Arrow's Rest by Joel Scott (best books to read all time .TXT) 📗

cleated it off. He let the jib run right out, and it fluttered and filled, fluttered and filled, and he debated setting it out with the pole, but decided not to and turned Arrow a few degrees off the wind until the sail filled. Once he passed Quadra Island, there would be a comfortable run to Cortes with little traffic, and it was easier and more comfortable to make a couple of long jibes rather than run straight downwind.

He took a last look around, clicked on the autopilot, stretched out on the cockpit seat, closed his eyes, and set his internal alarm for thirty minutes. It was a leftover from his time offshore when half an hour was roughly the length of time you had if a container ship or tanker happened to rise up over the horizon on a collision course. He had no illusions about watch-keeping on commercial boats at sea, Arrow having had her fair share of close calls over the years. Even a U.S. Navy destroyer with every conceivable navigational bell and whistle and a full complement on watch had managed to run into a freighter on a clear summer night a few years past.

He knew he should check his cell phone but decided to put it off for a while longer. None of the messages would be friendly, and some would be outright savage. He couldn’t handle any more bad news right now. He turned on the VHF and set it to scan on the off chance. The Blue Harp was a well-known boat and would attract some attention out on the water. Bored boaters gossiped over the airwaves, he might hear something. Stranger things had happened. Jared stretched out on the cockpit seat and in five minutes was fast asleep to a dull background noise of interrupted conversations and idle chatter as the VHF flipped through the channels.

He didn’t hear the float plane’s call to the Blue Harp giving the eta for a passenger drop-off.

Chapter 40

Bill Lacey sat at Rainbow’s wheel, the big diesel engine thumping comfortably along at a steady eight knots as the lights of Vancouver gradually faded behind him. The winds were light, the seas calm, and the traffic almost non-existent at this late hour. The sixteen-mile radar was on and showed a tug and barge out near mid-channel. Apart from the freighters anchored up behind him whose blips were now touching the twelve-mile outer ring on his radar screen, that was it. He had the VHF on sixteen and scanning, but it remained silent. He’d listened to the weather channels for the first few minutes, and nothing was expected in the way of extreme weather. The low was coming in with some easterly and possibly some heavy rain squalls later on at the back of it. Then a big high was forecast to come in with clear skies for the foreseeable future. It seemed like nowadays it rained and rained up until mid-spring and then a switch was flipped and it was all sunny and dry for the next few months. Maybe climate change was responsible, he didn’t know and cared less. Let the ice melt and the waters rise, not his problem. He was living on a boat.

Lacey didn’t really have a specific destination in mind, he was just heading north, leaving behind the city and all his problems there. He felt more relaxed with every mile. Out here away from the pressure cooker that was his life in Vancouver lately, he had time to think and put things into perspective. He realized he had made a serious mistake in his dealings with Albright and Sullivan. He should have kept them separate, strung them all along and let things play out for a while, until he could come up with a foolproof long-term plan. But in an effort to be seen as a team player, he’d casually mentioned Sullivan’s nervous, probing phone call to Clint, and the next thing he knew the lawyer was gone. For good, if he had to make a guess. Things were getting desperate and you didn’t need to be a genius to know that the next link in the evidential chain that Albright would consider eliminating was his accountant.

He knew now that he would never get his money out of the complex deal that was going to be his last, the one that would have made him rich and let him escape from the web that seemed to be tightening every day now. Things were moving too quickly, spinning out of control. Sullivan had disappeared five days ago, his phone went straight to message, and his office said they had no idea of his whereabouts and had formally reported him as missing to the police. He’d seen a piece on the evening news, and the disappearance was being treated as suspicious. If nothing else they would want to interview him sooner or later, given his close connections with the lawyer. He knew that some of his business deals with Albright and Sullivan would not survive close scrutiny.

After the episode at the bar where the big Indian had gotten into the fight with Clint and Travis, he’d panicked. Headed straight back to Rainbow, fired up the engine, cast off the lines, and headed out. He needed space and time to think. He’d suspected for the past two months that this day might come and had made some preparations, prime among them readying Rainbow for an ocean passage. She was a seventy-foot ex-Seattle tugboat that he’d bought for a song from an ill-fated kayak expedition company that had just barely been covering expenses when the diesel engine failed and they promptly went bankrupt. He’d changed her name and spent over sixty grand on a refit that included a complete engine rebuild and a month in the yard for replacing half a dozen planks, sandblasting, and new paint.

Lacey felt she was in as trim and seaworthy condition as she’d ever been, and while her frame