"All right," she said. "The helm's inside. I'll shut them down."
She turned toward the salon door, and the sergeant stepped over from the patrol boat's gunwale onto Clementine's swim platform, and then up over the transom onto the aft deck, quick and heavy, the whole boat dipping under him, and before she had taken two steps his hand closed on her upper arm.
It was a big hand. It went most of the way around. It closed hard, on the soft inside of her arm above the elbow, where the skin was thin, and it pulled her back and around so that she stumbled against the fighting chair bolted to the deck and caught herself with her other hand.
"Nope," he said. "You're not going inside. You're getting off this boat. Off the boat, ma'am. Go."
"I'm trying to shut down the engines like you—"
"Deputy Brannon will shut down the engines. Off the boat."
He walked her to the side of the aft deck where the gate opened onto the finger pier, his hand still clamped on her arm, steering her the way you would steer a child or a drunk or a calf, and she went, because there was nothing else to do with fifty-three feet of boat moving under her and a two-hundred-and-forty-pound man attached to her elbow. She went down the two steps onto the finger pier. He came after her. He did not let go.
Behind them, the young deputy had brought the patrol boat in against Clementine's stern with a bump of fenders and was climbing aboard with a bow line in his hand, looking for somewhere to make it fast and not finding it, because she had already taken in the stern cleats' lines and coiled them, and he stood there on the aft deck holding the line like a man holding a leash with no dog on it.
"Sergeant," Claudine said. "You're hurting my arm."
He let go then. Not all the way. He shifted his hand so it was resting on her shoulder blade, as if she might run, as if there were anywhere on the end of a dock in a rising river for her to run to.
"Is this your vessel?" he said.
And that was when Tuan Vo shouted.