"Let me go," Branko was saying, choking, "let me go to him, let me go—"
"No," Duncan said into his ear. "No. I handed him the light. I'm not handing you anything."
Then there was the line around them both, and Sig's hands, and the side of the skiff, and the deck under him, and far off, coming in from the gate with her blue light flashing, the Coast Guard forty-four-footer from Station Los Angeles–Long Beach, too late to do anything but follow them home.
He had two cracked ribs and a scalp cut that took eleven stitches at San Pedro Peninsula Hospital, and he would not lie down. He sat on a gurney at one in the morning in a blanket, and in the next curtained bay he could hear Vesna Perovich crying, not loudly, the way she had been crying for eight months, and Branko's voice under it, low, in Croatian.
After a while the curtain moved and Branko was standing there.
He was in a hospital gown with a blanket over his shoulders and a bandage on one hand. His face was gray and very old. He looked at Duncan, and Duncan looked back at him, and neither of them said anything for a long time.
"You should have let me," Branko said.
"No."
Branko nodded, slowly, as if that were the answer he had expected. He looked at the floor.
"Wednesday," he said. "You're going to tell them."
"Yes. Everything. The ports and the alarm and the hatch and one more set." Duncan swallowed. "And me. That I helped with the plates. That I didn't refuse. That I handed him the light. All of it."