The rain off the Gowanus Canal tasted like copper sheeting and old diesel.
Sean Dennis took his tea black out of a chipped blue enamel camping mug, because the paper cups from the Greek deli on Van Brunt had wax liners, and hot water melted the paraffin into an oily film that coated the back of a man’s teeth for hours. Nobody else on the night shift cared about paraffin. They drank their sludge out of whatever bleached pulp sat by the urn, then wondered why their stomachs rotted by forty-five.
Sean wiped the mug’s rim with his thumb. Up in the rafters of Berth 3, a brown-winged miller moth beat itself stupid against the amber housing of an sodium lamp. The dry, papery rattle of its wings made the hair on Sean’s forearms stand up like wire. He took two paces back, keeping his eyes on the concrete floor until the creature fluttered away into the dark rafters. He had hated moths since he was six years old, when one crawled into his ear during a family camping trip in the Catskills and took an emergency room doctor with a pair of long blunt tweezers twenty minutes to drown in mineral oil.
The noise that had brought him out to the pier hadn’t been an animal. It had sounded like a subway train coming off its trucks at sixty miles an hour, three blocks inland, followed by an hour of dead silence.
Now the fog was lifting off the water, grey and thin as curdled milk.
Berth 3 smelled wrong. It smelled of wet zinc, burned hair, and arterial iron.
Sean stepped past the yellow safety chain. His steel-toed Red Wings crunched on tempered safety glass, pulverized so fine it looked like coarse sea salt. Overhead, the secondary load beam was twisted at a thirty-degree angle. Ten-inch structural steel, torqued like a licorice whip. A web line—thick as a hawser, grey-white and beaded with dirty water—hung from the sheared flange, swaying in the draft from the river.
At the base of the gantry crane, Logan was sitting on an overturned cable spool.
He wore an undershirt that looked like someone had run it through an industrial planer, stiff with dried mud and black crust along the ribs. His boots were laced with wire. A half-burned cigar sat unlit between his knuckles, cold ash flaking onto his dungarees. He didn’t look up when Sean’s boots hit the gravel.
"Told the harbor cops to stay past the gate," Logan said. His voice was a shovel dragging over river shale.
"I’m not harbor," Sean said. "I’m the night super for the dry dock. You broke my hoist."
Logan spat into the grease puddle between his feet. A thin thread of dark red came with it. "Hoist was rotten anyway. Salt got the gear teeth."
"It was rated for forty tons."
"Was," Logan said.
Sean looked at Logan’s right hand. The knuckles were raw, pink skin knitting over split knuckle-caps while Sean watched, the tissue bubbling tight with a faint, nauseating hiss like solder cooling on tin. Logan caught him looking and dropped his arm into his lap, casually turning the meat of his wrist inward. He wasn't hiding the wound; he was hiding the brass dog tag tangled in his sleeve. The metal was stamped with Canadian military serials, but the bottom half had been chewed off by bolt cutters.
"He inside?" Sean asked.
"Up top," Logan grunted. He reached into his shirt pocket, found a crushed matchbook, and struck one with his thumbnail. The sulfur flared bright and bitter in the cold. "Don't go up there. Kid’s got glass in his head."
Sean looked at the ladder bolted to the silo wall.
A smear of crimson marked every third rung, trailing fifty feet up toward the catwalk where the conveyor dumped into the grain hoppers. A red-and-blue glove, fingers shredded down to the split seams, hung from an electrical conduit halfway up.
Sean didn't call the police. The emergency phone was twenty yards behind him inside the shack, glowing red beside the time clock, but calling nine-one-one in Red Hook when these two had torn an acre of reinforced masonry apart meant two dozen tactical cruisers, helicopters shaking the sheet metal, and three hours of federal badges asking about shipping manifests he hadn't filed yet. Instead, Sean walked toward the tool crib, took a pair of heavy-gauge cable shears off the shadowboard, and climbed.
His boots rang dull on the iron treads. Forty feet. Fifty. The wind off the Upper Bay hit him sideways, cold enough to draw water from his eyes.
