Chapter 19. A Fading Dream

Away from the loom of the light of the shores, 

engine purring at cruising speed, it's easy to be 

seduced into thinking I'm the master of my fate.

Anna was sleeping peacefully curled up on the wide seat directly behind me and I was at the helm. Doc was locked up and nodded out in the forward berths. The blue-waters on the Pacific Coast in the winter’s months are where I’m most at home. They never fail to open my soul to the peace of surrender to the raw power of squalls and storms or the night sky at the holy time of the year when Cassiopeia’s stars beneath Polaris meet the Northern horizon to dip and twinkle there. It truly is as it is in the children’s rhyme…. Twinkling little stars… where weather is shaped of wind and the seas are alive to the speck of a human being sailing there at the mercy of her force. Away from the loom of the light of the shores, engine purring at cruising speed, it's easy to be seduced into thinking I'm the master of my fate. The harsh weather of experience in that time of the year informed me years ago that a sailor is at the most peril, not when sudden storms toss our craft from stem to stern in rolling catastrophes of foaming breakers, but real danger awaits in the calm of serenity when preparation for the worst isn't foreseen.

I began a confused stream of thought while thinking of the storm to come. Preparation for what? Anna, Anna, Anna, I feared she was like any Bar Girl at times and worse, wondered about her entanglement with… oh fuck, Doc and that Yuri. I saw her eyes before the adrenaline withdrew and that tangle of neurons began a tremble through her body. It wasn’t her first kill. She couldn’t hide that from me… but she’d gotten honest about her addiction. Paranoia… a good case of it… reality. You can’t trust anything at face value that an addict says. This isn’t a theory…. it’s personal experience… my own lies…. and, as a drunk, since I got back from Nam, I hadn’t anything as dark as the evil Anna was mired in… even all the crap around Counter Intelligence. But that was War. Each side in a war has a justification for what we must do… or what we are ordered to do. The ruse is part of the game and reading the runes is a developed skill and I had read the runes as far as she was concerned. I hadn’t figured out much but I knew she had killed before because she showed little sign of being moved by it. I remember my first kill and I most certainly remember my last… but the ones in between… no. Whatever was going on in the background of this mess had to be more than a petty blackmail and a sex game gone bad. Then there was Perry’s suicide and my own peril here.

It made no sense to me so far why Ryan thought it better to keep it under the table. I hoped and prayed that he couldn’t be dirty. I knew that the fishing trip the other day had been his way of checking me out… perhaps to see if I was sober enough to handle it. It… whatever it was. He reads signs too… the runes. How involved was I in this? He had to know I knew nothing. Maybe that’s why I was where I was. I wondered whether she had seduced Ryan into buying her story. Naw… Ryan didn’t train her to shoot like that, on-the-mark, kill-shot… … every round she fired counted. The clip is emptied so fast with a kick on a Mac-10, an amateur would have sprayed lethal nuggets of lead all around and maybe a few would take out the goon. You can’t miss with one of those but I saw her drop him with one in the shoulder to immobilize his trigger finger and a neat pattern in the chest. I spent six years in the Army’s Counter Intelligence and could flip from and M-16 to an AK… break ‘em down blind… but I couldn’t shoot like that. She must have been trained by a pro when she disappeared. I had so many questions that had to wait for a better time. The immediate problem was what to do with Doc. Work him… trade craft reawakened.

I kept the radio on… hoping to hear Ryan’s call. It was getting late and the seas were showing troubling signs. The storm came with plenty warning enough the next day. The rollers were mounting. We had a couple hours until dawn. This flying turd’s GPS showed us off Avila Beach fifty miles.

Anna checked the screen, “Why do we have to stay out here? Isn’t that Avila beach? It's close to us.”

 “We’re waiting for Ryan’s call, wake me… okay? Then we’ll know.”

