Floodlights hit the river like a slap and turn the underbridge world to theater. The Proscenium flinches in the glare, paint drinking light, lines pulling taut against the pilings. I taste diesel and cold iron. Harbor’s engine coughs and idles down, leaving the groan of current against wood and the mutter of radios passing short instructions like secret notes in class.
Elena steps in first, boots clean and certain. “Warrant’s live,” she says, showing the laminated authority to the water more than to me. She nods at a deckhand cop. “Sweep. Slow corners. No heroics.” Her breath ghosts in the beams.
“Copy,” the deckhand says, hands steady on the boat hook as he draws us flush. The tidal creek’s far-off lap keeps time, muffled and patient, as if it remembers everything this city hides at the edges and then returns when the moon insists.
I land on the deck and the texture bites through my soles: sand grit, old varnish, a curled edge of gaffer tape. Floodlights turn droplets into pearls. I smell the burnt sugar that rides the river from the factory upriver, sweetness wrong-footing the night.
“Stay on my left,” Elena says. She doesn’t have to add, and stay out of my way. We’ve built a détente from dumplings and late-night parking-lot arguments; I know the choreography.
“Rolling,” I say, lifting the phone rig just enough to frame the deck and not the faces. No live. No heat-chasing chat. Proof without spectacle. I repeat that to myself, the way I count breaths before I go on air.
Harbor’s second officer clambers over and peels back the weather curtain. Inside, a narrow passage swallows his light and burps it back in dull slats. Elena gives a two-finger move. “Port first.”
We step into a cabin dressed like a black box: low ceiling painted theater-flat, ropes coiled like sleeping snakes, shelves holding plastic bins with tape labels—PROPS A, PROPS B, RIGGING, LIGHTS. A tan Pelican case rests open; inside, a foam puzzle holds microphones with their windscreens shaved down to meaner shapes. My stomach tenses at the sight of a pre-cut slot that could hold a metronome.
“Clear,” a voice calls from the bow.
Elena keeps us moving. The next cabin smells of glue and damp canvas. Racks of masks hang by clothespins, pale ovals that have been sanded, scored, then repainted in thin coats of sad beige. Some carry a faint cherub curl at the cheek, a mistaken smile, the Orpheum’s motif copied and warped until it looks like mercy carved in chalk. I angle the phone, pulse beating in my knuckles.
“Don’t touch,” Elena says.
“I’m not,” I answer, and my voice lands higher than I want.
She glances at me, and the glance says she remembers the pirate feed, the silence I cut into, the votes I asked for. “I’m bagging those,” she adds, and I hear the we that includes me by omission and, tonight, by grace.
We push past a curtain and the air changes. Dryer, cooler, a thin ribbon of ozone that says electricity has been used here with care. The room opens into a set of three risers welded to the hull like someone wanted a real auditorium and had to build with what the river would allow. On the center riser sits a single metal chair, bolted to a plate. An overhead light isolates it in a blunt circle.
My mouth fills with tin. “He staged an interview.”
“He staged a confession,” Elena says. “On his terms.”
I swallow and step closer, camera trained low. The chair’s paint is gray, standard-issue schoolroom, scraped to shine at the edges where hands have clutched and shoes have kicked. A black gaffer cross marks the floor beneath the chair’s front leg: hit your mark, hit your truth. The beam throws dust into tight constellations; every mote looks ready to speak.
“There,” Elena says quietly.
I follow her finger to a shelf cut into the wall paneling at shoulder height. Between a rolled drop cloth and a coil of DMX cable, a small lens stares back—no blinking tally, no comfort light—just a glass eye set into a matte black track housing. The cable disappears through a drilled hole and into the wall’s gut. I lean, slow. The lens faces the chair with an intimacy I reserve for people who ask.
“Hidden camera recording a single subject,” Elena murmurs for her evidence mic. “Angle fixed. No two-shots. No audience, only witness. The river built him an echo chamber.”
“He would’ve forced open posture,” I say, throat tight. “Feet flat, hands visible. He’d let silence do half the harm.” That last word lands heavier than I like. I breathe through the taste of apology I’ll be paying for a long time.
Elena’s eyes flick to mine and soften a notch. “We record the room before we move anything.” She lifts her chin to the officer at the door. “Body cam sweep.”
I step back and let the lens turn us into data: markers on a stage, two women in the wrong play. The light hums. Somewhere in the hull a pump kicks and coughs, then steadies, the boat’s aquarium heart continuing to circulate the show.
“Ready to bag?” the officer asks.
“One more pass,” Elena says. “Then yes.”
We move to a narrow desk screwed into the bulkhead. A neat stack of script pages lives under a paperweight shaped like a cherub head—stone pitted, one eye chipped. The irony could light a borough. I take a breath through my nose and hold it until the urge to laugh dies ugly.
