Dungeness and Dragons Read online

  Dungeness and Dragons

  A Driftwood Mystery

  William J. Cook

  This story is a work of fiction.

  Any references to matters of historical record;

  to real people, living or dead; or to real places are intended solely

  to give the stories a setting in historical reality.

  Other names, characters, places and incidents

  are the product of the author's imagination,

  and their resemblance, if any,

  to real-life counterparts is

  entirely coincidental.

  Dungeness and Dragons Copyright © 2020

  by William J. Cook. Printed in the United States of America.

  Cover designed and created by Roslyn McFarland ([email protected])

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Books by William J. Cook:

  Songs for the Journey Home, a novel of spiritual discovery

  The Pieta in Ordinary Time and Other Stories

  Catch of the Day, short stories

  The Driftwood Mysteries:

  Seal of Secrets, a novel

  Eye of Newt, a short story

  Woman in the Waves, a novel

  Dungeness and Dragons, a novel

  Table of Contents

  Author's Note

  Acknowledgements

  1. The Wreck of the Johnny B. Goode

  2. Skating on Thin Ice

  3. Calling a Ghost

  4. Running on Empty

  5. The Tracker Picks Up the Scent

  6. Charley's Vibe

  7. Rumpelstiltskin From the Fifth Dimension

  8. Some Viewers May Find These Images Disturbing

  9. The Wolf at Home

  10. The Elephant in the Room

  11. Poker Night

  12. A Celebratory Cup of Coffee

  13. Long Blonde Breadcrumbs

  14. City Hall Misadventures

  15. SNAFU

  16. Fighting Fire With Fire

  17. Dragon Boat

  18. Who’s Laying the Eggs?

  19. Falling Off the Face of the Earth

  20. The Apprentice

  21. Ms. Pizza Fights Back

  22. Carl Makes a Mistake

  23. Message in a Bottle

  24. Special Delivery

  25. Elysium

  26. The Candidate

  27. The Rally

  28. Cat and Mouse

  29. The Problem with Calling Bad Guys on the Phone

  30. Itsy, Bitsy Spider

  31. Crab Pots

  32. Fog Lifting

  33. Legerdemain

  34. The Dancer Decides

  35. Murder-Go-Round

  36. Going Nowhere

  37. Slouching Toward the Elephants’ Graveyard

  38. The Serpent and the Hare

  39. Gone Fishin’

  40. The Dash to Friday

  41. The Cost

  42. If It Quacks Like a Duck

  43. The Shrill of the Violin

  44. A Game of Chess

  45. Nostrovia

  46. On the Dark Side with Mr. Rogers

  47. An Act of Faith

  About the Author

  Author's Note

  Calling the Western Ocean “The Pacific” is misleading. It is often far from peaceful. Especially during the storms of winter, it can be one of the deadliest bodies of water on the planet. Nonetheless, every season hundreds of crab fishermen leave the safety of their homes and venture out to the deep to ply their trade.

  The Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission caps their permits to fish at 424 vessels spread over six major ports from Astoria to Brookings. Three quarters of the harvest are usually captured during the first eight weeks of the season, which typically begins in December. The average seasonal catch is 16 million pounds, but in 2018, 23 million pounds of crab were caught. Worth $74 million at the docks, the harvest injected $150 million into state and local economies.

  The 2019 season was delayed an entire month because the Commission felt the crabs were too small. When the season finally opened, crews rushed to sea in an attempt to regain their lost income, despite the treacherous weather. On Tuesday, January 8, 2019, at 10:00 P.M., the crab fishing boat Mary B. II capsized “crossing the bar,” trying to get back home over the Yaquina Bay Bar in Newport. Coast Guard crews faced 12- to 14-foot waves in trying to rescue the three doomed fishermen aboard the ill-fated boat, but their efforts were unsuccessful.

  The Yaquina Bay Bar is one of several infamous ones along the Oregon coast—those places where outgoing rivers collide with the ocean, creating hazardous swells and currents, made more catastrophic by the savage storms of December and January. Further north, the Columbia Bar is the worst of all. Known as The Graveyard of the Pacific, 2000 ships have been sunk there and 700 lives lost since records have been kept.

  Sometimes coming home is the most dangerous journey of all.

  Acknowledgements

  Although writing a novel can sometimes feel like a very solitary enterprise, and the author may feel like a restless shade flitting from one dimension to another, at other times, it is a very communal venture. I’m not sure where my writing would be without the weekly support of our faithful “library group,” Writers Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. Or my trusty Facebook group, the Northwest Independent Writers Association, which has been gracious enough to publish five of my short stories in consecutive yearly anthologies. Then there’s my monthly critique group, sharing their time and energy to pour over pages of manuscript for developmental and copy editing. And, of course, the Salem Branch of Willamette Writers.

