Charon's landing

off a cold pearly light. Backed against the low scudding clouds, the sky was like an opaque shroud, a special effect only nature could create.

Within a few minutes of getting the baited hooks in the water, Mercer heaved a ninety-pound halibut to the surface. Jerry and John used heavy gaffs to haul the fish over the gunwale. Its flat white body was smooth except for the two blisters on the top of the fish that protected its eyes. Although the halibut was one of the ugliest creatures in the world, Mercer was congratulated soundly.

“Great fish.”

“Beautiful fish.”

“Looks like my ex-wife. Don’t tell your mother I said that, John.”

Five minutes later, Mercer and Jerry helped John land a forty pounder, and then it was Howard’s turn to haul in one of the monsters from two hundred feet down. For an hour it went on like this, each man catching only a few minutes after his hook reached bottom. After they had all caught one, they released the fish back into the depths. There was no real sport to this type of fishing; it was just a test of strength to bring the sluggish creatures to the surface.

Jerry compared it to pulling a queen-sized mattress from the bottom of the ocean, no fight but plenty of weight. The camaraderie was halibut fishing’s true appeal. Jerry said that to experience real Alaska fishing they had to stand hip deep in an icy river while the salmon were making their spawning run. There were so many fish, they butted against your waders as if you were just another obstacle in the water. Yet, during the spawning runs the salmon almost never feed, so most fishermen just watch them swim past their lines.

“More frustrating than impotency in a whorehouse,” was how Jerry described it.

Howard had recovered from his hangover enough to begin enjoying the beers Mercer kept passing to him. Jerry Small too was drinking steadily. Only John, too young to drink legally, seemed to have any interest in remaining sober. Jerry had told the boy it was all right to have a few, but John said he was training for the upcoming basketball season, so he abstained completely.

By ten in the morning, it seemed that they were catching the same fish over and over again, so they hauled in their lines, and Jerry started out for another hole farther from Homer. They motored south, the Chevy keening sharply so the Wave Dancer trailed a fat wake behind her. The seas were still calm and the sky had cleared enough so the sun poked through in sharp rays that flashed against the water like heliograph signals.

About twenty minutes into the run, John pointed starboard and shouted, “Dad, what’s that?”

Jerry throttled back immediately and turned the boat hard over, Mercer and Howard clutching at the dash to maintain their balance. About five hundred yards away, another boat bobbed eerily in the low swells. She was larger than the Wave Dancer by twenty feet, a commercial fishing vessel with a small cabin hunched over her heavy bows, her afterdeck supporting a purse net derrick at the very stern.

Even at a distance, everyone could tell there’d been trouble aboard the other ship. She was unnaturally low in the water, and her upper works were darkened and scored by fire. There was a forgotten, haunted feeling to the vessel. It was the unnatural silence of the crypt that hung over her. Jerry swung Wave Dancer closer. No one moved on the derelict or answered his call of “Hello.”

“What boat is that?” Jerry asked absently as he brought his boat alongside.

“Her name’s burned off the transom,” his son answered as he tied fenders to the Wave Dancer’s gunwale. “But I think it’s the Jenny IV out of Seward.”

Mercer was in position to jump across with a line when the two came together. He secured the boats quickly. The alcohol-fueled banter had died as soon as the Jenny IV was spotted, and he moved with a calm professionalism, as if finding burned-out wrecks was an everyday occurrence.

Six inches of sea water washed across the Jenny IV’s scarred decking, slopping from gunwale to gunwale as she rolled sluggishly. The waterproofing on Mercer’s boots failed soon after leaping aboard the fishing vessel, and his feet quickly numbed. He looked around the deck, then turned to Jerry.

“Radio the Coast Guard and report what we’ve found. Tell them to take their time, no one survived.” Mercer’s voice possessed an edge of command that hadn’t been there before.

“How can you tell?” Howard asked, leaning over between the two boats.

Mercer looked forward again before speaking. “Because the life raft is still hanging in its davit and there’s a charred body at my feet.”

“Oh, shit,” Jerry Small said from the console of his boat. “John, make that call to the Coast Guard.”

He leapt onto the Jenny IV, steadying himself against a scorched deck winch when he saw the facedown corpse.

“Oh, shit,” he repeated.

If the condition of the boat was bad, leaking and burned as she was, the body on the deck was much, much worse. Whoever it was had obviously survived much of the fire, because the corpse’s position indicated that he’d dragged himself from the cabin. He lay stretched out on the deck as if he’d been crawling from the worst of the flames before dying. The upper body was remarkably undamaged, and he still wore a safety orange coat over a checked flannel shirt, but from the pelvis downward, nothing remained except the blackened stumps of femur bones sticking obscenely from his hips. His hands were twisted claws, charred bone and tendrils of flesh that waved delicately with the water sloshing across the deck.

Mercer had no desire to turn the body and see what damage the fire had done to its face.

The odd state of the body only compounded a deepening mystery surrounding the vessel. Already Mercer’s mind was worrying at a problem with the boat’s condition. There had been an accident on board and a raging fire, one that had caught the victim unaware, but there was no explanation as to why the fire went out before sinking the craft. Had it been extinguished by another ship, then surely the body would not have been left on the derelict. It didn’t make sense.

“Get back aboard your boat,” Mercer said to Jerry. “I need a flashlight and an ax.”

Jerry thankfully reboarded the Wave Dancer and handed the items over to Mercer. He sat anxiously against the gunwale as Mercer continued his investigation.

“Don’t you think we should wait for the Coast Guard?”

Howard had a good point, Mercer thought, but something about this fire bothered him and he wasn’t going to wait for the authorities to find out what.

“I won’t be a minute.”

Forward, a short set of stairs led up to the wheelhouse. Next to them a door led to the belowdecks area. The pilothouse, though damaged by the fire, wasn’t nearly as ravaged as the deck below, so Mercer went to the door and tried to wrench it open. The wood had been so warped by the heat that it jammed almost immediately. Mercer swung the ax a few times, and the wood splintered. Half the door fell to the deck with a splash.

He flicked on the heavy flashlight and cast its beam around the cramped room below the pilothouse. A small galley was to his left next to a couple of bench seats and a dining table. Everything was burned horribly. To the right were three bunks, two of them empty save for smooth layers of ash that had been the mattresses and blankets. The third bunk contained another skeleton, this one burned so badly that no flesh remained on the bones. Empty eye sockets watched Mercer almost accusingly, sending a superstitious chill up his spine. No matter how strong the urge to escape the charnel cabin, he forced himself to remain critical and press on.

He suspected that the third crewman of the Jenny IV must have jumped overboard to escape the inferno. Placing his hand against a steel bulkhead, he noted the metal was ice cold. Because the night before had been so bitterly cold, it would be impossible to guess the fire’s exact time until a forensic specialist went over the bodies.

The room’s ceiling was scorched by the flames, but it didn’t appear as if there had been enough time for the wood to burn through. Next to the door that Mercer had smashed through, another led down a short hallway to the cargo holds. Of the door itself nothing remained, and the casing and bulkhead near it had been blown outward by an explosion farther belowdecks. That explained why the fire hadn’t totally destroyed the boat. The explosion must have robbed the flames of oxygen, snuffing the inferno.

Mercer wondered what the fishing boat could have carried to cause such an explosion.

The vessel’s engines were in the stern, and logically the fuel tanks would be close to them, but there would be evidence of that sort of explosion abovedecks. Certainly that would have sunk the vessel. It was something else.