NOTICE OF VIOLATION AND INTENT TO ASSESS. Boat Slot Unit 1. Owner: Claudine A. Pettaway.
Tuan had read it standing at the printer, with the shutter crank still in his hand.
It said that the Slot Owner was in violation of Article Twelve, Section Two, of the Declaration, Prohibition on Commercial Dockage, by maintaining in her Slot a vessel not owned by the Slot Owner, without Board approval, in exchange for consideration. It said that the Board had received credible reports that the Slot Owner had exercised undue influence over the elderly vessel owner, a vulnerable adult, and that such conduct constituted a nuisance under Article Fourteen, Conduct of Members. It said that the Board intended to assess a fine of two hundred and fifty dollars per day from the date of first violation, and that unpaid assessments would constitute a lien against the Unit, enforceable by foreclosure, pursuant to Article Nine, Section Four. It said that documentation of the violation, including law enforcement reports, would be attached.
Would be attached.
He had stood there a long time. Then he had folded the draft in thirds and put it in the inside pocket of his rain jacket, and he had not been able to decide all morning whether that was theft or something else, and he had not decided yet when the patrol boat turned into the C dock fairway with its blue lights going.
He set down the fuel nozzle. The Viking's captain said something. Tuan didn't hear what.
There were two men on the patrol boat. The one at the wheel was young, sandy-haired, with a sunburned neck and a life jacket over his uniform, and he was concentrating on holding the boat against the wind with little bumps of throttle. The other was older and bigger, standing at the gunwale with one hand on the T-top frame, and he was looking at her.
He was in his late forties or early fifties, thick through the chest, with a gray-shot mustache and a tan line across his forehead where a cap usually sat. He wore a sergeant's stripes and an inflatable PFD harness, and his eyes had the red, flat look of a man who had been awake since some hour that started with a four. He looked at her, at the diesels burbling exhaust out of the transom, at the spring line in her hand, half off the cleat.
"Ma'am," he said. "Shut those engines down."
"Sergeant, I'm about to take this boat to a hurricane hole up Halls Mill Creek. I'm waiting on the owner. He's—"
"Shut the engines down. Now. Step away from the line."
She dropped the line on the deck. Not because she had decided to. Her hand did it. She had spent twenty-two years in intensive care units, and she knew that voice, the voice a person used when they had already decided what was happening and were not interested in new information. She had used it herself, on families, at three in the morning, when a heart rate was falling and somebody's son was asking questions in the doorway.