"An hour ago, maybe. From the Twenty-second Street landing."
Duncan told her to stay by the phone and call the Coast Guard back and tell them it was a sixteen-foot aluminum Lund with a twenty-five-horse Evinrude, headed for the wreck buoy on the Santa Rosalia, four miles outside the breakwater. He hung up. Sig was standing in the kitchen doorway, drying his hands.
"Branko Perovich," Duncan said. "In a skiff. In this."
Sig didn't ask a single question. He took off the apron and folded it and laid it on the counter. "Who's got a boat," he said, "with a searchlight and a radio and an engine, that'll be tied up at Fish Harbor tonight?"
Duncan thought of exactly one.
They took the Datsun across the Vincent Thomas Bridge at sixty with the wind trying to put them into the next lane, the whole harbor below them in the rain, the container cranes swinging their red lights, the channel streaked white. Duncan skidded onto the fish dock in front of the Marija. There was a light in her wheelhouse. Zoran Bakota had been sleeping aboard all weekend, the way skippers did in a blow.
Zoran came out on deck in his oilskins, squinting into the headlights. Duncan told him. Zoran stood in the rain looking at him, and then he turned and bellowed down the companionway for Jure, and in two minutes the big Caterpillar diesel was turning over, rough and cold, and Jure was throwing off the lines.
Zoran looked at Sig, standing on the dock in his pea coat.
"Who is this?"
"He's a navigator," Duncan said. "He's the best one you'll ever meet."
Zoran looked at the old man another moment, and then he jerked his head, and Sig went up the side of the Marija like a man thirty years younger and into the wheelhouse.