  Larry, in southern Oregon, has been a partner-in-crime, as has Diana on the East Coast. Peter, recently deceased, and Pat, both in New York State, have been in my corner. I have been blessed with lifelong friends Dick, Joe, and Kevin, unwavering in their support. And I will always be indebted to Stephen for the best one-line reviews ever: upon completing a beta-reading of the manuscript for Seal of Secrets, he told me, “It has more twists than a corkscrew about to open a bottle of fine wine.” When he finished Woman in the Waves, he said, “You’ve written a Greek tragedy for modern times.” Yowza! Then Mike, a member of my critique group, said, “Your writing is like pale ale or whiskey.” As you may imagine, comments like that can keep a writer stoked for days, if not weeks.

  My wife Sharon, my children, my grandchildren are my delights. We suffered a tragic loss this past year, and some readers may note that grief is one of the wellsprings of Dungeness and Dragons. We soldier on, with smiles on our faces and tears in our eyes.

  For Jason David Cook, a brave man, a good husband, a loving father, and a beloved son.

  “If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

  - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

  “The whole question here is: am I a monster, or a victim myself?”

  - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

  “Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darknesses.”

  - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

  1. The Wreck of the Johnny B. Goode

  MONDAY, JANUARY 7, 2019. The first storm of January had begun in earnest. Although the sun had not appeared all week, today the roiling black clouds seemed to suck even the faint remaining light from the
late afternoon sky, creating a premature twilight. In the darkness, the twelve-foot swells were liquid mountains, rushing headlong toward them, indifferent to the boat bobbing on the surface, unforgiving of any mistakes the three-man crew might make. Even with the howl of the wind and the slashing of the rain, the men could hear the whistler buoy astern, moaning like the soul of a drowned fisherman.

  “Are we having fun yet?” Derek Lea shouted to his crew mate Rick Perrins over the roar of the wind. The rain smacked his bright yellow foul-weather gear with a ferocity that seemed bent on shoving him overboard. Waves thundered over the bow, drenching him with walls of water. His mouth filled with the briny taste of the sea. Even through his layered clothing, the cold was leeching the warmth from his body.

  “This is nuts!” his partner yelled back. They could barely hear each other, but each knew what the other was thinking. Long familiarity with the hazards of the Pacific made them almost telepathic. Perrins shivered in the onslaught and spat onto the deck. “What are we doing out here?”

  “Earning a living, numb nuts!” He drew his hood tighter over his head.

  “There's gotta be an easier way!”

  “Of course there is! But everything else is boring!” With the deft hands of years of practice, Lea gaffed the line from a crab pot resting on the sea bottom in fifty feet of water. He looped it over the block, a circular winch at the end of a stainless steel arm, bent at the elbow over the side of the boat, its hydraulic muscle ready to haul the heavy pot out of the water. The pots or traps were round disks about three feet in diameter and a foot high. Metal grates were wrapped around steel frames, making cylindrical cages. One-way doors on opposite sides of the traps allowed crabs to crawl in toward the bait, but not back out.

  He engaged the block. The line tightened and came thrumming in. When the three white marker buoys shaped like artillery shells reached the winch, he flipped them away from the gear and back out into the water. As the pot broke the surface, he hit the lever on the gunwale, and the arm of the block extended upward and swung toward the boat, lifting the pot within easy grasp of the two men.

  “Heave ho!” Perrins opened the door on top of the trap and the fishermen spilled its contents into a trough between them. They were greeted by a mass of flailing legs and claws as the Dungeness crabs struggled to right themselves and take shelter. The men tossed the large ones into the hole that dropped into the live tank under the deck. Perrins put a gauge across the shells of the smaller ones to make sure they were of legal size, tossing those too small and any females over the side. In moments, he was attaching a new bait bucket filled with frozen squid and sardines inside the pot. Lea disengaged the line from the block, and the men heaved the trap back into the water. The entire operation took less than two minutes.

  “There were some big ones in that bunch!” Lea reached for the boat hook again.

  “Current's getting stronger,” his partner complained. “It won't be long before it pulls our buoys under and we won't be able to find them until the tide changes.”

  “We'll fall off that bridge when we come to it. Let's just get the next one.”

  The men had been working the Johnny B. Goode for five years. It was a good ship, 48 feet long with an 18-foot beam, used to rough seas. The large wheel house at the forward end held all the living space, including bunks for the crew and a modest galley. Before launch, 250 crab pots had been carefully stacked in the stern of the craft, the lines for each in serpentine coils on top. The Johnny B. Goode was all business.

  The men's fathers and their grandfathers before them had been crab fishermen, and it was all they knew. “It's in our DNA,” Lea was fond of saying. Neither had ever given a thought to doing anything else, despite the dangers of their chosen profession. Each was a family man, Lea with two sons, ages 12 and 14, and Perrins with three daughters, 5, 10, and 13. On the upper deck of the wheelhouse sat their skipper, Carl Hamisu, piloting the craft and minding the electronics. He spoke little, but he knew the ocean. Widowed five years before, catching crabs was his way of managing his grief.

  Lea stretched over the side of the boat to gaff the line just as the ship rose high on a large swell. His feet slipped on the wet deck. He grabbed for the gunwale and caught himself.

