"The meter's tagged," Pete said, nodding his chin toward the locked panel on shed three.
"City Light took the jumper leads," I told him. "County prosecutor took the logs."
Pete looked at the empty slip where the patrol cruiser had stood, then spat into the tide. "He took twenty-four hundred off my brother in November. Said our bilge separator had an uncertified manifold. Held our clearance papers on his desk until two hours after the morning auction closed. We had to dump five thousand pounds of rockfish to the rendering plant for ten cents on the dollar."
"It's over, Pete," Frank said from the deck.
"Is it?" Pete asked, looking past our wheelhouse toward the downtown towers rising through the mist. "The port commission didn't hire Keller out of a vacuum. They gave him the master key because none of the suits in the glass offices wanted to come down here in the freezing rain to balance the power draw. They wanted the revenue numbers to match the ledger, and they didn't care whose skin paid the difference."
Pete didn't wait for an answer. He turned and walked back toward his boat, his heavy boots crunching rhythmically against the gravel until the warehouse corner swallowed him up.
He was right, of course. The arrest didn't wipe out six months of burned auxiliary diesel, and it didn't put forty thousand dollars back into the cooperative's depleted maintenance fund. There wouldn't be a restitution check arriving in the mail to cover the extra wear on our generator's bearings, or the nights Frank had spent sleeping on the greasy deckplates of the engine room with a wrench in his hand, listening for the telltale shudder of a compressor starving for voltage. The harbor district would issue a formal administrative statement by noon, expressing regret over an isolated personnel breach, and by next week another uniform would be assigned to carry the clipboard down the service berths.
But the padlocks on shed three were real. The federal preservation order was stamped into the county record, and the private fiber bypass running through our mast was no longer a secret splice. The power on the pier belonged to the boats again, not to a back-room storage hustle.
Frank reached down to the deck locker and brought out our second mooring line, a fresh length of four-inch braided nylon that had never touched Keller's gangway. He walked to the bow without a word and dropped the eye over the timber bollard, snubbing the bitter end around our heavy steel deck bitt until the tug settled firmly against the dock fenders.
"We running for Bellingham on the afternoon slack?" he asked.
I pulled my watch from my pocket. It was seven-twenty. The tide would turn at two o'clock, carrying twelve feet of clear water through Admiralty Inlet and up into the northern straits.
"We run on the slack," I said. "Go below and get some sleep, Frank. I’ll take the morning watch."
Frank nodded once, touched the brim of his ballcap, and swung himself down through the engine room hatch. A moment later, the companionway door clicked shut behind him, leaving only the steady, familiar thrum of the ship's service generator running smooth and level in the belly of the vessel.
I climbed the ladder to the upper wheelhouse and stood by the brass helm. Through the clear circle of the spinning rain-screen, the waters of Elliott Bay opened out toward the west, vast and cold under the lifting gray clouds. The smell of diesel and creosote was still thick in the air, but beneath it came the sharp, clean bite of salt spray blowing in off the Pacific, washing the stagnant harbor muck out of the slips.
I picked up our blue ballpoint logbook from the chart table, opened it to the fresh page marked Saturday, and pressed the paper flat against the wood. In the small rectangular box for departure clearance, where Keller’s initial had sat like a tax on our lives for fourteen straight months, I wrote the vessel's registration number, the current water temperature, and the single word Clear.
Then I capped the pen, laid it across the compass binnacle, and stepped out onto the bridge wing to watch the morning tide come in.
FINAL THANK-YOU NOTE
Thank you for making room for these pages today.