"I'll call it in," he said, and slid the window closed in her face, and sat back down on the stool.
He picked up the shack phone and dialed Sentinel's night line. It rang eight times and went to a recording that said all supervisors were assisting other customers and to leave a message. He hung up. He dialed Fuselier's cell. It rang four times and went to voicemail. Fuselier was probably at the refinery gate across the channel, where Sentinel had another contract, dealing with the same storm. Wade left a message: "Ernest, it's Wade at Gulfline Two, I got a lady here in a, in a headscarf says she's a harbor pilot, TWIC reader's still down, I can't verify the card, call me back." He hung up again.
He could call Gulfline ops. That was what the procedure said. But ops tonight was Twyla Guidry, who had been a dispatcher on the docks back when Wade was a longshoreman and who had never, in Wade's opinion, liked him much, and who, the day after the crane thing, had walked past his shack and looked at him through the window with an expression he could not stop thinking about, a sort of disappointed pity, like you'd look at a dog that had gotten into the trash. He did not want to call Twyla and say, I don't know if this is real. He wanted to call Twyla and say, I stopped somebody.
He looked through the glass at the woman in the red Honda. She was holding her phone up to her ear, talking to somebody, and looking at her dashboard clock, and then looking past the shack toward the berths. She did not look scared, which bothered him. People who were lying got scared when you made them wait. Or they got loud. She was neither. She looked like she was waiting for a train.
And then a thought came to him, and it was such a relief, such a clean, clear, simple explanation, that he almost laughed out loud.
Beau.
Beau and the line crew. Beau and Dusty Arceneaux and that big Vietnamese kid, Tommy Bui, who did the stern lines. They had been riding him for three weeks about the crane guy. They called him Officer Toups. They called him the Gatekeeper of Gate Two. Last Thursday somebody had left a plastic toy sheriff's badge on the counter of his shack with a sticky note that said FOR WHEN THE POPE COMES. A week before that, around two in the morning, a man in an enormous foam chicken costume had pulled up to his arm in a pickup and said he was a federal poultry inspector here to check the frozen chicken containers on Berth Seven, and had kept a straight face for almost a full minute before he broke, and Wade had found out later it was Tommy Bui's cousin, and the whole line crew had laughed about it for days.
A woman harbor pilot. In a Muslim scarf. In a red Honda. With a storm coming. On the night his son was working Berth Four. It was exactly the kind of thing those boys would think was hilarious. It was the chicken suit all over again. It was a test, to see whether Officer Toups would wave through the Pope.
He slid the window open again. He felt better now. He felt like a man who had seen the trick.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. Who put you up to this?"