Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal (4 page)

Having blown up the jailers and left the dungeon, we clung tight
to a rusty, wobbly banister as we snuck down a steep flight of
mossy steps. A scrap of moonlight showed the dock some fifty
yards ahead.
“Better hope the machine gun guy in the watchtower
don’t see us,” said Stupid George.
This was on all of our minds. And the machine gun guy
might not have seen us if George hadn’t said it out loud. A
second later, all of us were blinded by the search light from the
watchtower. Then a machine gun the size of a telephone pole
pivoted our way.
In that same second, Thesaurus, the harpooner, ripped
loose a section of banister and hurled it. I ought to mention
that Thesaurus had passed up scholarships to play quarterback
at several big-time universities because he felt only “nancy men”
went to universities. The section of banister looked like a laser in
the moonlight. It passed clean right through the watchtower and
disappeared into the jungle.
“Bummer,” George said, again expressing what the rest
of us was thinking—until the machine gunner keeled over the
watchtower rail, dropped thirty feet, and plopped onto the sand
before us. The banister’d passed right through his head on its
way through the watchtower. Duq may not like it, but he’s going
to have to share Employee of the Week with Thesaurus.
At the dock we found the jailers’ patrol boat. It was
chained there with a padlock the size of a lunch pail and
we didn’t have the ignition key. “I can take care of both, no
problem,” said the former pirate Nelson.
Once aboard and back at sea, the problem was this: Now
what? I couldn’t very well pursue the bastard and his pod in a
hot police patrol boat (never mind that its owners were sadistic,
murderous crooks). Also, we had insufficient weapons and sonar
and crap. The only stuff of any use we found on the patrol boat
were a couple of flare guns and some cups o’ noodles.
Then, below deck, I happened on a bunch of bags
of cocaine that’d either been confiscated or the jailers were
selling. My drug-addicted deckhand Moses estimated it’s worth
$5,630,250.
P.S. A scrimshaw of the harbor patrol boat. George thought we
could solve her conspicuousness problem by changing the P in
POLICE to a R.

How would you like it if guys busted into your house, slit
your throat while you slept, then made off with all your stuff?
Forgetting that you’d be dead, the answer is, obviously, you
wouldn’t like it a whole lot. Well that’s what pirates do, except
instead of your house, it’s your boat—and a lot of the time they
take that too. So there’s nothing romantic about being a pirate,
despite what maybe you’ve seen in the pictures.
Reason I bring this up is that my (pirate until just a couple
weeks ago) first mate Nelson suggested we ditch the hot police
patrol boat we’re in and jack a couple-hundred-foot yacht Flarq
sighted aft, a sleek water rocket that could catch and mow down
the world’s swiftest sperm whale, let alone a big old blubbery
one. But what about the cost? It’d be stealing, of course, plus
having to make sure (in the pirate way) that the folks aboard tell
no tales. This would be necessary, cause if they did tell tales,
odds are high that the next jail we’d wind up in wouldn’t be as
easy to bust out of as the last one. So I ruled against this plan.
Next item on the agenda: Whether or not I should sell the
five million or so’s worth of cocaine we found on the crooked
cops’ boat, then use the money to buy a better boat and weapons
to go after the whale. Five of my six crewman urged me to sell
the coke. The sixth, Moses the drug addict deckhand, voted
we sell four million’s worth and make the rest part of the daily
rations. But I vetoed selling any of it. The issue here is if I get
busted trafficking drugs, again, we’re talking slammer.
Nelson found a way out of this dilemmer for me. In
gratitude for me sparing his life last month, he said, he would
undertake all of the risk. He proposed he go ashore at the
small island of Guava, sell the coke himself (to a connection of
Moses’s there), then return with the cash. A guy Flarq knows
on Guava could also hook us up with a quick boat. This plan I
okayed.
