Cooks Overboard by Joanne Pence Page A

captain. Believe me, he won’t think twice about docking if he thinks there’s any danger possible.”
    “A strike?”
    “I don’t care who you get to give him the news, but it had better be good.”
    “How much is it worth?”
    “Ten thousand, max.”
    “Twenty.”
    “Fifteen.”
    “Seventeen.”
    “Done.”
     
    Angie pushed hard on the mattress, and as the ship rolled in the other direction, the mattress lowered with a whump.
    She sat up on it. Her hair was standing on end—probably from the fury she felt. She would have been even more angry about this whole miserable trip except that she was too busy brushing dust off herself and running her hands over her face and arms and through her hair.
    That had been one of the most horrible experiences of her life. Holding onto walls and furniture, she got off the wall bed—she had never thought they were called that because you could get walled up inside one—and went to tell Paavo all about it.
    To her complete amazement, he was still asleep.
    She put on her robe and slippers to go to the galley and find something to settle her stomach. She felt parched, seasick, and generally miserable. Being shoved into a wall by a mattress will do that to you.

17
    Where was the galley? She’d been told it was just below the main deck, near the crew’s mess, but she’d never been this far down in the ship before. She thought she was on the right deck, though. Maybe she should have taken the elevator instead of the stairs, but the elevator was so slow. She’d expected there would be a large sign on the door, something like the kitchen sign in a big hotel.
    There seemed to be nothing but closed doors down here. The galley wouldn’t have regular doors. They’d be swinging ones—or so she hoped. Things weren’t that different on a freighter, or were they?
    The decks below the main deck were larger than those that rose above it in the superstructure at the rear of the freighter. But even here, in the hull of the ship, most of the space was taken up by massive containers.
    She turned a corner and saw two large doors up ahead. It had to be the galley—with double doors large enough to roll carts of food out to the mess and up the elevator to the passenger’s dining room. She walked up to it and pushed the door open.
    A flashlight blinded her, then went off. Startled, she froze momentarily, then turned to run when a hand grabbed her wrist and yanked her into the dark galley. “No!” she screamed as she was flung into the room.
    She stumbled forward, banging into a rack of pots and pans. They fell over with a loud clatter, and so did she.
    She lay without moving. The only sound she heard was the swishing of the galley door back and forth until it stilled.
    Was she alone? She waited, scarcely breathing, listening for any sound that might tell her that her assailant was still in the room.
    Nothing except the heavy pounding of her heart.
    She inched her way toward the door and was ready to run out when she heard a plop-plop-plop sound in the hallway. She scooted back to where she had been and found what she wanted—an enormous cast-iron frying pan.
    Now that her eyes had grown used to the dark, she could see the narrow line of light from the hallway beneath the galley doors, so she knew where her assailant would be coming from. She carefully, quickly eased to the side ofthe door, the frying pan hoisted over her shoulders like a baseball bat.
    The door was pulled open slowly, then stopped. From the dim night-light in the hallway a hand reached into the galley. She was sure she was going to faint.
    A long gown floated against the door’s opening. It was either a woman or a ghost, she thought. But there were no such things as ghosts, so it had to be a woman. Must be Nellie or Ruby. No problem. Although it seemed a little tall for Nellie…even for Ruby.
    Maybe she should call out, greet them.
    But what if she was wrong?
    Something rubbed against the wall, up and down, up and down.