The Saboteur

CHAPTER ONE

There are days when you wake up with a sense of dread about the coming day. Days when you stare out the window at the cold city streets and know that after you set foot out the door, everything that can go wrong will go wrong. You have a premonition that the immediate future will drastically change your life.
I should have felt that when I woke up that morning. A warning should have gone off in my groggy head when I looked down on the street slick with rain and carpeted with ghostly fog. I should have somehow known in my subconcious that that day would change my life. Most people would've sensed the ill tidings of the morning, but I didn't.
My old friend, the brilliant retired Inspector D.C. Pickles and I walked out the door of our shared home at 81 Stuyvesant Lane, an old brick house that leaned ever so slightly to the right, and into the criminal world.
It was a cold morning in early autumn. Fog drifted off the bay and diffused the pale light. This gave the deserted road an unnatural glow that was strangely disconcerting.
We were walking to the Wharfside Cafe three blocks west, where we would be greeted with the heavenly aroma of fresh-ground coffee. I shuddered in my faded green windbreaker and tried to focus on how warm I would be once I had my coffee fix. Pickles stalked along side me, looking skinnier than humanly possible in his beige trenchcoat, his thin, bony hands finding refuge in the deep pockets. The cold made him look twenty years older than his actual age of thirty-eight. Years as a homicide detective had taken its toll on my friend. His calculating grey eyes were distant, as though he was silently solving a complex logic problem to distract his attention from how cold his red, beak-like nose was.
"Is it just me, or is it abnormally cold for September?" I asked. I shivered involutarily.
"No, it is cold for September," Pickles answered tersely. I nodded and he returned to his musings.
"Do you think that it'll be cold again tomorrow?"
"I don't know, Cody," he replied, still staring off into the horizon. "Check the paper at the cafe." He returned to his own world and I gave up on the conversation.
Not soon enough, I sighted the cafe. Just beyond it were the shadowy boulders that lined the murky bay. I spotted the dark hulls of several spectral fishing trawls riding the high black swells coming off the Atlantic.
"I guess we've got it good in comparison," I said to myself under my breath.
"In comparison to what?" Pickles asked. The man missed nothing.
"Can you imagine being a crewman on one of those fishing boats? Facing the elements like that every day? The horrible hours? The harsh disipline? It must be hell."
"Don't fool yourself," he said, gesturing a pale finger at one of the trawls heading for the harbor. "There's good money in that industry for those who know who to control it."
I thought about this as we turned the corner. When we reached the door to the Wharfside Cafe, Pickles reached over my head to hold the door for a teenager hurrying out with a glazed donut. He glanced nervously at me before rushing down the road. I thought nothing of it.
The interior of the cafe was bright, with glowing white light spilling in through a massive window that occupied the whole front wall. Starkly highlighed against the fog were the backwards, modest black words: "Wharfside Cafe, Est. 1986." The cafe was almost completely empty. A young couple was sitting in a booth by the window, a dark-haired woman was apparently asleep on her table in the far corner, and a fat, middle-aged man with a comb-over and blue wool sweater-vest was balancing precariously on a stool at the back counter.
Pickles and I sat down a few stools over from the fat man, shed our coats and set them on the polished maple countertop. Joseph Kiersted, the owner, walked over to us.
"Good morning, Mr. Kiersted," I said.
"Morning, boys. What'll it be?" he said. His thick, black eyebrows, in sharp contrast with his bald head and well-kept white beard jumped up in anticipation. The man loved his job.
"Large Columbian brew, extra sugar," Pickles said with a smile.
"Excellent choice, Mr. Pickles," Kiersted agreed.
"I'll have a regular coffee, black," I said.
"There's a man after my own heart," Kiersted said to me with a grin. "I'll be back a jiff."
While we waited, we swivelled around to watch the bay. The sun was losing to the fog, which refused to reliquish its hold on Tiber City. I was drawn to one of the larger boats, riding low in the water, heavy with fresh fish. She was old and it seemed to take all her strength to lumber to the docks. She coughed black smoke into the humid air, where it swirled and mixed with the silver mist.
I was mesmerized by the mysterious ship when a deafening bang shook the cafe, from its rafters to its cheap ceramic coffee mugs. I blinked and looked for the source. Out on the bay, the old ship coughed up more black smoke, but now there were flames on her deck.
