Chapter 6 #2
“He walked the way a man walks when he doesn’t want to be heard.
He was wearing dark clothes, no logo, no markings on the pickup.
He had a small bag in his left hand on the way down the pier and the same bag in his left hand on the way back, and the bag looked the same weight both times, which I noticed because my husband used to carry his fishing tackle home empty when he hadn’t caught anything, and a man’s arm hangs the same way going home empty as it does going home full when the bag is the right size for the work. ”
“Catherine, did you write any of this down?”
“I did not. I read books, drink coffee on my deck, and pay attention to my dock. I haven’t written anything down since I retired in 2014. If I started writing things down, my dock would know, and my dock would treat me differently. I prefer it not to.”
“Understood.”
She set the coffee down on the small table, folded her hands in her lap, and her shoulders settled into the small specific quarter-inch they settled when she was done with the heavy work.
“I’m going to read for a while. You’re welcome to sit, but I’m going to read.”
“I’ll let you read.”
“Good. Tell Sloane the casserole was your idea if it comes up.”
“It wasn’t my idea.”
“Tell her it was anyway. She’ll like that you took the trouble.”
“Catherine.”
“Yes, dear.”
“I’m not going to lie to Sloane about a casserole.”
Catherine looked at him over the chain of her glasses. Whatever she’d been about to say went through her head the small revising count it took an older woman to revise what she’d been about to say, and she nodded once.
“All right.”
“Good.”
He stood up, stepped off the houseboat the way he’d come on, with one hand on the rail and his weight even, and Catherine watched him go from the chair, and he walked back up toward the boardwalk.
Doyle was still in the office.
Ethan walked back to slip seventeen and went below and wrote it in the back of the notebook.
Slip nine. Monday night. Twenty-two thirty-eight to twenty-two fifty-three. White pickup, no logo. Unknown male, dark clothes. Small bag, same weight in and out, per neighbor. Pier Two observer position confirmed — C. Pell, slip six, eleven years on dock, no written records.
He closed the notebook and sat at the dinette with his hands flat on the table for a long count of breaths.
Catherine had told him about the white pickup because she had decided he was the kind of man who ought to know.
She had also decided, separately and in advance, not to tell Sloane.
The decision-tree in Catherine Pell’s head was operating on rules he didn’t yet have full visibility into, and Catherine was running her own quiet operation on this dock in parallel with the one he’d been deployed to run, and the two operations were now braided together in a way he was going to have to be careful about.
Sloane didn’t know about Monday night.
That was the part he wrote down second, in his head, without writing it in the notebook.
The most observant tenant on the dock had decided to give him the intel and not Sloane, and Sloane was the woman whose marina the white pickup had been on, and Sloane was the woman who deserved to know what was happening at her own dock at ten thirty-eight on a Monday, and Sloane was the woman who was now another thing on the list of things he was carrying that he hadn’t yet told her about.
He stood up, and went back up the cabin steps and got back to the manifold.
George Halsey came across the channel at eleven fifty-four with the Tarpon Lady’s tender, because the easiest way for a charter captain on Pier One to invite a tenant on Pier Three to come out for the afternoon was to row the tender across instead of yelling.
Ethan saw him coming. He stepped off the swim platform and met George at the cleat.
“Vale.”
“George.”
“I have a half-day charter that booked through the website at eight this morning. Three men from Lakeland looked at the photos and decided they wanted to fish. I said yes. The third spot in the cockpit is open. I’d like to take you out with me.”
“Why?”
“Because you bought a boat that needs work and you spent your first afternoon sanding the rail instead of drinking a beer, and a man who works on a boat for a living is a man I like to have on my own boat for an afternoon when I’ve got the room.
Also you’ll meet a few people. The Lakeland boys won’t talk to you.
Greg Bonner will. He runs Reel Therapy and he’ll be at the cleaning station when we come in. ”
“I’d be glad to come.”
