The Last Run (13 page)

There was a card wedged in the glass of the lookout window. It was one of those miniportraits of Jesus that Bible salesmen hand out at supermarkets. Bob Doyle nodded at the photograph of the young woman beside it.

“You always bring her along with you?”

Morley nodded. “Tamara’s a good girl. We’ve had our ups and downs. But she’s my world.”

Bob Doyle pondered the photo.

“I was a lot wilder in my younger days,” Morley said. “Drank a lot. Never saw a lady I didn’t like. Well, maybe a couple.” He laughed, then said, “I’ve been in trouble with the law, you know.”

“Really.”

“No shit. I did time for a hitting a cop. Not a lot of time, mind you.”

“No?”

Truth was, he had served fifteen months at a correctional facility in Anchorage for kicking in a cop’s face in Valdez. That episode was the grace note to an agony-to-ecstasy-to-agony tale that had actually begun two years prior to his arrest, on a rainy summer night in Sitka.

That night, Mark Morley had been chugging Jim Beam inside the Pioneer Bar and popping off challengers at the pool table when a little guy with a New York accent and a nifty parka chalked his stick and put a bet on the bar. At first glance, he didn’t look like a pool-hall hound. He looked like a chump. But he wiped the table. That impressed Morley. The man had a college degree. And he was an Alaska skipper. To Morley, a high school dropout from Detroit who was the son of a West Virginia coal mining clan, polish and sea savvy were qualities to hold in high regard.

They bought each other whiskies. Rob Carrs introduced himself and in no time Morley was pouring out his woes. He had just bailed from a Bering Sea trawler and come to Sitka to find work on a salmon troller. Literally, he had missed the boats; everybody was already crewed up for the season. He did wangle a job trolling on the
Tiffany
with a bunch of Mexicans. But the crew never made a dime. The owner always stiffed them.

Morley was too proud—and hungry—to go on like that. He’d packed his bags and was prepared to operate forklifts in Detroit for the rest of his days. Relax, Carrs told him. Alaska had its share of fool’s gold. But there was plenty of real gold to be had, too.

The next day Carrs introduced him to Dave Franklin, owner of the
Heida Warrior,
the troller he’d been skippering. Morley was in luck: the boat had just lost a deckhand. Carrs vouched for him and by that evening the boat left Sitka with Mark Morley in tow.

The
Heida Warrior
fished the last opening of the season, unloaded in Ketchikan and returned to its port of call, Sitka. The trip was a success. In Deep Inlet, they caught a heap of dog salmon and sold them for forty thousand dollars. Everyone, including Morley, pulled a nifty share. That was the end of any thoughts of returning to Michigan. The man was hooked.

The following season they did even better —until Morley got into trouble with a barmaid at the Marine, a strip joint in Ketchikan. She caught his eye with her overly tight Bush Company T-shirt. He caught hers with his tangerine-colored sport jacket and a line delivered with just enough excess of Southern drawl: “Hey,
dawrlin’!
What’s a sleazy girl like you doing in a nice place like this?” She rolled her eyes haughtily and sauntered off. He howled.

A few hours later she returned in a body suit. They and Carrs had a few more drinks before stumbling next door to the Frontier Bar. In a booth, Morley took off his glasses, and they started squeezing. She stuck her tongue in his ear and offered him a ride home. Carrs took his cue and waved to the couple on his way out the door. They hardly noticed.

The next time Carrs saw his deckhand was at three the following afternoon at the local jail. He found Morley slumped in his cell, still in his tangerine jacket, looking as glum as a lost beagle. His lovely lady had apparently filed rape charges. According to Morley, they had driven to a parking lot at the ferry terminal. She offered a blow job. He accepted. Because he’d had much to drink it was not easy going, and she sat up, annoyed, and said that on second thought her husband might not understand her tardiness. She shoved him out of her car, the job half done, as it were, and he was walking back to the wharf when a police car rolled up.

Unfortunately for him and the crew of the
Heida Warrior,
the judge did not buy Morley’s version of events and ordered him held for two days until his bail hearing. Dave Franklin had to post ten thousand dollars bail, Carrs had to take formal custody of his deckhand and a trial date was set nine months hence.

