Siren. Part 3

"d.a.m.n," the captain said, shaking his head. His voice sounded flat as he p.r.o.nounced, "He was a good man. I wish we'd gotten to know him better."

Rogers had just joined the crew at their last dock. Few of the ship's men would be able to remember much about him for the funeral service, when they gave him the last rites and pushed the chewed-up body back over the side. Rogers had kept to himself and stayed belowdecks much of the time, serving as cook and cleaner for the ship. And then one morning, he just hadn't been around.

Buckley slapped a hand on Jensen's shoulder. "Go get a sheet to put the man in," he said. The boy nearly tripped as he twisted around to comply. He was back in moments. "I pulled this from my bed, sir."

"You'll be sleeping cold tonight then," the captain responded, but motioned for him to lay it out on the deck. Buckley bent to help Travers and slipped his hand beneath one of the corpse's ribs. The lower half of the man was missing, as was the head.

Travers grimaced, but grabbed the carca.s.s by the ragged bone that stuck out of the carnage where the neck should have been. He and the captain hefted the sodden weight onto the old sheet, which quickly stained a pinkish red. Two thin chunks of flesh fell to the deck as they moved their former crewmate and the captain nodded at Taffy. "Throw 'em in here."

The crewman bent to retrieve the pasty hunks of skin and muscle. Taffy touched the flesh as if he were picking up a steaming pile of manure. His face remained white as chalk after his trip to the edge of the hull. He dropped the pieces of Rogers onto the gruesome cage of ribs and quickly wiped his fingers on the edge of the sheet. Then he made a beeline for the ocean again.

Buckley and Travers folded the sheet end over end, and then again, tying the edges together, until Rogers was little more than a lump of laundry tied up in a bloodstained bow.

"Shall we throw the fish back, Captain?" Reg asked quietly, and Buckley laughed. "h.e.l.l no, lout, what would we do that for?"

"Because it's not right, sir. There are still little pieces of Rogers...and his blood...all over the catch. If we sell this batch, we're selling our cook for people to eat too, sir."

"Fish is fish and a catch is a catch," Buckley said, pointing to the silver fish in the net that had also held their former cook. "Rogers is gone and that's a good haul he brought us. We're taking it to sh.o.r.e. Now get it cleaned up. We'll have a service and say our last words for Rogers after dinner tonight." He turned to Cauldry and raised one eyebrow high. "How's that stew comin', cookie?"

Cauldry had taken over Rogers's duties the past two days, and so far had not successfully made anything qualifying as edible.

"I'll go check, sir." He dashed belowdecks again.

"Right," Buckley said. He nodded at the men who were pulling the net away from the sheeted body, and followed the boy down belowdecks to his cabin. As he opened the door and stepped inside, he grimaced at the odor of fish and something musky and rank. Working on the sea-living on the sea-made you immune to a lot. But Buckley had never grown to love the smell of fish. Thank G.o.d that "fishing trawler" was not the Lady Luck's full-time occupation. He opened a small door in the wall above his bunk and pulled out a brown jug. Pulling off the stopper, he inhaled one bittersweet draught of alcohol and smiled as his nose cleared.

Then he took a long swig and sighed as his throat burned from the liquor. There were crates of the stuff on board right now, headed for port just north of 'Frisco. But the best...the best bottles never left the captain's quarters. He breathed out a mist of aged tequila, corked the bottle and checked the lock on his door. The captain then stripped off his jacket and shirt, and then carefully folded his pants to set in the corner.

At last, he turned to his bunk, and the reason he had come down here in the middle of the day. It hadn't been to drink. Two eyes sparked like lightning as he bent to touch the woman lying p.r.o.ne on his bed.

She jerked against the ropes that bound her wrists and ankles, and her head flew angrily from side to side, silken raven hair drifting and kinking across her face in black seaweed tangles. But she didn't make a sound.

She couldn't.

A leather strap gagged it all inside her.

"How is my little songbird today, hmmm?" the captain said, as he bent to kiss the exposed skin of her neck. With rank, came privilege, he thought, and without the pretense of love or foreplay, crawled on top.

Chapter Eight.

"On my clock, eight thirty comes before nine o'clock," Darren called, as Evan slipped into the Delilah Harbor Authority office. He closed his eyes and stifled an equally smart-a.s.s reply. He hated it when Darren tried to be funny.

"Sorry," he said instead. "I promise I'll get back on schedule next week."