"The boat!" I yelled, pointing out the window like an idiot.
"It looks like an explosion," Pickles stated the obvious as he got up and headed for the door. I ran ahead of him, without grabbing my windbreaker, outside, across the two lane road and down onto the rocky shore. There were shouts of pain and fear echoing out of the obscuring white mist. I looked for someone who could help them but there was no one around. Even Pickles had disappeared. There was only me.
I bared my teeth and started to wade into the cold seawater. I swore as the water, a measly fourty degrees at best, seeped into my shoes, crept up my legs and penetrated my torso. I knew then that I had lost my mind. Several times I almost gave up and started to head back, but the desperate voices kept rolling over to me.
The bottom of the bay dropped off rapidly, leaving me to struggle against the dead weight of my sweater and jeans and fight the swells of black water. I swam with a conviction that I never imagined I had, toward I ship I couldn't see, guided by voices I didn't know.
Out of nowhere, the rusted hull of the fishing trawl loomed over me, spewing diesel-fed flames. She was leaning dangerously to port, making it easy for me to grab onto the railing and haul myself up. I took but a second to see the name of the ship, the Chesapeake Migrant, painted in bold red letters on the bow, before I entered the disaster on deck.
I pushed past the men who were frantically jumping the railing to swim to shore. Amid the black smoke, I found the hatch that led below deck. It was filled with the smell of burning diesel and the blistering heat of a forest fire crammed into a passageway only four feet tall and three feet across. Below, I found a man with blood streaming down his leg. He screamed as flames licked the grey jacket he was wearing. I stompped the flame out, accidentally kicking the man in the back twice, threw him over my shoulder, and tried to carry him up to the deck. I stumbbled and nearly dropped him, when one of the crewmen grabbed him from me. I didn't pause to thank him, but ran back down the stairs to the cargo hold.
I tripped over a leg protruding from behind a large wooden crate marked HANDLE WITH CARE. I ducked under the smoke and found an unconcious man with horrific burns on the right side of his face and what looked like a broken right arm. Remembering a first aid workshop I'd taken while working as a lifeguard fifteen years before, I checked his pulse before trying to move him. The pulse was slow, but steady. I hoisted him up and slung him over my shoulders. All his weight almost crushed the back of my neck. I stumbled blindly up the stairs as the ship leaned further and further to port.
On deck, I slipped on the wet planks into Pickles, who led me to the bow, took the unresponsive man from me and handed him down to three men in a small boat with an outboard motor.
"Where did you go?" I asked as we went back below deck.
"I had to borrow that boat," Pickles answered, ducking into the stairwell. "It took a few minutes."
At the bottom of the stairs, we found ourselves ankle-deep in seawater.
"The hull's taken a gash," Pickles yelled to me over the sound of gushing water and raging fire.
"Do you think that she ran aground?" I asked. We came to two more injured men. We each picked one up.
"No, this doesn't look like any navigation error to me," Pickles replied. The water was coming on faster, it was already up to the top of my shin. Diesel fuel floated on the surface, turning the way back to the stairs into a liquid inferno. Pickles braced himself and jumped into the flames. He took no more than a second to hop up onto the stairs and rush up to the deck, flames climbing up his pantlegs. I gripped the torso of the man on my shoulder with one hand, shielded my face with the other, and charged through the flames.
I clenched my teeth and kept running up the stairs. My leg was thankfully flame-free, but the stairwell was leaning ever more to the left, so that I had to lean against the scuffed white wall for support. At long last, I made it onto the nearly deserted deck and stuggled to keep my balance as the trawl threatened to capsize.
Suddenly, I tripped and fell, landing on a heap of steel cables. The man hanging limply over my shoulder slid headlong down the steep deck and his forehead collided with the railing with a dull clang.
I dragged myslf painfully over the now submerged railing to the man. I grabbed his wet denim jacket and hauled his face above the water. Blood trickled from somewhere under his matted black hair and he wasn't breathing. I pulled his nose back, put my mouth to his, and gave two breaths. I sat up, spat out some seawater, and nearly threw up at the stupid thought that I had just kissed another man. He still wasn't beathing, his pulse was faint. I closed my eyes and gave another breath. He coughed, but didn't breathe in again. "Oh God," I thought. "He's going to die..."
