She went forward and checked the bow lines. There were four of them now, doubled, three-quarter-inch nylon, each one run through a length of old fire hose at the chock for chafe gear, each one made fast with a proper cleat hitch and a locking turn, not the nonsense knots she saw on half the boats on B dock, granny loops and wrapped-around-until-it-holds. She had learned cleat hitches at seven years old on the Ozella P., with her grandfather's big hand around hers, and he had made her do it a hundred times one Saturday, a hundred, until she cried, and then one more. Under, around, across, under the horn, across, flip, and pull. A line is a promise, he'd said. Don't make one you can't keep.
She walked aft down the side deck to start taking in the spring lines and stopped, because there was a blue light flashing across the water.
At first she thought it was the reflection of something in the dock house windows. Then she saw it properly. Coming down the river from the direction of the bridge, fast, throwing a white bow wave the shape of a broken wing, was a gray aluminum patrol boat with a T-top and a light bar, and along its side in reflective letters she could read from two hundred yards: MOBILE COUNTY SHERIFF. MARINE UNIT.
She had seen them all day. They were running the river ahead of the storm, warning liveaboards, telling people in houseboats up the bayous that there was a mandatory evacuation for zones A and B, and that if they stayed they should write their names and Social Security numbers on their arms in Sharpie. She lifted a hand to wave.
The patrol boat did not go by. It throttled down, came off plane in the mouth of the C dock fairway with a slap that sent a wake rolling down between the slips and set every boat on the dock to rocking, and turned in. It came straight down the fairway toward her, toward the foot of the dock, toward slot 1 and the stern of the Clementine sticking out into the channel with its diesels rumbling, and stopped across the end of the slip, broadside, so close she could have reached out and touched its gray rub rail with a boathook.
It had blocked her in.
Across the fairway, on the fuel dock, Tuan Vo had been watching the patrol boat for almost a minute before it turned in, because he had been waiting for it since a quarter past one, when his phone buzzed in the pocket of his rain bibs and he took it out and saw the name and felt his stomach drop like a dropped anchor.
Lawson Tillery: Is anyone on my father's boat right now? Yes or no.
He had not answered it. He had put the phone back in his pocket and gone on pumping diesel into a sixty-foot Viking sportfish whose captain wanted to top off before running it to a dry stack in Fairhope, and he had watched the numbers climb on the pump, four hundred gallons, four-fifty, and thought about how he had gotten here, to a fuel dock at twenty-seven years old with a business degree from the University of South Alabama, eleven hundred dollars in his checking account, and a notary public commission in his wallet that he had paid forty dollars and taken a two-hour online course to get because the marina office kept needing someone to witness bills of sale.
At one-forty the phone buzzed again.
Lawson Tillery: I'll take that as a yes.
And then nothing. Which was worse.