  “Don't talk about falling off just yet, big guy!” Perrins laughed.

  “Not funny, wise ass.” He drew the line in, looped it on the block, and engaged the machine. The line grew taut but stopped.

  “Shit! It's sanded!” Strong currents sometimes buried the pots in the sand, making them impossible to retrieve. Played by the gale-force winds, the tight line began to whine like the string of a violin.

  “Look out!” Both men averted their faces as the nylon line snapped with a sound like a gunshot. The broken line whistled by them, barely missing Perrins's face. He had not been so lucky last year, and he still bore a scar on his right cheek as mute testimony to the bite of the line. He gathered the loose cord and threw it on the deck until he could coil it later.

  “That's the fourth one this trip. It's starting to cost us.”

  “What?” shouted Lea. “My teeth are chattering so loud I can't hear you!”

  “You crazy sonofabitch! I'm telling the skipper we need to haul ass back to port. It'll be pitch dark soon and I hate going over the bar at night.”

  “We've done it a hundred times. What are you scared of?”

  “Not scared. Just trying to be smart. This storm has only just begun. It's gonna get a whole lot worse before it's over.”

  “Hurry back, buddy. Duty calls.”

  Perrins made his way forward to the wheelhouse, slowing down through the worst of the swells to maintain his balance. He climbed the stairs and entered the enclosure, pulling the door closed behind him, relishing the sudden warmth now that he was out of the wind.

  Carl Hamisu sat in his chair, his signature captain's cap perched far back on his head, his eyes riveted to the array of instruments before him. His features were a mixture of Asian and Native American.

  “Skipper, we need to beat feet outta here. It won't be long before we can't see our buoys anymore, and the storm is only growing stronger.”

  Hamisu looked up, nodding his head. “Agreed. New weather report says this howler may reach 65 mile per hour gusts in the next couple of hours. I say we head home and come back out tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, Carl. I'll let Derek know. We'll stow our gear and batten down the hatches.”

  He stepped outside. The frigid cold struck him like an icy slap as he made his way back to his friend. The boat pitched as another wave surged into its bow, and he grabbed the gunwale. The spray soaked him.

  “Skipper says we're going home,” he yelled. “Shut it down.”

  “Fine by me. I could use a cigarette and a drink.”

  When the deck was secure, the two men went forward into the galley. Once out of the roar of the wind, they could hear each other again. They sat on opposite sides of the small wooden table.

  “Your lips are the color of the blueberries my little Dakota picked last summer from our garden.”

  “It's cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. Let's goose this heater.”

  As the temperature rose, they shed their hooded coats but left on the rubberized pants and boots. Lea grabbed two cigarettes from the pack in the overhead cabinet, lit them both, and handed one to his partner.

  “Let's think warm Hawaiian thoughts.”

  Perrins exhaled a large plume of fragrant tobacco smoke as the boat heaved hard to port. “He's gotta turn this baby fast. Glad he's so good at it.”

  “You and me both.” Lea pulled at the long black beard on his face, wringing water from it. “What I wouldn't give for three fingers of Irish whiskey right about now.”

  “Skipper runs a tight ship. No alcohol while we're working.”

  “I know. Just saying.” He relished the kick of the nicotine after hours without it. “Sure am looking forward to my warm bed tonight. Holly will make me all toas
ty.”

  Perrins smiled and nodded his head. Heidi would do the same for him. Friends often asked them if it was strange being married to sisters, but each had always denied it. Instead, it seemed to make their own friendship stronger. “A hot shower first. Wash this ocean off of me.”

  “Amen, brother.”

  Suddenly, Perrins leaped from his bench. “What was that?”

  “What?”

  “That...nothing.”

  And then Lea heard it, too. The absence of the constant drone of the diesel engine, the sound to which each had grown so accustomed that it only drew attention to itself when it stopped.

  “The goddamn engine quit! Christ almighty!”

  They ran from the galley to the upper deck. They found Hamisu frantically scrambling over the electronics, searching for the cause of the failure, trying to get the diesel restarted. “Get on the horn to the Coast Guard! Now!”

  Perrins picked up the radio. “May Day! May Day! Johnny B. Goode. Engine died.” He looked toward the Skipper. “Where are we at?”

  “Just outside the Driftwood Bar.”

  “We're just off the Driftwood Bar,” he called into the radio. “Need help fast.”

  “Johnny B. Goode, this is Coast Guard Cutter Thomas Jefferson. We are just off your stern. Get you pronto. Hang tight.”

  Perrins put the radio down. “Hang tight, he says? Hang tight? If we turn broadside in this shit, we can kiss our sorry asses goodbye!”

  Aboard the Thomas Jefferson, Captain John Hartford was barking orders. He ran his hand over the charts spread before him. His face screwed into a frown. “Regents, get outside with the lights and see what we've got. Brady, keep your eyes on the radar. If their engine is down, they have only minutes.”

  “Skipper, what are those damn fools doing out on a night like this? Jesus!”