The Dry Dock Confrontation

The padlock on the Slip Three dry dock gate had not been forced; it had been oiled.

Reese Adler stopped three paces from the chain-link barrier, crouching low enough to catch the yellow gleam of the harbor lamps across the shackle. Fresh grease smeared the brass barrel, catching the cold salt mist that blew off the basin. Tobias Corby had left his carriage two streets back near the tallow works, but he had failed to account for the grease on his fingers or the wet clay prints trailing across the granite apron. Corby had clearly set out to reach the lower keel of the Osprey before the midnight tide began filling the sluice gates, aiming to do it without his bodyguard watching him.

Reese drew a slow breath through her nose, feeling the damp bite of the bay air in the back of her throat. In her right coat pocket, the heavy steel spud wrench rested against her hip. In her left, sealed in oilskin, lay Captain Gentry’s hidden sounding chart and Corby’s handwritten transit slip. She did not draw the tool. She pushed the gate open an inch at a time until the latch cleared the frame without a click, stepped onto the timber apron, and slipped the retaining bolt back into place to secure her rear.

Below the apron, the dry dock opened like an oblong quarry cut into the rock. Thirty feet down, resting on massive oak keel blocks, sat the black iron hull of the Osprey. The vessel looked far larger out of the water, its twin screw props caked in dead kelp and barnacles, the rudder pinned by heavy turnbuckles. At the base of the basin, the drainage channels trickled with gray slime, running toward the iron floor grates where the harbor pumps sat silent.

A faint glow flickered behind the rusted plates of the port engine casing.

Reese moved down the timber catwalk with measured steps, keeping her weight on the outside edges of her soles to mute the creak of the damp spruce planks. When she reached the midships gangway, a narrow span of spruce bolted to the dock wall, she paused at the upper deck hatch.

She did not enter immediately. Instead, she knelt by the auxiliary escape scuttle that led down into the steering flat, slid a six-inch steel wedge from her tool kit into the dog mechanism, and tapped it home with the heel of her hand. The scuttle jammed solid. Then she circled to the forward companionway ladder, drew the locking pin from the safety gate, and set it on the stringer.

If Tobias Corby ran, he would run into a wall of solid oak or drop twelve feet into an empty bilge sump.

Reese descended the companionway stairs into the engine well. The air here was heavy with the stench of stagnant seawater, sour diesel, and cold iron. Down in the narrow passageway between the fuel tanks and the reduction gear, a single hurricane lantern stood on an upturned grease drum.

Tobias Corby stood before the open bilge hatch, stripped of his fine wool overcoat. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, revealing white, soft forearms streaked with black machine grease. He was prying at the rusted retaining bolts of the lower inspection plate with an iron tire lever, his breath coming in ragged, wheezing gasps that echoed against the hull plating. On the deck beside his polished leather shoes lay a canvas satchel, an empty specimen sack, and a brass-sheathed diver's knife.

"The pitch on those thread bolts is three-eighths reverse," Reese said from the bottom of the ladder. "You're tightening them."

Corby spun so hard his shoulder slammed into the coolant manifold. The tire lever slipped from his fingers, clattering sharply against the deck plates before dropping through the floor grating into the sump below. He pressed his back against the iron bulkhead, his chest heaving, his fingers clawing at the rivets behind him.

"Adler," he gasped. His face was gray under the yellow lantern light, slick with sweat that had nothing to do with the night chill. "God in heaven. You shouldn't be here."

"You left the office door unlocked," Reese said evenly, resting one hand on the cold iron rail of the ladder. "Wyatt Croft is asleep in your records closet with three grains of laudanum in his tea and a wet compress on his phosphorus burns. Your clerk went home at four. That left nobody to carry your satchel."

Corby swallowed hard, his eyes darting toward the companionway stairs behind her, catching on the steel wedge driven into the upper dog latch and the darkness beyond. "I don't need an escort down here. My retainer covered the office and my residence. This is private company maintenance. An emergency hull inspection before dispatch floods the basin tomorrow morning."

"At nine o'clock at night?" Reese asked. "With a tire lever and a diving blade?"

"We have a schedule to keep," Corby snapped, though his voice lacked any trace of the haughty authority he had used in Transit Shed 9. He tried to pull his cuffs down, smearing black grease across his linen shirt. "The underwriters won't clear the release until the lower sea-cocks are verified. Royston insisted on it. If you want your final balance paid on Friday, you'll go back to the street gate and wait by the carriage."

"You're paying me three hundred dollars a day, Tobias," Reese said. She walked slowly toward the grease drum, her boots ringing dull and flat on the non-skid plating. "That is an absurd amount of money to spend on someone whose only talent is noticing when numbers don't add up."

Corby stiffened. "What are you talking about?"

Reese reached into her coat pocket, pulled out the torn manifest fragment from Transit Shed 9, and set it flat on the drum beside the lantern.

"Let's start with the fuel," she said. "A standard diesel trawler of the Osprey's tonnage burns eighty gallons every twelve hours when running five knots against the outer shoals. Gentry took on eight hundred gallons before clearing the spit on Thursday. When Naomi Teague dipped the tanks this morning, six hundred gallons were gone."

Corby didn't look at the paper. "They hit heavy weather off the Banks. I told you that. Everyone knows the Banks take double fuel in a gale."

"Except the sea-log at the lighthouse recorded calm water and five-knot breezes through Sunday," Reese continued. "And the Osprey never went near the Banks. If she had run to the cod grounds and back, she would have burned over two thousand gallons. She burned six hundred because she held station. Four days, twenty miles offshore, anchored directly over the scuttled quarantine fleet in Section Nine."

Corby's tongue flicked across his dry lips. "That's speculation. You're private security, Adler, not a hydrographer."

"I don't need hydrography to read a stencil or a tool stamp," Reese said. She drew the heavy silver-brazed spud wrench from her pocket and set it down with a ringing metallic thud, followed by the brass stencil plate. "Requisition Chit 412 from Naomi Teague's dispatch log. Graham Fallow signed for this B-07 wrench to sound the sunken hulls before he dropped it on the North Spit. And this brass plate from beneath his radiator: Q-H. Section Nine. The exact coordinates Fallow pulled from the archives before someone kicked his deadbolt in and tore his soundings ledger to ribbons."

Corby looked at the brass plate. The muscle along his jaw twitched once, violent and involuntary. "Fallow is an assessor. He has business with every wreck in the harbor."

"He had business with the Sovereign," Reese said. "The quarantine steamer your grandfather and Royston's syndicate scuttled eighty years ago with two hundred passengers locked below decks so the city wouldn't lose its free-trade charter."

The silence in the engine room stretched thick and rancid, broken only by the steady drip of condensation falling from the deckhead into the bilge.

Corby let out a thin, shaking breath. "You don't know what you're stepping into, Reese. That was a lifetime ago. It has nothing to do with this ship. It has nothing to do with me."

"It has everything to do with the four-hundred-and-twenty-pound cast-iron chest currently sitting in Lockup C," Reese said. She took a third object from her pocket and dropped it onto the drum with a heavy, leaden clink.

The lead death tally token spun twice on the tin lid before settling face up. The stamp was unmistakable under the lamplight: three crossed anchors beneath a salt-crown, inscribed with the name GENTRY.