Rogue Wave
Authors: Susan Dunlap
Susan Dunlap
For Ginny Rich
1
H
ER KNUCKLES STOOD OUT
white against the tan of her clenched hands. She could no longer feel where her skin stopped and the boat’s wheel began. Her arms were nearly numb from the prolonged pressure, and her shoulders were so tense that she couldn’t turn her head.
Robin Matucci stared through the spray-mottled window at the black water. The Pacific off the Golden Gate wasn’t supposed to be so rough, not in October. She had miscalculated. She’d needed a storm, but not one like this. A black wall of water flung itself forward, and
Early Bird
jolted. She had to keep her feet firmly planted, one pressed against the bulkhead, knees braced.
The bow hit a wave and lifted sharply. The cabin door broke loose from its hook and banged. She clung to the wheel as much as steered with it. Risking a quick look behind her, she saw the body of Carlos Delaney, her deckhand, banging back and forth in the open stern. Delaney was drunk.
He’d been dry since he’d signed on, right up until they’d passed under the Golden Gate Bridge yesterday afternoon. But one taste of bourbon and that was the end of it. Half a bottle gone in record time, and the ocean getting rougher by the minute. When the blow came that felled him, he couldn’t get out of the way. An inch lower, and it would have burst his carotid artery. Now his dark hair fanned over his goggles, and his thin lips were parted in a parody of the wry smile that had made her ignore her suspicions until it was too late. He lay like a stunned sockeye, waiting to be washed overboard.
What she would have given to have
Early Bird
headed toward shore! But in a storm like this she couldn’t pull the wheel hard over and turn around, couldn’t expose the starboard side to a wave, even momentarily, couldn’t risk the boat broaching, skidding out of control, helpless against the next wave that would smash down on the starboard quarter and toss
Early Bird
over like a child’s plastic tub toy.
But the sun had been out when they left the wharf! She almost laughed at that excuse—who was she going to tell, St. Peter?
Early Bird
would go down. And no one would be surprised.
Robin grabbed the wheel tighter and stared through the windshield. The gigantic wave coming—
flying
—at her was so high the mast light reflected off it halfway up. She couldn’t see the foam at its crest. It hit with a sickening smack.
Early Bird
lurched straight up, as if a rope had yanked up the bow. The wind battered her face, numbed her ears; still she could hear the scrape and thump of Delaney slamming into the bulkhead. Then the boat stopped, dead. The wind was silent.
Early Bird
had crested the wave.
Momentarily,
Early Bird
hung in midair, and the only sound was the ominous whir of props spinning out of water. Then the boat slammed into the trough and walls of water rose round her. Her breath caught. It took her a moment to recognize that unfamiliar sensation: fear. She was never afraid, never let herself be.
Delaney moaned. The boat hurtled into the next trough, sending him flying. Water crashed into the windshield; the side window shattered. Glass spat across the cabin. Water lashed her face.
Through blurred and stinging eyes she stared up at the foam at the top of the wave as it began to curl down, aiming its full force at them with a viciousness she’d never seen in these waters.
There was no time left. She had to deal with Delaney. He was less than a yard from the cabin doorway. But the wave was too close now. Her hands froze on the wheel.
Early Bird
flew straight up. Delaney slammed against the fighting chair in the cockpit. The boat shot down so steeply that she was sure it would pitchpole end over end. Water crashed over the bow and banged back and forth inside the boat. Hanging onto the wheel, she watched as Delaney bounced against the stern. His mouth was open. He was screaming! No. Of course he wasn’t. Delaney was past screaming. That shriek was the wind. The boat slid backward; water swept over the stern. She watched Delaney go with it—over the stern into the ocean.
Her whole body shook. She pushed Delaney out of her mind. She couldn’t afford to think of him, or of how slim were her own chances of surviving. The engine strained; with the props out of water, it would burn out.
Another wave exploded through the broken window; water poured over the stern and for a panicky moment she thought it would bring Delaney’s body with it.
Location! She’d lost track. Was she too near the rocky mounds of the Farallon Islands? They could destroy her! She pictured the murderous sea smashing Delaney’s corpse against the Farallon rocks. Unbeckoned came the horrifying vision of Delaney, as the Coast Guard picked up his mangled, bruised, dead, dead, body.
She steered automatically, despite her terror. And when the flames shot up from the engine room, she made no move to stop them. Before dawn off the coast south of San Francisco
Early Bird
sank.
