Grave Phantoms (3 page)

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.

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.

Bo had little faith he'd ever feel dry or warm again. All of this weirdness with the blue-faced survivors was a bad ending to a bad day, and he was impatient for it to be over.

A lie.

He was just impatient to see Astrid again. After she'd left for college at the end of the summer, he'd hoped time apart would tame his feelings. Instead, the yearning turned him into a deranged man, one match short of combusting with obsession. Absurd, really, that one tiny girl had that effect on him. So he told himself it was merely a case of mind over matter, and prayed when he saw her again she'd appear less dazzling. He would merely look upon her fondly. Platonically. Like the old friend she was, nothing more.

But now that he had seen her, he knew all of that had been a pipe dream. It was so much worse now. Because the truth was, college
had
changed her. He didn't know how or why, only that if it had anything to do with that Luke fellow she wrote about, it would take every man in the warehouse holding Bo back to stop him from driving down to Los Angeles to bloody the professor's face against the classroom chalkboard.

No, time apart hadn't helped one bit. His blood still heated at the sight of her. His heart still ached, wanting
what it couldn't have. And no matter how he tried to pretend she was still the same fourteen-year-old, gum-smacking, know-it-all live wire he'd first met years ago, she hadn't been a little girl for a long time. Seeing her tonight did strange, bewildering things to him. The sound of her voice alone sketched a secret road map from his heart to his brain, with a looping detour down to his cock.

Aiya
, she made him miserable. Weak. Crazy. Stupid.

He absently glanced toward the light of the office window and spotted her silhouette.

“She's angry with you,” Winter said, startling Bo out of his thoughts.

Not half as angry as he was with
her
. But he didn't say that, because then he'd have to explain why. And as much as he confided in Winter, he wasn't dumb enough to admit that Astrid had yanked out his heart and stomped on it with a few careless words in a weeks-old letter. Some lines you just didn't cross, and pining over the Viking Bootlegger's fox-eyed baby sister was one of them.

He tore his eyes away from the girl and stared straight ahead at the yacht. “She'll get over it when she goes back to Los Angeles after the holidays.”

Three weeks. He might survive three more weeks of Astrid (devious smile, stubborn chin, blond curls, scent of roses, soft skin) if he stayed busy, out of sight. Found excuses to sleep at his old apartment in Chinatown instead of in his room at the Magnussons'. Kept his cock and balls locked up in some kind of medieval chastity cage . . .

“I'm going home,” Winter said in a weary voice. “I haven't had more than an hour of sleep since yesterday, and Aida will divorce me if I stay out another night. She hasn't been sleeping, either. She's had a few unsettling séances lately. Heard strange messages . . .”

“About what?” Winter's wife, Aida, was a trance medium who conducted séances for a living, temporarily able to summon back the dead to talk with their loved ones. Plenty of frauds out there, but Aida was the real thing. “Not about all this, I hope,” Bo said, motioning toward the yacht.

Winter shook his head. “No, something else is coming. It's probably . . . well, hopefully she's wrong about it, but it's making her worry.”

“Go home, then,” Bo encouraged.

“Suppose I should take Astrid back with m—”

“I won't be much longer,” Bo said a little too quickly and tried to keep the eagerness out of his voice. “The sandbagging's finished, and squaring away the yacht shouldn't take long. I'll drive her back.”

“She's not your responsibility anymore,” Winter said softly. “You're my captain now, not a driver, and not her guardian. She can take care of herself while she's home for the holidays. She's a grown woman.”

Oh, he'd noticed, all right. But that didn't stop him from worrying over her safety. Hell, it made him more anxious. The Magnussons might be wealthy, and Bo might be better paid than ninety-nine percent of the other Chinese immigrants living in San Francisco, but that money was hard-earned and came with a list of threats so long, he couldn't keep them all in his head at once: rival bootleggers, cheap club owners, crooked cops and politicians. Mobsters from out East. Smugglers hunting new cargo. Disgruntled customers looking to save a buck . . . and hungry, delinquent kids looking to steal one.

