"Ms. Pettaway," Tuan said, and his voice broke on it.
"Keep recording," she said.
Lawson had stepped back. He had his hand over his mouth. He looked, she thought, like a man who had ordered something online and been surprised when it arrived. He said, "Wiley, she's not going to run," and Shuford said, "I know it," and did not take the cuffs off.
And then, from up the dock, a voice.
"Lawson Ozro Tillery."
It was not loud. It did not need to be. It was the voice of a man who had spent four decades in the wheelhouses of harbor tugs making himself heard over two thousand horsepower of diesel and the wind off Mobile Bay, and it came down the dock through the rain like a heaving line, and every one of them turned.
He was a hundred feet away and coming, slow. The cane and then the left foot and then the right. His windbreaker was soaked dark across the shoulders, and his canvas cap was pulled low, and Deputy Brannon was walking a step behind him with one hand hovering near the old man's elbow, not touching it, and the look on the young deputy's face was the look of a man who has been very thoroughly told something.
"Daddy," Lawson said.
"Hush."
It took him most of a minute to cover the hundred feet. Nobody spoke. Claudine counted his breaths without meaning to, the way she counted every breath she could hear: twenty-six a minute, too fast, his shoulders lifting with each one, his lips with a faint gray tinge at the edges she did not like at all.
"He was in the laundry room," Brannon said, a little sheepish. "Sitting on the bench in there. Back behind the dryers. I went right past it."