Page 7 of The Girl Beneath the Sea

They must be paying him a fortune, because he knows my rules. He also knows that breaking them means I don’t do any more jobs for him.

Twice before, somebody has tried to hire me for people. A guy moving girls down out of Canada, another one I never let get to the details. I don’t do that shit.

I look at him until he has to light the cigarette to have something to do with his hands.

“Come on, man,” Sully says, reading my face. “I told you. We don’t get to say no. Not now.”

I believe him. There are people out there who don’t like complications. Me walking away is a complication. Sully has me stuck and he knows it.

He holds out his hand. “Phone.”

I give it to him. I knew that was coming. In exchange I get a burner, a flip phone with one number saved in it. “That’s me. Call me if the boat’s on fire. Nothing else.”

Last, the keys. I get a ring with two padlock keys, a small one that can only be for handcuffs, and one for the chain-link gate at the top of the slip.

The stack in the hold is all for the cargo. Nobody bought the guard dog anything. That’s fine. I’ve got my duffel with jerky, cans, a jar of instant coffee. I’ve done longer weeks in worse places with less.

At the top of the ladder, Sully stops with the rain coming down the open hatch behind him.

“Two weeks,” he says. “Then it ships, we get paid, and this never happened.”

He looks past me down the ladderway, at the dark where the box is. “For what it’s worth, I told them to get somebody else.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t want to fuck up our relationship.”

“Too late. Go home, Sully.”

He goes. I listen until his engine fades up the road, and it’s just me, and the thing I’ve agreed to keep alive.

I check the boat before I do anything else.

I go through it carefully. I need to know the layout in case anything goes wrong. I check the deckhouse first: two cabins stripped to their bunk frames, a galley with a propane ring, a head that more or less works. Then the deck, learning where the shadows sit and where the footing’s bad.

At the gangway I balance a coffee can of rusted bolts where anyone coming up in the dark will put it over the side. If I’m living on this wreck for two weeks, I’ll need to know her better than anyone who ever sailed her.

And the cargo? A person means somewhere out there this is personal in a way that paintings aren’t.

Then I make coffee on the propane ring in the galley, and drink it standing where I can see the gangway.

Across the river there’s a glow where the city proper starts. Sirens in it tonight, more than usual. Might be connected. Might not be. Not my business. Nothing off this boat is my business either.

Still, my head is stuck on the cargo.

If the cargo is injured—a real possibility considering the kind of people who deal with this kind of cargo—then that’s a risk. Cargo that dies on my watch is a murder charge with my name already written on it. I need to know what I’m dealing with so I can get the job done and then get out of here.

I rummage in my duffel for my balaclava. It’s been sitting in there ten years and this is the first time I’ve had to wear it. Like I said, I don’t do risk. And I certainly don’t need whoever is in there to see my face.

I pull it over my face and then I load up properly, because if I’m opening that door I’m opening it once tonight: the blankets, two bottles of water, a granola bar, the lantern hooked on my belt. Feeding time, that’s all this is. The schedule just started early.

Outside the container I stop and listen. Under the sound of the river, I can hear breathing — fast and shallow, the kind you do when you’re trying to be quiet about it and losing.

There’s a smell coming off the vent, too. Blockers — that dead-air nothing the professional stuff makes, the kind security details wear. Somebody soaked this cargo in them. The blockers are losing. What’s getting past them is sweet, gone sour at the edges. Fear does that to a scent. Anyone who grew up where I grew up knows fear when he smells it.

I pull the drop bolt, unlock the padlocks and pull the door.

The scent hits me like a fist.