Peter Parker was wedged behind the secondary conveyor motor.
His mask was off, balled in his left fist like an oily rag. His face looked like a plum that had been dropped from a roof: the left eye swollen completely shut behind a rim of purple flesh, the bridge of his nose crooked and weeping clear fluid. He had his knees pulled up against his chest, his spine pressed into the vibrating steel housing of the turbine. He was shivering so hard his teeth clicked together in uneven bursts.
When Sean’s head cleared the deck plates, the kid didn’t jump. He just turned his good eye toward the ladder, his shoulders hitching.
"We’re closed," Peter said. It came out as a whisper, shredded by concrete dust. "Dock's... dock’s condemned, mister. You gotta back up."
"I signed for the cement mixer you threw through the roof," Sean said.
Peter looked at the shears in Sean’s hand. His pupil was dilated until the brown was just a thin ring around the black. "Didn't throw it. He hit me with it."
"Same difference on the insurance form."
Peter let out a dry, ragged breath that caught halfway down his throat. He winced, his right arm curling tight around his floating ribs. Under the torn spandex, his skin was mottled with green and yellow bruises the size of dinner plates, crossed by three parallel lines that had scabbed over into thick black ridges.
"You should leave," Peter muttered. "He doesn't quit. He just... he sits there until the blood stops, and then he comes back."
"He's smoking on a spool," Sean said. "Doesn't look like he's climbing."
"He doesn't have to climb. He knows what's in the barge."
Sean stopped on the top platform. The shears were heavy in his right grip. "What barge?"
Peter didn't answer. He turned his face away, pressing his forehead against the cold motor casing. A small, black plastic drive—the kind couriers used for encrypted flight recorders, sealed with green epoxy around the seams—was wedged between his hip and the steel decking. He pulled his torn jersey over it, clumsy and defensive, but his fingers were shaking too hard to tuck the fabric flat.
"He told you why he was here?" Peter asked.
"Said the hoist was rotten."
"He lied." Peter’s voice dropped lower, flat and dangerous in a way that sounded entirely wrong coming from a kid who couldn't have been older than twenty-four. "He was in Munich three days ago. Ask him whose passport he burned at JFK."
Sean didn't ask. He reached out and snipped the frayed web tether that was keeping the emergency cutoff switch from engaging on the grain motor. The nylon snapped with a sharp *twang*, and the hum of the turbine died instantly, dropping the gantry into hollow, echoing silence.
In the quiet, the water slapped against the pilings below with a slow, wet rhythm.
"You took a chunk out of his leg," Sean said.
"He tried to gut me with the steering column of a Mack truck," Peter whispered. "I put him through the retaining wall because he wouldn't listen. She didn't want him there. She left three letters in the locker at the Port Authority, and every single one said if he showed up, she'd jump."
"Who?"
Peter’s jaw tightened. A drop of blood fell from his chin, dark against the rusted zinc deck. He didn't say the name. He closed his mouth, his jaw muscles jumping, and looked down through the grated flooring at the tiny figure of the man sitting on the spool fifty feet below.
Down on the pier, Logan threw his match into the puddle.
"Hey! Blue collar!" Logan yelled up. His voice didn't carry the strain of the climb; it carried the steady, deadweight force of a sledgehammer. "Get down here before the kid passes out and rolls off the rail. I ain't scraping two of you off the asphalt."
Sean looked at Peter. The kid wasn't moving. His skin had gone the color of skim milk, but his fingers were locked around the drive like rusted pliers.
"Can you stand?" Sean asked.
"No," Peter said honestly.
"Then stay out of the draft. It’s going to rain harder before six."
Sean walked back to the ladder. On his way down, his boot caught on something wedged between the seventh rung and the grain chute: a circular brass lens, three inches wide, cracked across the center and rimmed with scorched rubber. It wasn't from Peter’s mask; Peter’s lenses were teardrop-shaped white mesh. This was green glass, ground thick for night optics, with Cyrillic numbering stenciled along the retaining ring.
