She looked past him through the bars of the main gate, down the curve of the path through the beds of ornamental grass, past the lounge with its fireplace burning in the middle of a bright October day, toward the head of C pier. It was the shortest way. It was perhaps a hundred and fifty yards shorter than going around by the road. Her legs ached. Her back ached. Her eyes felt as though somebody had rubbed sand into them, which on the red-eye up from Fort Lauderdale on Saturday night and the thirty hours since then, most of them spent in the trauma unit at Rhode Island Hospital and on the phone with the Maritime Authority of the Cayman Islands, somebody more or less had.
"Leave it," she said.
"Ma'am?"
"Leave the gate. I'll go around."
Dex said, "Miss Foster, it's like a quarter of a mile..."
"It's not a quarter of a mile. It's about three hundred yards. Meet me at the green gate, Dex. I want to see it." She looked at the man in the windbreaker again. He had a name tag. SILVINO. "What's the code, Silvino?"
He hesitated, and then he told her. "Four, one, one, seven, star."
"Thank you."
She went back out to the road and turned left. She did not look back to see whether he was watching her go. She was fairly sure he was.
The dumpsters were still there. They were newer, and they had been fenced in with gray composite boards to look like a garden shed, but the gulls had not been informed of the renovation and stood on top of the enclosure in a row, watching her, and the smell came through the boards the same as it had in 2007. Beyond them was the boatyard, a gravel lot full of sailboats on jack stands, their bottoms freshly painted red and blue, and beyond the boatyard was the green gate. It was a good gate now, steel, powder-coated, with a keypad in a stainless housing and a small sign that said SERVICE ENTRANCE in the same tasteful serif lettering as everything else the hospitality group had touched. Somebody had stuck a sticker on the keypad housing that said AGUANTA LA PUERTA, hold the door, in hand-drawn letters, and somebody else had tried to scrape it off with a fingernail and given up halfway.