My Client Withheld My Pay While My Camera Kept Working

Silas Mercer owed me $4,860, and he wanted me to beg for it in front of his men.

I stood in his pier office with harbor water dripping from my boots. Through the window, fishing boats moved toward the New Bedford hurricane barrier. My invoice lay under his coffee cup.

It carried my full name, Yuniel Menendez, and the same rate he had approved before we started.

I was forty-one, a Cuban American man with brown skin, broad shoulders, close-cut black curls, and a pale scar through my left eyebrow.

I made my living as a commercial diver, checking piles and fixing things most people never saw. That afternoon, I had inspected Bellweather Pier, a private dock Mercer controlled through three companies.

Silas Mercer was a tall white American man of fifty-nine with silver hair combed flat, a heavy pink face, and spotless brown shoes.

He looked at my patched gloves.

"You charge nearly five thousand dollars to swim around?"

"For a crew, equipment, and two days of inspection. The price you signed."

"I signed for a clean report."

"You signed for an honest one."

His thumb covered the part of my invoice marked PAYMENT DUE ON COMPLETION.

I had found a split pile under the outer loading bay. A new scrape ran across it, pale beneath the growth. Whatever had struck it had been heavy.

"That bay needs to stay clear," I said.

"My property will do what I tell it."

He spoke about workers the same way. His forklift driver had hurt his wrist that morning, and Mercer had told him to operate with his other hand.

I picked up my invoice. His cup left a brown ring around the amount.

"Your crew moved a load over my dive area," I said. "We stopped work. That's in the report too."

His eyes moved to my helmet, which waited on the dock outside.

"Camera on that thing?"

"For inspections."

"Then leave the card. I paid for the inspection."

"You haven't paid for anything. You receive the report and the inspection clips when payment clears. Raw files stay with me. Section eight."

He smiled, as if I had named a toy law.

"Nobody needs what you keep."

My father had cooked aboard scallop boats. He kept every wage slip in an old bread box because an owner once claimed he had already been paid.

I used waterproof cases instead.

Back aboard our workboat, my topside partner, Rosa Pike, shut down the recorder. We had worked together for eleven years. She handed me the original card in its numbered sleeve.

"Already copied to the boat drive," she said. "Same as always."

My camera had its own card. The deck recorder kept a second file. Our dive log tied both to the clock we checked before each shift.

Back at our shed, three years of older pier inspections filled a locked cabinet. Mercer had signed a receipt for every report.

We did that for broken pipes, lost tools, and clients who remembered agreements differently after the work was done.

"He pay?" Rosa asked.

I showed her the invoice.

"Coffee money," she said.

I sat on the engine cover and took out my sewing tin. There was a small tear beside the left glove's cuff. I used red waxed thread so I could find each repair before the next dive.

Six little stitches. Pull, check, pull.

My hands steadied when they had a job.

Across the pier, two of Mercer's men were dragging a lift chain toward the loading bay. One was Cal Rusk, his yard foreman. The other wore a yellow raincoat I recognized from our aborted dive.

Rosa watched them.

"That cage wasn't on their lift list."

"No."

I had seen it swing overhead through the green water. A storage cage, used for parts, with chain around its door. Rosa had pulled me away from the bay as soon as she saw the load.

I had been watching my own air hose. I hadn't looked into the cage.

My phone rang before we untied.

It was a boatyard manager who had offered me a Friday repair.

"Yuniel, I need to hold off," he said.

"Weather?"

He went quiet.

"Mercer says you take brass and fittings off wrecks. Says the harbor guys are watching you."

"That's false."

"I figured. But I can't have trouble here."

After he hung up, Rosa set her jaw.

"Want me to call him?"

"First, let's save today's files somewhere else."

We were still tied up. I opened the deck copy on my laptop and moved through the last dive, looking for the lift that had crossed our work area.

The cage turned slowly in the current.

At first I saw a boot.

Then a knee. An orange sleeve.

A man sat inside, wearing a full-face diving mask. Two air cylinders were fastened beside him. His hands were tied to the bars.

I knew his face from the missing-person notice taped inside the chandlery door.

Graham Vale. Mercer's accountant.

Rosa leaned over my shoulder. Neither of us spoke.

The next frame showed his fingers moving.

Outside our cabin, someone stepped onto the boat.