Boxing the Octopus, page 15
The problem with conspiracies was all the fucking conspirators. You couldn’t trust any of the sneaky bastards. At least pirates had a code. This whole thing made Cragg feel sick to his stomach.
Maybe it was time to visit the doctor.
40
There once was a doctor
who, behind every locked door,
took all of his patients to bed.
He thought it was fun,
till his nurse bought a gun,
and shot the old cad in the head.
Lou stared at the limerick and tried to decipher a hidden meaning. It was carved on the inside of the ship’s hull, above the deck on the left side if you were facing the front of the boat. Lou knew that meant port, or starboard, but could never remember which, and he didn’t understand why sailors couldn’t tell their left from their right without making things so fucking complicated.
The poems were ubiquitous, etched into every wooden surface of the ship with intricate care, like tattoos on a sailor’s torso. A scrimshaw calligraphy that helped Lou pass the time but left him as clueless as ever. He was hoping a pattern might emerge, each rhyme a riddle leading to his salvation.
They were sailing in slow circles around Alcatraz, the waves choppy enough to keep Lou off balance. His right knee was swollen from a hard fall earlier, a sore reminder of the importance of holding onto something. The crew had all laughed their asses off.
It was a skeleton crew, only three of Cragg’s mooks on board, to man the ship and keep an eye on him. Lou thought he could take one of them, but without a weapon, no way he could take all three. Besides, what good would it do? He couldn’t sail a paper boat on a lake, let alone steer this beast into port.
Lou moved closer to the bow and bent down to discover another cryptic lesson scrawled about four feet above the deck.
The old scallywag
liked dressing in drag,
though all his shipmates found it queer,
But they all played along,
when he wore a sarong
and brought the whole crew pints of beer.
Lou was losing his mind. He knew he was living on borrowed time. Being out on the water again was terrifying, but after that incident in the holding tank, so was taking a bath. He thought about the Great White and tightened his grip on the railing. There was no way Cragg had expected him to climb out of that pool with both legs.
Lou had done the job he was hired to do, and he’d done it with style. He should be lying on a beach with cash in his pocket and a girl in his arms, wasn’t that the plan? So where was his girl, and where the fuck was the cash? Lou didn’t have to think hard about which one he wanted more.
The problem with plans is other people might have plans of their own. Now he was just a pawn in somebody else’s game of chess.
Fuck that, I don’t even play chess.
Lou moved to the other side of the boat, were Alcatraz was close enough to make him feel incarcerated. Even on a sunny day it seemed grim. He glanced in the opposite direction, toward the city, every whitecap between him and dry land looking like a dorsal fin.
The sailor with the beard, whom Lou named Mook Number Two, left the stern for the bow, where Mook Number One, a fat fuck with bow legs, was helming the ship. Lou studiously ignored them and crossed to the other side of the deck. As he passed the mainmast, another engraving shared its watery wisdom.
The girl from the sea
was religious, you see,
so she always would visit the cloisters,
The monks that would meet her
were sure glad to see her,
even though she smelled faintly of oysters.
He needed to get the hell off this boat.
Like most San Francisco natives, Lou knew the story of Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers, the cons who busted out of Alcatraz and escaped the island in a makeshift raft. Clint Eastwood played Frank Morris in the movie, which ended as the story had in real life, a mystery. The three men were never seen again.
Experts claimed they drowned in the vicious rip currents or died of hypothermia from the frigid water, but that didn’t explain why, five decades later, the brothers were still on the FBI’s most wanted list.
Lou liked to believe they made it to shore. He had to believe it.
The two sailors were still at the front of the ship, the third below decks. Lou didn’t know what went on down there, but the third guy only came on deck once an hour, and his last appearance had been ten minutes ago.
Lou took an interest in a seagull riding in their wake and wandered toward the stern of the boat. He paused to read a cautionary tale chiseled into the boards of the deck.
A man all too often,
winds up in a coffin,
from his terrible lust for some gold
But if he just walked away,
he might actually stay
above ground, and one day grow old.
Finally, a sign. It was time to walk away, even if he had to swim first.
Lou gripped the stern rail with both hands and balanced on his good knee. Checked to make sure the two sailors were preoccupied. Both were smoking, the chubby one laughing at a story the bearded one was telling. Lou hoped it was a long story with a happy ending. He could use a head start.
As he braced himself to jump overboard, Lou silently prayed the water wasn’t cold enough to stop his heart.
41
The water was freezing but Cape jumped off the pier anyway.
The bay welcomed him like a spurned lover, with a hard slap and a cold embrace. Cape adjusted his regulator and let the soft undertow of the marina pull him down. It had been years since he’d gone diving, and that was in water as blue as the sky and warm as a bath. In water this cold your buoyancy wasn’t the same.
He sank like a stone.
A kick of the fins brought equilibrium as he angled toward the spot where the armored car took a bath. He rotated his right hand to follow the lanyard tied to the Pelican flashlight, gripped the handle and thumbed the switch.