“Twelve thirty at my slip. Bring water and a hat. Don’t bring anything else. The Lakeland boys are paying for the bait and the beer.”
“Twelve thirty.”
George rowed back across. Ethan washed his hands at the slip hose and changed into a clean T-shirt and put on the cap he’d bought at the Jacksonville hardware store, and he was at the head of the Tarpon Lady’s slip at twelve twenty-eight.
The Lakeland boys were already aboard. Three men in their fifties, the kind of men who’d grown up fishing together and hadn’t been able to do it as often as they wanted to in the years since, greeted Ethan with the small careful interest of men who’d been told a fourth man was coming along and had been relieved to learn it was somebody George thought was all right.
Ethan shook three hands and gave three names back.
The names went into the back of his head the way names had been going into the back of his head for nineteen years, and within four minutes he’d collected three new pieces of information he hadn’t had four minutes ago, which was that the man on the left was a retired sheriff’s deputy from Polk County, the man in the middle owned a roofing company, and the man on the right had a wife who’d told him he could come on this trip only if he brought her back a pelican carving from the gift shop at the marina, which George informed them didn’t have a gift shop, which prompted forty seconds of laughter.
Ethan let himself laugh.
He laughed easily with them, slightly louder than he meant to, with the easy correctness of a sound that fit the moment.
George caught his eye over the captain’s console while he started the engines and gave him the small approving look of a man who had judged something and decided it was going to work.
They cleared the breakwater at twelve forty-six.
The Gulf at noon was the white-blue of a postcard, and the Tarpon Lady ran along the channel marker line at twelve knots while George talked through the plan, which was a half-day run to a reef about eleven miles out, two hours on the reef working a bottom rig for grouper, then back in by five.
The Lakeland boys nodded. Ethan nodded. The boat ran smoothly, and Ethan watched George’s hand on the wheel for a count of about a minute and noted that George Halsey had the unhurried particular hand of a man who could probably run his boat through a hurricane, wouldn’t enjoy doing it, but wouldn’t be surprised by it either.
At one-fifteen they reached the reef. The Lakeland boys baited up.
Ethan baited a rod for the man whose wife wanted the pelican carving, who was the least experienced of the three and had been pretending not to be, and the man took the rod gratefully and didn’t say thank you out loud because that would have admitted he had needed the help, and Ethan let him not say it.
Then the fishing happened.
Two hours of grouper coming up off the bottom in a slow, steady cadence, two hours of George reading the wind and adjusting their position with small touches of the throttle, two hours of three men from Lakeland and one man from Jacksonville and a charter captain on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico doing the thing the boat was built for.
Ethan ran the cooler, gaffed two fish, took two pictures of the deputy with a six-pound grouper, drank one beer because refusing the beer would have been worse than drinking it, and made small talk about Jacksonville with the roofer that didn’t include a single sentence about logistics, because the roofer didn’t want to talk about logistics, the roofer wanted to talk about whether the Jacksonville Jaguars were going to draft a defensive end this year, and Ethan had spent an hour on the drive down south Monday afternoon listening to radio DJ's hashing this very subject out.
Which, in turn, came in handy in a moment like this one.
By three forty the cooler was full and the Lakeland boys were happy and the sun had moved off the worst of the heat and George was running them back.
Ethan stood at the gunwale on the way in.
He was looking at the chop along the starboard side, and the running lights coming on at the marker, and the gulls following the boat in a slow, lazy line in case the gut bucket got dumped on the way back, and it landed on him that he hadn’t thought about her in forty-five minutes.
Forty-five minutes.
He’d known her for thirty-three hours, and he’d just gone forty-five minutes without thinking about her, and the moment it landed, he thought about her, and the thinking-about-her landed in his chest the way it had been landing for thirty-three hours, which was warmly, and inconveniently, and without his permission, and he stood at the gunwale of George Halsey’s Tarpon Lady at three forty-one on a Wednesday afternoon and let himself, for the small count of breaths it took George to bring the boat around the channel marker and into the approach, look at it.