At the end of the pier was a building called the New England Fish Exchange, Members and Captains Only. It formed the dead end of the wharf, enclosing the long courtyard and blocking off the view of the harbor. In this interior courtyard, trucks and forklifts and tourists mingled with seagulls and food wrappers and the smell of dead fish and diesel fuel and the No Name restaurant where fish were frying. Water from melting ice formed puddles near the packing companies and stood stagnant, luminous with oil slick.
Behind the pier buildings, the fishing boats were tied to the pier, tossing on the baleful harbor water, rusted and dirty-looking with arcane equipment for dragging and trawling, and other things that a landling couldn’t identify. After the noise and movement of the interior courtyard, this outback strip along the ocean was silent and almost empty of life. A crew member hosed down one of the trawlers, two guys in rubber boots and dirty white T-shirts sat on the edge of the pier eating fried fish from a paper container and drinking something from large paper cups. Across the harbor, planes sat waiting on the taxiways at Logan.
Hawk and I stood near the land end of the pier, looking down the length of the pier behind the buildings.
“If I were doing this I’d come in by boat,” I said. Hawk nodded. He was looking, in a relaxed way, everywhere.
“Behind the Exchange Building, right?”
“Un huh.”
“So they could come in from the harbor, do it, go back down into the boat and be gone before we hit the pier.”
“If they could get a boat,” Hawk said.
“Costigan can get a boat,” I said.
Hawk nodded again, his eyes moving along the roof line of the row of buildings nearest us. “And they only have to go over behind the next pier and get out and into a car and make good their, uh, escape.”
“You eloquent bastard,” I said.
“Be the best way,” Hawk said.
I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “We got about a half hour. Let’s go next door to Commonwealth Pier and reconnoiter.”
“Reconnoiter?” Hawk said.
“If you can say `make good their escape,‘ I can say reconnoiter.”
“True,” Hawk said.
We went back through the short parking lot in front of the fish pier and walked maybe a hundred yards to the Commonwealth Pier Building, which had recently been an exhibition hall and was now being converted to some kind of computer center. The noise from the power tools was loud, and the rubble of interior demolition made it hard going. Workers in yellow hard hats moved about and a couple stared at us as we walked through hard hatless, but no one bothered us. The huge interior of the building was nearly gutted. A small yellow front-end loader was scooping rubble into a container to be skidded out to a truck. At the end of the pier we could look through the window openings in the gutted building and get a clear view of the fish pier behind the Fish Exchange. There were a lot of white seagulls with gray wings, and a few brown seagulls, the color of sparrows. There was nobody else.
“You figure they know what we look like,” Hawk said.
“Probably got descriptions. Maybe pictures. Costigan owns Mill River and they had pictures of us.”
“Or maybe they just got orders to blast every handsome black man they see with an ugly honkie.”
“We’d be safe,” I said.
An open-topped Art Deco speedboat with a very large outboard engine idled slowly past us and edged in toward the fish pier. It was a new boat, with very raked-back lines and a metalliclooking gray paint job with red trim. There were four men in it. The guy steering wore a white captain’s hat. The other three were Oriental, wearing nondescript black pants and matching black T-shirts. The guy in the white hat brought the boat to a gentle idle beside the fish pier, on the outside harbor edge, behind the Exchange, eight feet below the surface of the pier, and tied up to a rusted metal ladder that reached almost to the water line. The three Orientals went up the ladder, almost it seemed without touching it. One of them stood in the center of the dock, moving his head back and forth. He carried a blue gym bag. The other two took a place at opposite corners of the Exchange Building. Below, the speedboat idled quietly, and the guy in the white hat leaned on the steering wheel with his folded arms and gazed out toward the open sea. I looked at my watch. They were fifteen minutes early.
“The revenge of the Ninja,” Hawk said.
“Somebody’s doing somebody a favor,” I said. “Somebody must owe Costigan.”
“Maybe everybody owe Costigan,” Hawk said.
“We do,” I said. “What do you suppose he’s got in the gym bag?”
“Sophisticated kung fu weapons,” Hawk said. “Like maybe a Uzi.”
“Or a sawed-off,” I said. “Where’s Bruce Lee when you really need him.”
“We could use a boat,” Hawk said.
“Can you swim?” I said.
Hawk looked down at the murky harbor water and then looked at me. “In that?”
I nodded.
“That like swimming in a sewer,” Hawk said. I nodded again. Hawk shook his head.
“Man was right ‘bout you blue-eyed satans,” he said.
