Blues in the Night

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The Vigilant ghosted silently past the Hudson wharves in a milk-thick February fog. The glow of brilliance from a docked Cunarder, the floodlights on a Norwegian freighter’s loading derrick, the pink-neon of the waterfront bars bathed the Manhattan pierheads in a strange opalescence which distorted all shoreward outlines to the two men on the police boat.

The one in the cockpit called:

“Put the peek on Pier Nineteen, Sarge. Next to that Danish single stacker.” The officer who spoke wore a peajacket over dungarees. His long-nosed, weather-lined face with its cold blue eyes and lean, hard-bitten jaw, might have been the model for a banks fisherman.

His bulky-shouldered companion in the pilothouse rubbed mist off the window, peered toward the berthed liners and the shed-covered wharves.

“Prob’ly the watchman, Lieutenant. Gettin’ away from the stink of them green hides for a breath of air.”

“Since when did they start hiring dames as night watchmen?” Lieutenant Steve Koski flicked beads of moisture off his eyebrows, stepped up on the port waterway to get a better look. “Bear in a bit, Joe.”

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