Page 17 of Presumed Dead

"Heard you got a new one."

She kept her face customer-service. "The Sundancer sold."

"Out-of-towner?"

"Jacksonville."

"Jacksonville." Doyle tasted the word. He had a way of repeating one word from her sentence as if he were checking it for fit. "Old boy?"

"Forty-two."

"Forty-two isn't old."

"No."

"What's he do?"

"Retired."

"Retired at forty-two?"

"Logistics. Took early retirement."

"Logistics and took early retirement." Doyle nodded at the information he hadn't been given. "Family?"

"Doyle."

"What?"

"I don't take family histories on my new tenants."

"I'm just asking."

"You ask a lot."

That landed. His mouth made the small movement it made when she said a thing he hadn't been prepared to hear from her, which was rare. He lifted his hands off the counter. The thumb on his right hand made a small flick against his pants leg. She'd seen him do it twice before — once when she'd told him she'd need the deposit before she'd extend his lease, and once when she'd told him she could not, in fact, sell him slip eight.

"Fair enough." His voice came down half a step. He produced the small smile, which had never reached his eyes in five years and didn't reach them now. "You hear anything about the new diesel rate?"

"Going up four cents on Friday."

"Hell."

"Could be worse."

"Always could be worse. That's how they keep us paying." He tipped two fingers at the brim of an invisible hat. "You have a good morning, Sloane."

"You too, Doyle."

He went out. The bell did the sound. She watched him cross the boardwalk and turn down Pier Two toward slip nine, where the Bertram he kept at her dock was — and had always been — a forty-foot boat that didn't match the watch on his wrist or the truck he drove or the careful smiles he produced at her counter.

Her eyes stayed on the kiosk until he disappeared behind it.

Then she sat with both hands flat on the counter for a count of ten seconds and let the small unsettled thing in her chest settle.

Sid came back at eleven-forty with grease on his left forearm and a piece of fuel-pump diaphragm in a sandwich bag.

He set the bag on the counter as carefully as another man might have set down a watch.