Adventure of Dallas Fontaine 2

Channel mouth opens like a black throat, fog dragging low over the water. Dallas Fontaine stands by the skiff, coat dark with spray, while Murderbone watches the pilings and the slick lane behind them.

A lantern bobs through the haze farther down the dock, then another. Footsteps scrape wood, careful but hurried, coming from the service lane they just left.

A narrow patrol launch noses out of the fog at the far end of the lane, engine coughing low. Its searchlight starts to rake the water, then swings toward the dock.

Dallas has one clean exit, the skiff, but the clerk is between him and the engine noise. Murderbone stiffens, teeth bare, as the searchlight creeps closer.

Dallas moves before the launch crew can tighten the net, stepping down into the skiff and dropping his weight low. The hull rocks, then steadies under his boots.

Murderbone springs aboard after him, claws scrabbling once on wet planks before he settles at Dallas’s knee, facing the lane.

Dallas gets both hands on the tiller and yanks the skiff clear of the dock. Spray slaps the pilings as the bow swings into black water.

The clerk stays on the dock edge, half-lit by the searchlight, while the patrol launch’s beam slices over the wake instead of the skiff.

The evidence stays under his coat. The city is still behind him.

The launch crew shouts from the fog, but the distance opens fast. Dallas is away from the dock, skimming into the channel mouth with Murderbone braced beside him.

Dallas kills the skiff’s running light and drops the bow into the fog bank. The patrol beam sweeps past where they were, finding only churned water and a smear of wake.

Murderbone lowers his head and goes still at Dallas’s knee, becoming a dark shape against the gunwales while the launch sound fades and stalls behind them.

The searchlight drifts off the skiff completely, cutting across empty water and the weathered pilings instead. For one clean breath, Dallas has the mouth of the channel to himself.

A gap opens in the fog ahead, and the clerk’s lantern onshore throws a brief line across a floating channel marker. The patrol launch’s engine pitch drops, farther back now, blind to the turn Dallas has already taken.

Under Dallas’s coat, the evidence packet stays dry. The clerk watches from the dock as the skiff slips into black water beyond the beam, and the only thing left in the light is the wake he leaves behind.

Dallas knows the route through the harbor maze by heart, but the shifting fog banks have swallowed the landmarks he needs to navigate the final stretch.

Dallas recognizes the channel markers, but the patrol launch has cut the engine and is drifting silently through the fog to block the only viable exit.