Grey Lady Read online

  GREY LADY

  By Paul Kemprecos

  SUSPENSE PUBLISHING

  Also by Paul Kemprecos

  Aristotle “Soc” Socarides Series

  Bluefin Blues

  The Mayflower Murder

  Feeding Frenzy

  Death in Deep Water

  Neptune’s Eye

  Cool Blue Tomb

  Matinicus “Matt” Hawkins Series

  The Emerald Scepter

  GREY LADY

  by

  Paul Kemprecos

  DIGITAL EDITION

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Suspense Publishing

  Paul Kemprecos

  Copyright 2013 Paul Kemprecos

  PUBLISHING HISTORY:

  Suspense Publishing, Paperback and Digital Copy, November 2013

  Cover Design: Shannon Raab

  Cover Photographer: iStockphoto.com/glaflamme

  Cover Photographer: iStockphoto.com/bpalmer

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks.

  To Terri Ann Armstrong, who urged me to write another Socarides book. I wish she were here to know that I followed her advice.

  PRAISE FOR PAUL KEMPRECOS

  “What a character. Aristotle Socarides is a diver, a fisherman, and a PI who just can’t seem to stay out of trouble. He’s the brainchild of a genius—Paul Kemprecos—who knows a thing or two about writing action and adventure. I bow to the master and urge all of you to read this latest installment in a first rate series.”

  —Steve Berry, New York Times and #1 Internationally Bestselling Author

  “#1 New York Times bestselling author Paul Kemprecos shows once again he is the undisputed master of high-action adventure, better on his own and better than his former co-author Clive Cussler period. Returning to his roots in Grey Lady, he brings back old friend Aristotle “Soc” Socarides in a rapid-fire tale chock full of historical mystery, cutting edge technology, and sea-going daring-do with so many twists and turns you’ll need to take a Dramamine before you plunge in. Masterfully paced and brilliantly constructed, this is reading entertainment of the highest order.”

  —Jon Land, bestselling author of The Tenth Circle

  “Paul Kemprecos has crafted another winner! The Grey Lady’s dogged and irreverent private investigator Aristotle “Soc” Socarides is a blast to spend time with, and the story’s clever twists and turns will have you rocketing through the pages until the very end. Don’t miss it!”

  —Boyd Morrison, author of The Loch Ness Legacy

  “The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children.”

  —Aeschylus

  GREY LADY

  Aristotle “Soc” Socarides Series: Book 7

  BY PAUL KEMPRECOS

  PROLOGUE

  The Pacific Ocean, 1822

  Obediah Coffin crouched in the bow of the open whaleboat under the hungry gaze of the two men who yearned to gnaw the flesh from his bones.

  The skeletal fingers of his right hand clutched a pair of dice carved from the tooth of a sperm whale, but he could not bring himself to make the throw.

  “Do it!” one of the men growled. His name was William Swain and like Coffin, he was a whaler from Nantucket.

  “Aye, Obed,” said the third Nantucket man, Henry Daggett, his voice a bare whisper. “No use putting it off. God’s will be done. What will be, will be.”

  Coffin wanted to shout at Daggett that God’s will would be to condemn him and the other men in the boat to eternal damnation for the abominations they had committed, but his lips were as cracked and dry as parchment. He gazed with red-rimmed eyes at the lonely sea stretching to the horizon in every direction.

  “God’s will be done,” he mumbled. He took a rattling breath, pried his fingers from the ivory cubes, and tossed the dice without shaking them. They rolled a few inches and came to a halt in a puddle of water that had leaked through the seams of the boat.

  A five and a three. Eight.

  William Swain cursed, then scooped up the dice, shook them in his cupped hands, blew on his boney knuckles, and gave the whalebone cubes a loose toss, careful to aim for the driest part of the deck where they would have a full roll. They bounced off the base of the harpoon resting post and came to a stop showing two fives.

  “Hah!” Swain said. “A ten. Your turn, carpenter.” He picked up the dice with his left hand, placed them in his right palm and offered them to Daggett.

  Daggett stared vacantly at the dice lying on the calloused palm.

  “Can’t move?” Swain said. The fierce, deep-set eyes under the sloping brow bored into Daggett’s ravaged face. “Your hands were fast enough back at the island when they grabbed for my woman.”

  There had been no love lost between the two men since their ship, the Moshup, had set sail from Nantucket Harbor on a sultry August day nearly two years before. The animosity between them was inevitable. Daggett was young and handsome, and his position as ship’s carpenter gave him privileges such as superior sleeping quarters and food and a bigger lay, as shares in the whale oil profits were called. Swain was a harpooner, a misshapen troll of a man whose muscular body and scarred face had been marked by the dangers of his profession.

  The crewmates had nearly come to blows on a Pacific island where the ship customarily stopped for supplies. Despite lectures from the captain against the dangers of venereal disease, the men unleashed their libidos on the willing young female natives. A beautiful bronze-skinned woman who had been Swain’s on a previous voyage had been attracted to Daggett. Swain had pulled a knife on the carpenter, only to be stopped by order of the first mate.

