The Tideflats King Claimed the Surveyor Who Trusts No One, and My Signature Was His Brother's Alibi novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Dry Dock
On the deck of a burned crab boat Lena Rautio is claimed by the Tideflats' most feared man; he takes her wrist, she makes him let go with one sentence and hands him her terms.
I heard him on the deck behind me and I did not turn around.
Nobody stands behind me.
I had been on the Sea Marija for three days, in the rain, with a flashlight and a notebook, and I had a rule about the wheelhouse door.
I kept the wheelhouse door at my left shoulder, always, so that I could see the whole deck in the corner of my eye.
I had not heard anyone come up the ladder.
"Ms. Rautio," a man said.
His voice was low and unhurried.
"You are standing on my brother's boat."
I closed the notebook over my pen.
The name on the stern was half burned off, but I knew it before I read it.
Sea Marija.
I had signed the survey on this boat six years ago, at twenty-three, as my uncle's junior surveyor.
It was one line.
Cause undetermined. No accelerant detected.
I had not thought about it since.
"I'm on this boat for the insurer," I said.
"The insurer has reopened the claim," he said.
"I own the note on the wreck now.
"I bought it on Friday."
I turned around then, slowly, with my back against the wheelhouse wall.
He stood two steps from me in a charcoal overcoat with the rain running off the shoulders.
He was tall, black-haired, gray at the temples, with a nose that had been broken and set badly.
Behind him at the foot of the ladder stood the yard foreman and two men in dark jackets who did not look at the boat at all.
They looked at him.
I had seen that man's face in the Tacoma paper for six winters.
Nikola Matkovic.
The waterfront called him the Harbormaster, because nothing was frozen, towed or loaded on Commencement Bay without his word.
"Mr. Matkovic," I said.
"You will finish this survey for me," he said.
"At my warehouse, on my terms, for ten times your fee."
"No."
He did not blink.
"I have not finished asking."
"You've finished," I said.
"I don't take clients who tell me where to work."
I picked up my flashlight and walked toward the ladder.
His hand closed on my wrist.
It was not hard.
It was only enough that I could not take the next step.
His palm was warm and dry, and the grip was exact.
Six years.
I had not let a man touch me in six years, not once, not a hand on my back at a funeral.
My left sleeve held a folding knife.
I felt it against my forearm.
"I do not ask twice for what I have decided is mine," he said.
He said it quietly, so quietly that the foreman at the ladder leaned in to hear.
I looked down at his hand.
I was afraid.
I was so afraid my knees had gone soft.
I could do the one thing I knew how to do, which was say what I saw, in a flat voice, for the record.
"Take it off," I said.
"Or I put in my notes that you laid hands on the surveyor.
"And then you will never get a signature out of me, Mr. Matkovic, not for ten times my fee or a hundred."
The rain ticked on the burned deck.
Nobody breathed at the ladder.
He looked at my face for a long moment.
Then he opened his hand.
He did it slowly, finger by finger, and stepped back a full pace and put both hands in his coat pockets.
My wrist burned where he had held it.
I did not rub it.
I took my notebook out again, found a clean page, and wrote in front of all of them.
His name.
The date.
Client, not agreed.
"My day rate is fourteen hundred dollars," I said, aloud, so that his men could hear me say it.
"Not ten times that.
"If I take this job, I do it on my boat, in daylight, in my time, with my back to the wall.
"Or not at all."
"Your boat," he said.
"The Sea Marija is mine."
"The survey is mine."
I could not tell what was in his face.
It was very still.
Something at the corner of his mouth moved and was put away.
"Where did you test for accelerant?" he said.
It was not the question I had braced for.
I had braced for why had I written it, or what did I know.
He asked about my method.
"Not on the record," I said.
I tore the page out and wrote six lines on a clean one, fast, in block capitals.
I folded it once and held it out.
He took it between two fingers, careful not to brush my hand.
"Not your warehouse," I said.
"My building.
"The lobby, at nine tomorrow.
"If you come up behind me, I'll walk."
I went down the ladder past his men.
The foreman moved out of my way.
I walked the whole length of the yard in the rain without looking back, because I could feel it, the weight of his eyes between my shoulder blades.
It was the first thing in six years that had made me want to turn around.
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