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

was toast. Well, at least he’d gotten one in on that harp player — the one the little bastard had been romancing until Clint and Travis visited her. The last he’d heard, she was in a Swiss asylum. He wondered if Ivery knew what had happened to her. He doubted she’d contacted him; romantic relationships were the last things she’d be considering for a while. For a pleasant few moments Albright daydreamed a fantasy wherein he and Ivery were ranged side by side in their wheelchairs on the afterdeck and he was telling him about harp lady and then he reached across and grabbed Ivery and his wheelchair and raised them high over his head and —

The intercom rang and Albright picked it up and listened.

“Right,” he said. “I’ll be down in five.”

Chapter 51

The wind had settled into the southeast and was holding around fifteen knots. The glass was low but relatively steady and hadn’t moved the last time Danny had given it a rap on the way by in one of his endless trips with the bucket of water. They had run out of gas for the trash pump sometime during the night, and the manual bilge pump by the tiller that Joseph worked while he steered had finally died. A broken piece of glass had miraculously climbed up inside the hose and slashed its membrane, rendering it useless.

It was fitting, Danny thought bitterly. The last remaining thing on board Arrow that bore any relationship to modern technology was dead and gone. Now they had no engine, no depth sounder, no gps, no radar, no radio, no lights, no pumps, no galley stove — the lids had popped off and it had filled with rainwater blown through the open companionway — and no head, although now the whole bloody saloon could be called that — and no rest. It had been twenty hours now since they had anchored the Annie J in a sheltered cove in behind Lasher Island and started out on their miserable journey. The beautiful, warm, dry, homey Annie J, in which they would have been making their comfortable way north at a relaxing five knots, eating hot meals and sipping on whisky as they adjudicated the weather forecasts from their comfortable seats and let the gps and the autopilot do their work. But no, that would have been too fucking easy. They had to take the cold, dark, wet, miserable, leaking and possibly sinking, creature-comfortless, bloody old sailboat. But with Joseph, protest was useless. Danny couldn’t recall ever winning a point.

There was a muffled thump against the hull and a loud crack from topside and then a sudden lurch and Arrow tilted under Danny’s feet and he lost his footing in the gloom and measured his length in the filthy water once more. The bilge floorboards were loose and floating, and the ones that remained in place were grease-covered skids. Danny stepped into the deepest part of the bilge, where the useless pump lay, and painfully barked his shins against it. Crossing the saloon was like trying to navigate an ice rink with your eyes shut. A constantly moving and tilting ice rink. But Arrow was down by the bow and the water pooled the deepest and had to be collected there, and the hazardous trip back and forth was a necessity. If she had been down by the stern, which would have made sense as that was where her weight and breadth were greatest, he could have bailed from the cockpit with the bucket on a rope. But that would have been too easy, and nothing about Arrow was easy at the moment.

But he was gaining. A lot of the original water inside Arrow was fresh water that had entered from the holes in the deck during the rainstorms that had occurred before they found Arrow. The first thing Joseph had done after finding her was shut off all the thru-hulls. When Danny arrived, the two of them had tacked sailcloth over the holes on the deck and the forward hatch, and rain was no longer a problem. Although she was still taking on some water, the rate had slowed enough that Danny could keep up now and even take the occasional break.

Danny regained his footing, refilled the bucket, and lurched towards the companionway stairs. He was too exhausted to even curse. He threw the water out into the cockpit, then climbed out on deck for a break. The first thing he saw was the jury-rigged sail billowing forward from the stump of remaining mast. They were running almost straight downwind — although running was a misnomer in this case, crawling would be a more appropriate word. Danny thought they might just be making two knots in the gusts. He doubted they’d make a knot if they had to beat to weather, that is, if sailing upwind was even possible.

He’d been slammed up against the mast support on a sudden list and had felt it give a fraction. Reaching up to the through bolts on the top plate, he’d found water squirting through. Something had changed in the mast connection, and it was impossible to do anything about it at the moment. Tacking could shift everything loose those final few degrees to the point where the mast ripped right out of the deck and toppled over the side. They were already pretty much a raft, albeit one with a scrap of sail and some steerage. Any kind of a headwind would finish the job and they’d become just another drifting piece of flotsam. Or jetsam. Whatever. Was there even a difference?

Danny took a long look around. The rain had almost stopped now, but at midday it was still almost dark, the visibility shut down so much by the low clouds it was like sailing in a flooded crypt. Joseph sat by the tiller, his arm moving occasionally under the blanket as he steered, an unlit pipe clamped between his lips. A