Page 48 of Presumed 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.