Free Ocean Burning by Henry Carver Page A

A fingernail struck what felt like the little labels hanging from each key. Using a scissor action with the two fingers, I grasped it and tugged.
    The key came free. Rigger kept snoring.
    I left quickly, light on my feet, and made my way back to the guest state room and opened the lock, slipped inside and clicked the door shut behind me.
    The cabin stank.
    The reek came at you just inside the door, the body odor of two men in need of a shower and who needed desperately to wash their socks. Or burn them. Underneath that odor a foreign, bitter smell flowered up at me. It reminded me of the taste of drinking water from old copper pipes.
    I searched through the dirty clothes thrown all around—Ben and I had lent the men new ones—and through all the displaced bedding. I didn’t see what I was looking for, and frankly, there was no real place to hide it. The room was too small. I searched the space again before I realized where it must be stashed.
    A small utility hatch sat right up at the tip of the bow. It gave access to the space between the inner and outer hull here at the front.
    I approached it, stopped for a second, looked up. I thought of Rigger less than four feet away. He sat above this very spot.
    The hatch had a little wheeled locking mechanism, and I spun it, then popped the door open. The smell of rotting copper poured out of the small, contained space. It was distinct by not exactly unpleasant. I stuck my arm in, reached down, and felt canvas.
    The duffel bag.
    My arm yanked up on the strap. I had almost forgotten the weight of it, so heavy it had nearly dragged me down to the bottom of the sea. It took me a second, but I wrestled it up out of its hiding place and laid it carefully on the floor. I glanced around me, though of course there could be no one else in that small room, then tugged down the industrial-grade zipper.
    The zipped moved easily. The bag gaped at me, a fine-toothed mouth. I pulled a tiny flashlight out from my pocket and clicked it on.
    I looked inside.
    Money.
    Lots of money. I recognized Alexander Hamilton right off, and Grant floating around in the green. Franklin made a cameo appearance here and there.
    American currency, thick stacks of it, filled the bag. In the puny circle my flashlight made, the light green bills seemed grimy and brown. I picked up one stack and riffled through it. That coppery smell assaulted me again, and this time I recognized it: blood. The money had been soaked in blood, so much of it that bag’s trip through the sea had only swirled the stuff around, saturating the bills before drying again.
    I examined the stack in my hand, realized the currency strap on it was marked. The bills weren’t new, I could tell that just from their wrinkles and frayed corners, but they had been brought into a bank as part of deposits and the bank had counted them carefully into these stacks of twenties, fifties, and hundreds. Most of the little piles in the bag were purple wrapped twenties, marked as two thousand dollars each, but there were brown wrapped packets of fifties labeled as five thousand each.
    The packet I held was banded in a distinct mustard color. It was all hundreds. Ten thousand dollars, the outside said.
    An incredible amount of money, but what really interested me about the currency strap was the little black stamp inked onto it. Those stamps were added by all banks, a kind of signature, and it clearly stated the name and location. The name of the bank this money had come from was writ large for all to see: Banco United.
    Ben Hawking’s bank.
    “Senor Conway?” a voice called.
    It was Carlos, back from his shady siesta. It sounded like he was already up on deck, headed for the top of the stairs.
    Things had changed. Whatever Rigger and Carlos had been doing out here on the water, it was bigger than a fishing trip. And it was bigger than shooting one man in the chest.
    I dropped the thick stack of bills into the bag, pulled the zipper closed, heaved the bag up