Chapter 29 · Two Warrants

"Say it out loud," Garrett said. "Where I can hear it."

"Eight hours, twenty minutes." My voice came out scraped raw. "Five hundred minutes till the gavel. Berth Four, the drydock, the loft — everything my dad killed himself building."

"And before the gavel?"

"The logs." I flattened my palm on the oilcloth between us and felt the wax give under my thumb. "No federal stamp tonight, they're scrap paper."

"Paper burns." He dug at his belt for keys out of habit, stopped himself, did the math on the walk back from the breakwater. "Yard loaner's out back."

"It runs?"

"It starts."

We took it. Rust-eaten sedan, one cracked headlight, a heater that blew cold, a windshield that fogged gray by the second mile. I kept the bundle clamped to my ribs and wore the wax down to the threads with my thumb.

Cannery Row was six blocks of dead streetlight. The federal annex had two barred windows and a bulb over the door that had been out since I worked there.