When the
State of Alaska
v.
Mark R. Morley
came to trial, everyone turned out for the show except the plaintiff. Because of her unexplained absence, the prosecutor had to rely on the statement she had given police the night of the alleged incident, in which she said she could not recall having any sexual contact with the defendant. Normally, the case would have been thrown out right away. But this one had been advertised in the newspapers for months, so they took the proceeding to its hazy conclusion.

The verdict came back not guilty, but it was obvious that Morley was shaken up. He had lost his beard, locks and ponytail—he had to snip them for trial —and much of his swagger. It took him months to get over the experience. He quit clubbing, topless dancers, pot parties. He worked all the time and, as a token of gratitude to Dave Franklin, built a bait shed on the aft deck of the
Heida Warrior.
What Morley lacked in sea smarts and tact he compensated for with enthusiasm and loyalty. He did not snivel, gave 100 percent effort and was always ready to sail on an hour’s notice. His hard work paid off. Franklin and Carrs rewarded him with a full-time job as deckhand.

By the fall of 1994 Morley had paid off his debts, settled up with the IRS and had twenty thousand dollars of his seining share stuffed in his duffel bag. He’d had no time to spend money; the
Heida Warrior
fished without letup. In mid-September, after a one-day stop in Sitka to pick up bait and longlining gear, they took off for Cape St. Elias and a forty-eight-hour halibut opening that Dave Franklin did not want to miss.

He wasn’t after the halibut. Alaska’s fishing authorities had forgotten to set a limit on what boats could take as black-cod bycatch. At the time, halibut was selling for fifty cents a pound; black cod for three dollars a pound. Plus, Franklin knew a hot black-cod hole near Cape St. Elias. It was a no-brainer. They sailed straight to it and dumped every skate they had, 150 all told. They were still fishing the hole when a storm snuck up from the southwest and caught them with 70 skates still in the water.

A gale was blowing and the seas were up to thirty-five feet when the cooling unit blew. The catch began to spoil. Most skippers probably would have pulled their gear, turned south and clawed back to Sitka against the blow. Not Carrs. He ordered the crew to leave the gear in the water. They made straight for the nearest port, Cordova Bay, the longlines trailing behind.

It was a wild ride but a quick one. Instead of eighteen hours, it took them twelve to reach Cordova Bay. They anchored and started hauling back. They were stunned: every single hook had a huge black cod dangling from it. The total haul was seventy-five thousand pounds. After deducting for groceries and supplies, each crewman walked away with twenty thousand dollars —not bad for two days work. And more was to come. No one in the fleet, it turned out, had gone for halibut. Another opening had been scheduled in a week’s time. Franklin parked the
Heida Warrior
in Valdez, told the crew to be ready to go when the weather cleared and hopped a plane with Carrs to Sitka, leaving Morley behind to mind the boat.

It was Mark Morley’s finest hour: he had weathered a humiliating trial, gained his sea legs and the respect of his mates and, with forty thousand dollars in his duffel bag, was the richest he had ever been. Not only did Morley have the dough, he was in an Alaska boomtown flush with swank restaurants and 24/7 cabarets. The tin man from Motor City had made it to his Emerald City.

He decided to celebrate his good fortune; really celebrate. He drank, smoked and snorted his way to dizzying heights, along the way wooing women, his Achilles’ heel. Valdez had no shortage of female flesh: divorcées, single moms, ladies of means with a misstep or two in their lives, waitresses, strippers, lap dancers, barflies—they were all hard-partying gals, a little rough around the edges, and all lookers. Every one could see Morley coming with his Detroit street strut, his California ponytail and nothing but greenbacks and time on his hands.

When Carrs returned a week later, he found his deckhand had blown nearly ten thousand dollars of his earnings. Morley had girlfriends in every joint in town, though there was one tart, Lisa, who had hooked her float to his parade and refused to let go. She was a runaway from the Midwest, early twenties, a little goofy—she claimed she saw angels walking the streets—with a stringy, bleach appeal. She’d had a few run-ins with the local police, and was not exactly a hit in the clubs. (One bar manager had eighty-sixed her for soliciting on the premises.) It was Lisa he took to the Sugar Loaf dance club the night of October 2, 1994. The bouncer told her to scram. She refused. So the bouncer called the cops. While the couple danced on the floor, two officers entered, grabbed the young lady by the arm and led her out to the parking lot.

