Chapter 8: Pier 14

Ida handed the key to Rowan on the sidewalk, in front of the patrol car.

"It's your pier, Mr. Garvey," she said. "Your lockers. A property owner can open his own property at any hour he likes."

"And the police?"

"The police have no warrant a judge would sign this week," she said.

"I can't be there. I'd like to hear about it afterward."

She went back into the lobby, peppermints rattling.

We went at one in the morning, in his driver's old Buick, with the headlights off for the last quarter mile.

The Calumet Terminal ran along the river for half a mile.

Cranes stood against the sleet like black skeletons, and the water below them was the color of a bruise.

Pier 14 was the far slip. Nobody had a reason to go there after dark.

I knew it in my sleep.

I'd stood on it in the rain fourteen months ago, at four in the morning, while divers brought up a sedan.

Rowan knew what the place was to me, and he didn't say so.

I walked out onto the planks ahead of him, in a black coat borrowed from his closet, and did not look at the water.

"You're quiet," he said.

"I'm working."

"You've gone white."

"Then I'm working harder."

Near the end of the pier stood a long tin shed with twenty steel lockers in a row, numbered, padlocked, rusted.

Number nine was in the middle.

I put the brass key in. It turned without a sound.

Inside was a shelf and a smell of old paper.

On the shelf lay four bundles of cash in yellow bank straps, stamped LAKESHORE in blue.

Beside them was a rectangle of cleaner metal where a box had stood and been taken away.

"They moved something," I said. "Recently. The dust is gone."

"The books?"

"A ledger box, maybe. The size of a hat box."

"Somebody got here first."

"Somebody got here this week," I said, and picked up the last thing on the shelf, a photograph lying face down.

Before I could turn it over, a flashlight swung across the yard.

Two men in black jackets, thirty yards off, with earpieces and the slow walk of men paid by the hour.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Boss, Your Wife's a Whole Detective from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.