This afternoon, we dropped anchor off Guava and
Flarq, Moses, and Nelson rowed ashore in the lifeboat. In my
judgment, the crew’s bonded pretty tight through the dungeon
experience and everyone’s now real into catching up to that pod
and dusting Dickhead. Flarq gave me his word of honor that
he’d keep Nelson and Moses in line, and a seaman like Flarq
would rather have his mom and six sisters violated than his word
of honor. The idea of Moses in a small boat with all that coke
is scary though. And of course the biggest risk is that Nelson—a
crook from the age of eleven months when he stole another kid’s
pacifier—will corrupt Moses, deep-six Flarq, and split.
So now Duq, Thesaurus, George and me are sitting here
in the patrol boat, bobbing up and down, checking out the
tangerines dotting the leeward face of Mt. Guava, and waiting.
Thesaurus is praying, hard, to several of his gods, and the rest of
us, even though we’ve never heard of any of them, are inclined to
join him.

As a captain, I’m learning, you’ve got to make decisions in a
split second that you might wish you had a whole weekend to
mull. And assuming you’re human, you’re sometimes going
to make lousy decisions. The best you can hope for’s a good
batting average. In hindsight, allowing a pirate to row off with
all my capital while I stayed behind praying to gods I never
heard of before that he returned may have been one of the lousy
decisions.
Sure enough, after selling the cocaine, Nelson the pirate
drugged the crewmen with him (Moses and Flarq), then split
with the $8,000,000 (turns out Moses was way low with his
estimate of the value of the coke (in fairness, he’d been sniffing
hull cleaner before he’d given his estimate)).
It went down like this: Right after landing on Guava,
Nelson stopped in at a water bewitchery, as the tea parlors in
these waters are known. These places have spread like weeds
lately not for tea (the customers in these waters aren’t interested
in beverages that don’t got alcohol) but for high-speed Internet
access. Nelson can’t go twenty minutes without checking the
damn stock market. While he was online, he also checked this
blog (which he does every time he checks his stocks because he’s
got a thing for one of the ladies who posts whale sightings). He
read that me and the others of the crew were out at sea bobbing
up and down and praying. So he knew the coast was clear for his
treachery.
After selling the coke to Moses’s connection, Nelson
suggested to the boys that they stop at a tipple house on Guava
Boulevard to toast a job well done. Two of the grogs in the
round Nelson bought were laced with a knockout powder he’d
bought at the poisonry up the block while he was pretending to
be in the head copping a grunt. Once Moses and Flarq were in
Snoozetown, Nelson slung the duffel bag full of cash over his
shoulder, bolted on down to the docks, rented himself a fast
cruiser, and hopped aboard.
To his surprise, Duq, Thesaurus, and me were waiting for
him in the cruiser’s cabin (Stupid George’d come with us too,
but, a few minutes earlier, he’d fallen overboard).
I’d figured all along Nelson’d pull a stunt like this. That’s
why I posted the fake entry about us being out at sea bobbing up
and down like idiots praying. I misspelled “dilemma” on purpose
to add authenticness (I may not be an Ivy League guy, but I’m
not that much of a plankhead). My overall plan was to get the
money with minimal risk to myself. It paid off on Nelson’s rental
cabin cruiser when Thesaurus picked up Nelson by the face,
ripped the duffel bag off him, and tossed it to me.
Nelson was real remorseful. Still, I’ll likely have to dock
him a week’s pay. I know, I know, you’re thinking that’s too soft.
Remember though, I’ve had crewmen try to murder me before,
docked them a week’s pay, then seen them go on to risk their
lives and win Employee of the Week.
We won’t have to wait long to see whether or not Nelson
will toe the line. The reason for that is that right after he fell
overboard, Stupid George was helped out of the water by a
boatload of fisherman and, when asked by way of small talk what
he was up to on Guava, he told them. It turns out, regrettably,
that the fishermen were actually pirates disguised as fishermen.
I learned that just now when, brandishing enough weapons
to overthrow half the governments around here, the pirates
boarded the rental cruiser to kill us and steal my duffel bag of
cash.
