Free Dead in the Water by Nancy Holder Page A

looked around the room. Nothing. And the feeling of fear was dissipating like a tide pulling itself back into the ocean.
    The van Burens made no more sounds. She sat quietly, collecting herself. The mantle of unbelief cloaked her once more, and she told herself that when she met Marion Chang, she would tell her she’d decided not to pursue—
    It was so damn hard to breathe! No wonder she was upset. She laid a hand over her chest and climbed onto the bed. Lifting her nightgown, she walked on her knees to the head and pushed the curtain away from the porthole. Some fresh air would clear her head. If the van Burens came to her door to see how she was, she’d say she’d been cursing at the porthole, trying to get it open. That it had been stuck …
    It swung open at her light touch.
    The closet door rolled and cracked, rolled and cracked. Outside, the sailors tromped and cursed and jangled their ghostly chains.
    A Spirit propelled the ship, she found herself thinking, with no idea why. It sailed the Ancient Mariner straight for perdition. He had wanted to round the Horn, and boasted to God and the devil that he could do it. His pride had lured him to his doom.
    The dream, the person in the water. Could that have been Stephen? Had she dreamed that her love was luring her to
her
doom?
    “Good grief,” she murmured, and thrust her head out the porthole.
    Surrounded by the night, Donna and John stood beside Ramón Diaz on the bridge. Clad in a dark blue jumpsuit, he pointed to various instruments and droned on about what they were, a very dry textbook visit for tourists. When he’d invited her up, Donna guessed, he hadn’t expected her to bring someone else along, especially not another man.
    As Kevin would say, Bummer, dude.
    She checked her watch. It was eleven-fifteen, but it felt like o-dark-thirty. Well, she’d told Ramón that sea air made her sleepy, hadn’t she? Not realizing, of course, that it was true.
    “Okay, now, this is our LORAN system. We navigate using this device,” Ramón instructed them, as if there would be a quiz at the end of the visit.
    Donna shifted her weight and surveyed the bridge, idly wishing she’d worn a sweater over her shorts and white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt. It was dark, save for a muted overhead light fixture that basically gave you a fix on things, but not a very good look. In the aft section of the room stood a large light table, now turned off, where they could lay the charts and study them, triangulate, all that jazz. A dozen charts rolled like house plans hung out of pigeonholes beneath the table, and thick books, of more charts, she assumed, leaned against each other drunkenly on a shelf above the pigeonholes.The colors of their covers had bled into the darkness; they all looked a sickening shade of mustard-yellow.
    Donna noted the wheel, small and made of gray plastic, like the kind of thing you used to find on an infant’s car seat, beep-beep, baby driver. At least it was a wheel. Ramón told them some ships were operated with joysticks.
    Glenn would have said something crude and dumb about that.
    She rubbed her nose. The circular windscreen on the upper left quadrant of the panorama window whirled around and around, a windshield wiper gone amuck. Talk about your symbols; that was how her mind was, too, trying to make a decision about Glenn. Maybe she could get it taken care of early so she could enjoy her vacation, goddamn it.
    So. The smartest and best thing to do was also the most obvious: transfer. Get another partner. There were plenty of good officers on the force who wouldn’t have a spasm over working with a woman. Not, frankly, that
she
wouldn’t.
Cagney and Lacey
had been a TV show, hon, not a rational life-style for a female person trying to survive in Macholand. How’d
you
like to put your life on the line for some stupid bitch mooning over a guy?
    Her throat hurt. Surreptitiously she touched her face—no tears—and wandered toward the back of the bridge.