"Deputy Brannon walked up that dock not two minutes ago to get your envelope out of the salon, and I'm looking at that dock right now, and I don't see an eighty-one-year-old man with a cane on it."
She turned and looked.
C dock stretched away from them toward the shore, six hundred and eighty feet of it, gray planking and dock boxes and power pedestals and the long row of boats tossing in their slips, and at the end of it the ramp up to the boardwalk and the dock house with its shutters half down. There was nobody on it. Nobody on the ramp. Nobody on the boardwalk in front of the dock house. The wind had picked up, and the first fat drops of rain were starting to come across the water at an angle, leaving dark coins on the planks.
"He's slow," Claudine said. "He's in the restroom. Or he went into the ship's store. He likes the Cokes in the glass bottles from the cooler in there."
"The store's closed," Tuan said quietly. "I locked it at noon."
She looked at him.
"I locked it at noon," Tuan said again, miserable. "Mr. Whitsett said four but I locked it at noon because nobody was buying anything but ice. The restrooms are open. The restrooms are always open."
"Then he's in the restroom," Claudine said.
"Ms. Pettaway," Shuford said. "Here's what's happening. You're going to stay right here with me. When Mr. Lawson Tillery gets here, we're going to look at his paperwork and we're going to look at whatever's in this envelope, and in the meantime Deputy Brannon's going to go up to that dock house and look for the old man. If he finds him, good. If he don't, then I'm going to have some more questions for you, and you might want to think about whether you want to answer them here or downtown."
"Downtown," Claudine said. "On a Saturday. With a hurricane coming."
"Ma'am," he said, "I've been on this water since four-thirty this morning. I've pulled three drunks off a houseboat in Fowl River and I've told about two hundred people to get off their boats and go inland, and I've got a mama in a single-wide in Coden who won't leave because her cat won't get in the carrier. I don't want to take anybody downtown. I want to go home. But I've got a report of a vulnerable adult missing and his boat being taken, and I've got you, standing on the boat, with the engines running. You want to help me, help me find Ozro Tillery."
"Then let me go look for him."