Pirate Pete's Arc

Chapter 13 of 14

Night came, and Pete rowed the three barrels ashore under a thin moon. Sweat soaked his shirt as he wrestled each one up the mud bank. The barrels could not stay on his ship, and the sea cave rotted them. He needed dry land tonight, or his mother would smell rum by morning and know every word he'd told her was a lie. Up the shore stood a shack, half-buried in beach grass. Its boards had gone gray with salt. The roof sagged. No smoke rose from the leaning chimney. Pete pushed the warped door and it scraped open. Inside was dry. Nobody had lived here in years. He rolled the first barrel across the threshold and knew he'd found his spot. He rolled in the second and the third. The floor held. The air smelled of old fish, not rum. Pete stood and breathed easy for the first time in days. Then his boot knocked something under a heap of rags. He crouched and pulled it loose. Stencil sheets. A stack of them, edges dark with soot. Bold cutout shapes ran across each one. He knew the marks. They were the kind smugglers brushed onto powder crates to mark them harmless. He turned one in the moonlight and saw the answer to his other worry. He could stencil these barrels to look like salted fish or ship's stores. If his mother ever found them, she'd read the marks and pass them by. But the stencils meant more than that. This shack was no forgotten ruin. Someone stored gunpowder here. Someone used it now. A voice came from the doorway. "Those aren't yours to hold." Pete spun. A woman stood in the frame, black dress, a rope of pearls at her throat. Not his mother. This one held Pete's ship contract in her ledger. Gloria Marchetti ran every smuggling load through the cove, and this shack was hers. She stepped inside and looked at his three barrels like a shark reading blood in water. "Rum," she said. "In my powder house. On the night before my next run." She smiled without warmth. "You've a talent for owing me, Pete." Pete's throat went dry. "I only needed one night." "You'll need more than that." She lifted a stencil sheet and tapped it against her palm. "The barrels stay. I'll keep them dry and quiet. But you'll owe me for the room, and you'll owe me silence about what else is stored here." Her eyes hardened. "Cross me, and your mother gets a letter naming every barrel you've ever hidden." Pete looked at his rum, safe on dry boards at last. He had solved the smell. He had beaten the tide and the rot. But he'd carried his barrels straight into the one hand that could crush him. The shack was dry. The price was Gloria's, and she had not yet named it in full.