Read Chapter 6: The Missing Stevedore

The docks smelled of diesel and rotting rope when Danny O’Shay found him. Jack was coiling a hawser near the warehouse line, the *Eleanor*’s hull groaning against the pilings behind him. The kid came up fast, cap in hand, face pale as the gulls circling the bait sheds.

“Jack. You gotta hear this.”

Jack didn’t stop working. “If it’s about the foreman again, I told you—keep your head down until payday.”

“It’s Vince Poole.” Danny’s voice cracked. “He’s gone.”

Jack’s hands paused on the rope. He remembered the name—quiet hauler, kept to himself, worked the *Meridian* offloads. The one who’d disappeared two days ago. Jack had pushed it aside, too busy lining up the boat, too busy counting his O’Malley debt, too busy pretending the unease crawling up his spine was just the cold Atlantic wind.

“Gone how?” Jack asked, keeping his voice flat.

“He didn’t show for work yesterday. Or today. His wife came down to the sheds asking around.” Danny swallowed hard. “She said he left Tuesday night for a job and never came home. Nobody saw him after the last whistle.”

Tuesday night. The *Meridian* had been docked Tuesday. Jack had been in her hold, digging through crates, finding nothing but that damn locket.

“Maybe he ran off,” Jack said. “Men do.”

“Not Vince. He’s got three kids, Jack. Another on the way. He wouldn’t just—” Danny stopped, licked his lips. “There’s talk. Down at the Fulton Street coffee shop. They’re saying he got too close to something. Something that wasn’t his business.”

The wind shifted, carrying the stink of low tide. Jack stared past Danny at the water, where the *Eleanor* rocked at her mooring. A hundred and fifty dollars had bought his first whisper of a better life. The O’Malleys’ five hundred had bought a boat with a rebuilt engine and a fresh coat of gray paint. Both transactions had been quiet, cash-only, handshake deals.

But Vince Poole had been a quiet man too.

“What’s that got to do with me?” Jack said.

“You were on the *Meridian* the night he went missing.” Danny’s eyes were wide, earnest, too young for the weight he was carrying. “You found that whiskey. You’ve been asking questions. People talk, Jack. They say you’re trying to find the source. And Vince was the one who knew the source.”

Jack’s jaw tightened. He set down the rope slowly and turned to face Danny fully.

“Who’s saying that?”

“Everybody who matters.” Danny glanced both ways down the pier, then stepped closer. “I heard the O’Malley brothers sent a man around to Vince’s house yesterday. Not to pay respects. To ask what he’d told anyone about the *Meridian*’s cargo.”

Ice settled in Jack’s gut. The O’Malleys had given him the money without blinking—five hundred dollars, no paperwork, no witnesses beyond the two of them and a bartender who kept his eyes on the glass. They’d smiled when Jack signed his father’s house into the bargain. Old Tom O’Malley had clapped him on the shoulder and called him a smart kid.

Smart kids don’t survive long if they ask too many questions about other people’s product.

“I didn’t know Vince,” Jack said. “We worked different shifts. I barely remember his face.”

“That’s not what his wife thinks.” Danny’s voice dropped. “She told my mother that her Vince kept a ledger. Names, dates, shipments. He was going to sell it to someone—someone who was trying to build a route up the coast. Then Tuesday night he got a note saying to meet at the salt shed. He told her if he didn’t come back, the ledger was in the floorboards under their bed.”

Jack’s blood went cold.

He saw Vince Poole clearly now—sallow cheeks, thin wrists, a man who carried cargo all day for wages that couldn’t feed his family. A man who’d seen an opportunity in the hidden crates and calculated his way into a grave.

Just like Jack was doing.

“Why are you telling me this?” Jack asked.

“Because whoever sent that note thought Vince was talking to you.” Danny’s gaze held his with an unsettling directness. “And if they thought that, they might come asking you next. I figured you’d want a heads-up.”

Jack’s mind raced. The O’Malleys. It had to be them. They’d financed his boat with suspicious ease, almost like they wanted him to run the operation—wanted him to take the risk while they reaped the profit. And when he’d gone sniffing around the *Evelyn Frost* for a product source, they had to have heard about it. The docks had eyes everywhere.

But killing Vince Poole? A quiet hauler with a family?

The O’Malleys were loan sharks, not murderers. At least, not that Jack had ever known. They leaned on men, broke fingers, threatened to take what they were owed. But this—a man vanishing without a trace, a ledger hidden under his wife’s bed, a note left at the salt shed—this was a different kind of language.

This was the language of men who didn’t want competition.

“I need to see that ledger,” Jack said.

Danny blinked. “What?”

