Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Sloane closed the daybook at five twenty-four and put the pen across the center seam.
She’d been closing the daybook at six o’clock most nights since her father died. Tonight she’d closed it at five twenty-four because the man who’d told her this afternoon he’d be at her office at five-thirty was a man she had no intention of meeting across an open daybook.
She wiped the coffee pot, moved the till to the safe, and unlocked the side door — he’d come in the side door this morning, and the side door was the door she’d unlocked for him without having to say so — and she left it cracked the inch he’d need to push it open without knocking.
Then she sat down on the stool behind the front counter and put both hands flat on the wood and waited.
The kiosk light was on. The marina outside was quiet at five twenty-five, with the captains on Pier One done with their afternoon and most of the boats at canvas, and the sun moving down toward the Gulf at the slow gold angle of a late May afternoon, and somewhere on Pier Two Catherine was on her deck with her paperback and the sun in her face.
Sloane had been holding the lie in her head and her notebook for ten hours and forty-seven minutes.
She’d put her notebook on the shelf at six forty-one this morning and she hadn’t taken it off.
She’d worked through the morning, eaten crackers at her counter at noon, and set a new cleat at slip ten by herself this afternoon with a man she’d been thinking about since six thirty-two on Tuesday morning bringing her a cup of coffee at two-forty.
The lie had stayed on her mind through all of it.
She was going to get it out of her head in about ninety seconds.
The side door opened at five twenty-six.
Ethan came in with a folded page in his back pocket and a clean shirt on and his hair combed back from his face, and he closed the side door behind him with a careful quiet, and he stopped at the front of the counter.
He didn’t sit. There was a stool on his side. He didn’t take it.
“Hey.”
“Hi.”
“I’m going to give you the answer. Then I’m going to stop talking and let you ask whatever you want to ask.”
“Okay.”
“I’m a special operative.”
Sloane didn’t move.
“I’ve been on a maritime investigation for eight months. The marina is on the route. Doyle Pruitt is a person of interest. He isn’t the principal. There’s a network, and the network runs transport through here, but also in other ways outside of here. This is one part of it.”
She felt the words land.
Her chest felt heavy and her heart beat faster. At first her mind was blank, absorbing the news. She had felt on some level he wasn't who he said he was. She didn't expect this.
She kept her face still.
“Go on.”
“I can’t name the principal yet. We’ll be there in two or three weeks. There’s a piece of the file I can’t share with you for those two weeks. The piece isn’t about your marina and isn’t about Doyle, and I’ll give it to you when I can.”
She watched his face.
Whatever the piece was, it was sitting in his face as the lie was sitting in hers, and she could see the weight of it.
She didn’t ask. He’d told her there was a piece he couldn’t give her, and the not-asking was the first thing she could give him back.
But she wanted to. Her heart beat so hard she wondered if he could see her body move with every beat.
Her breathing was hard to even out. Through it all, she managed to say, “Go on.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. The sooner was a calculation. The calculation was operationally correct and personally wrong, and I know those two things are going to live separately in your head for a while, and I’ll earn back what I can earn back.”
He stopped.
She let the silence sit between them on the counter.
She searched his eyes for truth. He continued to hold her stare without blinking or looking away and she gave him credit for that.
If he'd been lying, he wouldn't have done that.
She knew that much about people. When they lied to you, their eyes shifted and refused to look at you.
Special operative. What did that even mean?
Eight months. Doyle. A network.
She turned each piece over slowly, looking for something underneath.
The marina was on the route. That meant Doyle had been running the route through her dock.
That meant the diesel she’d sold him on Wednesday morning had been diesel she’d sold to a man running cargo for a network in heavy weather.
That meant her father’s dock — the dock her father had built up from hard work and dedication — was operational geography for something ugly and illegal.
She put her hands flat on the counter. It was the steadiest thing close to her. She needed its strength right now.
"Sloane?"
“Give me a minute, Ethan.”
“Take it.”
She took two of them. She breathed in and out through her nose at the steady tempo her father had taught her when an obstinate tenant was waiting on her.
She lifted her hands off the counter and looked at him.
“Doyle came in at six thirty-eight this morning.”
Ethan didn’t move. He continued eye contact.
