The woman lowered the phone from her ear. "I'm sorry?"
"Was it Beau? Or Tommy? Tommy Bui? He get his cousin to find you?" He was smiling now. He held her card up between two fingers and waggled it. "This is good. This is real good. Where'd you get this, they make these online? It's a good fake. I mean that. Better than the badge."
"Sir." She said it slowly. "I don't know who Beau or Tommy is. That is a real federal credential, and I need it back, and I need you to open this gate. The ship I'm supposed to pilot is at Berth Four with a sixty-knot squall about fifteen minutes away, and if I'm not on her bridge before it hits..."
"A harbor pilot," Wade said. He laughed. He could not help it. It just came out of him, a short, hard bark of a laugh, and once it was out he could not put it back. "Lady, you know what those guys make? Those are the best jobs on the whole coast. It's a closed club. You got to be somebody's son, near about. You got to have, I don't know, twenty years on ships. You expect me to believe they handed one of those to..." He stopped, but not soon enough. He waved his hand at her, at the car, at the scarf. "To you? Come on. Come on now. You're a joke. This whole thing's a joke. Tell Beau he got me for about thirty seconds."
There was a silence in which he could hear the window air conditioner rattling behind him and, very faintly, far away to the southwest, the first low roll of thunder.
The woman looked at him. She did not look hurt, exactly, and she did not look angry, exactly. She looked at him the way he imagined a doctor might look at an X-ray, like she was seeing all the way through to something and making a note of it.
"I'm going to tell you some things," she said, "and I want you to remember that I told you before your radio does. The ship is the Corvina Star, flagged in Panama, a pure car and truck carrier, two hundred meters long. The master is Captain Reynaldo Bautista. She has twelve lines out, and her forward breast lines are already working, because the wind is going to come off the land and she's high-sided and nearly empty. Your terminal's line crew is on the dock at Berth Four, waiting to let her go, and they're standing within the snap-back zone of those lines whether they know it or not. The tugs are the Evangeline and the Bayou Rose, coming up from the lower basin. The plan was to have her off the dock by six fifty-five. It is now," she glanced at her dashboard, "six forty-nine. In a few minutes, somebody from your ops is going to come on your radio and ask if I'm at your gate. When they do, I'd like you to remember that I told you."
She held out her hand, palm up, for the card.
Wade did not give it to her. Something cold had started at the back of his neck and was moving down between his shoulder blades. He knew it was the weather. It had to be the weather. He looked down at the radio clipped to his belt, a black Motorola handheld with a stubby antenna, its little green light blinking steadily, silent. The line crew was on that channel. Twyla Guidry in ops was on that channel. Beau was on that channel.
"You could have got all that off the ship schedule," he said. But his voice came out smaller than he meant it to.