Arrow's Fall Read online

  Arrow’s Fall

  Joel Scott

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  The water had that stark clarity found only in those rare places a thousand miles from the possibility of man; a clear shining medium that brought the ten-fathom bottom so sharply into focus it seemed I could reach down and touch it. I had seen the fish twice now, a leopard grouper in the five-pound range gliding among the coral canyons like a green spotted ghost, its head swivelling lazily as it checked for dangers, its overhung jaw slightly open as it hunted.

  I took a deep breath and planed down behind him, my spear gun extended in front of me, the mask tightening on my face as I descended with long scissor strokes of my flippers. The grouper sensed something in the final second and spurted out of sight around the corner of a sheer cliff so sewn with anemones and starfish that it seemed to undulate as I passed.

  I turned in his wake and came out on a large plateau that extended beyond my range of vision, and there, just at the edge, a quick movement. I moved out and saw another quick motion, and then another and now the spotted back of the grouper had changed to stripes, and there were giants in the water, and I choked down the scream that rose up in the back of my throat.

  The tigers were loose!

  I turned and raced back for the cliff, but I was far too slow, and they curled lazily around in front of me, all the time in the world, the circle tightening, and I spun to face them with my spear but there were too many. As I wheeled, one of them grazed me and I spat out the mouthpiece and screamed and turned, but it was the bloodied mask of Jack Delaney that bumped me, his face rough and sandpapered like that of a shark. The skeletal teeth grabbed my arm and shook me like a dog with a bone and I closed my eyes and screamed in shock and horror.

  ***

  “Wake up, Jared, you’re dreaming again.”

  My eyes flew open and the threshing of the shark changed into my friend Danny shaking me.

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered. Sweat poured from my body and the twisted sheet was damp and clinging.

  “What was it, the tiger sharks?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I think you should start drinking again. This unnatural sobriety is affecting you.”

  Danny handed me a cup of coffee and I took a grateful sip. He was serious, a man who had never experienced a hangover or blackout in his life. He refused to understand that it wasn’t the same for everyone. I began drinking too much after Jane left and had cut back in the last month.

  “You’re probably right. What number on the job list are we up to today?”

  “Thirty-two. The head hoses.”

  “Shit.”

  “Exactly.”

  For the past three and a half months we had been tied up in New Zealand for the South Pacific hurricane season. It was five months of boat preparation and overhaul for the next cruising season, combined with a few tours by car and the occasional coastal junket on Arrow.

  Danny MacLean is my travelling partner, fellow Canadian, and closest friend. Half First Nation and half Scots by birth and all Indigenous by choice, he’s a big brown good-looking man who is as strong as an ox and the perennial party animal. He considers it his mission in life to rescue me from introspection and ensure I have a good time, the definition of which usually involves alcohol and, sometimes, women. Two years earlier we had salvaged a large amount of illicit cash from the safe of a sunken drug boat that had been pursuing us. It should have been enough for five good years of cruising, but Danny went through money like the proverbial drunken sailor. I tired of being the whiner who moaned about money and joined in. Now there was barely enough cash for another season in the tropics. We’d have to go home and earn some more. It was a prospect neither of us looked forward to.

  “We’d better have a good breakfast; we won’t feel like eating once we’re into the job.”

  Danny picked up the cast iron griddle and set it on top of the propane burners we hung on the big Dickinson stove when we set out for the tropics. I topped up my coffee and went out on deck to check the weather.

  We were ten miles upriver in New Zealand’s North Island, moored fore and aft on pilings in Whangarei town basin with a couple of hundred other yachts, many of them offshore cruisers. Most of us had followed the same tracks through Tonga and Fiji and had a nodding acquaintance. Tied up next to us on the port side was a forty-foot American registered Valiant, and Rachel and I exchanged friendly good mornings from our respective cockpits. She was minding the boat while her boyfriend was back in Silicon Valley topping up the cruising kitty. We’d become friendly with her, Danny more so than me; our hulls were barely five feet apart, and I had felt the sway of Arrow many a late night and early morning as Danny swung across and back. Women responded to Danny like iron filings to a magnet, and he was never one for resisting the natural laws.

  It was a fine morning, cool and overcast with just enough breeze to crank over the wind generator hanging on the mizzenmast and give us enough amps to run the electrics and fridge without having to start the engine. We had done a costly refit in Tahiti two years back after we lost our rig when we were driven over the reef in the Tuamotus, but we hadn’t touched the diesel, an old Perkins 4-108 with the Lucas electrics, ill-tempered and flighty, but never quite reaching the point where it had to be replaced. We had a perverse fondness for it, apart from the serious money it would take to replace it with a new one. We tried to use it as little as possible, and then only when it would have been dangerous not to.

  “Here, eat up.”

