"I can."

His grin was tired but appreciative. "That's why I love you, Katie, you tough little broad, you. Now what have you got for me?"

"Zip," she said with relish.

He leaned back in his chair, crossed his feet on the edge of the bunk, laced his hands behind his head and looked at her, waiting.

She blew out an exasperated breath and flopped on the bunk, kicking off her boots. "What did you expect'? You fly into the Park with some cockamamie story about the Case of the Disappearing Crewmen, and yank me out of there so fast I barely have time to get Mutt and her pups over to Mandy's. The next thing I know I'm on a boat in the middle of the Boring Sea, in gale-force winds and freezing rain, pulling pots and wondering what the hell I'm doing there."

"You didn't have to come," he pointed out. "As you have made abundantly clear on more than one occasion, you don't work for me anymore."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she said. Jack was being reasonable and Kate wasn't interested in reasonable at the moment. "Except for when you offer me four hundred dollars a day and expenses." Not to mention $8,300 a week in incidental earnings, she thought. The prospect cheered her, but she would be damned before she let him see it.

"Besides," he added, "the Avilda needed a deckhand pronto, and the board couldn't stall off Gault forever, not with so many wanna-be deckhands in Dutch. There wasn't time to brief you."

"There's time now," she pointed out.

He eyed the bunk, and her on it. "I was kind of hoping we could try out that bunk first." He waggled his eyebrows. "It's going to be tough, justifying it on my expense account. I want to make sure I'm getting my money's worth."

She bit back a smile and said sternly, "Get on with it."

He gave a mournful sigh and dug into his pack, producing a tattered, bulging file folder with sheets of paper sliding out in every direction. "I assumed when I flew into the Park last week that you had heard of the two crewmen who were lost last March."