Grave Phantoms
Page 4

“Not to mention that you seemed pretty busy gazing at stars with what’s-his-name,” Bo said, snapping his fingers. “Professor Hotel Room.”
Astrid was too tipsy to convincingly feign shock over his implication. Yes, she’d told him about Luke and the hotel. But she certainly hadn’t said what they’d done there. It was none of Bo’s business. Besides, she hadn’t spoken to Luke since that night. She merely stopped showing up for class, and he never bothered to track her down.
So much for her sensitive professor.
But it didn’t matter. She was a grown woman. So what if she’d made a few mistakes her first semester at college? Well, a lot of mistakes, actually. Luke may have been the worst of those, a lapse in good judgment, but there was nothing she could do about that now. Life went on. And everything else was perfectly fixable as long as Winter didn’t find out. Now, as for Bo . . .
Hold on just one second. Her drunken brain oh-so-slowly began piecing Bo’s words and tone together. Was he jealous? Her heart skipped a beat.
“Listen,“ she said as he slipped into his suit jacket, but the rest of her words were lost under a horrific wrenching noise that was so long and loud, it rattled all the family photographs on the back wall for several seconds. Beyond that wall was the northern pier.
They both glanced at each other. Bo drew his gun, and without another word, they raced through the offices and into the warehouse. The workers had abandoned their sandbagging and were running through an open cargo door onto the docks. Cold rain and a howling gale cut through Astrid’s clothes as she jogged behind them into briny night air.
Industrial lights lit up the pier. Foaming waves, impossibly high, streamed over the creaking dock boards and splashed over her ankles. No wonder Bo was sandbagging the warehouse; she’d never seen the Bay this high. And it was storming so hard, she couldn’t see past the men thronging the edge of the pier. Winter shouted something at Bo, who pushed his way through the crowd. She shielded her eyes with one hand as a bolt of white lightning pierced the sky.
And that’s when the source of the noise came into view.
A luxury motor yacht, encrusted in barnacles and draped in seaweed, had crashed into the Magnussons’ pier. Inside the main cabin, a group of people stared out the windows, unmoving and silent. And for a dizzying, terror-struck moment, Astrid was convinced they were all ghosts.
TWO
The Plumed Serpent wasn’t precisely a ghost ship, Bo decided, after helping to moor the crashed yacht. But the strange people who filed off its deck were certainly spooked. None of them knew who they were. Names, family, homes . . . all forgotten. No one remembered where the yacht had been or how they’d gotten on it. They all claimed to have woken up a few minutes before they’d crashed into the pier.
Six survivors. Six men and women wearing white robes, and whose cheeks and foreheads were covered with blue greasepaint, like they’d been staging some kind of theatrical performance. They were terrified. Confused. And yet, apart from looking weak and dehydrated, seemingly unharmed.
And while the police questioned them, Bo had sent Astrid back inside the warehouse to safety while he watched the chaos from a healthy distance, mumbling an old Cantonese folk saying to ward away evil—along with a bit of the Lord’s Prayer and a line from a popular song for good measure. Whatever had cursed the yacht, he wanted nothing to do with it. Granted, the Plumed Serpent was a damn fine boat. Only a handful of yachts like it in the Bay Area, and Chief Hambry confirmed this one belonged to a wealthy widow who had reported it missing during an investigation last year.
Lost at sea for an entire year.
A boat doesn’t just reappear after being gone that long.
Ambulances carried the stunned survivors to Saint Francis in Nob Hill. And when the hubbub finally died down, Bo shivered in his wet clothes as he watched the police chief’s car pull away from the pier.
“I’ve seen a lot of strange things in this city . . .” Winter murmured from his side as they huddled together beneath a narrow overhang outside the warehouse.
Bo snorted. “I’ve seen a lot of strange things in your house.”
The dark-headed Swede chuckled and pressed the heel of his palm against his scarred eye. “True. But this feels wrong. Something happened to those people, and I don’t want any damn part of it. We don’t need this headache right now.”
Winter wasn’t just Bo’s employer. Five years back, after Bo’s uncle (and last living relative) had died, the burly head of the Magnusson clan had taken then sixteen-year-old Bo out of Chinatown and given him a home in Pacific Heights. More than a home. A job. Education. Purpose. A family.
The entire city saw Winter as one of the biggest bootleggers in town—someone respected and feared, no one to screw around with—but Bo knew the man behind the mask. And knowing this man had changed Bo, for good and for worse. Bo was neither wholly Chinatown nor Pacific Heights. Not part of his old life, not fully accepted into all corners of this one, either. He was between cultures and classes. Between worlds. And that was unstable ground.
Bo rubbed warmth back into his fingers. “I’ll make sure the yacht’s not taking on water and poke around in the engine room. See if she can be started up. If so, I’ll move her to that empty pier next door, so that she’s off the property and out of sight from the road. Otherwise, I’ll get a tugboat over here to move her in the morning.”
Gawking reporters and nosy crowds were the last thing an illegal enterprise needed, so the less the public could see of the yacht, the better—at least until the police could track down the owner and get the damn thing off Magnusson property. They didn’t need the cops poking around out here, either. Sure, Winter paid them off. But it was one thing for them to look the other way, and another to operate right in front of their faces. Tomorrow night’s distribution runs would need to go through their secondary Marin County docks across the Bay, which would mean more time spent in the cold rain.