  From the galley, Danny passed up a plate of bacon and eggs and came up on deck to join me. He gave a reserved greeting to Rachel and she responded equally sedately. The rascals.

  “Seen Sinbad this morning?”

  “No, but I felt a slight list around five o’clock this morning,” I said. “It must have been him.”

  Danny chose to ignore it. “Is it a mafia day today?”

  “Yes. Likely see Basil in another hour or so.”

  The New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry was responsible for defending the shores of their country from the depredations of foreign pets. You were not allowed to land an animal on shore until it had been in quarantine for six months under pain of death for the beast and the loss of a large bond by its owner. In addition, there was a biweekly inspection of all boats with pets confined on board. The inspector rowed among the moored fleet, and the owners would bring their pets on deck for his contemplation, the process often accompanied by acrimony on both sides.

  Since it was their country, they got to make the rules, and they widely publicized their aversion to foreign pets: if you don’t like it, don’t land here.
Danny and I had no problems with any of this. Unfortunately, Sinbad did.

  Sinbad was our ship’s dog, a hundred and sixty-five pounds of ugly and muscle. He was devoted to Danny and barely tolerated me, although he did save my life once. We picked him up in the port of Santa Barbara on our maiden passage down the west coast, and he remained with us ever since.

  Sinbad grew up on an atoll in the Tuamotus, a free-running village dog belonging to no one, and fed himself for the most part by catching fish. The cruisers loved to watch him working the shallow edge of a lagoon, springing through the water in high stiff-legged leaps with his head on a swivel, then suddenly pouncing to emerge with a fish captured in his jaws. They were less thrilled when he devoured one of the seabirds he varied his diet with.

  Sinbad was befriended by an American single-hander who stopped off at the remote island of Ahe in the Tuamotus, and when the cruiser departed he took the dog with him. When the sailor’s voyage ended in Santa Barbara two years later, he deposited Sinbad with the local SPCA, and that is where Danny’s grandfather Joseph had found him and brought him aboard two years previously.

  He was unquestionably the ugliest dog I have ever seen: outsized head, with yellow staring eyes above a flat brutal face with something of the wolf in it. His neck was massive, the skin loose and rumpled above powerful shoulders that ran down to a narrow, skinny rump and short muscular hind legs with broad thickly furred feet that propelled him through the water at surprising speed. His tail was thin, mangy, and rat-like and had been docked by the teeth of a shark. Another attack left a thick network of scars beginning under his chin and running back through his neck and chest like twisted silver ropes. It also took half his left ear, and the remaining flap was serrated in little steps.

  When Sinbad looked at you with those hellish amber eyes and uttered his low, eager growl, it was sufficient to turn any man’s bowels to water. He still scared me, and I had known him since Joseph first brought him on board Arrow.

  We couldn’t declare Sinbad when we reached New Zealand. It would have been his death sentence. No force on earth could have kept him on board for six months and so, a mile from the customs dock on our way up the Ha¯tea River, Danny dropped Sinbad over the side. He followed us along the shore until we berthed in the basin and then disappeared. It was another week before we saw him again.

  I finished my breakfast and went into the galley to clean up. While I worked I tried to think of a valid reason to postpone the head job, but nothing came to mind, and soon we were immersed in it, pumping bleach through the lines to kill the odour and cursing the frozen fittings. We could have beaten the hoses against the side of the boat to get out the calcium buildup, but it was easier to just replace them all. We had calculated three hours to do the job and the immutable law of boats came into play and doubled the time; it was four o’clock before we finished up, dirty, sweaty, and evil tempered.

  We took the inflatable and rowed ashore to the marina office with the showers installed alongside, and less than an hour later were sitting in the Balmain, one of the tougher bars in Whangarei. A lot of Māori did their drinking there. Danny was something of a fixture most evenings, and with his First Nations North Pacific heritage, regarded as a distant relative of sorts. It wasn’t even an hour before Danny was charming and chatting a pair of adventurous young schoolteachers who had stopped in for a drink on the way home. They sat close on either side of him, fascinated with Danny and his embellished stories about the cruising life. It was clear that a competition was taking place between the ladies, and the loser would get me. I was contemplating an excuse for leaving when a different woman approached the table.

  “Excuse me. Are you the captain of Arrow?”

  She stood before me clutching the briefcase to her chest as if it might afford some protection against the rough trade that surrounded her. She looked out of place and ill at ease in her severe tailored suit. She was in her mid-twenties and coming in here might have been the raciest thing she’d ever done. She didn’t wait for my reply.

  “I’m interested in chartering a boat for a couple of weeks to do some research in the Bay of Islands. Sort of a working holiday. May I sit down?” An English accent mixed with something else. Irish?

  “Why not,” I said.

