Chapter 1 #2
"Arizona," Junho said. "Which is famously a desert."
"They have money and they have a legal department and they have — " I stopped.
"They have what?"
"They have a history with the people behind Meridian Deep."
Because that was the part I'd found at four in the morning, which is when I find everything. Meridian Deep's filings traced back through two shells to a private foundation that had been named in a Louisiana civil suit eight months ago, on the losing end, over a smuggling manifest.
And on the winning end of that suit was a curator named Broussard and a legal team paid for by a company in Cerro Vista, Arizona.
Somebody had already punched these people in the mouth once.
"They're a motorcycle club," Junho said, reading over my shoulder now, because of course he was. "Ris. This says motorcycle club."
"It says salvage and recovery."
"It says that in the part you're pointing at. It says motorcycle club in the part I'm pointing at."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
"They are extremely mutually exclusive!"
"Junho."
"You want to call bikers."
"I want to call a co-claimant," I said. "Meridian Deep out-lawyered me before breakfast. I can't fight that alone.
But a co-claim with an established recovery firm with prior standing against the same parent entity — that's not a lawsuit anymore.
That's a fight between two companies, and I've got the thing they don't."
"Which is?"
"The porcelain. And the transect log with the timestamps. Their data's stolen. Stolen data has a birth certificate, and I'm holding it."
Pop stood up off his bucket.
He did it slowly, the way he did everything now, with a hand on the rail. He'd gotten thin over the winter. I'd told myself it was the heat.
"Call them," he said.
Junho and I both looked at him.
"You don't like anybody," Junho said.
"I don't like you," Pop said. "That's specific." He coiled the line and hung it on the peg where it goes, where it's gone every day of my whole life. "Girl's right. You bring a bigger dog or you get off the porch."
"That's not a saying."
"It's a saying where I'm from."
"Where are you from?"
"Here," said Pop, and went below.
Marguerite came down the dock at four with the fuel slip, because she always came down the dock at four with the fuel slip, and she took one look at my face and didn't hand it to me.
"Bad?"
"Somebody filed on my site."
"You had a site?"
"Everybody's very hung up on that part."
"Well, sugar, you told me you were doing contract transects." Marguerite has run that dock for nineteen years and has never once been surprised by anything. "Who filed?"
"Meridian Deep."
She wrote the name on the back of her own hand with a pen, which is a thing she does and which I have never understood, and looked at it.
"Never heard of them."
"Neither had I. That's the design."
"You need fuel?"
"I need fuel and I can't pay for fuel."
"Then take fuel," Marguerite said, "and don't pay for fuel," and walked back up the dock, and I would like to point out for the record that six weeks later a Delaware holding company bought her dock out from under her and she called me at eleven at night to apologize, which is the single most Key West sequence of events I've ever been part of.
Junho watched Pop go below. "He's been weird."
"He's seventy."
"He's been weird since June."
I didn't answer, because I was already dialing a number in Arizona that I'd written on the back of a fuel receipt, which is where all the important numbers in my life live.
It rang twice.
A woman answered. Older. Warm the way a cast-iron pan is warm, which is to say it will also take your hand off.
"Compass Salvage."
"My name's Nerissa Kwon. I run a salvage outfit out of Key West. I've got a debris field nineteen miles out that I found and somebody else just claimed, and I think the people who claimed it are the same people who lost to your lawyers in Louisiana."
A pause. The sound of a chair.
"Baby," the woman said, "say the last part again slower."
I said it again slower.
"Hold on," she said. "I'm gonna go get a man out of a garage."
There was a clunk, and a long stretch of nothing, and then, distantly, a door, and voices, and one voice underneath the others that didn't rise but that the others stopped for.
Then a man came on. Flat and unhurried, the vocal equivalent of a hand held out palm-down: slow.
"This is Cade Merrick."
"Nerissa Kwon."
"Miss Kwon. Tell me about your wreck."
So I did. Nineteen miles, four hundred meters of scatter, Kangxi porcelain, a ghost named the Santa Perpetua, a filing at eleven-forty this morning, and a fifty-meter hole in a stolen mosaic shaped exactly like my own bad day in April.
He didn't interrupt once. Nobody's ever done that to me before.
When I finished he said, "How deep."
"Ninety feet, most of the field. Little more in the cut."
Silence.
Long enough that I said, "Hello?"
"I'm here." Something moved on his end. "Miss Kwon, I'm going to send you a partner. Diver. He's the best I've got and he's going to be the worst company you've ever had on a boat."
"I don't need company, I need a co-claim."
"You'll get the co-claim. Paper's easy. He's the part that matters." A pause. "Understand something. If this is who you think it is, they won't stop at paperwork. They'll come at your fuel, your dock, your crew, and your mother if she's alive."
"She's not."
"Then they'll come at the other four."
I looked at Junho, who was pretending not to listen and doing it badly, and at the hatch Pop had gone down.
"When does he get here," I said.
"Thursday."
"Does he have a name?"
"Torren Vale."
"Is he going to be a problem, Mr. Merrick?"
There was something in the pause that I would spend the next three months learning how to read.
"Yes," Cade Merrick said. "But not for you."
And he hung up, and I stood on my father's boat in the flat gold four o'clock light with a phone in my hand and a stranger inbound, and somewhere below deck a seventy-year-old man was very carefully not making any noise at all.