Free The Whiskey Sea by Ann Howard Creel Page A

something Frieda had never heard of, and telling her that had caused the stroke and could cause another one. Silver needed to eat mostly rice and fruit and no salt.
    On her first day out of the house, the sun had also emerged, like a promise of better days. Still, it was cold, and she pulled her cap down over her ears. Despite her emotional exhaustion, she walked down to the docks, where the men and their boats had been awaiting her return. Many of them asked after Silver and told her about the engine work they needed done. She took all the jobs she could, worked out her pay, and then planned each job one by one in her head. She’d be caught up on her work in a week’s time.
    She was preparing to go buy parts when Hawkeye told her that a man named Dutch wanted to talk to her.
    Looking at Hawkeye in his good eye, Frieda managed a nod of her head. Maybe Dutch needed work done on his boat, and Hawkeye was giving her a lead. She couldn’t thank him, however, not for all the tea in China. He represented all that had gone wrong in this town.
    She headed over to see Dutch, one of the most successful shore runners based out of Highlands. Once a lobsterman, he’d started with a twenty-eight-foot dory that could do about fifteen knots when light. But it could do only half that when fully loaded, so recently he’d bought a forty-foot Jersey sea skiff that could do thirty knots to outrun the guardsmen who were playing it straight. When Dutch saw Frieda, he moved from sitting at the helm and stepped up to the transom.
    “Welcome back,” he said to her. Dutch was big and blond, a man in his late thirties with huge rounded shoulders and a trim waist, a perpetually reddened face, a deep cleft in his chin, and an overall look that said, Don’t even think of messing with me. He could’ve been descended from the first Vikings who had landed in America, and he also could’ve been a contender for Bea’s father. But she couldn’t think about that now. She could tolerate him. He had the pointed, squinty, farsighted eyes of a good sailor and didn’t talk much unless he’d been drinking. When he did speak, he went straight to the heart of a matter.
    He said, “My engineer took sick.”
    Frieda knew the man, a fine mechanic named Hector who had been her biggest competition for work along the docks before he started working solely for Dutch.
    Dutch laughed with a smirk on his face. “Well, that’s his story at least. Truth is, he’s either getting cold feet or getting whipped by his wife to get himself out. He don’t want to go out no more.” He shrugged. “He can do OK out here working honest, but he might be my drop man from time to time.”
    She nodded and listened.
    “We’re only a crew of three, and normally I got to have men big enough to catch the bags they throw down from the rummers out there. You’re too small; you won’t be able to do it.”
    She gulped and let her eyes drift over the boat, a beauty with her square stern, bluff bow, and engine amidships, with room for cargo fore and aft. She had looked at Dutch with renewed respect when he named the boat Wonder , much to the guffaws and taunts of the fishermen around him. “So, what are you proposing?”
    “When we go out there, we got to move fast. We pull up and tell them what we want, and they start tossing down the bags. If we get swells, we can take some hellish beatings. Water can leak down into the engine no matter how hard we aim to keep it dry.”
    “I know.” She also knew that Dutch would not be telling her all of this without some purpose behind it. Her heart thumped in expectation, and she looked at the boat now in a new way. It was made of very thin wood—maybe five-eighths of an inch thick. Not much of a barrier between sailor and sea. And she already knew the shore boats ran at night without lights to hide from the coast guard boats in the area. If they hit a submerged log or other wreckage, it would go through the hull like a pickax through a