  Danny glanced up, raised his eyebrows at me, and resumed his conversation with the ladies. The three of them were talking in low voices and doing a lot of giggling.

  “Would you like a drink?” I asked.

  “No thank you.”

  “My name is Jared Kane.” I offered her my hand. She looked at it but made no move towards it.

  “Yes, I am aware of that. They told me when I asked about your boat. My name is Laura Kennedy.”

  I finished my drink and ordered another. She sat on the edge of her seat ramrod stiff and waited impatiently for me to finish with the cocktail waitress. Laura wore no makeup, and her hair was swept back from her forehead and gathered so severely into a bun at the back it was a wonder her eyes weren’t slanted. She looked about five feet two and her shape could have been anything under that suit. She might even have been attractive if she’d taken the broomstick out of her bum.

  “I’m studying marine biology and I’m doing my thesis on phytoplankton. I need to do some research on the coccolithophores, a branch of diatoms that are only found in warmer waters.” She paused to take a breath.

  “Sounds absolutely fascinating,” I said.

  She frowned. Her bun moved up an inch.

  “I have relatives in New Zealand, and the Bay of Islands is warm enough for my purposes, so I thought I would come here for a visit and do some research as well. I noticed your boat tied up in the basin and wondered if you would be interested in chartering it out.”

  I regarded her skeptically. Danny and I had never talked seriously about chartering Arrow to anyone. It was just another hare-brained idea we might have kicked around late some evening when we were in drink and calculating the state of our finances.

  “Where did you hear that we were considering chartering?”

  She gave a small superior smile. “It was just a guess. I know that a lot of cruisers do a little on the side to supplement their travel funds. I’d pay the going rate.”

  I wondered for a moment if she could be connected to our past troubles with Jack Delaney and his hired killers, and then dismissed the idea as paranoid. It had been two years, and the accent was all wrong. We hadn’t tried to hide, and we would have been found by now if anyone had been serious about looking.

  “Why do you want Arrow? There are lots of regular charter boats for rent here.”

  We had neither a licence nor a good layout for chartering. Arrow, like so many large wooden yachts of her era, had been built for a couple to cruise in comfort and style, with the other accommodations all a bit cramped. Chartering her out was one of those ideas that seemed brilliant late at night after a few drinks, then shrivelled and died in the sober light of day.

  “I like wooden boats. They have so much warmth and character.”

  She said this with an uneasy smile, like an actress who didn’t quite believe her lines. She could have used some warmth and character though, that was damn certain.

  “No kidding. Arrow isn’t set up for chartering, you know. She’s not really all that big or comfortable.”

  Arrow is an old wooden ketch, British built from a Laurent Giles design in 1965. She’s just shy of forty-seven feet on deck with a thirty-five-foot waterline and an eleven-foot beam. She draws six feet with external lead ballast and a cutaway keel and is heavy by modern-day standards but has a tall set of Sitka spruce spars in her and carries a thousand feet of sail. When she is on a good point of sail, she is as fast as most boats and prettier than all of them.

  Laura sat there watching me with an anxious look on her face.

  “I’m sure she would be just fine. Would you please consider it?”


  There was an intensity about her request that was out of proportion, her face flushed, and her hands tightly clenched as if my response were a matter of life and death to her.

  “I’d have to talk it over with my partner. I doubt it though; we still have some work to do on the boat before she’s ready for the cruising season. I’m sure there are other people who would be glad to take you out. There are lots of cruisers up in the Bay of Islands right now. It would make more sense to charter someone who is up there already. Thanks for the offer.”

  She sat there biting her lip and staring at me for a few moments, and I thought she was going to say something else, but then she stood up without a word and marched stiffly away and out the door.

  “You’re welcome,” I muttered.

  A full drink sat waiting in front of me and I threw it back and started talking to the little brunette school teacher who suddenly found me fascinating.

  The drinks warmed and enlivened me, the women were charming and the music loud, and it all swept up and over me and I let myself go and didn’t give another thought to Miss Prim and her odd request to charter Arrow.

  Chapter 2

  I woke sweating and disoriented and lay in my bunk trying to reconstruct the evening. I could remember nearly all of it. Towelling off the stale alcohol sweat, I slipped on a sweatshirt and shorts and went ashore for a run. Before I had gone a hundred yards, Sinbad drifted alongside. It was one of the few times he kept me company. Jane and I had run together most days, and he’d always accompanied us, gazing up at her with a look of panting adoration on his ugly face as he trotted at her side. Maybe he still thought she was coming back.

  We moved along the road in unison, neither of us looking at the other, Sinbad’s shoulder level with me as we went along the river road past the chandleries and swung around the loop over the bridge past the stadium. I picked up the pace, extending my legs and concentrating on my breathing, and the two of us moved out in concert, Sinbad’s head nodding in counterpoint to his choppy stride.