Mason supposed he’d been expecting more visitors.
One way or another, he was in the middle of this thing with Brock Boyd. The sheriff sure seemed to consider him a suspect. So whether it was Hart, Tyner Gillies, or some combination thereof, Mason knew the law wouldn’t leave him alone for long.
The only person in the county Mason didn’t figure would pay him a visit was Jess, and he guessed he couldn’t blame her. Objectively speaking, there was plenty on the table to point to him killing Boyd, and she, being a deputy, had to pay attention to all of that. Mason couldn’t begrudge her for doing her job.
But hell, it hurt anyway. Truth be told, he relied on Jess plenty, to help him navigate the town and the county beyond, to lend him an air of legitimacy when the rest of the populace seemed to want to see him as a menace. Now he didn’t have Jess, and he didn’t have Lucy, and Mason already missed them both something terrible.
Either way, he knew Jess and the dog wouldn’t be coming back down here, to the boat, in any kind of a hurry. So when he heard boots on the wharf boards outside, the boat swaying a little and the late afternoon light starting to wane, he knew it wasn’t a romantic call waiting for him when he stepped out of the wheelhouse.
Sheriff Hart led the parade. He had Jess’s fellow deputy with him, Tyner Gillies, and a man Mason had never seen before, who was carrying an oxygen tank and a duffel bag. Hart and Gillies stopped on the wharf beside the boat, and the third man set down his bag and his oxygen tank and peeled off his jacket, and Mason could see he wore a wet suit underneath.
Mason watched the men through the galley window and thought about staying inside, making Hart come to him, but there seemed no point in prolonging the situation, so Mason walked to the wheelhouse door and pulled on a rain slicker and swung the door open.
“Evening, Sheriff,” he said, stepping out onto the deck. “Deputy. What can I do for you fellas?”
The question was a formality; Hart had brought a diver, and Mason knew that meant the sheriff thought he’d find something in the water, probably the gun that had killed Brock Boyd. What Mason wasn’t sure of, not yet, was whether the gun was down there or not.
“Mason, this is Ed Aymar,” Hart said, motioning to the diver. “Ed’s just going to check out the bottom of your boat for us. That okay?”
Mason shrugged. Whether it was okay with him or not, Aymar was going in the water, and everyone knew it. Mason pulled the hood over his head and stepped across the deck to the gunwale, watching how Gillies tensed every time he moved, like the deputy was waiting on him to run.
“Go ahead,” Mason said, and Hart nodded to Aymar, who checked his mask and his regulator, flipped on a little flashlight, and slipped over the side of the wharf into the oily water beneath, leaving the three other men behind on the surface to watch the water and wait.
The rain had slowed to a drizzle, though the wet still seemed to seep through Mason’s jacket all the way to his bones as he stood on the wharf beside Hart and watched the bubbles drift up from where Aymar was diving.
As the late afternoon light continued to fade, the yellow sodium lights on the standards above flickered on, bathing the wharf and the boats and the men in some sickly light, and Mason could see, above and behind Hart, Spinnaker’s restaurant was doing good business, the dinner rush already picking up.
“I guess you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think you had something,” Mason said to Hart after a while.
The sheriff smiled a little bit. “We try not to waste anyone’s time.”
“That’s thoughtful of you.”
“Had a witness come in,” Hart told him. “Said they heard voices in the harbor—men’s voices, fighting—the night Brock Boyd was murdered. Said they heard a gunshot too.” He paused. “Then maybe they heard the splash as somebody threw a weapon away.”
Mason looked down at the water where Ed Aymar was searching, and he knew that sooner or later the diver was going to come up with the gun the sheriff expected him to find. And he knew, as soon as that happened, he was done for.
Gillies was watching him. The deputy shifted his weight and rested his gun hand on his holster and stood square in the center of the wharf, the only path back to the government dock and dry land.
Mason closed his eyes. “You fellas bring that pistol with you?” he asked Hart, who chuckled and shook his head and didn’t bother to answer.
“The way I see it, there’s two possibilities,” Mason continued. “Either you all are in on this too or you’re not.”
“Burke,” Gillies said.
“I’d like to think the law in this county is a little more honest than when I first arrived,” Mason said. “Which means you all aren’t the type to chuck a gun in the water just to pin this whole thing on me.”
Neither Gillies nor Hart said anything; neither man looked at Mason.
“Which means it was someone else put you up to this,” Mason said. “Whoever that witness is, either they chucked that gun away or they know the person who did.”
“There’s a third possibility, Mason,” Hart said.
“I didn’t kill Boyd, Sheriff.”
Hart wasn’t smiling anymore, and he wasn’t laughing either, and Mason noticed how he, too, had unsnapped the holster on his belt. For the first time, Mason wondered if he would make it off this wharf alive.
“Let’s just wait for the diver,” Hart said. “Could be there’s no gun down there in the first place.”
But there was a gun down there. Mason knew it. He just wasn’t sure if Hart knew it too, or if the sheriff was simply playing someone else’s hand.
The men waited there. Stood in the drizzle and got steadily colder and wetter as they watched the dark water. And time passed, and Mason couldn’t have said how long or how little, except that eventually his jeans and his shoes had soaked through and he was shivering, whether from the cold entirely or from adrenaline too, he didn’t know.
Then the diver broke the water. About fifteen feet from the stern of Joe Clifford’s little troller, and halfway out into the channel between the two wharf fingers. He spat out his regulator and found Hart on the dock and held up something small and black and shiny in his hand.
“Sheriff,” he said, “it’s a .38.”