* * *
At ten minutes to five the next morning, the public ramp at Bayou Clement looked like a stage nobody had bothered to light properly. Officer Wade Pruitt sat in the cruiser with the window down and a cup of coffee from Mrs. Tran's thermos in the holder, because she had decided, apparently, that he could not be trusted with gas-station coffee any longer.
At four fifty-two, the old Ford came down the shell road with its one dim headlight. It backed the trailer down the ramp in one smooth motion. The old man got out, glanced over at the cruiser, nodded once the way a man nods at weather, and went to the winch.
Under the sodium lamp, the stripe on the white skiff looked navy.
Wade got out of the car. He took the old chrome flashlight from his jacket pocket, clicked it on, and played the warm, honest circle of light along the hull, and there it was, green, deep and new and forty years old, exactly where he knew it would be. He clicked the flashlight off. Mr. Tran, coiling the bow line over his shoulder, did not turn around, but Wade saw his shoulders shake once, the way they did when he was pretending not to laugh.
Wade keyed the radio on his shoulder.
"Unit Four to dispatch."
"Go ahead, Four," said Roxanne Bergeron.
"Public ramp, all quiet. Mr. Henry's putting in." He watched the skiff slide off the trailer into the dark water, the Yamaha coughing twice and catching, the old man lifting one hand without looking back. "White skiff. Green stripe."
There was a pause on the channel, a long one, longer than radio traffic usually allowed.
"Copy, Four," said Roxanne. "You check it twice?"
Wade watched the little boat run out past the channel markers toward the pearl-gray line where the sky was beginning, very slowly, to tell everybody the truth about everything.
"Twice," he said.