The Boat Inspection Ended With A Camera Under His Shoe

Silas Creel offered me coffee before he told me which boat had sunk.

That was how he worked. A warm cup first. Then a thing you could not refuse without spilling something.

I was thirty-one, an Italian American underwater welder with a small shop off Dundalk Avenue. I had olive skin, dark curls clipped close, a bent nose, and broad shoulders that made borrowed jackets fit badly.

That morning, I had been fixing a diving mask someone had left beside a trash bin. The glass was sound. Only the head strap had split. I sewed a yellow loop through its cloth end and put it beside three others.

My tender, Vic, called them my retirement plan.

"Four masks and eleven dollars," he said. "You're nearly there."

Creel arrived before I could answer.

He was a broad white man of fifty-five, with silver hair combed flat, pale blue eyes, and soft hands that rested neatly on his coat.

"I have an inspection job," he said. "Two thousand four hundred dollars. Today."

The boat was the Mercy Bell, a forty-foot workboat resting near an old pier on Curtis Creek. Creel said a storm had torn loose a hose. He had sold the wreck to Ada Pike for $4,800.

"Poor woman wants to raise it," he said. "I told her I'd cover a proper look first."

"Why?"

"Because I was raised right."

He smiled as if that settled the matter.

I asked for the bill of sale and the owner's written consent. He brought both from a cream folder. The sale listed storm damage. It also said the buyer accepted the wreck in its present state.

I called the number beside Ada's signature.

"I want every frame," she said.

"That's in my terms."

"Make sure it stays there."

Before we left, I checked the cable that carried my helmet picture up through the umbilical. My helmet recorder saved a copy. A second recorder saved the same feed in a dry compartment inside the compressor housing.

I had built that arrangement after losing footage to a cracked case. The surface unit sat behind a screwed panel, clear of the engine and moving parts. A yellow thread looped through its latch so I could spot movement.

"Both running?" Mara, my dive supervisor, asked.

"Two places to remember one mistake."

She marked the equipment check. Vic handled my line. Ezra stood ready as our standby diver.

Creel watched from his pier while we set up on our work float. He had brought coffee for everybody. Nobody liked him enough to drink it hot.

At twenty-two feet, the creek turned brown around my light. I followed the Mercy Bell's rail by touch until her name came out of the silt.

The hull had no broad tear. Her propeller was whole. Below the engine space, I found a hose cut clean across, far from anything sharp. Its clamps were still tight.

"Hold the picture," Mara said over the wire.

I held it.

Then I reached the little cabin hatch.

A steel keeper crossed the outside handle. Someone had welded its ends to the frame. The beads were rough and fresh beneath the mud. You could not swing that handle from inside.

I knew welds. These had been made above water, before the boat went down.

"That's no storm," I said.

My light passed a side window. There was a boot beyond it. Then a trouser leg that did not move when the water shifted.

For a few seconds, I forgot every joke I had ever used to keep fear small.

"Possible person inside," I said. "I'm not touching the hatch."

Mara's voice stayed level. "Understood. Come back along your line."

On the float, I sat while Vic took my helmet. Mara called for police. Ezra started writing down times.

Creel stepped across from the pier.

"An old boot?" he asked.

"Someone's in there."

"You saw poorly."

He lifted the small recorder from its helmet bracket while I was still getting out of my harness. Before Vic could stop him, he dropped it onto the deck and brought his heel down hard.

The case cracked. He ground it once more.

"Cheap things break," he said.

Mara told him to get off our float.

He laid an envelope beside my gloves. Twenty-four hundred dollars in cash.

"Inspection paid. No need for a report."

"There is always a report."

He crouched, close enough that only I could hear the next words clearly.

"Then remember where your shop is. All those little masks in the window. Such breakable glass."

He stepped away before the patrol boat arrived.

I looked at the yellow thread on the compressor panel. It had not moved.

While an officer took Mara's name, my phone lit up with a message from Ada Pike.

It held a missing-person flyer and six words.

Was my brother on that boat?