For an instant Cape thought he’d jumped into a dumpster instead of the bay. A marina is a garbage dump, a landfill nobody can see. Cape had lost count of the Greenpeace stickers on the sterns of the boats overhead, but underwater there was no one to snitch when a beer can fell overboard. Sometimes trash was too cumbersome to carry down the dock to garbage cans on the pier, so it miraculously disappeared after the marina lights went out.
Paint cans. Candy wrappers. Shoes too worn for goodwill. Enough cigarette butts to rebuild Kon Tiki and sail across the Pacific. Humanity’s contribution to the ocean floor.
Less than twenty feet beyond the nearest mooring, the sand of the marina started to clear. Trash segued to mud, silt, and the swirling detritus of decaying sea creatures.
Cape scissored his legs, the sound of his breath through the regulator a raspy rhythm in his head. The water was less than thirty feet deep.
The flashlight cut through the murk surprisingly well. Blowback from the LEDs made his hand glow like a souvenir from Chernobyl. As he neared the bottom, Cape stopped kicking, drifting downward as light conjured detail out of darkness.
A license plate thrown from a nearby cabin cruiser or carried here by the current. New Mexico, Land of Enchantment. Mud. Sand. An underwater fern that might one day become seaweed. A dead crab flat on its back, ten arms beseeching the sea gods for a second chance.
More mud. More sand. Broken bits of red and white plastic, pieces of glass. Might be shards from a shattered taillight or headlight, but it could be nothing.
Bingo.
Cape swam in a tight circle until he circumnavigated the impact crater of the truck. Nothing else could have made such a depression. The vague outline of the vehicle was already blurred, in another week it would be erased entirely. He floated idly over the area for several minutes, letting his eyes go in and out of focus, scanning for shapes.
A shoe. Black against the brown of the sand, almost impossible to see unless you caught the contour of the sole, a man-made edge not indigenous to seafloors. Cape grabbed it by the laces and dropped it into the mesh bag on his hip.
Cape sucked on the regulator and choked as his breath caught in his throat. Sudden movement to his right, a shadow bigger than a man, gliding across his peripheral vision.
Shark.
Cape felt a primal fear clutch his heart until the creature was followed by another, this one closer. Cape’s subconscious mapped the chubby torpedo shape and released the necessary endorphins for him to start breathing again.
Sea lions were swimming home from the bay, heading to their resting place at the pier. It was sea lion rush hour, and Cape was stuck in traffic.
An undersea roller derby ensued under the pylons as sea lions cut each other off, racing for first dibs on the floating dock and a chance to sleep under the sun. Tourists would be gathering to watch the swimming sausages jostle for position, barking in outrage if shoved back into the cold water of the bay.
Cape swam in the opposite direction, under the larger ships in the marina. He threaded his way past anchor lines toward the adjacent pier, the long cement ramp where cruise ships docked. Cruises heading north to Alaska stopped here, as did ships bearing south for Baja and Puerto Vallarta. Thousands of tourists disembarked daily to stretch their legs and shop on the pier.
Cape was surprised there wasn’t more security around the big ships. Then again, maybe there was.
He considered the possibility that Homeland Security or the NSA had underwater cameras tracking his progress with infrared imagery, matching the shape of his earlobes to an Interpol database of known terrorists. Then he recalled his last visit to the DMV and decided it was far more likely the government had a chimpanzee in a wetsuit, hiding in a cage with a disposable camera.
Either way, he wasn’t too concerned about setting off alarms.
Banks had alarms, so if something went sideways during a robbery, you were trapped inside. Take down an armored car and you’re exposed, out on the street for the sirens to find you, unless you plan your escape routes and work fast. Sink an armored car in thirty feet of water and you’ve bought yourself quite a bit of time.
Cape knew he should be at a bank now, trying to find an angle on the money. But if he marched into the manager’s office and started asking questions, he wouldn’t get any answers. He’d be lucky to walk out with a toaster. So he had called his friend Linda, the nosiest reporter he’d ever known, and asked her to work with their mutual friend Sloth, a hacker who couldn’t resist a challenge. If Cape couldn’t stroll through the front door of the bank, maybe they could find a back door.
Cape was getting distracted, never good when diving. His head was too busy, his eyes no longer registering the geometry of objects passing below. Soon he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between flotsam and jetsam, assuming anyone ever has.
He stopped swimming and let his mind drift with the current. Visualized the armored car crashing, the driver bracing for impact as it hit the water. Cape didn’t have to strain his imagination, having once driven his own car off the pier after someone cut the brake lines. His insurance premiums had never been the same.
Cape wondered how different a crash like that would be if you saw it coming. Would you keep your seatbelt on until the last minute, or would you fear getting trapped? Would you try to jump clear of the car before it hit the water?
Cape recalled the swim fin that had fallen out of the truck. If he lost a fin, would he swim with only one or just go barefoot? The water wasn’t deep, and it was a short swim under the adjacent piers.
If you wanted to disappear, which way would you swim?
Cape glanced at the junk beneath the boats but saw nothing of interest. He swam past mooring lines, between pilings of the pier that separated small boats from the big ships. The pilings were covered with thousands of barnacles, their Sargasso tongues tasting the ocean and jeering at Cape as he swam past.
