Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Ethan stripped the wet clothes off below deck at six forty-one and stood under the shower head with the water cranked as hot as a marina hot-water heater would give him, which was warm enough to take the cold out of his hands and not warm enough to take it out of his shoulders.
He stayed under it five minutes, toweled off, and put on a clean T-shirt and dry jeans and his second pair of work boots, and he stood at the dinette with both hands flat on the table and made himself drink a full glass of water before he picked up the phone.
Caleb had been calling for nine minutes.
Three missed calls in a row, which meant the data had landed and the data was the kind Caleb didn’t leave on a voicemail.
Ethan keyed the encrypted line and stepped back up to the cockpit, because the cabin was too quiet and the dock was the right kind of loud, with the marina drying out around him and the captains on Pier One starting their morning coffee and the halyards doing the soft slow tap of a marina that had survived a fifty-knot wind.
Caleb picked up inside one ring.
“Vale.”
“Caleb.”
“You’re alive.”
“I’m alive.”
“You wet?”
“I was. I’m drying. What’ve you got?”
A small pause. Caleb was at his desk, pulling something up on a screen. Ethan could hear the soft tap of a keyboard on the other end, which was Caleb collecting his sentence before he said it.
“Doyle took her out at three fifty-seven this morning.”
Ethan didn’t move.
The wind had dropped to ten knots, and the rain had eased to drift, and the cockpit deck was warm under his hand on the gunwale, and Catherine was below on her houseboat making her second pot of coffee, and the man on the other end of the encrypted line had just told him the Bertram had moved through the worst hour of the storm.
“Three fifty-seven.”
“AIS shows her off the cleats at three fifty-seven. She ran due west for fifty-two minutes at twenty-three knots, slowed to four for fourteen minutes, then turned around and ran back at twenty-six. Back on her cleats at six thirty-eight.”
“Six thirty-eight.”
Ten minutes after he and Sloane noticed the Bertram was still out.
Ethan looked across at Pier Two. The Bertram was on her cleats now. He could see the bow from the cockpit if he leaned half a step to the left, which he didn’t do, because a man on Pier Three leaning to look at Pier Two at six fifty-three on a Thursday morning was a man making an unforced error.
“Where did he stop?”
“Forty-one nautical miles offshore. Open water. No fixed structure within twenty miles.”
“He met somebody.”
“I assume. Whoever he met ran without an AIS.”
“Yes, and there’s no satellite pass on a thirty-foot vessel in fifty knots of wind and rain. The transfer happened in the storm. The storm was the cover.”
Ethan let that sit. He took the count of three breaths and let the sentence settle into the place where it was going to live.
“Fourteen minutes at four knots.”
“Long enough to bring a boat alongside, transfer cargo or people, push off.”
“Cargo or people.”
“The Bertram’s a forty-footer and she’s not built for either at speed, but she’ll carry small loads short distances if a man knows what he’s doing. Doyle was a Navy boatswain. He knows what he’s doing.”
“How long has he been doing this?”
“We don’t know yet. The AIS history goes back twenty-eight days. Three runs in that window, all in heavy weather, all between midnight and four. We’re pulling the prior twelve months from the federal data warehouse this morning. I’ll have it by tonight.”
“Okay”
“Vale.”
“Yeah.”
“Does she know the boat wasn't there?”
“She knows. She saw the empty slip with me at four thirty-six during the storm. She saw it again with me at six twenty-eight when we walked the dock together. The second time we stood at the head of the slip for a beat.”
“Where was she when he came in?”
“She left me at six thirty. She said she was going to walk the rest of the dock by herself. The Bertram came in eight minutes later.”
“So she saw him come in?”
“Probably. Pier Two was clear and she was on it. The angles work.”
“Did she help him tie off?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll know more this afternoon.”
“Vale.”
“Yeah.”
“If she helped him tie off, she got a story off him. She’s smart enough to have asked the question a marina owner would ask. He’s smart enough to have had an answer ready.”
“I know.”
“Which means she’s now carrying a lie she heard on her own dock without anybody helping her hear it.”
“I know that too.”
“Does she know what it means?”
“She knows the math. She doesn’t have the AIS.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her the boat wasn’t there. I didn’t tell her about the AIS. She said she’s asking me later.”
“When is later?”
“This afternoon. Her words.”
A second pause. The second pause was Caleb deciding how much rope to give him.
“How much are you going to tell her?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Vale.”
“Caleb.”
“If you tell her you’re federal, we lose the op.”
“I know.”
“If you tell her you’re after Doyle Pruitt, we lose Doyle.”
“I know.”
