Page 23 of The Captain
Each had a delivery signature. J. Kellerman. I didn’t like the cursive. It felt like a man who would compliment your dress while he stole your wallet.
“Who is Kellerman?” I asked.
“Manager for Arcturus,” Papa said. “Smiles too much. His shoes do not scuff. He wears a watch that costs more than my car and tells me, with modesty, that it is a gift from his wife.”
“Did he say what went in the housings?” I asked.
“He said ‘survey gear’ and ‘proprietary.’” Papa met my gaze straight on. “He did not ask me to sign anything that put a finger on my mouth. If he had, I would have called you before using a pen. He brought cut sheets with dimensions and tolerances, tight as a banker’s heart. Eli cut to the millimeter. I checked every weld myself.”
“Fairings,” I said. “Housings. Quick-release mounts. That’s a quiet deck for equipment that doesn’t want to be seen.”
“It is also a quiet deck for research that wants to be clean,” he said.
“You think they’re scientists?” I asked, sharper than I meant.
“I think they are men who put work on our table,” he said. “When I asked for a DUNS number, they gave it. When I asked for payment terms, they honored them. When we delivered, they saidthank youwithout pretending we were servants. That makes them rarer than you might think.”
I swallowed once. The heat had cooled since the PDF opened. Now something colder moved. “Typhon,” I said, tapping the line, the shaky redaction. “Any contact under that name?”
He shook his head. “Not to me. Does this name stand on your beach when you are moving animals?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe it hides behind men who do.”
He reached across the desk and put his thumb on the edge of the invoice, the way he used to put his thumb on a splinter I brought him so he could pull it clean. “Ma puce,” he said, voice softer, “what do you need from me that is not a defense of my choices?”
I hated that my throat went tight. I pushed the contractor tag I’d tucked into my tank across the desk instead—plastic, stamped with a logo that made my skin crawl. “I cut this out of our pen seam this morning. Arcturus is on your ledger. This company is on a Navy authorization list. Someone is running noise in a box they told me was quiet. Somewhere between here and my creek is a line that connects all of that. I need to find it.”
He ran his thumb over the plastic, thinking. “This was tied to your pen?”
“Knotted into a snarl of monofilament,” I said. “Exactly where a careless hand would snag it.”
He turned the tag end over end like a worry stone. “Eli!” he bellowed without looking away. “Bring me the gate logs for last week and the camera stills from Tuesday night.”
Eli materialized from nowhere and everywhere. “Got ’em.”
Papa flipped the printouts.
“Cumberland Logistics,” Papa said.
“And Cumberland is?” I asked.
“A broker,” Papa said. “Not always dirty. Often messy.”
“Messy ruins animals the same as dirty,” I said.
Papa’s hand went back to the tag like he couldn’t help it. “If this was dropped by careless men, the camera at the river gate might have their faces,” he said, almost to himself. “We catch the tide there, you know, in images. People do not look up. They look only where they are going.”
“Can I have copies?” I asked.
“You may have eyes,” he said. “You may not have the originals. I will keep those where they do not get lost.”
“Papa—”
He raised his brows. “You taught me chain of custody is a religion,” he said. “Do not blaspheme in my office.”
Despite myself, my mouth tilted. He must’ve seen the relief because he exhaled like a man who’d been holding a wrench too tight and finally put it down.
“You are angry with the Navy,” he said, adjusting the papers into a neat pile so he wouldn’t reach for me instead. “And maybe you should be. But listen to me with both ears. This city will sell you contractor sins as uniforms. Sometimes it is true. Sometimes it is not. The boat that takes a whale’s language from him is built by a man who thinks he is making a weatherproof box for a scientist who wants to listen to fish. The line from one to the other—” He pulled taut an imaginary thread between thumb and forefinger. “—is this. Tension. And money.”
