Maritime Recovery

There are three places in Midnight Harbor where you’re likely to find retired dockworkers. Bars. Diners. And places where they’re technically supposed to be fishing. I found Walter Pike at the third.

He was sitting at the end of a wooden pier with a fishing pole in one paw and a thermos beside him. The harbor was gray that morning, the kind of gray that made the water and sky look as though somebody had forgotten where one ended and the other began.

Pike was seventy-eight, according to the old union records. He looked older. He also looked like someone who had spent most of those years outside.

I stopped beside him. “Walter Pike?”

He kept watching the water. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“Who’s asking.”

“Nick Nine Lives,” I informed him.

That got half a glance. “The private detective?”

“On good days.”

“What do you want?” He asked.

I sat on the edge of the pier. “Maritime Recovery Corporation.”

His fishing line stopped moving. Not the pole. Pike. For a few seconds, he didn’t even blink. Then he slowly reeled in the line. Nothing on the hook. “Who told you about them?”

“City directory.”

Pike looked back toward the water. “Directory should’ve forgotten them.”

“Apparently it tried.”

That got the rest of his attention.

Warehouse 17

I told him I was looking into the old Warehouse 17 fire. Not everything. Just enough.

Pike listened without interrupting, which is rare in Midnight Harbor. Most people interrupt because they know something. The rest interrupt because they want you to think they do. When I finished, he unscrewed the top of his thermos. “M.R.C. wasn’t a recovery company.”

“What was it?” I asked surprised at the revelation.

He poured coffee into the cup. “That’s what everybody wondered.”

I waited. Pike drank. I waited some more. Retired dockworkers and private detectives have something in common.

We’re both comfortable with silence.

Eventually, he started talking. M.R.C. appeared at Pier 17 without much announcement. No sign beyond the initials. No advertisements Pike remembered. No steady crews reporting for shifts. But trucks came. Always late.

“How late?”

“Midnight. One. Two in the morning.”

“What kind of trucks?”

“Freight.”

“What was in them?”

“Crates.”

“What’s in the crates?”

Pike looked at me. “If I knew that, detective, this conversation would be shorter.”

Fair.

“Crates went in,” he continued. “Never saw much come out.”

That bothered me. A company called Maritime Recovery should have been recovering something. Whatever M.R.C. was doing, it didn’t appear interested in telling the harbor.

The Ship Without a Name

Then Pike told me about the ship. It arrived after midnight near the end of M.R.C.’s short stay at Warehouse 17. Small freighter. Dark hull. No company markings. Pike couldn’t remember seeing a harbor registration.

“What was the ship called?”

“It wasn’t,” was his answe.

“Every ship has a name.”

“Then somebody didn’t want us reading this one.” He said the freighter stayed at the pier for about four hours. Cranes moved cargo between the vessel and Warehouse 17, although from where Pike had been working, he couldn’t tell what was being loaded or unloaded.

By dawn, the ship was gone. Within days, M.R.C. was gone too. No announcement. No final shipment. No explanation. The warehouse remained. At least for a while.

“What did the ship look like?”

“Like a hundred other freighters.”

“Nothing distinctive?”

Pike rubbed his jaw. Then his eyes narrowed. “There was something.”

“What?”

“Painted on the stern.”

He pointed toward the water as though the ship might still be sitting there. “A bird.”

“What kind?”

“White one.”

I reached into my coat. Dom Marlowe’s photograph had been folded into an inside pocket since I left City Records. I’d looked at it enough times that I could picture every shadow. Or thought I could.

I handed it to Pike. He stared. His expression changed. “There.”

He pointed. Warehouse 17 sat in the background, partially obscured by smoke from the fire. Near the loading doors was a dark shape I’d assumed was damage to the photograph. Except it wasn’t dark. There was a tiny patch of pale color inside it.

White.

A bird.

I’d looked at the photograph a dozen times. I’d never seen it.

Something on the Line

Pike handed the picture back. “Whatever they were doing,” he said, “people knew not to ask.”

“Did you?”

“I was twenty-four.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“Sure it does.”

His fishing pole jerked. Pike grabbed it. For the first time since I’d arrived, he smiled. “Finally.”

The line pulled hard. He worked the reel while I moved out of the way. Whatever was underneath us had weight. Pike pulled. The line surfaced.

No fish.

A length of rusted chain appeared first, dripping harbor water onto the boards. The hook had snagged something attached to it. Metal. Pike hauled it onto the pier. It was a rectangular tag, maybe three inches long, crusted with rust and whatever else thirty years underwater does to metal.

I crouched beside it. Three stamped letters were still visible.

M.R.C.

Neither of us said anything for a moment. Pike looked at me. I looked at the harbor. I’d spent two days chasing a company that had disappeared more than thirty years ago. Apparently, Midnight Harbor had decided to give something back.

The problem with the harbor is that it never gives you the thing you want. It gives you the thing that makes you ask another question.

I slipped the tag into an evidence bag.

Pike cast his line again. “Detective?”

“Yeah?”

“Be careful with that bird.”

I stopped. “Why?”

He was watching the water again. “Because I remember something else.”

I waited. Pike reeled his line slowly. “I saw it again.”

“Where?”

“Years after M.R.C. disappeared.”

He looked at me. “On a car outside Marlowe’s.”

The harbor suddenly felt colder.

Now there’s a ship without a name, a white bird that appears in Dom’s photograph, an M.R.C. tag pulled from the harbor and a new connection to the Marlowe family.

The mystery isn’t getting smaller, and it’s learning how to swim.

CASE STATUS: OPEN

To be continued.