15. Chapter 15 The Dock
The watch station sat at the end of a side street off the avenue, a squat stone building with a heavy door and a lantern bracket above it that hadn’t been lit yet.
A building that existed because the town needed one and nobody cared what it looked like.
A wooden bench sat outside and a notice board held two curling pages pinned to it.
I pushed the door open and Liv followed me in.
The room inside was small and plain. A desk against the far wall, a shelf behind it with ledgers, a second door to a back room, and a man behind the desk writing something on a piece of paper with a short pencil.
He was human, mid-fifties, with a gray-streaked beard trimmed close and a leather vest over a linen shirt.
His arms were thick but going soft at the shoulders, a man who’d been strong twenty years ago and had spent the last ten behind a desk.
A short sword hung on a peg behind him, not on his hip. He looked up when we came in.
He looked at the beastkin girl then me. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so. My name’s Daniel. I’m the naughty healer at the brothel clinic that helps beastkin.”
His expression changed. Not dramatically, but the pencil stopped and he sat back in his chair. “I know who you are. You’re the one who put the market back together after the bombing. My name is Fenrik. I run the watch.” He looked at Liv, then back at me. “What brings you in?”
“I want to report a mugging. A beastkin woman was attacked in the market today, in the more “human” part of it, during broad daylight. A man grabbed her groceries, and when she held on, he beat her. Cracked her ribs, split her lip, gave her a black eye. He took the meat and the cheese out of her bag and left the bread and fruit on the ground. People were standing around and nobody did anything.”
Fenrik picked up his pencil again and tapped the flat end against the desk twice. “Is the woman here?”
“No. I healed her at the clinic. She came in with the injuries and I fixed her up.”
“Did she want to file a complaint?”
“She declined. She thinks the guard won’t take her seriously. I hope she’s wrong.”
He nodded slowly, the nod of someone who’d heard this answer before.
“Then we’ve got a problem. Without the victim present and willing to make a formal statement, it’s hearsay.
You’re telling me what she told you, and I believe you, but I can’t act on a secondhand account.
Our hands are tied on that. She should have come here before she got healed. Now there is no evidence but her word.”
“She gave me his name. Vaughn Strom. He works the river docks, south quay, unloading barges. She knows his face. She’s been walking past him on her way to market for months.”
Fenrik wrote the name down. He wrote it carefully, the pencil moving across the paper in short strokes, and then he set the pencil flat on the desk and folded his hands over it.
“I appreciate you coming in, Daniel. I do. What you did at the market, that was something. The whole town knows what you did. People talk about you like you’re the best thing that’s happened to this place in twenty years, and they might be right.
” He let that sit for a second. “But I can’t send men to the docks on a secondhand report from a victim who won’t come forward.
No witnesses willing to talk. No formal complaint.
If I did that for every story that came through that door, I’d have half the town in cuffs by sundown. ”
“She won’t come forward because she’s afraid he’ll hurt her again. She lives alone.”
“I understand that. I do. And it’s a lousy situation. But the law is the law, and I don’t write it.” He leaned forward. “Can I give you some advice?”
“Go ahead.”
“You’re a healer. A damn good one, from what I hear.
You fix people. That’s your gift, and this town needs it.
But you can’t save every beastkin who walks through the quarter.
Sometimes bad things happen to people, and the best thing you can do is heal them up, send them home, and move on.
You keep taking on every fight that comes through your clinic door and it’ll eat you alive. ”
He said it like he meant it. No malice, no contempt, nothing in his voice that said he didn’t care.
He cared. He’d just made peace with not doing anything about it a long time ago.
At least if he’d sneered I could have pushed back against that.
This was just how things worked, and it was sad and unfortunate.
“Thank you for your time, Fenrik.”
“Anytime. Door’s always open. Tell her to come by and make a formal report. We’ll look into it. However, with no injuries anymore, it would just be her word against his. There’s no hard evidence.”
“I see.”
I turned and walked out. Liv was already at the door, holding it for me. She hadn’t said a word since we’d walked in. Her ears were flat against her skull and her face was still, the same face she’d had since Elin told her story at the clinic.
The door closed behind us. The street was quiet. The light had gone from amber to gray, the sun behind the mountains now, the shadows pulling long across the packed dirt.
