The Trapped Girl (Tracy Crosswhite #4)
Robert Dugoni
CHAPTER 1
Seattle, Washington
Saturday, June 24, 2017
Kurt Schill dragged his fourteen-foot aluminum boat across the beach logs he’d set to minimize the scraping of the hull against the rocks. He wanted to protect his recent investment, but he really wanted to avoid a confrontation with the residents living in the condominiums and apartments bordering the narrow access to Puget Sound. At four thirty in the morning, they would not take kindly to having their peace disrupted. If they bitched to the police about Schill launching his boat from what was strictly a walking path, he would have little to say in his defense. The posted signs were frequent and explicit.
Schill entered the water to steady the boat and felt the chill of the forty-six-degree Puget Sound through his rubber boots. He gave the boat a shove and leapt in, banging his knee hard, the boat rocking and rolling until he’d adjusted his weight on the center seat. The V-shaped hull felt more stable than his fiberglass boat, which was difficult to maneuver when the water got rough. He’d have to wait until he got a bit farther away, though, before he fired up the six-horsepower Honda engine and got the real feel.
He slid the wooden oars into the rowlocks and rowed from shore, silent but for the splash of the blades and the click of the oarlock with each stroke. The aluminum hull glided across the pitch-black waters. One more thing he was digging about the new rig. He’d saved his money and bought it off a guy on craigslist for two grand—boat and trailer. It was more than the $1,500 he’d budgeted—his father had helped him out, though he’d have to pay back that money. He figured he could save by avoiding boat launch fees at the local marinas and by hauling in more crab. Fish and Game put a limit of five Dungeness per person, but Schill wasn’t about to throw any keepers back, not with his restaurant contacts paying cash under the table.
He rowed in the direction of Blake Island, a black hump rising out of the water, though dwarfed by the shadowy presence of the significantly larger islands behind it—Bainbridge and Vashon. To the north, the lights of the eastbound Bremerton ferry inching toward Seattle made it look like an illuminated water bug. Perspiration trickled down his chest and back beneath his waders and life vest, and Schill was thankful for the light breeze blowing cool on his neck.
Several hundred yards offshore, he shipped the oars and moved to the rear of the boat. He hooked the kill-switch to his life vest, squeezed the ball on the fuel line three times to pump gas to the engine, adjusted the choke, and pulled the rip cord. The engine cranked, sputtered, and died. He made sure the gear was in neutral and the throttle on the tiller twisted to the turtle, and pulled again. The engine chugged and sputtered. Then it kicked to life.
Legally, only the Native American tribes could crab this early in the season, and the fine if you got caught was steep, but Schill had found a sweet honey hole at the end of last year’s run, and he was eager to find out if it was still producing. To avoid detection, he set his pots after sundown and retrieved them before sunrise. Still, there were risks. Running without a light increased his chance of being hit by another boat or hitting a log floating on the water. Either would ruin your day, big time.
Schill turned the tiller hard to the right, and the bow swung sharply. In no time, the hull was cutting across the surface, leaving a V-shaped wake. Sweet!
As he neared his honey hole, he eased back on the throttle, slowing, and searched the shoreline for the split tree, his landmark. Spotting it, he flipped the engine into neutral and scanned the surface of the water for a conical-shaped shadow, his red-and-white buoy. He felt anxious when he didn’t see it; tribal members took gear that infringed on their fishing rights.
Retrieving the flashlight from beneath his seat, he skimmed the light across the surface. On the third pass, he spotted his buoy, bobbing up and down in the waves. Relieved, he motored to it, grabbed the ring, and took up the slack in the rope until he felt the weight of the crab pot. He looped the rope onto the block wheel at the end of the davit pole—another perk he didn’t have on his smaller, fiberglass boat—and continued pulling in line, coiling it at his feet.
“Crab time,” he said.
He’d become pretty good at estimating his haul from the weight of the pot. It wasn’t foolproof; he’d brought up heavy pots only to find them filled with sunflower stars, flounder, and rockfish. This pot felt heavier than any he’d ever pulled up, and his shoulders soon burned. He had to tie off the rope to give his arms a break.
“Damn,” he said, feeling that familiar flutter of anticipation in his stomach.
He braced the soles of his rubber boots against the side of the hull, untied the rope, and immediately felt the weight of the cage. The boat listed, starboard side, the davit pole tipping down toward the water. Schill estimated he’d pulled in sixty feet of line, which still left about twenty feet to go. Something didn’t seem right though; the rope was not perpendicular to the water, but angled at forty-five degrees, which usually indicated a snag.
Whatever it was, it was coming up first, his basket somewhere beneath it. That worried him. If he’d snagged a big bed of seaweed, or a lost boat anchor, and had to cut it free, he could end up cutting his rope and losing his pot. Good-bye, profit margins.
He gave another pull, the muscles of his thighs, arms, and shoulders now all burning. Sweat trickled down his forehead into his eyes and he shook it away. Finally, a crab pot broke the water’s surface. Though hard to see, it appeared rectangular. His pot was an octagon. Either his line had become entangled with the line of a pot set close by, or he’d snagged a rogue pot.