A Speck in the Sea by John Aldridge & Anthony Sosinski

Author:John Aldridge & Anthony Sosinski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Weinstein Publishing
Published: 2017-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

Helen Battista is the quintessential friendly, engaging bartender, the kind of woman you immediately want to embrace and open up to. Ask any of the customers at Sammys, the popular dockside eatery and watering-hole where Helen works most days during the summer season, or ask any of her army of friends. Helen is a particularly close friend of Johnny Aldridge, whom she claims to have known “forever,” and she got the message that he had gone overboard from her pal Ed in a text at 6:45 a.m. Ed was crewing for Breakaway charters that morning, and the trip was already well underway—until the radio distress call prompted the charter boat’s captain, Richard Etzel, to cancel the trip and turn around. “We’re going back in,” he announced to his clients and crew. Ed tapped out the message to Helen right away: Load fell off the boat last nite looking 4 him Fuck.

Helen believes she actually got the message even earlier, at about 3:30 a.m., when she woke up—inexplicably and unaccountably—and could not fall asleep again. The text from Ed more than three hours later got her sitting bolt upright, feeling scared and alone. She didn’t dare text or call anyone else: at 6:45 in the morning she knew she didn’t want to spread rumors, and repeating the message only made it more true. Impelled by instinct, Helen dressed, leashed her dog, and walked down to the Montauk harbor just minutes away. Three fishermen and some other guys—Helen knew them all—were there, just hanging out, standing around. George Watson of The Dock was on the phone. “Whatever you have to do to get him back,” Helen heard him growl into the phone.

“Is it true?” she asked the men standing there. “Have they found him?”

It was true, and at that hour of the morning Johnny was nowhere near being found.

The harbor became very busy very fast. Charter captains had already headed out with their paying customers aboard. Now, as the Breakaway’s Richard Etzel had done, they were bringing their boats back, dropping off their customers—“Sorry, we won’t be fishing today”—fueling up, and heading out again to look for Johnny. Guys hung around to make up crews for the boats going out.

Helen hung around too. The way she saw it, “everybody was going out—everybody.” And that meant that “they were going to get him.” Pure and simple. She didn’t let herself think beyond that. They’re just going out to get Load, she kept telling herself. Until she had to be at work at eleven, this is where she would stay, watching the boats going out to get Load, secure in this space between The Dock and the jetty, between Watson’s angry concern and the sound of boats on a quest.

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