“You knew that was going to happen,” I said.
“I knew.” She said it without bitterness, same as Elin had. Like she was talking about the weather. “The guard doesn’t work for us. It never has. Any beastkin could have told you that.”
I nodded. The anger in my chest hadn’t moved. It sat behind my ribs where [Mend] lived, cold and settled. The guard was the last chance for the system to handle this. The system had passed.
“I’m going to the docks,” I said.
Liv looked at me. Her ears came forward, off her skull but not high. She was reading my face.
“I know what you’re going to do,” she said.
“Then you know I’m not asking permission.”
“I know, but you need to know I’m coming with you.”
“Yeah, I figured you would want to tag along. Hopefully I don’t get myself into too much trouble.”
“Should we get the others?”
“No, I can handle it.”
We turned south. The avenue ran downhill toward the river, the buildings stepping down with the grade.
A lamp man was making his way up the street with a long taper, lighting the poles one at a time, the small flames catching and holding in the still air.
Shop doors were closing. A woman pulled shutters across a window and latched them.
The anger was cold and it was staying cold. I’d made the decision when Fenrik told me to move on. Before that, even. When Elin told me she lived alone and had already decided against the guard because she knew what would happen. The system didn’t work for her. It wasn’t designed to.
The street tilted where the slope picked up.
The river’s smell hit before it came into view, cold water and wet wood, the same smell from the first time I’d walked down here weeks ago.
The buildings got lower. The bridge came into view, heavy wooden piers and low stone walls on each side, and past it the stone quay where the barges sat.
There were still men on the south quay. The light was going but the work wasn’t done.
Four or five men moving sacks off a barge, the heavy canvas bags on their shoulders, walking up the boards and stacking them on the stone.
The boards bounced under their weight. A barge master sat on a crate at the end of the quay, checking marks in a ledger.
I stopped at the top of the slope and looked down at them.
“Which one is he?” Liv said quietly.
“I don’t know yet. There’s only one way to find out.”
I walked down to the quay. Liv fell in beside me, half a step back and to my left. I approached the nearest worker, a stocky man with a sack on his shoulder who was heading back toward the barge for another load.
“Excuse me. I’m looking for Vaughn Strom. Is he working tonight?”
The man looked at me. His eyes went to the stonethread robe, the healer belt, and settled on my face. “Vaughn’s at the far end. Loading the grain cart.” He pointed with his chin down the quay toward a man standing at the back of a flatbed cart, swinging sacks up onto the bed.
“Thank you.”
I walked down the quay. The stone was wet under my boots. The river ran beside us, dark now, the surface catching the last of the gray light.
Vaughn Strom was bigger than I’d expected.
Taller than me by three or four inches, broad through the chest and arms, the build of someone who’d been lifting heavy things every day for years.
His hands were thick and red from the grain dust. He had a rough face, a heavy jaw, short brown hair cropped close.
He swung a sack up onto the cart with one arm and reached for the next without looking.
This was the man who’d beaten Elin, a woman half his size. He’d hit her until she fell and taken what he wanted and left the rest of her groceries in the street where anyone could see.
I thought about her ribs snapping together under my hand when I’d healed her. The split lip had closed under my fingers. The black eye had cleared. The scraped knuckles where she’d tried to hold on had smoothed over with new skin. The memory made me even madder.
“Vaughn?”
He turned. He looked at me, then past me at Liv, then back. He didn’t recognize me. He had no reason to.
“Huh? You talking to me?” he asked.
“That depends, are you Vaughn?”
“Yeah, that’s me. Who the hell are you? You don’t look like our normal crowd… especially her.”
“I’m Daniel. I’m a new healer.” I smiled. I put my hand out. “I’ve been trying to meet some of the folks who work down here at the docks. It’s good to finally put faces to the area. You guys are hard workers and don’t get enough thanks.”
He wiped his right hand on his trousers and took mine. His grip was rough and firm. This hand had cracked Elin’s ribs.
“Healer, huh. I’ve heard of you.”
“Good things, I hope.” I kept smiling. I kept holding his hand. “So, Vaughn. I want to talk to you about something. You were in the market today and you had a run-in with a cat-kin lady.”