Page 158 of Shatter

Ulf is trying to teach Sigurd to say motorcycle, and Sigurd is trying to eat his beard.

I'm on a barstool at the far end of the bar with a Coke and my laptop closed in front of me.

The stool beside me creaks, and I look over.

Aren sits there, his big shoulders hunched, his forearms flat on the bar on either side of a beer he hasn't touched.

He doesn't look at me.

He's barely said ten words to me in six months.

In the freezer hallway at Sawgrass Point, when Hakon carried me out, Aren was the one who held the door.

He didn't say anything then, either.

"Hey." I turn on my stool to face him.

He nods.

He turns the beer bottle a quarter turn on the bar.

Then another.

"Question." His voice is low and rough, like he doesn't use it enough. "About money."

I wait.

"A seafood company." He keeps his eyes on the bottle. "Say it's washing money. Not the reefers. Something else. Something that'd still be running after the reefers stopped."

The hair on my arms lifts.

"How would it hide it?" He finally looks at me, his dark eyes flat and steady and giving away nothing at all. "If you were doing its books."

I look at him for a long moment.

Sawgrass Point is still open.

I know because I checked, the same way I check on Signe Solheim, late at night, when nobody's watching.

The Desmond money's gone, and the reefers stopped rolling in the week after Apalachicola.

But Lyle Pruitt's name is still on the business license.

Nobody's seen Lyle Pruitt since the day his red truck left a trail of dust down the shell road.

"Cash." The word comes out slow. "Seafood's a cash business. Boats come in and buyers pay on the dock, no receipts. You inflate the catch on paper. Say you bought ten thousand pounds of shrimp when you really bought four. The extra six thousand pounds is where the dirty money goes in."

Aren doesn't move.

"And fuel." I turn my glass on the bar. "Boats burn diesel. Nobody can prove how much. You overbill the fuel, and you've got a second pipe. Someone good could run both for years before anybody noticed."

"Someone good." He says it low. "Like a bookkeeper."

"Like a bookkeeper." I hold his eyes. "Aren. Is this about the woman in the window?"

He goes very still.

It's the stillness I know from the inside, an animal in tall grass when something moves nearby.