Forty-four degrees, no wind, and a daughter who'd been running her mouth since four-thirty in the morning. Tom Parry figured that was about as good as a man could expect out of a day.

The float dock sat low and black on the water, frost furring the planks where his headlamp swept across them. Below, Gastineau Channel lay flat as poured glass — the kind of stillness that never survived past sunup this time of year. Out past the breakwater the spruce stood in a wall, every tree silvered, and the whole world smelled like cold stone and low tide and the two-stroke ghost of every outboard that had ever idled here. The Beaver rode at her lines, nose into the dark.