He should know.

To someone slinking down dark alleys, trying to stay alive, Astrid Magnusson's blue eyes looked like easy money. A kidnapping waiting to happen. And that's why Bo had been both relived she'd chosen to attend college in Southern California, so far away from all this—yet at the same, time terrified that it was
too
far. That he couldn't watch out for her anymore. That he couldn't protect her.

His absolute nightmare.

“I don't mind taking her home,” Bo told Winter, as if it were only a mildly irritating hardship. Casual. “It'll give her a chance to yell at me some more.”

“Better you than me,” Winter replied with a tired smile and slapped him on his shoulder. Then he bid Bo good
night and left the warehouse to drive home to his waiting wife.

Bo sighed heavily.

Before he could punish himself by being confined in a small automobile with Astrid, he had to take care of the crashed boat. He grabbed a chrome-handled flashlight from the warehouse and headed back out into the drizzle to track down the single cop the police had left behind to guard the yacht.

“Officer . . . ?” Bo said, bending down to peer into the cracked window of the black Tin Lizzie squad car.

“Barlow,” the man supplied.

“Officer Barlow,” Bo said with a smile and a polite dip of his chin. “Sorry to bother you. Just wanted to let you know that I'm going to step onto that yacht to see if she still runs. Boss wants me to move her. We got crabbers coming in tomorrow.” Fishing was still the legitimate part of the Magnusson business. Never mind that the storm was moving into the Bay too fast and scattering all their Dungeness pots to hell, filling them with sand; he just needed an excuse to move the damn yacht.

But Officer Barlow wasn't buying it.

“No can do,” he said, swallowing a bit of sandwich.

“Sorry?”

“You can't move the yacht. It's a crime scene.”

Bo smiled and tried a more jovial tone. “What's the crime? Wearing bad theater makeup? Not bothering to tell their families they decided to sail to some tropical island on a yearlong vacation?”

The officer was too dumb to be charmed by humor. “Magnusson should have cleared it through the chief.” He began rolling up the window as if the conversation were over.

It wasn't.

Bo clamped his hand over the rain-streaked glass. “The chief cleared it. You just must not have gotten the message.”

“Excuse me?”

Bo held Barlow's dark gaze, measuring the offense in his squinting eyes. It took him all of half a second to know that the man didn't have the balls to physically challenge him.

“The boat's on our property,” Bo said matter-of-factly. “We want it off. So you can call someone out here to tow it, or you can let me see if I can move it a few yards to the empty pier next door.”

“
Your
property? You people couldn't even vote three years ago.”

Bo's vision clouded as a dark urge for violence rose. His hand reached for the car door handle.

But a confident feminine voice piped up before he could open the car door. “Wait for me, Bo! I'm coming on the yacht, too. Oh, hello there, Officer. Are you going along with us? My brother will be glad to know you're concerned about our well-being.”

Buddha, Osiris, and Jehovah
, Bo cursed under his breath.

Lemony blond finger waves floated beneath an umbrella.
Astrid's cunning, foxlike eyes blinked up at him with sham innocence, her previous drunken wink now gone.

I don't need you saving me from this lazy prick
, he tried to project to her with a fake smile. Years of living under the same roof had made them good interpreters of each other's body language and expressions.

He's not worth the effort
, she seemed to project back at him.

And she was right; he really wasn't. But Bo resented when she stepped in like this and smoothed over the indignity with a smile. Whatever favor she thought she was doing him, he paid two times over with the loss of his pride. But maybe that was a good thing tonight; he needed a reason to stay angry at her.

Anger kept the wanting away.

“Or we can just go on our own,” Astrid added.

Officer Barlow opened his car door. “I'm going with
you. Let's make it quick,” he said, and without another word, he followed them along the pier.

Lightning streaked over the Bay. The bow of the boat canted in the choppy water. Bo was half convinced that they'd all disappear at sea if they stepped foot on it, but Astrid showed no sign that she shared his worry. When he suggested she go back inside the warehouse and wait, she answered through a stilted smile, “Like hell I will.”