Chapter 6 #3
She’d walked over to slip seventeen at noon yesterday and again at twelve sixteen today.
Yesterday she hadn’t stepped onto the boat.
Today she had. The half-second on her face when he’d looked up from the binder this morning had been the half-second he was going to be carrying in his head for the rest of the trip and the rest of the week and the rest of the operation, because the half-second had been a woman with her armor off looking at a man, and the man had been him, and the man hadn’t been Ethan Vale from Jacksonville with a fixer-upper Sundancer, the man had been him, and that was the part he was going to have to figure out what to do with.
George brought the Tarpon Lady through the breakwater at four oh-three.
Ethan helped tie up, helped offload the cooler, and shook three hands again and got three names back the second time, which was a courtesy he gave the Lakeland boys without their knowing he was giving it.
The deputy clapped him on the shoulder. Then the roofer told him the Jaguars were going to take a defensive end in the second round, and they would talk about it next year when Ethan came down for a follow-up trip.
The third man bought him a beer at the cleaning station, and Ethan drank it.
Greg Bonner came over from Reel Therapy.
Greg was a smaller man than George, lean in the way some charter captains went lean in their sixties, with a face that had spent thirty-five years in the Gulf sun and had stopped pretending the sun had done it any favors. He stuck out a hand.
“Bonner. Reel Therapy.”
“Ethan Vale. Pier Three, slip seventeen.”
“Don’s old boat.”
“Yep, Don’s old boat.”
“I’ll come look at her tomorrow. I owe Don ten years of unsolicited opinions on his bilge pump. You bought the rest of them along with the boat.”
“Bring them over.”
“I will.”
Greg tipped two fingers and walked back to his own boat.
George stood at the cleaning station with the three Lakeland boys, and Ethan helped clean the four biggest grouper, and at five oh-eight he walked back across the boardwalk to Pier Three with a paper bag of fillets the deputy had insisted he take and the unfamiliar useful feeling of having spent four hours being a man George Halsey would let on his boat.
He stopped at the head of Pier Two.
Sloane was at the kiosk window, doing something he couldn’t see from where he was standing because the kiosk wall was in the way, and he could see only the top of her head and the angle of her shoulder, and he took in the top of her head and the angle of her shoulder as if she were operational geography he'd been mapping for a long time, and he walked on past Pier Two and to Pier Three and his own slip without going around the kiosk to look at her, because looking at her was something he was going to allow himself to want and not allow himself to do.
He put the fillets in the icebox, washed his hands, and sat at the dinette with the bag from the bakery still folded in the trash and the notebook closed on the table, and he thought about a woman in a denim shirt at her counter who had walked Pier Three at twelve sixteen and had said “show me” before she’d decided to.
Caleb called at seven-thirty.
Ethan took the call on the swim platform with the channel cooling off in front of him and the deck light on Catherine’s houseboat already lit across the way. He spoke low and kept the phone tilted toward the channel and away from the dock. He’d been trained out of being heard.
“Day Two.”
“Day Two.”
“George Halsey.”
“Took me on the afternoon charter. Three out-of-staters from Lakeland. Returned at four oh-three. Met Greg Bonner of Reel Therapy at the cleaning station. He’s coming by tomorrow to look at the boat.”
“Halsey volunteered Pruitt yesterday.”
“He did. Bonner hasn’t yet. He may. I’ll know more tomorrow.”
“Pell.”
“Pell brought a casserole yesterday. She also brought intel — though she brought the intel separately, when I walked the dish back to her around nine-forty-five. Monday night, ten thirty-eight to ten fifty-three, white pickup, no logo, unknown male on the Bertram in slip nine for fifteen minutes. Small bag, same weight in and out per her observation.”
A pause. The pause was Caleb registering the intel. The pause lasted about three breaths.
“She volunteered it?”
“She did. She’s decided I’m the kind of man on this dock who ought to know. She’s also decided, separately, not to tell Sloane.”
“Why?”
“Her stated reason was that Sloane has been carrying things by herself for four years, and Pell didn’t want to add one more without thinking about it. I think the unstated reason is that Pell is running her own quiet operation on this dock that she’d rather Sloane not have to administer.”
“Pell’s sixty-eight years old.”
“She is, and she clocked a vehicle without a logo at ten thirty-eight on a Monday night from the upper deck of her houseboat. She had the time of arrival, the time of departure, the bag-weight assessment, and the suspect’s gait. She doesn’t write any of it down; she's decided not to start.”
“I want her on the asset list as a friendly.”
“She’s on it. She doesn’t know she’s on it. She wouldn’t accept it if you offered.”
“Understood.”
A pause. The second pause was Caleb deciding whether to ask the question Caleb usually didn’t ask, and Caleb decided to ask it.
“The asset.”
“The asset is on Day Two.”
“Vale.”
“Caleb.”