Sean didn't yell down. He slipped the lens into his canvas coat pocket next to his pipe tobacco, letting his coat sag under the weight.
When his boots hit the concrete, Logan was standing up.
The Wolverine looked shorter from five paces than he did from thirty, but his shoulders were wide as an axe handle. Up close, the smell of him was nearly unbearable: cheap whiskey, wet wool, and the sour, sharp reek of adrenaline that dogs get when they've been kicked in the ribs. He had his thumbs tucked into his belt loops.
"He still breathing?" Logan asked.
"He's breathing," Sean said. "He says you were in Germany."
Logan’s eyes went small. The skin around his cheekbones didn't move, but his left shoulder dipped an inch. "Kid talks too much. Always has."
"He says somebody jumped."
"Nobody jumped," Logan said. His tone wasn't angry; it was colder than the river mud. "She was dead before the plane touched the runway at Newark. Somebody just forgot to turn the radio off."
"Which somebody?"
Logan took three steps forward until he was close enough that Sean could see the burst capillaries in the whites of his eyes. "You got a truck here, Dennis?"
Sean felt his stomach tighten. "How do you know my name?"
Logan tapped his own collarbone with a blunt, scarred forefinger. "Your stencil's on the clip of your clipboard over on the shack counter. Now: you got an eight-cylinder flatbed with a winch?"
"I got an old Ford," Sean said. "Clutch slips in second."
"Good enough." Logan reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of hundred-dollar bills wrapped in green electrical tape. He dropped it into Sean’s enamel mug, which was still sitting on the salt spreader where Sean had left it. The wad hit the bottom with a dull *thump*. "There’s four thousand in there. You’re gonna take that Ford, back it down to Slip 4, and hook the chain to the rusted lockbox sitting under the stern of the *Amaryllis*."
Sean looked past Logan’s shoulder toward Slip 4.
The *Amaryllis* was a sixty-foot tug, decommissioned during the Koch administration, listing three degrees to port in the black water. Nothing moved on its deck. But around the stern, where the prop had been pulled for scrap twenty years ago, the tide was swirling with a greasy, pale yellow foam that didn't look like harbor bilge. It looked like industrial coolant.
"What's in the lockbox?" Sean asked.
"Ten gallons of stabilizer," Logan said. "And whatever’s left of the girl’s brother."
A piece of sheet metal groaned on the roof above them. Both men looked up.
Peter wasn't on the catwalk anymore.
He was crouched on the edge of the hoist arm, thirty feet above the water, swaying slightly against the grey sky. He had pulled his torn mask back down over his ruined face. The white eye-patches were smudged with soot, one of them torn open to reveal the swollen purple skin beneath, but he had both feet planted on a four-inch beam that Sean wouldn't have walked on without a harness and a prayer.
"Logan!" Peter’s voice cracked across the open pier, thin and desperate over the gulls. "You don't hook that winch! You touch that stern and the whole dock goes into the channel!"
Logan didn't draw his hands out of his pockets. He just tilted his head back, squinting into the cold mist.
"You're out of web, Parker," Logan said, quiet enough that the wind nearly tore the words away. "And you got two ribs floating in your lung lining. Go home to Queens."
"She told me where the detonator was," Peter said.
Logan’s hands didn't come out of his pockets, but Sean saw the tendons in the older man’s neck go rigid as iron rebar. The unlit cigar dropped from Logan's teeth, tumbling into the oil slick at their feet.
"She didn't have one," Logan said.
"She had two," Peter said. His hand came out from behind his back. Between his stained, shredded fingers, he held a black toggle switch connected to four inches of red detonating cord, the copper leads stripped clean and ready. "And you brought the second one with you from Berlin."
Sean stood between them on the cracked concrete, the green Cyrillic lens burning cold against his thigh through his canvas pocket. He looked from the kid shaking on the iron spar down to the man whose knuckles were clicking under his skin, and the salt on his tongue suddenly didn't taste like the canal at all.
It tasted like lead.
***