Beau waited.
"I thought it was you," Wade said. "I thought you boys put her up to it. Like the chicken suit. Like the badge. A lady pilot in one of those scarves, in a little red car, with a storm coming. I thought it was the funniest prank you'd ever pulled, and I thought I'd caught it. I told her so. I told her she was a joke." He heard himself say it out loud to his son and he wanted to crawl under the counter. "I said it right to her face."
Beau stared at him.
"You thought I'd do that?" he said. His voice had gone very quiet. "You thought we'd go find some lady because of what she wears and use her to mess with you? Like she's a chicken suit?" He shook his head slowly. "Daddy, the chicken suit was Tommy's cousin. He's our friend. He was in on it. That's not..." He stopped and started over. "She's done Berth Four before. Twice since I been on the gang. Alcide said she's the best they got at a bad undock, the guys all say it, they say if it's blowing they want Mansour. I never talked to her. I just seen her up on the bridge wing, the little lady in the hard hat with the scarf under it. I didn't know she was a pilot, the first time. I figured she was, like, company, from the owner's office or something. Alcide told me." He wiped his face with his wet sleeve, which did nothing. "I figured wrong, too. I just didn't say it out loud to her."
"No," Wade said. "You didn't."
Beau put the truck in gear. Then he didn't go. He sat there with his foot on the brake. "What are you going to do?"
Wade looked past the truck, down the long lane between the storage lots, toward the berths, where Berth Four sat empty now under its lights with a broken light pole lying across it and the black water slopping against the fenders, and beyond it, out in the channel, invisible in the drizzle, a ship was holding head to wind with a woman on its bridge whose name he had learned from a plastic card he'd refused to give back.
"I'm going to finish my shift," he said. "And then I don't know."
Out on the channel, at eight-fifteen, with the squall line gone rumbling off to the northeast over Louisiana and its lightning still flickering silently on the horizon, the Corvina Star was turned in the basin with the help of both tugs and pointed downstream, toward the Gulf, and Captain Bautista, who had gotten his coffee made and drunk and had made a second cup for the pilot, came and stood beside Rania at the console.