Mason followed the sound of a little marine diesel as he navigated the government pier and the spindly wharves on the water beneath. He’d left the Suburban parked at the foot of the pier, but there was no way to avoid it; Jess would be itching to leave, with or without him and Lucy, and he could only hope he’d bought enough time for a clean getaway, the driver still mucking about five or six blocks behind.
The wharf was three fingers, lit with lemon-yellow sodium lights. A handful of boats, and none of them looking seaworthy but one, tied up halfway down the last finger. Barely forty feet long, a rounded-off stern with paint peeling from the hull, a little cockpit where you’d stand to work the trolling lines. Ahead of the cockpit was a large box with a hatch on top that Mason surmised must access the fishhold, and beyond that was the wheelhouse, a squat, salt-stained structure that didn’t look much bigger than Mason’s living quarters in the state penitentiary. The wheelhouse windows were salt streaked; there was a tag taped to one, an outdated halibut license, and on the bow faded block letters read BETTER DAYS, and if that wasn’t a misnomer, Mason figured he didn’t know the meaning of the word.
But the engine was chugging, the stack belching black smoke. This was Ty’s boat, and Jess was waiting. She stepped out from the wheelhouse as Mason and Lucy hurried down the dock. Took in Mason, and then Lucy, and he thought he could see she was glad they’d both made it.
But there wasn’t any time for happy reunions. Jess took the shotgun from Mason and laid it on the fishhold. Then she reached over and helped him lift Lucy aboard, the dog grunting and struggling as though the whole operation were a personal affront to her dignity.
Then Jess climbed over the boat’s gunwale and onto the dock. She bent down to free the tie-up line amidships and gestured toward the bow.
“Cut her loose and then push the bow out,” she told him. “Don’t get left behind. I’m not coming back for you.”
Mason did as instructed. Loosened the bow line as Jess freed the stern. He chucked the rope over the troller’s raised bulwarks, then leaned on the boat and pushed, swinging the bow out from its berth as Jess climbed aboard and went into the wheelhouse.
He kept pushing until he heard her knock on the window, and then he hurried aft to where the stern still nudged against the dock. Stepped aboard and flashed Jess a thumbs-up through the wheelhouse doorway, heard the engine throttle up in response, the propeller churning wash as the boat slipped away.
“Made it,” he said when he entered the wheelhouse. It was warm inside, smelled of engine oil and kerosene and old clothes. On one side of the little room was a sink and a stove, a couple of cupboards, and on the other side was a table and a little three-sided settee. Up ahead was the captain’s chair, a panel of ancient electronics, the wheel and the throttle and the gear selector. There was a hole in the floor in a forward corner of the wheelhouse, same side as the stove, stairs leading downward.
Jess stood at the wheel, navigating the boat out from between the wharf fingers, aiming it across the harbor to the end of the rocky breakwater, where red and green buoys marked a channel to open water.
“I was beginning to think you all weren’t coming,” she said.
Mason found Lucy curled up in a corner of the settee, snoring already, her brush with danger tonight apparently forgotten. He scratched her behind the ears and sat down beside her.
“Wouldn’t have missed it,” he told Jess. “Just figured the dog needed a walk before we cooped her up on this boat.”
* * *
On the government wharf, Joy stood in the shadows and watched as the lights of the little fishing boat rounded the breakwater. The night was nearly pitch dark, but he could tell nevertheless when the boat had cleared the harbor; the lights on the mast began to rock with the swell as the boat motored out of sheltered waters and into the open strait. It plowed the waves and turned westward, carrying Jess Winslow and her companion with it.
The man and the dog had abandoned the Suburban by the time Joy reached the pier. But that was no matter. He’d hurried to the truck and heard the sound of a diesel engine in the boat basin below, and he’d known what the widow and the man planned to do.
He might have tried to intercept them, but he didn’t. He’d waited, hidden on the margins, away from the dim yellow sodium lights, and stared down at the little harbor’s three fingers, the derelict hulks moored therein.
For a few minutes he didn’t see anything. And then one of the hulks had moved, its propeller churning water, and Joy had watched as the little boat slipped away from the dock and out toward the breakwater.
The widow and her friend were gone now, and Joy wondered if he would regret not acting more assertively. He doubted it. Jess Winslow and her companion were on board a boat, a boat Joy could still see, those lights rocking in the black distance as the vessel bucked the waves.
The boat was headed west. That was all Joy needed to know.