K
IERNAN
O’S
HAUGHNESSY SAT
staring over her office desk at the misty yellow finger of sun stroking the Pacific breakers. Dusk came early this time of year. Still, there was no place more beautiful than La Jolla, with its gray-green water lumbering toward shore, rubber-suited surfers gliding atop the waves, and adolescents on their boogie boards, balancing, balancing, grabbing for air, and finally flailing down into the surf. Beyond it all, the horizon dropped off in clouds of crimson like the fiery breath of ancient dragons.
“Dinner in ten minutes!” Brad Tchernak called.
The smell of garlic butter floated in from his half of the duplex. She pictured him, all six feet, four inches and 240 pounds of ex-football muscle, standing at the counter breading a trio of giant clams flown in fresh from Oregon. When she stood next to him, the top of her short dark curly hair came to his armpit. It was one of the drawbacks of being not quite five foot one.
Less than ten minutes. She pulled open a file drawer and extricated the Yault file.
The door between the flats swung into hers. Ezra, her Labrador—Irish wolfhound cross, padded in, surveyed the desk, shook his wiry brown head in disgust and sank to the floor. Kiernan laughed. “Liked this room better as a kitchen, eh, Ez?” She reached down and rubbed behind his ears. “You are a very spoiled dog. One kitchen in Tchernak’s flat isn’t enough? I’ve never had food here. Only coffee. And even you, you big beggar, draw the line at that.”
Ezra looked accusingly at the printer, where the stove had once been. Following the dog’s glance, Kiernan eyed the file cabinets that had replaced kitchen cabinets, the computer that sat on a shelf above the smallest refrigerator money could buy. From the first moment she’d conceived of this remodeling job, this commitment to the decadent life, it had delighted her. As she had told friends, it was the working woman’s equivalent of Chinese emperors growing their fingernails ridiculously long because they knew there would be servants as close as a thumbnail, or in her case, the front half of a duplex.
She would always have a housekeeper, but not necessarily Tchernak. The job wouldn’t hold him forever. She tried to shake off the thought. Maybe once the election was over and Tchernak had more time … But if the attention he’d been getting as a local spokesman for the campaign to impede offshore oil drilling was an indicator, his days of preparing baked sturgeon stuffed with Italian fontina could be numbered.
Kiernan gave the big dog’s head a final rub. “Ezra, in spite of what you think, my flat does
not
need a kitchen. It needs an office with an ocean view.”
Ezra groaned.
“Eight minutes,” Tchernak called from his kitchen.
The phone rang.
“Don’t answer that,” Tchernak warned. “Remember our agreement.”
It rang again.
“I’ll be through in seven minutes.”
“Like last week, huh?”
“Tchernak, you forget your place. You are a house
keeper
, not a house
mother
.” She picked up the receiver. “O’Shaughnessy.”
“Kiernan O’Shaughnessy?” a hesitant male voice asked.
“Yes.”
“And you’re a detective now?”
“Private Investigator. Who is this?”
“You’re the same Kiernan O’Shaughnessy who was a doctor at the coroner’s office in San Francisco twelve years ago?” The voice seemed familiar, but she couldn’t tell if the connection was muffling what she might have recognized, or creating a mechanical sameness that gave the illusion of familiarity. The man’s nervousness was unmistakable. “Who is this?”
“Skip Olsen. From San Francisco.”
“Uh huh?”
“I was with the police back then, when you were at the coroner’s.
Harold
Olsen. We had a few stiffs in common.”
Olsen. Now she was beginning to remember. Harold “Skip” Olsen, a beat cop. He’d been about thirty then. Shortish, sandy-haired, excitable. The morgue had made him nervous. And he’d always referred to the corpses,
her
corpses, as stiffs. She’d never seen Skip Olsen without feeling he shouldn’t have been a cop. He was too unsure of himself. She remembered his pale blue eyes, and the way they followed people’s movements. There’d been a puckered look to his face, as if he was sure that even though he wore a uniform no one would take him seriously. But Kiernan had; she’d been wary of that insecurity, the type that led men to overcompensate. His was not an acquaintance she wanted to renew.
But even from the little he’d said, something didn’t fit. The “Harold Olsen.”
Sergeant
Olsen, or
Lieutenant
Olsen, is what Skip would have hidden behind. “Are you still with the police department?”
She could hear a quick intake of breath before he said, “No.”
“No? How come?”
“Lamed out.” Another nervous breath. “I was sorry to hear about your, uh, leaving the coroner’s office up north.”
He hadn’t said “your being fired from the coroner’s office.” That small show of subtlety surprised her. But it did not move her to explain the circumstances: that her mistake had been a natural one; that all but one pathologist in northern California had been willing to support her. Instead she said, “You’re calling me on business?”