Bill looked up at him with a twisted grin as Evan threw his bag under his desk and powered up the ancient computer. One of these days, the shipping yard was going to lose all of its records-Darren wouldn't spring for regular data backup service, or computers that had been manufactured in this decade. Windows 95 was just fine for what they needed to do, their boss had said on many occasions.

"He's not going to cut you any more slack, you know that, right?" his friend asked.

Evan nodded. "This weekend I'm turning the corner. I'm going to clean up Josh's room, Sarah and I are going to have a long talk...next week things'll be different."

"Uh huh. I've heard that before."

"I mean it," Evan insisted. "I can't do this anymore, I've gotta..."

Bill pulled a finger across his neck and Evan suddenly knew that Darren had walked right up behind him.

"I've got a special project for you today," the shipping master declared, and handed Evan a ream of paper. "These have to be cross-referenced with the files on Trans-Global for the past five years. They're calling for an audit next week, so I need to you get these in place before you leave today." He dropped the stack of paper in Evan's palms with a slap, and walked away.

Bill winked at him. "Told ya he was done. Meet you for a beer tonight at O'Flaherty's?"

Evan nodded. "Sure."

"Let's say eight o'clock? Looks to me like you're going to be busy until then."

Evan elbowed his friend in the shoulder. "Thanks a lot. Wanna give me a hand?"

Bill shook his head and laughed. "I didn't pull detention. This one's all yours."

There was already a roiling cloud of smoke drifting ghostlike along the ceiling when Evan slipped into O'Flaherty's. While California state law prohibited smoking in bars or any other public place, Delilah thought of itself as something of a sovereign state. n.o.body was going to complain about smoke at O'Flaherty's and the cops weren't going to come down on it. h.e.l.l, half the force smoked cigars in the back room on Sat.u.r.days.

Evan stepped past a clog of giggling college girls and moved deeper into the recesses of the bar, which wound through two connected rooms, each with cloisters of jabbering people gesturing and indiscriminately sloshing alcohol on its long, dark plank floors. Some stood around tables, some just loitered in the middle of the walkway. The sound of the crowd was louder than the music on the speakers; Evan couldn't quite tell what song was even playing, he just felt the remote pounding of drums and thudding movement of a ba.s.s line.

A hand reached out and grabbed him by the shirt collar. Bill yanked him into a cubby, cut off from the walkway by a stained-gla.s.s window. Evan slid onto the stool and sighed.

"Long day in the morgue?"

He nodded. "I thought I'd never get through that stack."

"Teach ya to be late."

Evan grinned. "I promise I will be in at eight thirty A.M. on the dot on Monday."

"Well then, drink up, 'cuz we got two days to kill first," Bill said, and motioned for the waitress. After she took Evan's order, Bill cut to the chase.

"It's worse, isn't it? With Sarah, I mean."

Evan nodded. "Yeah. I'm dragging her home almost every night. And then I can't sleep."

"Need to get her some help, man."

"You think I haven't tried?"

The waitress slipped a foaming gla.s.s of Anchor Steam in front of Evan, and he took a deep swallow of the amber brew before saying anything else. Then he put down the gla.s.s and looked at his friend. "Right now, I need an ear myself."

Bill looked surprised, but simply said, "Lay it on me."

"I've been seeing this woman, down by the beach..." Evan began.

Bill raised an eyebrow, and Evan laughed.

"Not like that." He described the first night he'd stumbled across the nude woman singing on the rocks, and his fear that she'd drowned when she'd suddenly jumped naked into the water and disappeared, not to reappear.

"Naked chicks never drown," Bill commented. "They're water nymphs. They always float."

Evan shot him a look, but went on to tell him the story of the previous night, and of "waking up" while standing in the middle of the ocean.

Now his friend looked interested. "You walked into the water?" he said incredulously. "Up to your chest?"

Evan nodded.

"You're afraid to put your f.u.c.kin' toe in the water," Bill said.

"Thank you for overstating the obvious. That's why I wanted to talk to you. I don't understand it, or how it could have happened. Her voice was just so incredible, so powerful, that I had to get closer, I guess. I got lost in her song and had my eyes closed, and was just...I don't know, I was in a different place. It was kinda like I went sleepwalking."

Bill's forehead wrinkled, and he took a sip of his beer before answering. "You ever sleepwalk before?"

Evan shook his head, negative.

Bill leaned in and spoke softly, but firmly. "You know what I think?" he asked. "I think you saw the Siren."

"What are you talking about?" Evan laughed, and Bill grinned.

"The Siren of Delilah," Bill said. "She's been luring men to their deaths out there by the point for decades."

"A Siren, like in mythology?"