  A few weeks after the island stop, the ship had chased down a sixty-foot-long sperm whale. Swain tossed a harpoon into the great creature, but it was a bad throw and the barb came free. The enraged whale had upended two boats, then rammed and sank the ship. The surviving crew had gathered provisions before the ship went under and set off in four whaleboats led by the captain, who was navigating for the fleet.

  The twenty-eight-foot-long, double-ended whaleboat was a synthesis of function and beauty. The demands of the whaling trade for a speedy and maneuverable lightweight craft imbued the whaleboat with a sleek elegance. The whaleboat was built to chase and dodge giant sea mammals and carry the implements of the trade used by the six-man crew. With good men pulling at the oars, and if the boats stayed together in a flotilla, the thousand-mile journey to land would have been hard but possible.

  But a storm swept in one night, and a boat had been separated from the flotilla, which included the only whaleboat carrying navigational gear. The boat had lost its oars in the storm and began to drift aimlessly. The survivors were reduced to skeletons; their bodies were covered with scabs from constant exposure to salt water and sun. Their joints swelled and the men became lethargic and weak. They suffered from blackouts; the lucky
ones never regained consciousness.

  As their shipmates began to die off, the desperate survivors did the unthinkable. They cut open the dead bodies of their fellow crewmen and devoured the hearts. Then they sliced what flesh remained, dried it in the sun and ate it like jerky.

  Finally, only three men were left alive. They managed to collect drinking water from the frequent rains, but they had nothing to eat. Driven half-mad by starvation, they had agreed that one man must sacrifice his life to feed the others.

  Swain produced the dice. Low man would slash his wrists and bleed out. Now it was Daggett’s turn to make the throw.

  “Do it, man,” Coffin urged. “For godsakes, don’t drag this out any longer.”

  Daggett slowly took the dice from Swain, cupped them in his hand for a second as he murmured a prayer, then let them roll.

  CHAPTER 1

  It was one of those seamless Cape Cod days in late spring, perfect in every detail, as if the gods were atoning for the nasty, raw winter they had visited on the narrow peninsula. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the flat-calm surface of Nantucket Sound looked as if it had been steam-ironed. The twin 250-horsepower four-stroke Yamaha outboard motors sent the thirty-six-foot Grady-White powerboat skimming over the teal-green water like a skipping stone thrown by a kid. I felt like a prisoner who’d escaped from a dungeon. Each breath of the sweet sea air filling my lungs was laden with the expectation of good things to come.

  The dumb smile on my face would have vanished in a second if I’d known about the trouble brewing thirty miles to the south, and the fact that soon I’d again be reminded that no abyss in the sea is deeper than the depths of the human soul. But there was not a whisper of danger in the breeze blowing off the bay when I had levered my body out of bed that morning. The rosy fingers of a Homeric dawn streamed through the windows of my converted beach house. I had showered, then pulled on a new pair of cotton chino slacks and a Mediterranean blue polo shirt.

  While the coffee brewed, I spooned out a glob of food for mature cats into a plastic dish. Kojak, my old Maine coon cat, has a hard time chewing dry food, but he sucked down his breakfast like a runaway vacuum cleaner. He was too full to object when I stuffed him into a wicker pet carrier. I hauled the carrier and a thermos of coffee to my 1987 GMC pickup truck, and took it as a good sign when the engine started on only the third try. The truck had replaced a 1977 pickup, but it seems to have inherited the old junk’s balky genes. I jounced out the long, cratered driveway to the road that ran along the bayside, and ten minutes later parked at the harbor where I keep my boat. I rowed a skiff out to the mooring and climbed aboard the Grady-White. Kojak stuck his nose out when I opened the carrier in the cabin, then emerged to settle in the nest of cushions I’d arranged for him in an empty fishing gear box.

  Unlike my temperamental truck, the boat started with the first turn of the ignition key. I listened to the pleasant purr of the outboards for a moment, then cast off the mooring line and cranked up the throttle. A southwest breeze brushed my cheeks with the gentle softness of a bride’s veil as the boat slowly moved into the harbor. The sun rising above the low dunes of the barrier beach was burning off the morning mists.

  The Cape is a narrow, seventy-mile-long arm of sand dunes and beaches curled into the Atlantic like the clenched fist of a muscle man showing off his biceps. I live and work about where the elbow would be. I navigated the channel markers of the no-wake zone and notched up the throttle when I hit open water. The boat left a creamy wake as it raced west across Nantucket Sound parallel to the low-lying southerly shore of Cape Cod.

  Forty-five minutes after leaving my home port, I steered the boat around the rocks of Point Gammon, headed into Lewis Bay and followed the channel markers to a large marina. I tucked the boat into my rented slip and tied up to the dock. After I checked in with the dock master, I went back to the boat. All was ready for my first charter. The shiny new fishing rods and reels were in their racks. Fishing lures were within reach. I plunked into a swivel chair, waiting for my charter to arrive, and smiled as I examined one of my newly-printed business cards. On the front of the card was the name and silhouette of the boat against a blue background. Under the boat was a line, with my home phone, saying the boat was available for charter. On the backside is the name of the captain: Aristotle P. Socarides. The P stands for Plato. People sometimes trip over their tongues trying to navigate the string of syllables. I usually tell them to call me by the shortened version. Soc.

