Chapter 15 · Ghost of a Touch

Grease tastes like pennies. Ten minutes of scrubbing and it's still in the creases of my wrists.

Then the dock boards groan.

Not the river. A heel, testing a loose plank.

I kill the lamp. Black all the way down.

Outside, a man moves with a heavy drag — bad knee, weight on the left. I know that walk. I've had seven weeks to forget it and I haven't managed one day. I grab the pry bar off the bench and back up till my shoulders hit the stove. The mark on my neck goes hot and jagged, a wire pulled tight. Damp doesn't do that. Cold doesn't do that. He does that.

“Open it,” he says. “Or I open it.”

I know the gravel in that voice before it reaches my ears. “Try it and I'll put this through your eye.”

The frame shrieks. He tears the door off the hinges and splinters spray. I swing. He catches the iron mid-arc, wrenches it out of my hands, drops it on the boards. Rain beads on his jacket and drips onto my floor. Pine, cold iron, and under that something low and animal —