Page 21 of Presumed Dead

“I see that.” George’s eyes came back to him. They were friendly eyes, faded by twenty years of Gulf sun, and they were also the eyes of a man who’d been reading people on a dock for two decades and had stopped pretending he wasn’t. “What’d you do before this?”

“Logistics. Jacksonville.”

“Logistics is a word a man uses when he doesn’t want to say what he did.”

“It is.” Ethan let the smile come up. “Freight forwarding. Port operations. The kind of job a man retires from and then never wants to talk about again.”

“Fair enough.” George took a swallow of his coffee. “You looking for advice on her, or you got it covered?”

“I’m looking for advice on her.”

“All right.”

And George started talking. Ethan had been on the receiving end of charter-captain advice before, and he knew the rhythm of it, which was that you let it come and you didn’t interrupt and you laughed at the right places and you let the man feel like he was telling you a thing nobody else would have thought to tell you, because some of it he was. George ran through the previous owner first — Don Bickford had loved the boat, Don’s widow Edna had wanted out of the slip fees, Don’s engine had blown the starboard manifold in two thousand twenty-one and was rebuilt by a man named Tully in Apalachicola who was the only marine mechanic in the panhandle worth driving to. George ran through the dock next — Sloane Mercer ran the marina the way her father had run it before he died, which was tight, fair, and without sentiment, and you’d learn fast that what she said was what she meant, and you’d also learn that she ran the cleanest dock between here and Tampa and you should be glad you’d landed on it. He ran through the weather next — a thunderstorm cycle that came in from the southwest in May and you wanted your canvas down before the wind came, the hurricane in 2017 that he’d ridden out tied to the rip-rap behind Pier Two with four extra lines and a prayer, the cold snap two Januaries ago that had cracked three engine blocks at this marina alone.

Ethan listened. He laughed once at the prayer line. He asked one question about the rebuild in Apalachicola and one about the cold snap. Both questions were the questions of a man who was paying attention, which was what George wanted, and George kept going.

“One more thing.” George tipped the coffee toward Pier Two. “Doyle Pruitt. Slip nine. Bertram. Don’t lend him anything.”

“Why not?”

“Because you won’t get it back. He’s been here five years, and he’s borrowed a sander, a pressure washer, and a half-tank of diesel off three different men and given back none of it.”

“Noted.”

“Friendly enough at the counter. Polite to Sloane. But the kind of polite that doesn’t mean anything. You’ll figure him out.”

“I’ll figure him out.”

George took a last swallow of his coffee. He looked at the toe rail again. The Rays cap came off and went on again.

“Glad you’re here, Vale.”

“Glad to be here.”

George stepped off the swim platform onto the dock and went back up Pier Three the way he’d come, and Ethan watched him go for half a beat and then went back to the rail. The sander started up under his hand. The marina kept being a marina.

Don’t lend him anything went into the back of the notebook later, when the sander was off, and George was three slips away across the channel doing whatever he did at ten in the morning. The fact that George Halsey had brought up Doyle Pruitt without being asked was its own data, and the data was already paying out, and the day wasn’t even half over.

The sandwich place was where Sloane had told him it would be, and they had the turkey.

He paid cash. Walked back the three blocks at a pace that didn’t look like he was in a hurry to get back to the marina, because a man on his first afternoon in town had no reason to be in a hurry to get back to the marina, and Ethan Vale had spent thirteen years building a face that matched what a man on his first afternoon in town was supposed to look like.

He stopped at the bait shop counter on the way past, because the bait shop was where the marina news lived and because the man behind the counter, a thin man in his sixties with a Vietnam Veteran cap, had been there at six fifteen this morning and was still there now. Ethan bought a tin of Altoids he didn’t need and said his name and shook the man’s hand. The man’s name was Roy. Roy didn’t say much. Ethan didn’t push. He’d be back tomorrow, and Roy would say a little more, and the day after that a little more, and by Friday Roy would be the kind of source who told him something without being asked, the way George Halsey already was.

He went down Pier Three with the sandwich bag in one hand and the Altoids in the other, and the morning paying out behind him.

At the head of the slip he glanced across the channel. The older woman on the houseboat was still on her deck. Paperback was open on her lap. She lifted the mug an inch. He lifted the bag.

She smiled.

He went aboard.

Lunch happened on the swim platform with the engine cover for a table. Turkey, wheat, mustard, lettuce, a slice of tomato sliced thin enough to suggest the person slicing it cared about something the rest of the operation didn’t yet pay them for. He let himself be like the tomato. There were going to be many small things over the next eight weeks he’d need to register and not allow himself to like, and a tomato in a Florida sandwich shop he could allow.

He ate slowly. He watched Pier Two without looking at Pier Two, which was something he’d been doing for nineteen years and which any working captain who happened to glance across the channel would see only as a man eating a sandwich on his swim platform.

Doyle Pruitt’s slip nine sat empty. The Bertram was on her cleats. Nobody had come down Pier Two yet today.