"Yep. You mean to tell me you've lived in this town all these years and you've never heard the stories?"

"I don't pay a lot of attention to urban legends," Evan said, and took another swig. "I don't believe in ghosts."

"The Siren's not a ghost," Bill insisted. "She's some kind of sea G.o.ddess...she lures men to the water, and most of the time, they never return."

"Then how do you know they went into the water in the first place?"

"What do you mean?"

"If they don't return, how do you know they ever went into the water?"

"Now you're just being difficult." Bill shook his head. "I can't believe you work at the port and haven't heard of the Siren. Some of the fishing trawlers won't even dock here after dark 'cuz they're so superst.i.tious."

"I've never heard of a shipwreck since I've been here," Evan said. "Isn't that what Sirens do? Lure ships to crash on the rocks and s.h.i.t?"

Bill nodded. "Sometimes. But they also lure men into the ocean. We haven't had a shipwreck here in ages, that's true. Though there were some a long, long time ago. Plenty of wrecks down there off the point."

"I hesitate to ask, but...what makes you or anyone else think there's a Siren haunting the bay now? Seems like a pretty 1800s kind of superst.i.tion."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? But h.e.l.l, man, you've lived here long enough to know this town. We may be just up the coast from San Francisco, but...there's a reason the rumrunners used to dock here instead of there. We're off the beaten path. A little backwoods. And you know what? People do disappear around here periodically. You've read about them in the papers and probably just didn't pay any attention 'cuz you didn't know them. But whenever it happens, I can tell you what the old guard are saying. They're shaking their heads when the police statements theorize about runaways who moved on and accidental deaths in the ocean. They're saying one thing: the Siren is swimming again."

Evan took a long draught of his beer, and then slammed it, empty, to the wooden shelf before them. "You know how ridiculous that sounds, don't you?"

Bill shrugged. "Is that any more ridiculous than an aquaphobe who goes sleepwalking into the ocean to chase after a naked chick? I mean, really, Evan."

"The music lulled me..."

"Exactly. What do Sirens do?"

"Never mind." Evan shook his head. "You're not going to convince me that this woman is some weird monster. The whole situation was a little odd, it's true, and she has a beautiful voice. But that's where it ends."

Bill shrugged. "Suit yourself."

The two men were silent for a moment, and then Bill laughed. "Okay, you win."

"What are you talking about?" Evan said.

"The whole Siren thing. It was a good try, and you had me going-but c'mon now. Tell me what really happened at the beach. Is this all a long way around you telling me that you are seeing another woman?"

"No-"

Bill shrugged. His face looked completely open, understanding, empathetic. "'Cuz I understand, if you are. I know things have been tough with Sarah since...the accident, but really, Evan, I don't think that-"

"No, I'm not cheating," Evan insisted. "I wasn't making up a story."

"Okay." His friend didn't sound convinced. Instead, he abruptly changed the subject. "So you think the 49ers are going to do it this season?"

"Sure," Evan said. "Why not?" He ordered another beer, and didn't bring up the woman again.

Chapter Nine.

There was a comfort in the familiarity of the wrongdoing...that's how Evan looked at it. Every night he walked the beach. Every night the sand stuck between his toes and every night he knew it was just an exercise in avoidance. He was expert at that. He knew that the right path was to move on...to step aside from the life that he'd built with Sarah all these years and start a new one. A life that didn't involve Josh. But...he couldn't seem to go there, as much as his mind said that it was the right place to be. He walked instead through sand that didn't care about Evan or Josh or Sarah...sand that had withstood the rush of a hundred thousand tides. Sand that didn't care if Evan's son had died here, f.u.c.ked here or slept here...it didn't matter.

To Evan, it mattered. He wanted to connect with those places that his son had been...those places that his son held dear. And so he walked the beach again and again. Sometimes it seemed as if a whole world were against them. And sometimes it was just the way of life. Tonight he walked along the tide and imagined his son out in the surf, riding the waves. Josh had taken to the surfboard like a fish; he could twist on a wave like n.o.body.

Evan used to watch and envy his son's natural acclimation. He wished that he could be so free in the water; for him it was like watching a bird in the air. The motion seemed natural, but magical at the same time.

The thought of Josh on the waves made him want to cry, but Evan just walked farther down the beach. Down away from memory. Down away from Sarah. Down away from the fear that maybe, just maybe, he could have done something to change what was. What is...

He saw the black shadow of Gull's Point and shook his head. He would not sing tonight. He would not tempt the woman who had made the past couple nights so disturbing.