His uncle had also judged wrong. They were far too distant from the airport to catch any of the planes taking off. In fact, they could barely seen any metal in the sky. A flicker or a flash as the aluminum skin caught the retreating sun.

Rastus saw one blaze in particular as he rode the bow: a brilliant white-and-orange glint that held the intensity of a camera’s flash. He pointed up to it and gasped.

“Uncle! Uncle!” he called out.

His uncle only laughed and hoisted the beer.

At first, he thought they were salmon, or seals or even Orca whales surfacing—an exciting splash a hundred yards to his left. Port, as his uncle called it. Why they couldn’t just call it left Rastus wasn’t sure.

The moment that first splash occurred, his uncle cranked the wheel in that direction, so severely that the cleat was not enough to hold Rastus, and he fell to his right, barely catching hold of the wire rail at the last possible second. He regained his balance, righted himself and looked back at his uncle in the wheelhouse.

The man’s face had contorted into a full flood of surprise and excitement.

Rastus turned to see why: three more giant splashes. Had to be whales, the way the water shot up.

His uncle was running the boat right into the same area, having goosed the mighty engine and thrown something of a duck tail into their now violent wake. The man hoisted a pair of binoculars and surveyed the distant splashes—for now there were three more. Then five. And suddenly the water was boiling all around them—ten, twenty, fifty.

His uncle dropped the glasses, let go of the wheel and ran to the railing. He hurled vomit into the water—a man who had never been seasick in his life.

Rastus looked down into the water as a white fish, dead and floating, passed incredibly close. The boat struck the next.

It wasn’t a fish at all: it was a naked woman. Big, and flabby and disgusting. Her skin around her chest and pelvis as white as bone; a patch of wet black hair where her legs met. And there, not twenty yards away, a man. Also naked. Faceup. Arms at his sides.

The sky was raining dead bodies.

A dozen a second now. Two dozen.

Rastus heard a tremendous explosion. He looked to where his uncle had been at the rail. There was nothing but a splash of red there now and a deep dent in the metal decking.

“Uncle!” Rastus screamed. “Uncle?”

Six more bodies streamed by the boat, now running out of control.

All naked. Every face locked—or were they frozen?—in an unforgiving expression of pure terror.

The fifth that passed by was unmistakable.

It was his mother.

As he’d never seen her.

Nine years later

The Joke’s on U was a comedy club in Seattle’s university district, on Friday and Saturday nights, a haunt for college kids, but during the week an escape for aging software wizards, Green-party candidates, some white-haired hippies wearing bifocals and, on this evening, an oversize man at the beat-up piano on stage, a long-in-the-tooth police lieutenant—or former police lieutenant, he wasn’t sure—plugging through a killer rendition of an Oscar Peterson arrangement.

The establishment had moved around town, mostly along 45th Avenue, occasionally changing or at least modifying its name, trying to retain its former clientele while simultaneously skating on some existing debt. It’s owner, Bear Berenson, was a fiftysomething hempie, round in the middle and pallid in the face, a man with a contagious laugh, an agreeable disposition, and a bad left hip. He’d fallen off a bicycle two years earlier, riding at night, without any light, while royally stoned and busy trying to do some math in his head. “The hip has never been right since,” he liked to say, counting how long it took whoever would listen to realize it was a pun. Those who missed the pun altogether were people that didn’t interest Bear. The man at the piano had not only gotten the joke the first time he’d heard it—of many—but had been quick enough to finish the sentence, and therefore the joke, for him. It was just this kind of person that interested Bear—fiercely intelligent, yet humble; nimbly facile, but reserved. Able to leap small buildings—with a ladder and rope.

Lou Boldt kept the song going with his right hand while he sipped some very cold milk, using his left. It was a good happy-hour crowd, all things considered. Some pretty coeds had wandered in, no doubt expecting stand-up, but had stayed the better part of an hour, were presently on the back end of several rounds of margaritas and, without knowing it—or maybe they did—were providing eye candy for the true jazz aficionados who populated the lounge.

Boldt brought the bass line back into the improvisation, but didn’t have time to wipe his mouth so he wore a Who’s Got Milk mustache for as long as it took him to lean into his own shoulder and drag his lips across the white button-down oxford. If you looked closely, you could see the JCPenney fabric tag escaping the starched collar for it was half-torn off and trying to act as a small flag beneath the buzz cut, graying stubble of head hair that held the texture of a kitchen scrub brush. Boldt smiled and grimaced when he played, his face a marvel to watch as it reacted to the shapes of the sound and the story his fingers told, as if surprised himself by what he heard. Enigmatic in conversation and generally not known for talking much at all, here at the piano, Lord of the Eighty-Eight Keys, Lou Boldt shined. For ninety minutes, once a week—sometimes twice—he revealed things about himself that only his closest friends understood. Bear Berenson was one of those friends. So was Phil Shoswitz, a former lieutenant himself, then a captain, now a deputy commissioner. He wasn’t a regular to these happy-hour performances, but he was no stranger, either. His presence at the moment, however, signaled something else to Boldt. Boldt had been black-balled by anyone of equal or higher rank within the department during his suspension, a leave of absence now in it’s third month. Only his homicide detectives treated him humanly. The inquiry had seen to that. Internal Investigations. Unsubstantiated charges of criminal misconduct meted out in a brutally partisan moment of city politics—as far as Boldt was concerned. I.I. looked at it a little differently—they believed they had proven that Boldt had sneaked nearly ten thousand dollars in cash back into the property room in an attempt to save a former homicide detective’s “past, pension and future,” who’d been stupid enough to “borrow” it in the first place.

For the past forty-three minutes—but who was counting?—Boldt had been assuming that Shoswitz had been sent here to dole out his sentence, to deliver the ruling, to answer the one question that had been hanging over Boldt’s head for the past eighty-seven days.

Did he, or did he not have a job?

For him it wasn’t about guilt or innocence, because he knew the truth. It was about how far I.I. could wear that stick up their ass and still sit down at the table. It was about ignoring fact for fiction, the exact way so many young detectives chose to do when first on the job—on Boldt’s homicide squad. People like Barbara “Bobbie” Gaynes, who was also in the crowd, but back in a dark corner staying away from Shoswitz as if the man were an AIDS carrier. The two had gotten along once—Gaynes and Shoswitz—back when Boldt had promoted her into the ranks of homicide detective, breaking a glass ceiling that still had shards on the floor.

You learned to tiptoe on the job. Gaynes was as good, or maybe better, at it than most. Than most of the most. A clear thinker and possessing single-minded determination, she fit the qualifications that Boldt sought for any and all of his teams. His staff. His bloodhounds. Her being here didn’t surprise him: she loved jazz piano, or claimed to. But she kept her eyes on Shoswitz the same way that Boldt tried not to. She knew. He knew.