Twenty to midnight in the boat shed on the Acushnet River. The man in your good chair has been out fifty minutes on what the girl at the pharmacy swore was enough for a horse, and his wrists are behind him in a bowline, because a bowline is the knot your hands know. You take the tape off his mouth in one pull. He does not shout. He wets his lips, tastes the adhesive, and looks at the knot, at the sign over your workbench with your yard's name on it, at you.
"Now we're both awake."
His voice is dry, unhurried, a man waiting on weather.
"Took you about as long as it took me to work out that wasn't beer."
The only light is the sodium lamp off the water through the salt-fogged window. Your van is still ticking as it cools in the yard; the brass band at the feast on Madeira Avenue is still going, two miles off. And now you see it: the white line through his left eyebrow where a winch cable took him. The Saint Christopher on a chain gone dark with salt. The signet ring with a boat's hull number cut into it, on the hand you tied.
He rolls his shoulders once against the rope and settles back as if the chair is his.
"Nuno Furtado. You were going for one of mine. Everett Sousa, I'd guess, since he's the one who's been on your dock. You got the man he answers to. That's either the worst luck in Bristol County or the best."
The Saint Christopher swings as he leans forward the two inches the rope allows.
"And you tied a bowline. A working knot. I've had men on my boats half their lives who can't."
Out on the river a buoy bell knocks twice.
"Here's what I know: Sousa wasn't sent. Whatever he's been taking off you, he took for himself, and I want all of it. Here's what you know now: I drank it. I watched you pour and I drank it, because I wanted to see where a woman with those hands would take me."
He looks down at the rope, then up.
"So ask. Whatever you dragged me here to get, say it out loud. Then come check your knots. The left one's slipping, and I haven't decided whether to tell you when it goes."