"I'm not going to Water Street with you," I said.
Victor's face went crimson. "You leave this room without me, Naomi, and you don't have a job by midnight. You don't have a reference, you don't have an indemnity defense, and you don't have access to the server logs to prove you didn't sign that paper yourself."
"The server logs won't help you anyway," I said, picking up the blue-backed cease-and-desist order and sliding it into my own leather dossier. "Because I kept the paper manifests from the October shipments in my personal locker at Pier 44. The ones you told the yard foreman to burn in the barrel behind the machine shop."
Victor went dead still. The anger in his posture vanished, replaced by the sudden, sickening realization of a man who discovers that the floor beneath him had rotted through years ago.
"You took those?" he whispered.
"I took all of them," I said, picking up my purse and stepping around the table before he could move to block the aisle. "And unlike you, Victor, I know exactly which dock gate the port police leave unlocked when the shift changes at ten."
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
I stepped out into the October night air. A sharp river wind cut through my wool overcoat, carrying the damp, metallic stench of low tide off the Delaware. The city had thinned out; it was nearly nine o'clock. Across the asphalt alley, the twin exhaust pipes of Victor’s black company sedan idled, twin plumes of white exhaust curling into the halo of the security floodlights.
Leo, the yard mechanic Victor kept on a monthly cash retainer to drive him between the waterfront sites, stood leaning against the front fender, chewing on an unlit toothpick. When he saw me emerge from the service exit alone, clutching my leather dossier to my chest, he pushed off the paneling.
"Boss isn't with you?" Leo asked, his eyes dropping to the blue backing of the cease-and-desist order sticking out of my folder.
"He's still inside with Mr. Vance," I said, keeping my pace steady, walking straight past him toward the mouth of the alley. "He told me to take an express cab down to Pier 44 to unlock the field office before he gets there."
Leo hesitated, his hand hovering near the pocket where he kept the yard's master key ring. He had worked on the docks for twenty years, long before Victor took over the operating leases from his father. He knew the difference between administrative errands and trouble that required a company car to idle in a dark alley.
"The gate's chained, Naomi," Leo said quietly, lowering his chin against the wind. "Port police put a yellow tag on the chain an hour ago. You go down there with a crowbar, you're on municipal surveillance."
"I don't need a crowbar, Leo," I replied without looking back. "I have my own badge."
I didn't hail a yellow cab on Locust. Instead, I walked two blocks north to Market Street, caught the subway down to 2nd Street, and walked east through the shadows beneath the Interstate 95 overpass. The concrete pillars overhead vibrated with the rumble of long-haul tractor-trailers hauling shipping containers north toward the rail interchange.
Pier 44 sat at the end of an unpaved access road lined with rusted chain-link fencing and stacks of waterlogged timber pallets. In the dark, the Delaware River looked like a sheet of poured black glass, broken only by the yellow navigation lights on the bridge piers and the intermittent red flash of a Coast Guard patrol boat drifting half a mile downstream.
At the main entrance, a heavy steel chain was looped through the sliding gate, secured with an orange Department of Environmental Protection padlock and an oversized laminated card bearing a warning against unauthorized entry. But forty yards to the north, where the perimeter fence abutted the concrete abutment of the old cold-storage warehouse, the bottom rail had been crushed by an errant forklift three years ago. We had tied it off with industrial wire.
I knelt in the gravel, unlooped the wire with my bare fingers until the rusted galvanized steel bit into my skin, and slid through the gap on my side, dragging my leather dossier behind me.
The yard was unnervingly silent. The massive diesel excavators and mobile cranes stood like frozen iron monuments against the night sky, their hydraulic booms lowered over the dark trenches where Victor had promised Vance a deep-water berth would be dredged by November. The ground was soft and treacherous, saturated with oily black run-off from the equipment pads.
I reached the rusted corrugated-metal siding of the machine shop. A single sodium-vapor lamp hummed overhead, casting a sickly yellow circle over a row of fifty-five-gallon steel drums. Three of them were scorched black from burnings, their rims warped by open flames.