"Got winded," Ozro said. "Sat down to catch it. It's not a crime yet, is it, Sergeant? Sitting down?" He had reached them. He stopped, and leaned on his cane, and looked at Claudine, at the cuffs, at her arm, for a long moment, and when he looked up at Shuford his eyes had gone the color of the bay in January. "Take those off her."
"Sir," Shuford said. "I'm going to need to—"
"I am Ozro Tillery," the old man said. "I was born on the eleventh of April, 1945, at the Providence Infirmary on Broad Street. I live on this vessel, Clementine, Official Number six three seven two one four, documented with the United States Coast Guard in my name, and have since 2016. I ran tugs for Bay Towing and Barge for forty-one years and held a master's license, near-coastal, unlimited tonnage. Today is Saturday, the tenth of October. The President is a fool. The governor's the same fool in a different hat. Hurricane Ophira is a Category Two, three hundred miles south-southeast of the mouth of Mobile Bay moving north-northwest at twelve, and she is going to come ashore somewhere between Pascagoula and Gulf Shores tomorrow afternoon, and if you don't let me move my boat in the next hour I'm going to miss the tide. That woman is my guest. I asked her to help me. She is helping me. Take those off her."
Shuford looked at him. Claudine could not see the sergeant's face; he was behind her. But she could feel him not moving.
"Daddy," Lawson said. "You're out of breath. Look at you. You can barely stand up. You walked out of Springhill in a hospital gown—"
"I walked out of Springhill because they were going to give me a pill to sleep and a pill to wake up and put me in front of a television set in a room with a man who screamed all night about his dog, and because you told the social worker I'd be going to the memory care wing at Westminster Village on the first of November. Without asking me. I heard you on the phone, son. I wasn't in my right mind in August, I'll give you that. I was by September. I'd have told you so if you'd come and asked."
"I came every week."
"You came every week and talked to the nurses."
Lawson's face changed. It did something Claudine had never seen it do, which was crumple, for just a second, around the mouth, like a child's. Then it smoothed out again.
"Wiley," he said. "He's not well. He's confused about the timeline. He's had a fall. He's got a heart condition and COPD and a broken wrist that hasn't healed right. He's eighty-one. He wants to take a fifty-three-foot boat up a river in a hurricane. You see it. You can see it. I have a valid power of attorney. That boat is an asset he can't manage and that woman is—"
"Sergeant," Claudine said. She said it to the brass plate, because that was where she was facing. "Captain Tillery needs to sit down. His respiratory rate is up near thirty, and his color's poor. There's a dock box right behind him. Would you ask him to sit on it, please. He won't do it for me. He might do it for a man in a uniform."