Whatever he’d been bracing for, it wasn’t this. She watched it land. She saw the small, specific tightening at the corner of his mouth that meant his teeth had just come together once and released, and his right hand on the counter went still.
“Go on.”
“I was on Pier Two. I’d walked the rest of the dock after you went back to the boat. The Bertram came around the channel marker at six thirty-six. I walked back to slip nine. He came in alone, and I took the bow line he tossed me.”
“You helped him tie off.”
“I helped him tie off. I asked him where he’d been. He told me he’d taken her out yesterday afternoon for a shakedown after the engine work, couldn’t get her back in before dark, and tied her up at a friend’s slip up the channel for the night.”
He continued to wait, his eyes not leaving hers.
“What did you say to him?”
“I said it was a long night. He said it was. I said I was glad he made it in. He said he was glad to be in. I invited him up for coffee at the office in ten minutes.”
“Did he come up?”
“No. I made the coffee. He didn’t come. I knew he wouldn’t.”
“Why did you invite him?”
“Because I’d have invited anybody who came in at six thirty-eight after a fifty-knot storm. The not-inviting would have been the thing he noticed.”
Ethan let a small, slow breath out. She saw it, though it seemed he tried to hide it.
“Sloane.”
“Yes.”
“He gave me the same story at the bait shop this morning. Shakedown after engine work. Friend’s slip up the channel. Word for word.”
She heard that.
She’d known there was no friend with a slip up the channel the moment Doyle had said it to her.
Now Ethan was telling her Doyle had given him the same lie later, and the same lie told twice to two different people on the same day was a lie a man had prepared in advance, and a man who prepared his lies in advance was a man who’d had reason to think both his marina owner and his marina neighbor were going to ask him where he’d been.
Doyle suspected people were watching.
“Ethan.”
“Yes.”
“Has he been watching me?”
“He’s been watching the marina. You’re part of the marina. So, yes.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know exactly. The AIS history we have goes back twenty-eight days. The full pull from the federal data warehouse comes tonight. I’ll know more in the morning.”
“AIS.”
“Automatic Identification System. Vessels over a certain size carry transponders. We see where they go.”
“So you know where he went?”
“We know exactly where he went. He left your slip at three fifty-seven this morning, ran due west for fifty-two minutes at twenty-three knots. He stopped for fourteen minutes in open water forty-one nautical miles offshore, and ran back at twenty-six knots and was on his cleats at six thirty-eight.”
Sloane heard that.
She did the math without doing it on purpose.
She’d been on her dock at four-twenty-six.
She’d walked Pier Two at four thirty-six and looked at his empty slip and had not known he was already an hour out into the Gulf at twenty-three knots in a fifty-knot wind.
She’d walked it again at six twenty-eight and stood at the head of slip nine.
She’d been on the dock the whole time.
The dock she’d been running for years had been the operational geography for a federal investigation for eight months and she hadn’t known.
Her hands on the counter were still. Questions bombarded her brain.
“What was he carrying?”
“We don’t know yet. Cargo or people. The Bertram will carry small loads short distances if the man at the helm knows what he’s doing, and Doyle was a Navy boatswain.”
“People.”
“Possibly.”
She closed her eyes. Her chest hurt. Tears threatened to flood from her eyes. When she opened her eyes, Ethan was looking at her with the careful, steady look of a man who had brought this sentence into her office and was now waiting for her to do with it whatever she was going to do with it.
She swallowed to wet her throat and to give herself just a bit more time. “Ethan.”
“Yes.”
“The piece you can’t give me for two weeks.”
“Yes.”
“Is it about people?”
He took two breaths.
“It’s about a person.”
“All right.”
“Sloane.”
“I’m not asking.”
“I know you’re not.”
“I’ll wait the two weeks. But right now, I want you to know, I had no idea any of this was going on. I'm not part of it.”
"We know you aren't."
"We?"
He nodded. Once. Slowly. "I'm part of a team."
She nodded slowly as the information began to settle in her head.
"A team." She said it softly, testing it out for herself.
"A team of special agents has been watching my marina for illegal activity that may or may not involve the trafficking of people for eight months, and a captain who rents a slip from me is likely involved.
Anyone else here I need to be made aware of? "
His voice was softer than before, the formal edge now removed. "No."