Fatigue caught up with me and I dozed until I heard the radio squawk. She put a finger on the radio speaker, “Just some mumbo-jumbo about the first inning with the Mudville Nine. Casey’s at the bat playing against a beach… or was it beach A? What’s he talking ‘bout?”

“I’m not sure. A beach… a beach…   Not just any beach… Beach A, but A Beach. First anchorage north is Avila Beach.”

She yanked my arm, “I got it! Casey’s waiting for us at Avila Beach.”

I smiled, “Did he say anything else?”

“Yes, he said bunt… baseball… but I’ll be damned…”

“We’ll try this… not trying to hit a run… just get on base.” The riddle Ryan employed was almost too clever… the only thing that figured. “We’ll try this… We’ll wait out of sight of the anchorage… let him come to us. Maybe he’ll call again.”

Anna looked at me as though she had seen a light come on, “I don’t know how you came up with that but, why not? You must be smarter than I thought you were.”

“You figured out the first part, girl. The rest came easy after that.”

I’d been going wherever the wind blew up until this sea cruise. I’d been forced to take command of the situation and it was gradually coming into being. Ryan wasn’t going by the book on this and I had to trust him. I had my own decisions to make and he was relying on my ability to do so. He was doing more than building a case but steering us through some dangerous waters. I was forced to trust his craftsmanship.

Anna was another story. I couldn’t trust anything that came from her mouth until it could be verified with Ryan. Interrogation is a team effort and half the team that knew what the fuck was going was in Santa Barbara and the rest of the answers were up front in the berths.

I powered down as slow as I could and set course for Avila Beach. I took another nap at the wheel and awoke at the loom of the light before dawn.

We approached the anchorage to catch sight of a flash signal coming from what looked like Casey’s rust bucket…. The Dinky Dao. She might as well had been the Queen Elizabeth for luxury as these damned Harley Hogs of the seas aren’t made for comfort. I held back on the throttle and waited for The Dinky Dao to make the approach since I didn’t need to draw any more attention to ourselves than I already had. It was early enough for a few fishing craft but hopefully no one would be paying much attention to care about one more luxury craft.

Casey was grinning as he tied up alongside, “Too bad we have to scuttle this tub.”

Anna came out of the berths hauling her sea bag crammed with armaments, “I’ll gladly make the trade. It’s fuckin’ hot down there… even at night.”

“Let me help you, young lady,” Casey was damned near drooling.

“She’s got it Casey. Come aboard and help me with his other bag of shit,” I said, slamming the hatch open and flicking the light switch below, “You’re awake asshole. Time to get up.”

Doc squirmed and protested through the bit but, with Casey’s help, we made light work of lifting and dumping him on the deck of the Dinky Dao curled up in cuffs and leg-restraints.

“Casey, you know what Ryan’s up to?”

“He just told me to meet you here… kept it all top secret… hush-hush… classified… for your eyes only… then we sink this here cock-sucker’s dream.”

Yeh… that’s good. Before we do that, get anything off her that floats. She was supposed to have gone down in the Channel.”

“Fuck man, I heard. Damn, Mzz Sherlock and all. Thought you were gone. Didn’t know you were with her. Man, this is gonna be some fun shit. Where we goin’ from here?” The only thing that stopped Casey’s chatter was following Anna’s gate passing through the cabin stashing her gear forward.

She sat in the galley putting her hands over her ears and planting her elbows on the table.

“She okay? I mean, she don’t look so good.”

Anna glared at him but I could sense it was staged contempt.

Casey had more on his mind. He was oblivious to her no matter the intent. He went about preparing to scuttle the Dream and continued the stream of unconscious babble unabated, “Say, Ryan? What’s with him. I wouldn’t have taken the news ‘bout Mzz Sherlock so easy. Man he loved her for sure.”

I wasn’t inclined to fill in the details with Casey. I didn’t have time to think about it while hooking up and towing the Dream out into deeper seas. We were running about one-twenty fathoms when I called Anna out of the cabin, “You and Casey stand Doc up to watch this. I want him to see what happens to his bullshit Dream.”