Another six yards, nothing. Cape swam below the dock. He swung the flashlight like a drunk pendulum. Bottle caps, rocks, another shoe. He was about to turn and swim the same pattern in the opposite direction when shards of silver shot from the seafloor, as if a star was stuck in the mud.
Cape tentatively extended his hand, turning the flashlight at an oblique angle to see what beckoned. It was a cross. A silver cross on a chain that Cape had seen before, in a photograph he didn’t want to borrow at the time.
Cape clutched the chain and pulled it free of the mud. He opened his other palm and hefted the weight of the cross. Even underwater it was heavy.
As heavy as a broken heart.
42
“I don’t want to break your heart, but I fucking love calamari.”
The Doctor gestured at the cylindrical tank and smiled apologetically at Cragg. A school of squid, each no longer than six inches, swam around frantically. They moved as a single, sentient mass as if trying to generate enough force to shatter the sides of the tank.
Cragg sighed in exasperation. “Calamari is just a fancy word the Italians invented to get squeamish Americans to eat squid without thinking about what they’re eating.”
“People eat octopus, too, though. Like your friend Oscar. Don’t they?”
“You want to eat octopus, you have to order octopus.”
“Isn’t octopus big in Spain?”
“And Italy,” replied Cragg. “Here in the city, visit North Beach and you’ll find it on plenty of menus, served with pasta.”
“Black pasta?”
“That’s squid again.” Cragg waved a hand dismissively. “Pasta dyed black with squid ink.”
“I had that once,” said the Doctor. “Didn’t taste any different. I’ve eaten a lot of weird shit, traveling in Asia, but I don’t think I’ve ever had octopus.”
“Octopus can be fried, like calamari, or simply cooked in oil.” Cragg waited until the Doctor turned away from the tank. The aquarium was closed and deserted, save for the two of them, but the tanks were lit from below. The indirect lighting threw long, squid-shaped shadows onto the walls. “I personally would not recommend eating octopus, but it’s considered a good source of B-vitamins and potassium.”
“Like bananas.”
“I can assure you, octopus tastes nothing like bananas.”
“I meant potassium,” said the Doctor. “Bananas are a good source of potassium.” He turned back to the tank and tried to track one of the squid, maybe make eye contact, but they were moving too fast. “They serve any on the pier?”
“Bananas?”
“Octopus.”
“Bananas can also be fried,” said Cragg. “They sell them at the far end of the pier, just past the candy store.”
“Are you fucking with me?”
“Am I?” Cragg’s expression didn’t change.
The Doctor gave him a flat stare. “Do…they…serve…octopus…here?”
“On the pier?” Cragg frowned. “No…they…do…not.”
“How come?”
“Because I won’t let them.”
The Doctor smiled, impressed. “A fisherman who likes fish. But you don’t care about squid?”
“You can eat all the calamari you like,” muttered Cragg. “Vicious bastards, squid. They hunt in packs, the jackals of the sea. Tiny hooks on their suckers can strip the flesh from their prey in seconds. If a fisherman falls into a net of frenzied squid, you’ll find nothing but the man’s bones by the time you haul the catch onto the deck.”
The Doctor made a mental note to chew his calamari thoroughly next time, wondering what those little suckers would do to his small intestine if he didn’t. “An octopus is different?”
“They are solitary creatures,” said Cragg. “Mind their own business, unless another creature trespasses or tries to steal from them. You must admire that, eh?”
“I admire their physiology.” The Doctor continued past the tanks, distorted squid shadows reaching for him plaintively as he moved down the long corridor. “And the ones you catch are worth much more to me alive than as an appetizer.”
“Let’s talk about how much they’re worth,” said Cragg. “I’ve noticed you expanded the operation.”
“What makes you say that?” The Doctor looked at Cragg over his shoulder. He wasn’t smiling but his eyes were. “Just because I wanted to borrow a few more of your tentacled friends?”
Cragg shook his head. “That could just be your research. I meant your visit.”
“Maybe I came for the fried food.” The Doctor followed the curve of the hallway toward the steps to the undersea grotto. “Got tired of being served live eels in China. Slippery buggers.”
“You’re a bit slippery yourself, Doctor.”
“Cragg, I thought you liked me.”
“I like you just fine.” Cragg stepped in front of the Doctor to unlock the metal door at the bottom of the stairs. “But if we’re to remain business partners, I need to trust you’re not holding out on me.”
“An armored car gets jacked, and you’re asking me questions?”
“I’m not talking about the car,” said Cragg.
“Who did it?”
Cragg kneeled to secure the door. The hallway ahead was lit only by a watery glow emanating from the grotto, pale light reflected off silvery fish swimming endlessly. No finish line in sight, but they never stopped racing. “I don’t know much about cars. Ships, on the other hand, I could tell you something about those.”
“Can we cut the bullshit?”
“Can we?” asked Cragg, slowing his pace so they walked shoulder-to-shoulder. “The lines at the donut shack have gotten longer.”
