"Why'd the bear go round the mountain?" She shrugged. "I've never been on the Peninsula, or seen the Aleutians. I could never afford the airfare."

Unconvinced, Jack let it slide. "So. Tell me about the good ship Avilda and her happy crew."

Kate looked back at the ceiling. "She's a good ship, all right, or she would be if someone took the time to take care of her. She deserves a better crew than those assholes."

"All of them are assholes?"

Kate thought back to her first day on board. Harry, his face congested with suppressed rage, had shouted at her.

"Nordensen says I gotta hire you, okay. But I don't like women, and I don't like Injuns, and I especially don't like Injun women on board my ship, they're nothing but trouble. You stay out of the guys' pants, you hear?"

He'd shaken his fist in her face, practically frothing at the mouth. "You fuck one of us, you fuck us all, you understand? Any trouble between the guys over you and you're off the goddam boat!" He'd leered at poor Andy, who had blushed beet red beneath his tan and hung his head.

Kate, unperturbed, had given Harry a cool nod. "I heard you the first time."

In truth, she felt Harry had done her a favor with the blunt announcement. All or none? That was fine with Kate. Harry Gault wasn't much of a sailor or a fisherman, but he understood the dynamics of a cramped and isolated workplace. So far, neither Ned nor Seth, nor Harry for that matter, had made any moves in her direction.

There'd been a few leers and some crude remarks, but no pawing, and from her last fishing experience she knew how fortunate she was.

"They're men," she told Jack. "They're fishermen.

They're crab fishermen. And they're Alaskan crab fishermen.

Of course they're assholes." She thought, and added, a trifle reluctantly, "Except maybe for Andy, my bunkie."

Jack sat very still. "You're bunking with a guy?"

Kate raised an eyebrow in his direction. "Don't go all Neanderthal on me, Jack. He's just a kid, and from California at that. The kind of guy who thinks the New Age arrived with the invention of the fast forward button on the VCR remote."

The amusement in her voice when she spoke, warm and somewhat rueful, was not reassuring. "What about Skinner and Nordhoff?"

"Too soon to say, but they're in tight with Gault,"

Kate said. "They hardly talk to Andy or me outside of work."

"And Gault?"

Kate gave a short, unamused laugh. "For the health of every fisherman afloat on the Pacific Ocean, Harry Gault should shoulder an oar and walk inland until he finds someone who doesn't know what it is and stay there for the rest of his life."

"Umm," Jack said, who had never considered poetry necessary, and who was more interested in the way Kate tucked her hair behind her left ear anyway. "What did you pull down, this trip?" he asked idly, gaze on that left ear.