Dead and Gone

waistband of her shorts. She pulled them down and bent over in one smooth movement.

I smacked her bottom half-heartedly. “More,” she said. I did it again, a couple of times, the cracks loud in the closed space.

She straightened up, adjusted her shorts. Turned around and knelt next to me as she had been before. “I have been punished now, yes?”

“Sure.”

“It is not enough?”

“It’s plenty, Gem. It’s not your fault. There’s some things I just can’t—”

“It was my fault. I know you. I never should have suggested what I did. I apologize. Do you accept?”

“Yes, baby girl. Just forget it, okay?”

“I have been punished, so my debt is paid. I will forget it. But … now may I give you that manicure, please?”

The next evening, Levi sat down next to me. “It’ll work,” he said, confidently. “I wasn’t sure at first. But I’ve been practicing. Every time there’s no other ship in sight, I toss one of the flotation devices overboard, wait till we’ve got some distance. If I can hit something that small at a hundred yards, what you’re talking about, I can handle it three, four times that distance, no problem.”

“And you can’t beat it for silence.”

“That’s for sure. Even over water, you can’t hear a thing.”

“We’ll probably never get to use it, you understand?”

“I understand. But if I have to go with the other option, you could double that distance and it’d be no big deal.”

We made even better time than Flacco had estimated. When he pulled in for the last refueling, I called the Chancellor.

“Please write this down very carefully,” he said, his voice more cocksure and commanding than it had been when he thought the old man was a long distance away. “Starting from the mouth of the Chetco River, from Red Buoy No. 2, proceed on a course of 238.5 true. This will take you out to 124 degrees, 31 minutes west; 41 degrees, 51 minutes north. Repeat: course is 238.5 true, heading to 124 degrees, 31 minutes west; 41 degrees, 51 minutes north. Please note, that point is slightly more than twelve-point-five nautical miles from the United States coast. If you would please read that back to me …”

I did that, except for the twelve-mile-limit part.

“Precisely,” he said. “Please tell your pilot that Red Buoy No. 2 has a flashing red light with a four-second interval. It also has a bell.”

“I’ve got it.”

“And the last buoy out, ‘CR,’ which marks the start of the Chetco Channel, is red-and-white-striped. This one flashes white in morse code the letter ‘A.’ And it is equipped with a whistle, not a bell. Are you still with me?”

“Yes,” I told him. And repeated what I’d written down, word for word, to prove it.

“Tomorrow morning at oh-seven-hundred.”

“I’ll be there.”

“If fog proves a problem, we will radio—”

“Fine.”

“Very well, sir. I look forward to meeting you.”

“What’s he mean, ‘pilot’?” I asked Flacco. “Guys who drive ships’re captains, right?”

“Right. When you drive, you’re the captain. But the guys who take the boats—the big ones, I mean, like the liners—the guy who brings it in or out of port, they call him the pilot. That was me, through the Canal. Got to have a pilot’s license to work those locks.”

“And you understand what all this stuff means?” I asked, showing him the directions I’d written down.

“Sure,” he said. “Just means he wants us to stay with the gyro compass. See where he says true north? That’s different from magnetic north. Could be ten, maybe even twenty-five degrees of difference.”

“And the true one is the more accurate?”

“That’s right,” Levi answered. Flacco and Gordo turned to look at him. “That’s working off the GPS, so it’ll be right on the nose, every time. You just dial in latitude and longitude, and it’ll tell you how to steer, stay right on course. But ships have to carry both. Even if we lost electrical power, the magnetic compass would always work.”

The Mexicans nodded approval. “That’s the truth, man,” Gordo said. “You ever drive?”

“No,” Levi said. “I was just on board a lot while I was in the Corps. But I’m a good listener.”

He was a good watcher, too. It was just getting light as Levi stood at the rail, a pair of binoculars to his eyes. “Christ,” he said, softly, “that’s a fucking Zhuk.”

“A what?” I asked him.

“A coastal-patrol craft. The Russians started making them thirty years ago. For export only—who’d try and patrol the Russian coast?”

“Where’d they find buyers? Something like that must cost a few million bucks, right?”

“Maybe once. Now one, one and a half max. The mobs in charge over there have been selling off the military surplus for a long time now. Hell, you could probably pick one up for half what I said, if you knew where to look. Nicaragua was a big buyer.”