Windward Passage by Jim Nisbet

Author:Jim Nisbet [NISBET, JIM]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC047000, FIC022000
ISBN: 9781468302981
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2012-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-THREE

SHE CAME UP THE COMPANIONWAY WITH A CARVING KNIFE. IN THE OTHER hand she wielded an unopened bottle of beer by its neck as if it were a chisel mallet.

Throwing the wheel over, Red Means neatly rolled Quentin Asche over his hip and launched him at Tipsy, who turned her back in order to avoid impaling the featherweight. Before she could repurpose, Red boxed her ears and kicked her down the companionway. She landed face down on the saloon deck, knife and bottle clattering down the teak steps in her wake, her head ringing like a steeple the day Pushkin died.

In the countertop of the cabinet at her shoulder yawned the teak lid of a top-loading refrigerator, which contained the severed head of her brother. Tipsy had recoiled without closing the lid. She didn’t want to stand up because she didn’t want to look at it again, and she knew that if she did stand up she wouldn’t be able to not look at it again. In any case she was so stunned she probably couldn’t stand up anyway. But if she didn’t stand up she might never see her brother again. Or what was left of him. Suddenly she understood the idea behind the open casket funeral. In this case the casket could be a hatbox. If she’d had a gun she could shoot Red. Or herself. She started to cry.

Quentin’s head, having struck the finial of the upper end of the companionway handrail, now lay, still attached to the rest of him, on the wheelhouse deck, bleeding and unconscious. Not three steps away, Red held the wheel as Kreutzer’s Revenge churned through a second three hundred and sixty degree turn. Fifty yards away, a magnificent view of the lights of Sausalito was occluded entirely by the stern quarter of Hercules Perforce, itself three hundred yards long and a hundred feet high, steaming at twelve knots against an ebb tide, bound for Southampton Channel, there to dock and spend the night mainlining petroleum into the long arm of Chevron.

Fifty yards between a vessel a mere twenty feet high and one at least ten times that looks like a near miss, and five panicked blasts from the Hercules Perforce air horn—meaning Ahoy, pissant vessel, change your course immediately or die—confirmed this impression. The sight of its bow wave alone, flashing over the tanker’s keel bulb, had filled the windscreen of the smaller boat and rocked her beam end to beam end. The loose beer bottle careened back and forth over the saloon deck, as did the senseless Quentin Asche on the command deck. Even in her grief, Tipsy clung to the pedestal of the chart table. Red had the wheel to hold onto, and his sea legs to keep him vertical.

The wave passed. Red got Kreutzer’s Revenge straightened out and heading north, passing aft of the stern lights of a tractor tug which steered the tanker by means of a taut wire hawser that stretched from a winch on the bow of the former to an after bitt on the stern of the latter.

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