“His wife. You said she’s telling people about it. Why would she do that if she’s scared?”

“Because she wants to know what happened to him. She thinks if someone buys the ledger, they’ll find out who took him.” Danny’s voice cracked further. “Jack, I’m not going to ask Mrs. Poole to hand over her dead husband’s secrets.”

“He’s not dead yet.” Jack picked up his coat and slung it over his shoulder. “And if I can find the ledger, I can find out who was doing business with him. Maybe that leads to Vince. Maybe it leads to whoever’s trying to pin this on me.”

Danny hesitated, fear warring with something else in his face—loyalty, maybe, or the desperate hope that Jack was the kind of man who’d actually help.

“She lives on Bremen Street,” Danny said finally. “Number forty-two. Blue shutters. But Jack—” He caught Jack’s sleeve. “If the O’Malleys catch you poking around this, they’ll do to you what they did to Vince. You know that, right?”

Jack pulled his arm free. “They won’t catch me.”

The walk to Bremen Street took twenty minutes through the warren of tenement blocks that smelled of coal smoke and boiled cabbage. Jack kept his head down, his collar up, his eyes scanning the shadows between gas lamps. The O’Malleys had men everywhere—not just enforcers, but informants. Old women at windows, kids playing stickball in the gutters, bartenders who poured three fingers of rye and remembered every face that came through their doors.

Number forty-two had a single lit window on the second floor. Jack knocked twice, waited, knocked again.

The woman who opened the door was younger than he expected—maybe twenty-five, with hollow cheeks and a shawl pulled tight around her shoulders. Her stomach swelled beneath the worn fabric. She looked at Jack with exhausted, suspicious eyes.

“You’re the one from the docks,” she said. “The one who found the whiskey.”

“Yes,” Jack said. “I need to talk about Vince.”

She opened the door wider, just enough to let him in. The apartment was small—a table, two chairs, a stove with a kettle on it. A child slept in a cot in the corner. Mrs. Poole gestured to a chair and sat across from him, her hands folded over her belly.

“Danny told you about the ledger,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You want to buy it.”

“I want to know who was dealing with Vince.” Jack leaned forward. “If I find that out, maybe I can find him. But I need to see what he wrote.”

Mrs. Poole studied him for a long moment. Then she rose, crossed to the bed, and knelt awkwardly. She worked a loose floorboard free and lifted out a battered oilskin packet. When she placed it on the table between them, her hands were shaking.

“He said if anything happened to him, I should burn it.” Her voice was quiet, almost a whisper. “He said the men he was dealing with wouldn’t stop at him. They’d come for me and the kids.”

“Then why haven’t you burned it?”

“Because I want the truth.” Her eyes met his, hard as flint. “And you’re going to get it for me.”

Jack opened the oilskin. Inside was a leather-bound ledger, its pages filled with a neat, cramped hand. Dates, ship names, cargo manifests, cargo holds. And at the top of the final page, an entry dated Tuesday night:

*Met with source. Payment agreed. Warning: O’Malley brothers fronting operation. Middleman called “F” runs product from Providence. Safehouse: abandoned cannery, east of the bridge.*

Jack’s breath caught. He read the entry again, then a third time, the words burning into his memory.

*Middleman called “F”.*

The locket. The engraving. The man who’d given it to Molly. The man whose identity she’d never confessed.

F.

He closed the ledger and slipped it into his coat pocket. Mrs. Poole’s eyes tracked the movement, but she said nothing.

“I’ll find your husband,” Jack said.

He didn’t believe it. But he said it anyway.

Back on the street, the fog was rolling in off the harbor, thick and cold. Jack walked fast, the ledger pressed against his ribs, his mind turning over the words like a man trying to crack a safe.

The O’Malleys were fronting the operation. That meant his loan wasn’t just money—it was a leash. They’d financed his boat to control him, to make sure his route ran through their product. And if he tried to find his own source, to cut them out, he’d end up like Vince Poole.

But there was another name in that ledger. A middleman. A man called F who ran product from Providence. A man who might know where the *Meridian*’s whiskey came from—and might be willing to deal with someone new.

Jack stopped at the corner, the fog swallowing the streetlights. He pulled the ledger from his pocket and flipped open the final page, scanning the entry for more details.

That’s when he saw it. A single line, written in pencil at the bottom of the page, so faint he’d almost missed it:

*F. — known as Finch. Docks regular. Blue Parlor. Thursday nights.*

Jack’s pulse hammered.

Thursday. Tomorrow night.

And Molly worked the Blue Parlor on Thursdays.

He closed the ledger and started walking, the fog closing in behind him like a door.