We sailed another forty-five minutes before the engines stopped for good. The hallways filled with chatter, but no one tried the door. I gripped my gun, ready for nothing, and nothing came. After an hour, the ship had gone quiet. I slipped open the lock, and we stepped into the hallway.

The hold was empty, the liquor gone. We crept back to the hold, and up the steps, where the bulkhead door swung free. The deck was bare. The dock was lit by a streetlight. Above our heads was the Manhattan Bridge. We hadn’t sailed upriver to some mysterious Hudson hamlet. We had just gone ’round the island to dock on the Eastside. Dizzying, that. I must have wobbled, because Juliette took my hand to steady me.

On the dock, the cops of the Fourth Precinct loaded the cargo onto an open-backed truck while a team of stevedores watched, flicking cigarettes with the calculated laziness common to dockworkers everywhere. There were ships on either side of us, their lights dark. At the end of the pier, the street was empty, save for a long, sleek limousine.

“How are we going to get past them?” hissed Juliette.

“Just wait.”

When the last crate was loaded, one of the idle men waved his arm, and the car drove down, lights bouncing as it passed over each slat of wood. It stopped beside the truck, and the back window rolled down.

“Something missing, isn’t it?” asked one of the cops, a man I did not recognize. “We bring liquor. You bring guns. The guns ain’t here.”

I could not make out the response from the car, but it did not placate the cop, who responded with a particularly vile curse. This was a mistake.

The car door swung open and connected with the cop’s skull. He tumbled backward, head hitting the pier with an awful thump. From the car stepped Glen-Richard Van Alen, dressed for the opera, and ready to brawl.

Van Alen took the cop by the throat and slammed his bloody scalp into the hood of the roadster. He groaned, the cry of a dying animal.

“Good lord,” said Juliette.

The other cops just watched as Van Alen dragged his victim across the dock as easily as a boy stealing his sister’s rag doll. He dangled the man in the space between ship and pier. The ship edged closer, pressing against his legs.

“I could drop him,” he said. “I could let the ship snap these twigs he calls legs. Or you scrawny, tattered pieces of filth could take my word for it when I tell you the guns’ll be here tomorrow, noon.”

No one argued. Van Alen dropped the man on the dock and used the ragged police uniform to wipe the blood from his gleaming leather shoes. Only when the door closed and the car backed down the pier, followed by the truck, did Thorne’s men move to help their friend.