“If you don’t tell her enough to keep her on the dock today instead of on the phone with a deputy, we lose her, which means we lose the marina, which means we lose the entire front of the file.”
“I know that too.”
“Then know it harder. Find the middle.”
“I’ll find the middle.”
“Sleep first if you can. You’re not going to be sharp this afternoon if you don’t.”
“Roger that.”
The line went dead.
Ethan set the phone face-down on the engine cover and stood at the gunwale and looked across at Pier Two.
The Bertram on her cleats, coiled lines tight and clockwise, the wash of the storm still drying off the transom.
A man had taken that boat out at three fifty-seven this morning into a fifty-knot wind, run her west fifty-two minutes at twenty-three knots, stopped for fourteen minutes in open water forty-one miles offshore, and run her back at twenty-six knots to be on her cleats at six thirty-eight.
Eight minutes after Sloane had left Ethan at the head of slip nine and walked back down Pier Two alone.
He thought about the eight minutes.
Sloane would have heard the engines coming in from the east. She would have seen the Bertram come around the channel marker and she would have seen who was at the wheel, and she would have done whatever a marina owner did when a tenant brought a boat in after a storm, which was probably help him tie off, because that was what Sloane did.
And Doyle would have told her something.
He’d find out at five-thirty.
Or earlier, if she came out to the fuel dock and he made himself useful and she let him be useful.
That was the question of the afternoon.
He slept for ninety minutes.
He set the alarm for eight thirty and was up by eight-thirty-three, head clear, and his body sore.
He drank coffee at the dinette and ate the remainder of last night’s casserole standing up, because it was there and the calories were needed, and at nine-fifteen he walked across the parking lot to the bait shop.
Doyle Pruitt was at the counter.
Roy was behind it with a clipboard. Doyle had his back to the door and didn’t see Ethan come in.
He had on a clean polo and dry jeans and the kind of yellow rubber boots a man wore on a working dock, and his hair was wet at the back where he’d showered, and he was leaning on the counter with both elbows the way he leaned on Sloane’s counter, and he was being short with Roy.
“I don’t care if you’re out. Order more.”
“I’ve got an order in. Friday.”
“Friday’s no good.”
“Friday’s the order, Doyle. I can’t pull bait from the air.”
“Then call Sammy at Apalachicola and get him to drive some down.”
“Sammy’s not driving down today. Storm’s tearing up I-10 east of here.”
Doyle straightened. He turned around and saw Ethan in the doorway, and his face did the small reset, and the reset was visible at the edge of his mouth and at the muscle along his jaw, and Ethan watched the reset land without doing anything with it on his own face.
“Vale.”
“Doyle. Tough morning?”
“Tough enough.”
“I came up around four-fifteen to help Sloane secure the dock. The Whaler in slip ten came off her line. Your slip nine was empty when we walked past.”
Ethan said it without weight, the casual marina-news tone of a man on Pier Three saying a piece of news to a man on Pier Two on a Thursday morning after a storm.
He watched Doyle take the sentence in. Doyle’s eyes moved once — a quarter-second move, no more — to the door behind Ethan and back, and Doyle’s right hand settled on the counter beside his elbow with the small careful settle of a man who had been a Navy boatswain and was thinking about what to say next.
“Yeah. Yeah, I had her out yesterday afternoon for a shakedown after the engine work. Couldn’t get her back in before dark. Tied her up at a friend’s slip up the channel for the night.”
“Slept on her?”
“Slept at the friend’s. Came back this morning early to bring her in before the wind hit.”
“Cut it close.”
“That I did.”
Roy was watching this from the counter. He didn’t say anything. Roy had not been saying anything at the counter of his bait shop since 2003 and was good at it.
“Anyway,” Doyle said. “Thanks for helping her out. She doesn’t ask for help, and she doesn’t take it when it’s offered, so I’m surprised she let you on the dock at all.”
“She didn’t let me on the dock. I came up because I saw the radar.”
“Saw the radar?”
“I sleep light, and the radar pinged.”
“Ah.”
Doyle tipped two fingers at his invisible hat brim and went around Ethan to the door. The bell rang. He was across the parking lot to his truck inside fifteen seconds and gone.
Roy set the clipboard down.
“Coffee?”
“Please.”
Roy poured him a paper cup of the bad coffee Roy kept on the back burner all day. Ethan took it. He paid for a pack of gum he didn’t need, a tin of mints he didn’t need either. Roy gave him his change without counting it.
“Vale.”
“Yeah.”
“Doyle Pruitt doesn’t have a friend with a slip up the channel.”
Ethan looked at him.