“Yeh, let’s have us an audience.” She yanked his bulk up with one skinny arm.

Casey leered, “Shit, you guys been havin’ some fun?”

"If this looks like fun to you, Casey," Anna chortled, "you’re sicker than I thought.”

“What do I know? You and Ryan been fuckin’ around with this eye candy so’s I can’t tell the diff.Know what I mean?” Casey talked past her. I expected fireworks knowing how much she hated being talked over like that. 

Anna’s eyebrows pinched, “I know what you fuckin’ mean.” She took a beat before giving Casey a coy impish grin, “No offense taken. Know what I mean.”

I’d been holding my breath until that tense moment passed because I needed a crew to be unified with more than a casual cohesion. The realization that I was in command of a crew struck me and that my job was to make sure we all got through whatever awaited us… alive or in one piece.

I could tell by Anna simple gesture of a smile that she liked Casey. We would all be getting along after all. I liked the way they read each other and that was the sort of intuition that gave this business a chance.

Doc was watching us like a dog in the pound, hoping against hope, to be rescued as we towed his Dream far out of sight of land. Ball gag n his mouth, all he could do is whimper, moan, and whine.

I passed the shotgun to Anna and tightened my grip on Doc’s leash as he recoiled in fear.

“Don’t worry, Doc, it’s not for you.”

Casey interrupted, “Not now… we gotta get far enough to make it easier for me to blow him away too.”

Anna and Casey waited for me to give the order, “Go ahead Anna.”

Anna stepped over into the cockpit and put the muzzle of the door breacher to the deck of Doc’s fading dream.

“Wham!”

She stepped aft, “Wham! Wham!

Casey reached out to grip the leash from my hand, “Shall I wrapped this on a cleat. The Captain always goes down with his ship, don’t he?”

Anna stepped back aboard the Dinky Dao and unscrewed the door breaching attachment from the muzzle. She took aim at the wording The Doctor’s Dream and put a round through the first “O” of the name, “It doesn’t say what kind of doctor you are, what? A proctologist?”

Casey joined in with the taunting, “A professor of porn?”

I didn’t share Casey’s or Anna’s feelings about sinking the boat but felt compassion for Doc. He looked so pathetic. The four of us stood by the gunnels and with reverence watched the last of the Doctor’s Dream slip out of sight into the deep.

Now I had a job to do… soften him up… have something to eat with him. It always worked better than torture… well, as a prelude to torture. I knew I had to put Doc through some extreme grilling and also knew that compassion is the key and can’t be faked. A meal with my subject opens the heart a crack. In Doc’s case it wouldn’t take much… no battery cable to the nuts or anything like using the water-board technique we used in Nam. It would be the shock of near communion of a meal contrasted by the harsh interrogation that would follow that did it on light-weights like Doc. I yanked him by the elbow and slammed him onto the seat at the cabin’s table. I sat directly across from him.

“Casey, how’s your cupboard?”

“Stocked her up real good for this trip. Everything from a ton o' C-rats I got from the Surplus store to regular good shit freeze dry goodies and spam and Spaghetti O's and oatmeal. Had no idea how long we’d be out and Ryan gave me plenty cash.”

“Doc here looks like he could use some chow. Ain’t that right, Doc?” I reached across the table and, by the strap, pulled off the ball gag.

Saliva from the ball-gag dropped down Doc’s chin, “I’m not hungry, you sons-a-bitches!”

 “You have some corned beef hash, Casey?”

“Yeah, and real eggs too. Say Doc, ever try fried oatmeal and catsup?”

“Let’s make a couple plates for breakfast. Doc here needs to get some calories… all this stress, ya know. Ain’t that right, Doc?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Look, Doc. Cut the charade. You aren’t good at this. Besides, you said none of this was your idea, right?” Doc wasn’t accepting my peace offering and I didn’t expect that he would. I wanted my suggestion to sink-in later in the game.

