"How many have I got?"
Tiago had looked at the wall. "Two."
So that was where things stood. Silvino was sixty-three years old. He had fished out of Sakonnet Point for twenty-six years and out of New Bedford for nine more, scallops and then groundfish and then whatever was left, and when his back had finally made the decision for him he had come ashore and taken the job at the gate because it came with health insurance and because Tiago was his wife's cousin's husband and had asked. Fatima did dialysis three mornings a week at the center on Valley Road in Middletown. The insurance through the marina was good insurance. Medicare was nineteen months away. He knew the number of months the way he knew the number for the cupola, and he did not let himself think about what would happen in between if Boston decided it did not know him from a hole in the ground.
On the second Monday in October the front came through before dawn. He heard it on the roof of the house in Tiverton at four, a hard rattling rain, and by the time he drove over the Sakonnet bridge the rain had stopped and the wind had gone around into the northwest and the sky behind it was scrubbed clean and pale as a mussel shell. When he unlocked the gatehouse the flags on the pier heads were standing straight out toward Jamestown and the halyards on the sailboats along A dock were ringing like a hundred cheap bells.
At the end of the long T on C pier, where the biggest boats lay, the Coriolis had her lights on already. She was fifty-eight meters, a steel-hulled motor yacht with a dark blue hull and white superstructure and a funnel that she did not need but had because somebody in Holland had thought it looked right, and she had been in Newport since the first week of September. Cayman Islands flag. George Town painted on her transom under the name in gold leaf. Silvino had watched her come in, all that length sliding up to the pier with no more fuss than a car pulling into a garage, the captain out on the bridge wing with a remote control box on a strap around his neck, and he had thought, the way he thought about all of them, that he had spent his life on boats and had never once been on a boat like that.
He had been on her now. Not inside. Just on the aft deck, Saturday afternoon, for about four minutes, because the captain had asked him to come down.
He did not want to think about Saturday afternoon, so he did the things he did at the start of every shift. He logged into the gate system and checked the list of expected arrivals. He checked the camera wall, the twelve small screens mounted over the counter in a grid, which showed the main gate and the service entrance and the parking lot and the fuel dock and the heads of all three piers in the gray, slightly fish-eyed way of security cameras everywhere. He checked the radio.
Screen nine was the fuel dock. If you looked at screen nine you could see, at the far upper left, past the diesel pumps and the pump-out station, the last forty feet of C pier and the Coriolis's foredeck, where the tender lived. The tender was a seven-and-a-half meter Castoldi jet boat with a white hull, and on Friday evening it had been sitting in the water alongside, and now it was sitting on its cradle on the foredeck under a gray cover, and a yellow plastic chain had been strung around the base of the crane that lifted it, from stanchion to stanchion, the way you would rope off a hole in the road.
He looked at screen nine for a while and then he looked at the expected arrivals list again, because it was something to look at.
COR — Coriolis. 1300 — Foster, O. — Keelhaven Yacht Mgmt. 1330 — Ratline Crew x2 (day). 1400 — Narragansett Lifting & Marine Survey. Owner's rep on board since 0900, L. Kemble.