I gave him more compressions and more breaths. Nothing. This was beyond my meager lifeguard skills.
"Pickles!" I yelled out into the wall of fog. "Pickles!"
I could hear nothing but the howling flames that devoured the trawl and the hiss of the same flames being drowned by the bay.
The old fishing ship groaned and lurched further to port. It occured to me that the trawl could easily have settled onto a sandbar and was now sliding to the sea floor. I nearly jumped off and swam for my life, but something held me there. This dying man.
"Pickles!" I tried again. Distantly, I heard the buzz of an outboard motor. Pickles emerged from the fog a few feet away. His passengers were gone, taken safely to shore. "Pickles, this man is dying. He's not breathing and his pulse is weak."
Pickles eased the boat in as close as he could. The trawl slid several more inches underwater.
Carefully, I climbed up into the boat. Then, with my friend grabbing the man's legs and me supporting the man's head, we lifted him up into the boat and laid him down in the bow.
Pickles steered the boat back to the docks and I looked back over my shoulder to see the Chesapeake Migrant sink slowly and painfully, fire licking the peeling white paint on her steel hull. Black smoke spiraled up into the fog with no breeze to carry it.
I gave the man another breath and finally he inhaled shallowly. Then
I looked down at the man's face, as he was laid unconcious in the front of the small boat. He was clearly younger than me, but a few grey hairs were sprinkled in his black hair and sideburns. I wondered what he had been through on the fishing trawl that had prematurely aged him.

CHAPTER TWO

The next morning, Pickles had three newspapers spread out on the coffee table in what at one time had been the house's living room. Over the past two years, the downsairs had been slowly overgrown by Pickles' junk. The man was a notorious packrat, keeping anything and everything that had ever remotely interested him. He left unfinished books scattered all over, with stiff socks and hamburger wrappers as bookmarks.
I was exactly his opposite, as our front office showed. I cautiously skirted the mess and slipped through the curtain to the front of the house. The room was spartanly furnished with only a single rickety desk and two other chairs to give relief from the checkered linoleum floor. It was the pinnacle of neatness. My own experience as a newspaper reporter had taught me the value of organization. How Pickles rose so rapidly through the ranks of the local PD was anyone's guess.
"That's strange," Pickles said from behind the curtain.
Finally, I thought. He's going to tell me what he's deduced. The previous day's events had been haunting me. I wanted answers.
"What's strange?" I asked, joining him in the "living room."
"The trawl was almost empty, " he said, leaning back on the sofa. He crossed his legs and rested them on the coffee table.
"But, I've heard that the waters off the coast are teeming with fish," I replied. It didn't make sense. "Why would the Migrant not have a full load after a night of fishing?"
"Perhaps her captain can answer that," Pickles said. "He's in the hospital, but recovering quickly thanks to you."
"Then he owes me some information in exchange for his life..."
Half an hour later, Pickles and I walked into the sterile hospital room. The captain must've been a recluse, for not a single get well card or balloon surrounded him. His right arm was in a sling and gauze was wrapped around his head, shielding us from the burns that had consumed the right half of his face. It was a shame, for other than a slight beer gut, he wasn't a particularly ugly man. He was propped-up in the bed, reading the sports page of the Tiber City Gazette.
"Too bad about the Devils, huh?" Pickles asked. "Doesn't that make their fifth loss in a row?"
The captain didn't look up, but continued to scan an article with his left eye. "Fourth, actually," he murmured. He folded the paper and tossed it onto the chair next to his bed. "Come on in. Do we know each other?"
Pickles and I walked over to his bedside, our shoes sqeaking on the floor.
"You don't know me, but I know you," I said. His jovial smile was gone in a flash. "I pulled you out of your trawl as it was sinking." His smile was back.
"Oh, I thought you might be...someone else," he said, shaking my hand with both of his. "God bless, you, Mr.?"
"Cody Sluethsalot," I said. It wasn't often that I beat Pickles to the introductions. I saw he was sitting by the window. This was my show. "I don't think I caught your name."
"John R. Simon," he introduced himself. "Owner and captain of the Chesapeake Migrant. What can I do for you?"
"I just a few questions, if that's okay."
"Questions?" he gulped.
"I'm just interested in finding out about what happened to your ship."
"Sure," he said. "I have nothing to hide."