Page 42 of Tin God

“Carwyn, you tax dodger.”

“I keep my money in gold, Ben. I don’t have a job. I just cash in some gold every now and then when I need to buy things.” He pursed his lips. “I need a Winnebago.”

“Why? And won’t you eventually run out of gold?”

“I really have a lot of gold,” Carwyn muttered. “And I need a Winnebago so I have more room to stretch. I love a sturdy recreational vehicle.”

“Okay, this is ridiculous.” Ben floated down to the ground. “Is the crew working?”

“If you mean are they fishing, no. This is a passenger transfer up to Ketchikan, and then we’re meeting another one of Katya’s people up there.”

“Where is Baojia?”

“On vacation in Indonesia apparently.” Carwyn had a feeling that his old friend was going to be more than a little angry that his boss hadn’t called him back when Carwyn showed up.

“I’m going to talk to the crew.” Ben walked to the door, stumbling a little as the boat shifted to port. “Want to come?”

“No.” Carwyn sat up and swung his legs over the side. “But I’ll come anyway.”

The crewof thePacific Ladywere a cool and serious group of professional fishermen consisting of six men and one woman. They ranged in age from the fresh-faced greenhorn to the woman, who looked like she had to be close to her seventies judging by the lines on her face.

Five of them sat in the mess hall, chugging coffee and playing cards while the cook that night—a middle-aged man everyone called Guff—cooked in the galley.

“What’s for dinner?” Carwyn asked when he sat down.

The old woman stubbed out a cigarette and grinned. “Not us if you know what’s good for you.”

The men laughed, and Carwyn was immediately put at ease. “No worries, friend. If I took your blood, I’d definitely wipe your memory.”

“See? Manners, Frannie.” A red-faced man with yellow-blond hair and a Northern English accent grinned. “I told you they were gents.”

“Brick, your idea of gents and my idea are gonna be very different things.” She winked at Carwyn anyway.

The easy jokes led to more laughter and a few stories being passed around about different vampire captains the crew had worked under.

Ben was surprisingly easy with the men. Once they’d gotten him out of his stark black wardrobe and into some worn jeans, flannel, and a beat-up parka, he fit into the tapestry of the crew just fine. He was paler than most, but that didn’t even stand out much in the Pacific Northwest, where the sun was covered about sixty percent of the year.

“So these two ships that went missing,” Ben started. “The ones Carwyn and I are going to look for. What can you tell us?”

There was a hush for a moment, and then Frannie spoke. “Nothing special really. One was a little smaller than this one. Five guys and a good captain. Her name was Maureen, and I worked with her before I transferred to Jeb.” She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder toward the bridge. “Irish water vamp. Kept her head down and her hold full. Her boys made good money.”

“You get paid based on how much fish you catch, right?” Ben asked.

All of them nodded.

“We get a stipend, right?” Brick added. “When things are lean. Not much, but it keeps the bills paid. But the bonuses go to us when the catch is good. The big boss is good to work with.”

“And the catch is almost always good,” Frannie said. “The only times we don’t come back with a decent catch is when the rest of ’em get suspicious, right? You can’t be that boat that never comes back empty.”

“Got it,” Ben said. “So the two boats?—”

“Three.” The young man at the end of the table spoke quietly. “There was theRangerand theAmaranth, but the yacht that went missing—that one had Grigorieva crew too. My girlfriend was the cook on theDolphin. TheFlying Dolphin, that was the yacht that went missing. We haven’t heard from her in months.”

He opened his phone and held up a picture of a brightly smiling blond woman in a blue-and-white striped shirt with a red scarf at her neck.

“That’s her on theDolphin,” he said. “She started working for Katya, but the money Paulson offered was so good she switched over. We were saving up to get married.”

“Paulson?” Carwyn asked. The name sounded vaguely familiar, but it wasn’t immediately unique. The majority of Scandinavians were a -son or -dottar of something. Paulson was far from a rare name even in vampire circles.

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