By the time Morley got outside, they had the girl up against the squad car, arm pulled up behind her and twisted in the socket, screaming. Morley shouted at them to let her go. One of the officers barked at him to back off. Morley called him a choice name. The cop told him he was under arrest for disorderly conduct, grabbed something—Morley was never able to say afterward what that something was—and raised his arm above his head.

Morley ducked, and in one lunging, sweeping motion, upended him. The cop went down hard. Morley kicked him in the chest. The officer rolled over on his back, tried to cover his head. Morley reared back and kicked twice more, as though he were kicking a field goal, and the cop’s nose and cheekbones caved like Chinese porcelain.

This time bail was set for twenty thousand dollars. Franklin and Carrs put up half each. Afterward, Carrs tried to talk Morley into fighting the charges. “I will go to court for you,” the skipper told him. “That bastard egged you on. He was begging for trouble. That was police brutality.” But Morley wouldn’t have any of it. He didn’t have the heart, not after the circus in Ketchikan. He pleaded guilty to third-degree assault and was sentenced to two and a half years, with the possibility of parole in fifteen months. He also had to pay the officer’s medical bills and court costs —fifty thousand dollars in all —which left him in a twenty-thousand-dollar hole.

After his release, Morley got a job at a gas station a block from the Pioneer Bar, where he met Tamara Westcott. He moved in with her, but soon fell behind a few thousand dollars in his restitution payments. In the fall of 1997, his parole officer gave him an ultimatum: pay what he owed or he was going back to prison.

That was when Morley called Scott Echols and asked for a chance to skipper the
La Conte.

Bob Doyle gazed out at the dark sea. “Well, I hope this all works out, Mark.”

“It’s got to.”

“We’ll do all right.”

“Sure we will.”

“Say, Mark—what are my chances of tendering with you in February?”

“I can’t promise anything,” Morley said heavily. “But I’ll do what I can.”

“I appreciate it.”

They looked out the window a long minute. Then Bob Doyle said, “Why don’t you get some sleep?”

“I’ll try.”

“I’ll wake you if I need anything.”

“Do that.”

Bob Doyle stayed on watch until ten o’clock, and Morley was still awake when David Hanlon came up to relieve him.

B
y midnight they were approaching the grounds. The wind had freshened up, with the moon gone, and the current had swung around to the southwest. Since they were sailing against the tide the engine had to work harder to keep eight knots. The stars were gone now, and somehow the sky seemed lower, the low, dark sky of a squall coming. No other boats had shown on the radar for hours.

Once they made the Boot, a shoal that looked like a large shoe on the map, they set a course for the western fringe of the Fairweather Grounds, an area known as the Triple Forties. That was where a trio of seamounts rose from the depths of the gulf to within forty fathoms, or 240 feet, of the surface. Deep-sea currents upwelled at these mounts and brought up plankton, on which the tiniest offish fed. In the evenings and mornings when there was a rising tide bigger fish would come into it to hunt, and in no time there would be halibut, black cod, quail back, tuna, lingcod, king salmon and yellow eye to choose from.

They were going to set over the shoals, starting on the lower bank. The idea was to release gear into the currents, from west to east, three strings at a time, and to drape the longline over the pinnacles. It was going to take six hours to lay out and haul back each set of three, two-mile-long strings. With luck, they would catch a thousand pounds of yellow eye each set. If all went spectacularly, they would pull twelve thousand pounds in four or, at the most, five sets, and be on their way to Juneau by suppertime on Sunday.

The marine forecast was calling for twenty-foot seas, gale-force winds and heavy sleet by early Sunday evening. They were not leaving much room for error.

The anchor made a big splash and main line zizzed through the chute. The line tightened as it hit the water and began racing out at a slant, slicing the water as it went.

“Anchor’s out!” Gig Mork called up from the companionway. Mark Morley marked the drop position on his video plotter, leaned out the door of the wheelhouse and yelled, “Got it!”

The skate was running out in a blur, the gangions and hooks and line making that
woo-woo-woo-woo-woo
sound as they jumped through the metal chute. Main line was paying out into the ocean off to starboard. With the motor throttled up to six knots, the
La Conte
bumped and flumed through the chop. The line moved out steadily.