Chapter 2

Sizemore set the box on the concrete and stood over it. "Whose is it?"

"I didn't say it wasn't mine," Hollis said. "I said it isn't mine to open."

"That's the same thing."

"It isn't."

The officer's jaw worked. Behind him, Eli had taken one step forward without meaning to, and Sizemore pointed two fingers at him without turning around. "Back up."

Eli froze. Hollis said, without any heat at all, "Do what he says, bud." The boy stepped back. His hands were shaking, so he put them in his pockets where nobody could see.

"License," Sizemore said.

Hollis took out his wallet and handed the card up the ramp without being asked twice.

Up on the apron, Kelsey Rudd watched all of it from behind her sunglasses. She was twenty-four and had been a trainee for twenty-nine days. Last July she had ridden with Sizemore on a pontoon check at a different landing and watched him make a woman dump her tackle box onto the dock over a life jacket that turned out to be under the seat, exactly where she said it was. Kelsey had written a paragraph about it that night. A supervisor called her into an office four days later and told her that what she had written was not a complaint, it was a personality conflict, and that she should drop it.

She dropped it. She had thought about that phone call about two hundred times since.

Tonight her right hand was in her hip pocket, screen in against her leg, and the recording hadn't stopped. She hadn't decided anything. She just hadn't stopped it.

"How long you had this boat?" Sizemore asked.

"Thirty-one years."

"Registration."

"In the truck. Glove box."

"Go get it."

"No, sir."

Sizemore's head came up. "Say that again."

"I said no. You can walk twenty feet and look at it yourself. You've got legs, and I've got a boy standing here."

"I don't need your registration," Sizemore said. "I need to know what's in this box."

"It's not mine to open."

"You keep saying that."

"Yes, sir. I do."

Sizemore crouched. He tapped the padlock with one knuckle, then straightened and looked down the ramp at the old man sitting on the trailer tongue with his hands on his knees.

"You know what I think?" he said. "I think you've got something in here you don't want anybody to see."

Hollis looked at him for a long moment. Then he said, quietly, "Brody, you don't want to do this."

The officer blinked. "How do you know my name?"

Kelsey saw it, because she was watching the old man's face and not the officer's. Hollis Renfro had read the name tape the second Sizemore walked down that ramp, before a word was spoken, and he had been carrying the name around in his mouth for ten minutes, deciding whether to say it out loud.

Sizemore reached down and unclipped the folding knife from his belt.