Chapter 16: The Deckhand

"Don't tell Lawton," I said.

Clancy stared at me.

"Rue, that's the man who was on deck with him. He's going to want to know."

"He's going to want to kill him. Then we'll have a dead deckhand and a husband in jail, and nothing else."

The fire marshal looked from me to Clancy.

"I didn't hear any of that," she said. "Send me the file, and I'll be in touch."

"He lives on a boat," Clancy said. "Last I heard, an old trawler at a fish camp up the Wando."

"Then that's where we're going. In the morning."

Lawton called me at six from the hospital.

His arm was dressed, second-degree, and they wanted him home in bed.

"How's the bar?" he said.

"Standing. Go home and sleep."

"Rue."

"I'm your boss," I said. "Sleep."

Sallie left for the county office at eight with thirty-eight thousand six hundred dollars in a red cooler.

The fry cook rode shotgun, holding a softball bat across his knees.

Clancy and I drove the other way in the bait truck.

The fish camp was a gravel road, a bait shop and a sagging dock off the Wando River.

The trawler at the end of it had more rust than paint.

A navy windbreaker hung over the rail to dry.

The man was sitting on an overturned bucket in the stern with a can of beer at nine in the morning.

When he saw Clancy, the can stopped halfway to his mouth.

"Clancy Mims," he said. "Been a while."

"Six years," Clancy said.

The man looked past him at me.

He set the beer down very slowly.

"You were at Sallie's last night," I said. "At twelve minutes after nine. Sallie's got you on camera, in that jacket, with a hacksaw."

"I don't know what you're..."

"There were two hundred people on that dock. Kids asleep on the coolers. A fry cook standing in front of that fryer."

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