The Graving Dock by Gabriel Cohen Read Free Book Online

she had read about computers. “What about ‘graphic user interface’? No, wait, that would be G. U. I.”
    “ ‘Gary, Indiana,’ ” he said quietly.
    She had to think for a moment. Just as she came up with something, she was disappointed to hear a subtle snore. “ ‘Geographical Institute,’ ” she murmured into the dark.
    She closed her eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. After a few minutes she rolled over and looked at the faintly glowing hands of the alarm clock: It was almost midnight. She lay back carefully, trying not wake Jack, and stared for a while at the dark ceiling, thinking about the way he had raised the subject of kids, and then just as quickly let it drop…It was pretty obvious that he had talked about her childlessness as if it was a done deal.
    In truth, she was close to the final age limit for having kids, but she rarely panicked about it, unlike many single women she knew, and that was because she had mixed feelings about the subject. She liked kids well enough—and loved her little nieces and nephews dearly—but when she saw the harried, sleepless looks of the young mothers she knew, the way that kids seemed to take so much romance out of life, sometimes she wondered if the tradeoffs were worth it. On her infrequent visits to her parents down in suburban Philadelphia, her mother always laid a big guilt trip on her, as if she was abnormal, or—at the very least—selfish and inconsiderate.
    Jack, on the other hand…He already had a son, Ben, a shy, gangly kid in his early twenties. She could understand if he didn’t want to go through diapers and all that baby stuff again, but still—if a major door was going to be closed in her life, she wanted to be the one to shut it.

CHAPTER seven
    “W E GET SOME FLOATERS,” said Sergeant Mike Pacelli, “but they don’t usually come in boxes.” He hit the starter switch and Jack was glad when the little blue NYPD launch stopped swaying and surged away from the Harbor Unit dock. Black clouds puffed out of the stern, and the smell of salt water was overtaken by a strong odor of diesel fuel. The engine was loud, and the deck rumbled beneath Jack’s feet. Both men fell silent as the boat veered out into New York Harbor, toward the Statue of Liberty.
    Jack shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets. He stood in an enclosed cabin, but the wind on the water brought the temperature way down; he wondered how long it would take for the boat to warm up.
    The launch plowed across the pewter surface. There was a powerful sense of freedom to this mode of transport: While Jack spent half his time struggling through the City’s tangled traffic, this was like driving out across a huge, empty parking lot. You could drive in circles, do figure-eights, whatever you wanted…
    He glanced at his old Academy classmate, calm but authoritative behind the wheel. Pacelli—born and raised on the Jersey shore—had never shown much interest in the City; he was just happy that the five boroughs were largely surrounded by water. He didn’t care that the “Charlie Unit” didn’t even have investigators, as long as he could get paid for working on a boat. Pacelli had a potbelly now, his hair was graying, and his face was weathered by long exposure to sun and wind, but with his dark Ray-Bans and cocky grin it was easy to picture him as a teenager speeding past a beach in a little powerboat, trying to impress some girl.
    Jack smiled back. “This is a pretty sweet detail,” he said, speaking loudly over the noise of the engine.
    Pacelli nodded. “I couldn’t take street patrol. Out here, you don’t have to deal with any of that ‘he-hit-me, no-she-hit-me’ crap.” He paused to listen to a dispatcher’s voice crackling out of the radio mounted next to the wheel, then decided it was something he could ignore. He fell silent for a minute, then turned to Jack with an awkward expression.
    Jack tightened up inside: He knew what the man was about to ask.
    “How are you