hillbilly hymns. One of them said,

Farther along we’ll know all about it,

Farther along we’ll understand why.

But Jimmy didn’t have the luxury of waiting for it all to make sense later. This was way too here and now. And human. On this plane.

Think darker. Darker than dark.

Who set this up? Why? Who would it profit? What would he gain?

“Look, you’re sure?” Jimmy said. “I mean—”

“She looks a little like her,” Angel said. “But not enough.” He pointed at her face, with two fin gers together, almost touching her forehead and then her cheek. It was a gesture that looked like he was blessing the girl. “Her eyes, her nose. It’s not her. This one’s older, for one thing. Ten years, maybe. She’s also more mestizo. She’s also probably Salvadoran. Lucy was Mexican.”

Jimmy hadn’t really looked at the girl on the table until now. And now when he looked at her . . . But how could you know? What do you go by? She’d gone into the wall face-first. Her skull had been smashed. Who knew what mortician skills Hugh had. Maybe he just wasn’t any good at this. It didn’t look like Lucy. But what did Jimmy know? How close had he ever really been to her? Ten feet away in the café in Saugus?

“This is somebody else,” Angel said. “Lucy is still alive out there somewhere. I know it . . .”

Jimmy covered the body. The face.

“So who’s this Hugh?” Angel said. “The one who sent us down here.”

Jimmy knew what Angel meant. Start at what’s right in front of you and backtrack. Go from man to man to man until it started making sense. New sense.

“He’s a Sailor,” Jimmy said.

“Yeah, I know. I got that. That can mean a couple of things.”

“Friend of Machine Shop’s. He works nights here.”

Angel said, “So lay it out for me.”

“Machine Shop was right there, Pier 35,” Jimmy said. “He didn’t see it happen, but he was on the scene right after, saw them load the body. She was wearing the blue dress.”

“Did anybody actually see it happen?”

“I don’t know. I guess. It must have been crowded down there.”

“Then what?”

“They brought her here. Shop and me came here, after we’d gone back down to the waterfront together.”

“And this girl is the one you saw that night? That same night. Here.”

“Her face was crushed in,” Jimmy said. “I don’t know.”

Angel said, “I never knew Lucy was dead. You know what I mean? I never felt it.”

The intensity was still there, but his anger was gone. And Jimmy knew why.

“She’s alive out there somewhere,” Angel said. “Her and her brother.”

Angel wasn’t even three feet from the car when he put a Sailor on his back in the parking lot with a single shot to the face. Angel wasn’t that big, so a good part of what knocked the man down was just surprise.

“Sorry,” Angel said. “Don’t come at me like that.”

They were on Fisherman’s Wharf. It was three in the morning. The tourists were long gone, but there were two or three hundred Sailors between the Porsche and the warehouse building. And no Black Moses to part the Red Sea this time.

Whatever tension, noise that had been in the air before, it had been cranked up a few notches. The waterfront Sailors saw Jimmy and Angel for what they were, two guys looking for trouble, or for something on the other side of trouble, and most of them backed out of the way.

But not the guard at the door. It was Red Boots, the blond, pouty Billy Idol in the peacoat and navy watch cap who’d tailed Jimmy his first night in town.

“Hold up there, mate,” he said, putting a hand on Jimmy’s chest.

Jimmy slammed his face into the metal door, something of an overreaction.

But effective. It knocked the door ajar.

Jimmy and Angel came down the same corridor as before, but this time it opened out onto a dock, inside the huge, unlit warehouse space.

They got their first look at the exterior of the ship.

It was painted black, or some dark color that looked black in this gloom. It was big, a refitted oceangoing trawler. With its three-deck-high square windowless cabin, it came off looking like a missile cruiser.

“What’s the difference between a boat and a ship?” Angel said.

“This is a ship,” Jimmy said.

There was a gangway that was level with the dock, a double-wide hatch at the end of it on the other side. It was probably where they’d been led in the other