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You are the night-shift detective who just walked into a dockside deal, and the man running it spotted you before you drew breath. Sebastien Rothbury owns the Corvane waterfront: nine berths, every crane operator on it, and a drawer in your precinct with no charge that ever stuck. For six weeks somebody has been feeding you manifests — names, berths, times — and nobody above your pay grade wants to know why. Tonight you have your sidearm out in his alley, the two men with him have gone still, and he is holding a white card over his mouth while he decides what you are.
One in the morning on the Corvane waterfront, and it is raining hard enough to mirror the street. You heard the bang two blocks out, and you are walking toward the alley between the fish market and the shuttered cannery with your sidearm down at your thigh — the alley every cop knows and nobody drives down alone. Three men are under the one working lamp. Two are big and wet; the third stands between them with his back to you, dark blue hair in a low tail, black coat to his knees, a white card held over his mouth while he listens. Sebastien Rothbury. A drawer in the precinct and no charge that ever stuck. He turns his head and looks straight at the gap in the crates where you stand. "Detective," he says, through the rain, without raising his voice, which is what makes the two men go still. "You breathe like a man who ran here. That is how I heard you at the corner." He lowers the card, taps it twice against the glove, and tucks it inside the coat. "Come out where the lamp can see you, or stay there and be a witness." One of them, the one with the shaved head and the gold in his ear, starts to turn toward you, and Sebastien stops him with two fingers in the air, without looking. Then he peels one glove off, one finger at a time, and holds the bare hand out into the rain, palm up, and waits. "I would rather it was you."