enough.

“Hey,” Dwyer whispered in her ear. “You want to get out of here?”

Before she could reply, there came the clatter of a tray on their table. Angie looked up to see Tori sliding into a chair across from them.

“Hey. Do you guys mind if I join you?”

Angie just looked at her. The Antoinette was a freighter, not some little dinghy, but there wasn’t a lot of space for the crew to get away from each other, aside from their own cabins and the two rec rooms, so they put up with the proximity. Sharing a table in the mess hall with other people came with the job. You didn’t ask; you just took the available seats.

But Tori asked, quiet and polite, because even after a nineteen-day jaunt down to Fortaleza and halfway back again, she didn’t know the protocol. It was her first time out. Maybe that was why she made such an effort to be nice. She was like the new girl in school trying to make friends in the cafeteria.

The right thing to do would have been to give her a few minutes, make her feel comfortable. But Angie had spent years on ships with men who didn’t think she belonged there, so when thoughts about the right thing entered her mind, she pushed them away. This wasn’t high school. It was her job. And right now, she was off duty.

Angie stood up, grabbed her tray. “We were just finishing up. No offense.”

Tori’s face fell.

“We really were about to leave,” Dwyer said quickly. “Sorry to abandon you.”

Now Tori smiled and Angie saw, not for the first time, that skinny as she might be, and lost in her own thoughts half the time, the woman was very pretty. She didn’t like Dwyer being so friendly.

“It’s no problem. Next time,” Tori said.

“For sure,” Dwyer told her. “The stew was great, by the way.”

Angie almost jumped in with something about how Josh made the damn stew and all the office girl did was chop vegetables and fill pots, but Tori beat her to it.

“Nothing to do with me,” the woman said, shrugging. “Wish I could take the credit, but Josh is the master. I’d like to take him home with me.”

Angie raised an eyebrow. “Oh, would you? Things getting hot in the kitchen?”

Tori actually blushed. “Only on the stove.”

“Kinky,” Angie said with a laugh. “But don’t worry. Only a matter of time for you two.”

She took Dwyer’s hand and led him to the door, leaving Tori with a weird look on her face, like she wasn’t sure if Angie had been making fun of her.

They stepped out onto the deck and started under the steps that reminded her so much of a fire escape, going up the outside of the accommodations block. Dwyer paused at the next landing and they turned to look at the moonlight glinting off the water. The engines thrummed loudly. He slid his arms around her.

“What is it about her?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Tori gets under your skin for some reason. I mean, yeah, Hank Boggs I get. Toss the fucker overboard and have done with him. But what’s she done to you?”

“I’ve got nothing against her,” Angie said, surprising herself with honesty. “But she acts like we oughta be girlfriends, right? For no reason except that she’s the only other woman on the ship — like that’s enough. But I’ve never been the sleepover, cry-on-my-shoulder, paint-each-other’s-nails kind of girl. Plus, you can’t tell me you don’t feel the chill Gabe and Miguel give off when they’re around her—”

“The captain seemed fine with her today,” Dwyer interrupted.

“Maybe. But you heard what Pucillo was saying about him and Miguel acting strange, and you didn’t deny it. I’m not in a hurry to make friends with a woman the Rios don’t trust.”

Dwyer nodded, brow furrowed in thought. “I’ve gotta wonder why they don’t trust her. It can’t be just because she’s new. This is my first time on the Antoinette, too, and there are a few others.”

Angie reached up, touched his face, grabbed his ear, and tugged it, none too gently.

“Ow!”

She grinned, stepped in close, ran her hands over his chest. “I have a question for you.” She looked up into his eyes. “Why are we standing out here on the deck talking about Tori Austin, when we could be up in my quarters, naked?”

Dwyer kissed her, fingers twining in her hair before his hands slid down her back, over the dirt-streaked cotton of her tank top.

“That,” he said breathlessly, “is one hell of a good question.”