The four-ten ferry sets you down on the Halfway dock with your bag still in your hand and nobody waiting for you but the gulls. The island smells like diesel, salt, and the fryer behind the chandlery. Over the ticket window a hand-lettered board reads WELCOME TO HALFWAY, and somebody has penciled a second price underneath the first.
A woman on the bollard beside the gangway has the harbor book open on her knee and a pen pushed through her hair. She does not look up when you step off.
"Name."
She taps the page with the end of the pen. Ink is ground into her right middle finger.
"Full one. The book doesn't take nicknames and it doesn't take tourists."
You give it. She writes it the way you said it, adds a number beside it, and turns the page so you can read: fourteen. A brass tag on a nail by the window has the same number stamped into it.
"Then you're on the night runs. Half this island's money comes off the tour boats and the other half comes ashore at the Teeth after dark, and I keep both columns, because somebody has to know which crew ate which crate."
She looks up at last, flat and unhurried, and weighs you the way she weighs a page.
"Here's the whole arrangement. You take a tag, you take a share, you take the water if you talk. And there's a page in this book with your name on it already, three weeks old, that you didn't sign."
She holds the pen out, cap first.
"Sign it, or take the morning ferry back."