Page 10 of Harbor Me

She’s got a legal pad in her hands.

“Three things,” she says, “Then I’m gone for the day.”

“I don’t pay overtime, you should be gone already.”

“Hendricks. I called him about the deposit. He’s mailing a check, he apologized, and he wants the same spot as last winter, which I told him was fine, tell me if it’s not.” She flips a page. “Two, your radar guy folded. Four-sixty back on the card by Friday, plus the supervisor’s direct line for next time, which I framed as a courtesy, and he correctly heard as a threat.”

Marcus, three feet up a ladder, isn’t even pretending to work anymore.

“Three.” She flips another page, and here her voice changes, just slightly, going careful. “There’s a locked drawer in the filing cabinet. Bottom left. No key on the ring I found in the desk.”

The workshop keeps ticking. Hot metal, gulls, Tommy’s radio. My hand stops on the wrench.

The bottom left drawer. Three years of letters in there. The denial. Stuff I couldn’t burn and couldn’t make myself read twice, so it went in the drawer and the drawer got locked.

“That drawer stays locked,” I say.

“Okay.”

“It’s not part of your system. It’s dead files. It’s nothing you need.”

“Okay,” she says again, easy, no push in it at all, and writes something small on her pad. “Then it’s off my list.”

That should be the end of it. It isn’t. She lingers a beat too long, pen resting on the paper, and there’s that look again. The one from yesterday. Like she’s measuring me against something.

Then it’s gone and she’s tucking the pad under her arm.

“According to your weather radio there’s a storm coming in tonight. I closed the office windows. The one that doesn’t latch, I wedged with a paint stirrer, which is a temporary fix. I’m sure one of you will be able to fix something as basic as that in a jiffy.”

She snaps her fingers low at her hip and Diesel materializes from behind the parts washer. “Walk me out, handsome.”

He sticks to her side like a burr.

Marcus waits until the truck door shuts before he climbs down off the ladder. He picks up a rag. Wipes his hands with the ceremony of a man about to deliver a verdict.

“Don’t,” I say.

“One day,” he says. “She found the Henderson part, scrounged up eleven grand, beat a warranty department into surrender, and got Hendricks to apologize. Hendricks, Aiden. I’ve known Hendricks twenty years. That man has never apologized for a thing in his whole sorry life.”

“It’s a trial period.”

“It’s a lottery ticket.” He throws the rag at the bench. “You know what your problem is?”

“I’ve got a guy on a ladder thinking about my problems instead of the wiring.”

“Your problem is she’s good, and you can’t figure out her angle, and a woman without an angle scares you worse than the IRS.” He heads for the door, then stops in it, backlit against the pewter sky. “Or maybe she’s just good at her job and wants to help. Ever consider that?”

Her taillights are already turning out of the gate. Bouncing along the middle of my rutted road.

“There’s always an angle,” I tell him. But I’m saying it to an empty doorway.

The first fat drops are starting to hit the gravel, and I catch myself doing inventory in my head. I have everything I need to fix the latch on that damn window. It’ll be a ten-minute job. Fifteen if I sand down the swollen frame.

For the office. Not for her. A marina can’t have windows that don’t latch, that’s just common-sense maintenance. And if I do it early enough tomorrow, before she gets in, I won’t have to hear whatever she’ll have to say about it.

Diesel trots back in soaked to the elbows and shakes himself off all over my boots. Then he flops down on the concrete facing the door as if he’s missing her already.

“She’s leaving in two weeks,” I tell him.