“You don’t know what you’re dealing with Kraszhinski. I have people you don’t fuck with. They'll make hamburger out of all of you.”

“You have people? Shit, Doc, your people have you. Listen to me, Doc. They'll make dog-food out of you when they find out you're as useless as you are. You’re just Larry now. I know you… we go back some. You’re not a big shot. We're all in the same boat now." I tapped the bulkhead to emphasize the metaphor in case he didn't get it, "You just wore a mask called Doctor Lawrence Spawnn but under that persona is a cabbie named Larry… number seven-five.”

Anna stood hovering behind him playing with a wire, wrapping it around a couple of dowels she found laying around, making for a garrote.

“No Anna. That won’t do. Unlock his cuffs. He’s not going anywhere.”

She pouted but said nothing and dug into her cargo trousers for the keys.

Casey kept busy frying up the hash and eggs as Anna sat next to Doc. I dropped the intimidating attitude and chatted casually with Doc, “Do you have a clue who I am besides another Cabbie? I mean, what I did in the Army? But I know you, Larry. You aren’t such a bad guy. Just another Cabbie too that hooked the big tuna and got yourself a good ride… got nothing against that. You did good for yourself. C’mon, un-cuff him, Anna.”

Anna, in a flash, slammed Doc’s face to the table and click-clack, un-cuffed him. She was obviously disappointed we weren’t putting Doc out of the picture. It reminded me of why Ryan said she couldn’t be completely trusted.

Doc sat up in time for Casey to place our paper plates on the table with cheap plastic picnic forks and knives on paper towels for a table setting.

“Go ahead and eat, Doc. This isn’t your last supper. Show some gratitude to the chef.”

Casey guffawed, “Nah, not your last supper but it might be your last breakfast.”

“Mix us up some of that good Gatorade, Casey. I’m going to have a long chat with Doc.”

Casey proceeded to mix the Gatorade powder into a large plastic cup and put the juice in the cup holder attached to the table. Doc didn’t make a move.

“You must be thirsty, Doc. C’mon, let’s toast to our new friendship and adventure.”

I picked up the cup, sniffed, swished it around my palette, took a swallow, leaving the cup half full and pushed it next to his plate. “Here, drink up. It ain’t a Bordeaux but that wouldn’t do for breakfast, now would it?”

Doc was thirsty. He eyed the cup for a few minutes and raised it to his lips suspicious, “Why Gatorade, don’t you have water?”

“Electrolytes... gotta re-hydrate. Sides, you don’t wanna drink our water straight with no chaser, Doc. Santa Barbara water's dank, don’t-cha think? Especially after it sits in the tanks a couple weeks. We’ll refill our tanks further north where the water's better tastin'.”

Doc drank the rest of the cup and lifted it to Casey for more. I shared it with him the same as before.

“Now Doc, let’s eat. Show some gratitude. After all, we’re having breakfast. Besides, Casey just gave us a treat… about 250 mics of pure Sandoz Labs LSD. We keep it around for entertainment purposes and we’re going to entertain each other Larry.”

“You sons a bitches!”

“What did I say about gratitude, Larry?”

Anna was alarmed, “What are you doing Crash, LSD? This is fuckin’ crazy.”

Casey leaned against the sink, “You don’t know what his fucker did in Nam? Crash was with Cee fuckin’ Eye. You know? Counter Intelligence. We used to haul his ass around the Delta. Rumor was that he was Superman… the best they had… could get a Nun to write bad checks… know what I mean?”

Connections… how did I forget that? I knew we were both in Nam and I knew we knew each other but... It was coming back as Casey spoke. He was the gunner on a swift boat that ferried me here and there, but how much did he know about me? How much did I tell him during one of our binges? LSD… shit, it brings back the cerebral entrails rotting away in dark recesses… monsters of memory… even makes ‘em seem beautiful… hell, enlightening swords of consciousness.

“Casey, pour us a couple cups of coffee.”