The Graving Dock by Gabriel Cohen Read Free Book Online Page A

feeling these days?”
    Jack shrugged, doing his best to act casual. “Fine. Better than the Jets—you see the game last night?” He didn’t like talking about his shooting or recovery. Back in the hospital, he had noticed something strange. Like any wounded cop, he had received many visitors, from the mayor and the commissioner on down. His colleagues would drop by, hand off some magazines or a fruit basket, say they had to run, and run. It took him a while to figure it out: All cops wanted to believe that they were invulnerable, magically protected by the badge. Seeing a wounded coworker put the lie to that belief. Now he just wanted to put the shooting behind him, to blend back in and resume the work he loved.
    He was glad to change the subject. “Tell me about the bodies.”
    Pacelli moved the throttle forward to pick up speed. “We don’t find them much in winter. In the cold weather they tend to sink and stay down, and they don’t come up until the spring.”
    Jack nodded. When the water warmed up, bacteria released gases in the corpses and they rose to the surface, usually around mid-April. It was known as Floater Week. There was a strange poetry to it, all those cold submerged bodies rising up: the drunken boaters, the bridge jumpers, the victims of mob hits (who often escaped their concrete shoes or chains as their bodies softened and frayed). Somebody had once called death “that bourne from which no traveler returns,” but every spring, there they came, not to be denied, all lifting toward the light like watery Pentecostals on Judgment Day.
    On shore to the right, block after block of huge beige warehouses slid by, the old Brooklyn Army Terminal; it had once processed most of the troops headed off to World War II. Up ahead came the piers and brick warehouses of Red Hook, where Jack was raised. The waterfront there was dominated by a few ship-loading cranes and the huge conical metal silo of the old Revere sugar factory. (At one point the factory had been owned by an associate of Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, and Jack knew a local who liked to joke that the abandoned silo was filled with Imelda’s discarded shoes.)
    The bow of the NYPD launch pounded up and down and threw sheets of spray as it encountered an occasional wake. During the summer, the harbor would have been crowded with speedboats, sailboats, even Jet-Skis and kayaks, but there were few vessels out in this chilly weather: mainly ferries and tugs, or tankers just arrived from the ocean, which opened out just beyond the Verrazano Bridge to the south. The ships rested on the water like majestic animals on some African plain.
    “Is this the end of the season for private boats?”
    Pacelli nodded. “Pretty much. By mid-January most people take their craft out of the water, because we start to get ice out here.”
    Jack stared out the broad windows of the cabin. If the coffin had not been unloaded from some small boat, it had probably been launched from shore. Where was the question—if he knew that, he would know where to look for witnesses.
    Pacelli turned away from his constant scanning of the water ahead. “Have you gotten a preliminary report from the M.E. yet?”
    Jack nodded. “It seems that the kid was poisoned, by injection.”
    Pacelli got a little wide-eyed. “Do you think it could be a terrorist thing? Like this goddamn anthrax that’s going around?”
    Jack shrugged. Since the World Trade Center attack, jittery New Yorkers were picturing terrorism everywhere: in accidents, in subway delays, even traffic jams. The fact was, though, that poisoners usually wanted their crimes hidden. Poison was a rather old-fashioned MO. For centuries it had been a favored means to surreptitiously get rid of a spouse or to speed up an inheritance, but recent advances in forensic toxicology and pathology had rendered it increasingly rare.
    “Actually, it was fentanyl ,” Jack said. “I’m glad it was that.”
    “Why?”
    “It’s a