Chapter 16: Fire Alarm

I stood in front of those wet lab doors until a deckhand asked me, almost politely, to move.

I didn't.

Margie put an arm around my shoulders and walked me back to the Second Wind.

"Not like this," she said in my ear. "Not in daylight. Not with cameras."

"He's in a box, Margie."

"Then we'll take the box apart. Tonight. Tomorrow night. With help."

By noon she'd made three phone calls.

By supper, three lobstermen were sitting at her kitchen table, eating her chowder.

Two of them were brothers, gray-bearded and silent.

The third was the one who'd laughed loudest at the Grange.

He looked at me across the table and turned red to his hairline.

"My brother says you never puked on his boots once," he said. "I owe you an apology."

"You owe me a forklift," I said.

He blinked.

"The station keeps one in the boathouse," I said. "For the net spools. Can you start it without a key?"

He looked at the brothers.

The brothers looked at each other and nodded.

The plan was simple, which was the only good thing about it.

The tank was a big fiberglass tub in the wet lab, under a steel grate bolted to the rim and chained.

Barrows and the postdoc slept in staff housing, fifty yards up the lawn, and there was a deckhand on the lab door.

"We need everybody out of those buildings," Margie said, "and facing the other way."

Minnow came up the ladder at dusk, on legs, in the bathrobe.

Her eyes were red from crying.

"He's in a box," she said. "She put him in a box."

"We're getting him out," I said. "I need you to pull a fire alarm."

"What's a fire alarm?"

Margie showed her the red box on the wall of her own kitchen.

"It screams," Margie warned her. "When you pull it, it screams and everybody runs outside."

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