  For years, I had worked with a Yankee gentleman named Sam, on his commercial trawler the Millie D. Sam taught me how to smell out fish. We made a good team until age and a temperamental heart caught up with him. Our high-line days of big catches came to an end after his cardiologist gave him a warning he couldn’t ignore. Sam quit fishing for good and headed south with the migrating snowbirds.

  I scraped some savings together, took out an equity loan on the waterfront property that surrounds my boathouse and used the money to buy Sam out. He and Mildred retired to a gated community in Florida and an easy life of early bird specials and bingo. He picked a good time to abandon the fishing business. The codfish were becoming harder to find than a bar tip at a miser’s convention. The scientists got alarmed at the declining stocks and the feds reacted by tightening the catch regulations.

  Squeezed between my loan payments and the shortage of fish, I decided to go to Florida to consult with Sam. I almost didn’t recognize him. Sam had traded in his work outfit—faded blue chambray shirt, khaki slacks and tan long-billed cap—for Madras shorts, espadrille sandals, and a pink flamingo Hawaiian shirt. He and Millie looked like a couple of kids. The southern sun that had tanned Sam the color of a walnut shell must have melted his Yankee reserve because he gave me a bear hug. We sat around the pool and I explained what I had in mind. I wanted to quit commercial fishing and go into the charter business. Years of backbreaking work in all kinds of weather had washed away the last trace of sentimentality about the boat. No amount of painkillers can cope with the aching joints that come from a lifetime at sea. He said to sell the Millie D. if I wanted to.

  “Maybe you should think about movin’ south, Soc. You’re not getting any younger.”

  I didn’t need to be reminded that my dark brown hair and mustache were streaked with gray, and the laugh lines around my eyes are sprouting branches. I glanced at the old folks sunning themselves around the pool. They looked like leather back turtles. Sam would have liked to have me around to talk about old times, but we both knew that routine would get stale.

  “Maybe in a few years, Sam,” I said with a wag of my head.

  He nodded and pronounced the fisherman’s phrase for all things good: “Finestkind, Cap.”

  Sam suggested that I swing by Sea World to see Sally Carlin, an old girlfriend who was working at the marine theme park as a biologist. Sally is a terrific woman, but I said I’d have to make it another time. Sam knew my checkered history with Sally and didn’t pursue it. I dined with Sam and Mildred that night at an all-you-can eat restaurant that wasn’t half-bad and stayed in their spare bedroom. The next day we said our goodbyes and I took a plane back north.

  I was disappointed but not surprised at the low-ball appraisal figure for the Millie D. The old gal had taken a lot of hard knocks from the Atlantic Ocean. I sold the boat to a young fisherman who’d been helping me, but the money fell short of the amount I needed for a new business. I bit the bullet and went to my family for a loan. My dad is pretty frail and spends most of his time at home, but my aging mother still rules the family frozen pizza empire with an iron hand. The family has more money than Fort Knox and it’s just as impregnable. The request for a loan went to the Parthenon Pizza family tribunal, consisting of my mother, my younger brother George, and my kid sister Chloe. George, who runs the operational side of the business, was against the loan; his argument went something like this:


  “I work my butt off for this business while my big brother, who should be working for the family, wants us to buy him a boat so he can screw off even more than he does. No offense, Soc.”

  “None taken, George,” I said.

  It was a refrain I’d heard before. George lives in a five-bedroom house in a North Shore suburb, drives expensive cars, indulges a wife who likes to shop, and sends his kids to private school, but in my opinion, working with my mother entitles him to his comfortable martyrdom.

  Chloe is head of marketing. We’ve always been close, so she was in favor of the loan.

  “This isn’t a gift, George, it’s a business proposition. Don’t pay any attention to George, Ma. I think we should give the money to Aristotle.”

  As company president, my mother was the tiebreaker. “Chloe’s right, George. The family must do what is right for the family.”

  My mother’s version of doing the right thing wasn’t based entirely on family loyalty. She said she would approve the loan in return for a stake in my new business and a promissory note to pay the money back at slightly less interest than a loan shark. Oh yes, she said. One more thing. With my mother, there is always one more thing, but what she wanted in return brought a smile to my face.

  With cash in hand, I bought a Canyon 366 center console boat with a sleek white fiberglass hull. My mother’s “one more thing” was a request to name the boat Thalassa—a poetic Greek word for the sea—that sounds like the whisper of waves on the shore. Coming from Crete, Ma swore by the healing powers of the sea. I ordered business cards and bought some blue polo shirts monogrammed with the name of the boat, matching baseball caps to sell to customers, and I was ready for my first season as a charter boat captain.