“Captain, if we survive this,” Duq asked me, “you think
about if Stupid George really need his tongue?”

There was four of us (me, Duq, Thesaurus and Nelson)
defending the cabin cruiser (we were hiding below deck) against
eight pirates. Each of the pirates had an Uzi or an AK. One guy
had one of those things that fires grenades. He held it an inch
from Stupid George.
“Give us the bag or we’ll spill his head,” the pirate
shouted down to us. He meant my duffel bag and, more exactly,
the $8,000,000 in it.
Our counter: We’d take George back if they paid us
$1,000, plus picked up our bar and tart tab for the week.
Now you might be thinking: Openshaw, man, it’s just
cash, give it up, you still got a boat, you can go after your whale—
that’s what it’s all about!
But there was no way either team was going anywhere
till the deck was red with a significant portion of the other
team’s blood. The challenge was to be the team that shed
less. Unfortunately, all we’d been able to gather up to defend
ourselves with was the small galley’s silverware and a flare gun.
We had one remaining hope though—the return of Moses
and the mighty Flarq. Nelson had mickeyed their grog and left
them in the Land of Nod at a tipple house an hour before. If
they woke up and got down to the dock, they could take the
pirates from behind. So there was a chance.
“No, man, no chance,” Nelson said sorrowfully. “I gave
them each enough knockout powder to put down a plow horse
long enough for cross-Atlantic transport.”
No sooner did Nelson finish the sentence, though, than
Moses appeared on the pier. Moses, as has been mentioned
before, has a thing for drugs. Turns out he previously had used
the very same knockout powder recreationally—a lot of times—
so he’d built up a pretty good tolerance to it. But rather than
open up a second front against the pirates or anything heroic,
he stumbled onto the cabin cruiser carrying a bale of “Guavan
Gold” (his drug dealer friend had comped him in appreciation
for the coke deal) like it was his newborn baby. The pirates,
doubled over laughing, let him pass, and he toppled down the
stairs. Thesaurus caught him. Duq caught the bale of marijuana.
“This exactly what we need!” Duq exclaimed.
Thesaurus added that Sunoco (not the oil company but a
local god) had answered his prayers.
“The crap are we gonna do,” I asked, “get the pirates so
stoned they die?”
“Just the die part,” said Duq, firing the flare gun into the
marijuana. Seeing this, Moses fainted.
A few seconds later, the entire boat was inside a cloud of
thick smoke. Like bats out of the night, we flew at the pirates.
The massive Thesaurus thumped onto the deck, stabbed their
startled captain in the head with a fork, then heaved him over
the gunwale.
Another pirate a few feet aft suddenly glimpsed the
flash of Duq’s steak knife. It was the last thing the bastard ever
glimpsed. And his comrades didn’t dare fire their guns. A bullet
in this dark mess was just as likely to take out one of their own as
one of us—if not more likely, given their greater number.
The deck became a tornado of flying silverware, fists,
and anything else you could whack someone with. Going Zorro
with a rolling pin, I rang up one bastard. All around me, cutlery
whined, slashed, whirled, and rang. The boat reeked of sweat,
blood and much worse. Men gasped, grunted, and howled like
dogs, and, as points landed, cried like them.
When the smoke began to lift, it looked like our
silverware had carried the day. The pirates still aboard were, let’s
say, done pirating for good. Although suffering from cuts and
serious smoke inhalation, all my crew had survived, including
myself. Also, everyone had the munchies.
We had just two problems: 1. Our defensive gambit had
left the cabin cruiser in flames, some of which’d eaten the lines
and set us adrift and others of which had eaten through the
hull, causing us to start sinking. Not that big a deal, though. We
could just jump overboard and swim the half mile or so to shore
except: 2. The blood had attracted sharks. A dozen gray dorsal
fins sliced the surface. Beneath them, humongous murky forms—
we’re talking the size of couches easy—circled us.
P.S. With all this action, it would’ve been good to have Flarq
aboard to do some scrimshawing. There is a relevant one that’s
been sitting around though.