Page 45 of Presumed Dead

“It was a long night.”

“Glad you made it in.”

“Glad to be in.”

Doyle stepped off the side deck onto the planking and the Bertram rocked once and steadied, and he looked at her for a half-second longer than a man looked at a marina owner he’d known five years, and what was in the half-second was the small careful calculation of a man trying to read whether the marina owner who’d just helped him tie off was the marina owner he thought she was.

She gave him nothing.

She’d been giving men at her dock nothing for fifteen years, and the giving-them-nothing was a face her father had taught her, and her face today was that face.

“I’m going up to start the coffee,” she said. “There’ll be some at the office in about ten minutes if you want it.”

“Thanks, Sloane.”

“Welcome.”

She walked back up Pier Two.

She didn’t look back at slip nine until she’d reached the head of the boardwalk, and when she looked back, Doyle was on his transom with a coil of dock line in his hand, looking up the pier at her with the same half-second calculation in his face, and she pretended not to see him looking. She turned at the kiosk, crossed to the office side door, and went in.

The kiosk light came on at six forty-one.

She stood at the back counter with both hands flat on the wood and didn’t move for a full minute.

There was no friend with a slip up the channel.

She’d known there wasn’t a friend with a slip up the channel the moment Doyle had said it, because Doyle Pruitt didn’t have a friend on this part of the coast who’d let him on their dock for the night, because Doyle Pruitt didn’t have friends. He had a marina owner who took his money and a bait-shop owner who sold him gear and a marina tenant or two who tolerated him at the counter, and none of them would have given him a slip in a storm. He’d been somewhere yesterday afternoon, somewhere overnight, and he’d come back this morning in the kind of weather a man only ran a boat through if he had a reason to, and the reason wasn’t the friend with the slip.

She added the lie to the shelf behind the insurance certificates.

The shelf was full now.

She made the coffee.

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?”