Shell Road ran along the east side of the bayou where the pavement gave up and became crushed oyster shell, white and loud under the tires. The houses there sat high on pilings, each with its own dock reaching out into the brown water like a hand held out for something. Number fourteen was a small green-trimmed house with a tin roof, a vegetable garden fenced against raccoons with chicken wire and old crab trap mesh, and a long workshop shed set back under a live oak. The white skiff was tied at the dock. Even from the road, in the four o'clock sun, the stripe was so obviously green that Wade felt his face warm just looking at it.
He parked on the shell and got out without his hat. He'd thought about that on the way over: whether to wear the hat. He'd thought about whether to come in uniform at all, and had decided that coming out of uniform would look like hiding, and then had changed his mind twice, and now here he was in uniform with no hat, which looked like nothing so much as a man who couldn't make up his mind.
Mr. Tran was on the dock, sitting on an overturned bucket with a crab trap across his knees, cutting away a torn panel of wire with a pair of side cutters. The boy, Danny, was beside him on another bucket, cleaning out a cooler with a hose. A woman about Mr. Tran's age, in a wide straw hat and gardening gloves, knelt in the garden among the tomato stakes. She saw Wade first. She stood up, looked at him for a long, level moment, and then went inside the house without a word. The screen door slapped shut behind her.
"Mr. Tran," Wade said, at the head of the dock.
"Officer."
"You got a minute?"
Mr. Tran snipped a wire. "I have a lot of minutes. I am retired. Mostly."
Wade walked out onto the dock. The boards were gray and sound and ran perfectly level, every nail set flush. He stood beside the skiff and did not look at the stripe.
"I wanted to come by," he said, "and clear the air about this morning."
"The air is clear." Mr. Tran held the trap up to the light, examined the hole, and set it back on his knees. "Very nice day."
"I mean I wanted to explain. We got a call. A specific call, about a specific boat at a specific place. I had a duty to follow up. And the vessel was a near match on the description—size, motor, color under the conditions—so I acted on that. I want you to understand it wasn't personal."
Danny turned the hose off. In the quiet, Wade heard how the words had sounded. He'd rehearsed them in the car, and in the car they had sounded reasonable, professional, even generous. Out here, on this level dock, they sounded like what they were.
Mr. Tran put down the side cutters.
"You came here," he said, "so I can tell you it's okay."