"You got registration for it?"
"In the truck."
"Go ahead and get it for me. Slowly." He heard himself say slowly the way they said it in training, and he heard himself say the whole thing a little louder than he needed to, the words spaced out, the way you talk to someone across a parking lot, or someone you have already decided does not quite understand you.
The old man walked to the cab, opened the door, reached into the visor, and came back with a laminated card and a folded paper in a plastic sleeve. He handed them over without a word.
Wade put his flashlight on them. Alabama boat registration. TRAN VAN HIEU, 14 Shell Road, Bayou Clement. The hull number had a run of characters and then a year. He couldn't make out the year; the laminate had gone cloudy and cracked across that corner, the way laminate does after it lives in a hot truck for twenty summers.
He walked the length of the trailer. The bow numbers on the hull had peeled; there were ghosts of letters where the vinyl had been. The motor was a Yamaha. It was a ninety. The stripe, in that brown and amber light, was the deep, flat blue of a pair of new work pants.
Wade had felt this before, once or twice in Mobile, the little click when a thing lines up. It felt like competence. It felt like the reason he had put the uniform on in the first place. He thumbed the radio clipped to his shoulder.
"Unit Four to dispatch."
The old man set the bow line down on the trailer fender. Then he folded his arms across his chest, not hard, not angry, the way a man folds his arms waiting for a kettle, and he said, in an English as plain and unhurried as the morning, "You want to check the color twice?"
Wade kept his thumb on the button. "Sir?"
"The color." Mr. Tran tipped his head toward the hull. "Your paper says navy. You are standing under a sodium light. Sodium light is all one color. Yellow. Everything under it is yellow or brown or blue or black. Green looks blue. Red looks brown. Your wife's car looks like your car." He unfolded one arm long enough to point at the lamp, then folded it again. "You want to know what color is my stripe, you have to wait for the sun, or you use a better flashlight than that one."
"This flashlight's fine."
"Your flashlight is LED, very cheap, very blue. Makes it worse. Here." He reached slowly, theatrically slowly, into the pouch of his sweatshirt, and Wade's hand drifted toward his belt before he could stop it. What came out was an old flashlight, heavy, chrome dull with age, with an incandescent bulb that threw a warm and honest circle. Mr. Tran held it out, handle first.
"Dispatch, go ahead, Four," said the radio. Roxanne Bergeron, who had worked the overnight desk since Wade was in diapers and who said go ahead the way other women said bless your heart.