“Gloves,” Elena says. She snaps blue and hands me a pair. “You see. I bag.”
I nod. My voice shows up late. “Copy.”
The top page is formatted like the others we’ve collected: character names in caps, stage directions bracketed and smug. I film the header without words. SCENE: THE PENULTIMATE. LOCATION: HOUSE OF WATER. LIGHT: LOW, WITH PROMISE. I scroll my camera past paragraphs of smug choreography and stop at the last cue block. A line printed in a different font waits on the bottom margin like an invitation scrawled on the back of a playbill.
Keene Bean—final act at the angels.
The nickname detaches my breath from my body for a second. Keene Bean lived in a fridge polaroid with raccoon eyes, in the way Tessa shouted warnings when I ran the dock too fast, in the way Mom called down the hallway when dinner went cold and the radio went loud. Lyle shouldn’t own it.
“He knows your house,” Elena says, reading my face, not the page.
“He knows my stage,” I say, and I hear the burr in the word. “The Orpheum is the angels. He’s always made them the angels.” I touch the paper with my knuckle, not my fingertip, and count again.
Elena slides the page into an evidence sleeve, then takes the whole stack. “We’ll read the rest off-boat. For now: grab, grid, go.”
“Copy,” I say again, and my mouth tastes like salt I didn’t earn from the river.
We back out, elk-slow. Elena directs the bagging like a conductor who hates applause: lenses, drives, routers with custom firmware stickers that would match the van’s bug if a lab put them side by side; masks in breathable paper; the cherub paperweight she claims with two evidence numbers because it feels more like a threat than a prop. I keep the camera’s gaze low and factual, the way Tessa’s notes taught me, the way Alina asked for in that voice memo: trauma-informed angles, dignity intact.
“Bathroom,” the officer at the stern calls. “Clear. Towels, wipes, nothing bio.”
“Good,” Elena replies. “No trophies.”
“No him,” I add.
She doesn’t answer that.
At the bow a hatch opens to a cramped sleeping nook that smells like graphite and citrus cleaner. Above the pillow a corkboard holds printed QR codes pinned like butterflies, each labeled with a venue name and a date. Beneath them, a ledger of short-names and payments, the entries tidy and mean: LC ARTS / CASH / RENTAL EXT. I feel the chain closing: coach’s ledger, our locker, the router hash, now this.
“Photograph, then bag,” Elena says. “Handwriting lab will fight me for this.”
“They can have it,” I say. “I want the chair.”
She gives me a look that says we both know why. “What about it?”
“He wanted a body without a crowd,” I say. “The same megaphone that gives voice can drown you. He built the drown and disguised it as mercy.” I hear myself and shut up before my mouth writes a think piece.
We return to the main cabin. The single chair waits under its cone of light, patient, smug, clean. I kneel to film the gaffer cross and find a second mark tucked behind the front leg: a tiny X etched into the plate with a knife. It points toward the hidden lens shelf. I angle the phone and catch a glint where a second, even smaller camera hides in a housing that looks like a screw cap.
“Secondary lens,” I say. “Redundancy.”
Elena crouches beside me, the floor cool through our knees. “He trusts patterns. He never trusts only one.” She looks at the plate. “Can we lift the chair?”
“Bolted,” I say, fingertip finding the hex. “But…”
“…he hid something under it,” she finishes.
She stands and calls for a tool kit. Harbor produces a case like a dentist’s nightmare. Elena hands me a hex key. “You found it. You turn.”
I want to mutter about chain of custody and her career, but she knows the line and I know my hands. I loosen the bolts in a cross, working slow. The chair wobbles on the last bolt; Elena steadies it without touching my hand. When the plate comes free, a small envelope nests inside a recess: gray paper, sealed with a sticker that repeats the cherub’s chipped smile.
“Bag and open in the van,” Elena says.
I nod and slip the envelope into a sleeve. Back on deck the floodlights feel cruel again. Water slaps a little petulance against the hull. The Night Choir’s far-off hum has swallowed itself for the hour; the creek will flood their feet when the moon tips, and they’ll love the mirror of it while they trade pins and theories. I want to give them quiet. I want to give the city light, but dimmed on purpose.
In the van, Elena clicks the recorder and keeps it on the dash. “Open.”
I slice the sleeve and slide the envelope onto a clean pad. Inside: a microSD, a ring of paper—the kind you get in a fortune cookie—stuck to the plastic with a dot of glue, and a second script page folded into thirds. The fortune reads, in blue diner ink, YOU OWE THEM A CURTAIN CALL. Not a threat—an instruction.
“He thinks I owe him,” I say.
“He thinks everyone owes him,” Elena says. “Page.”
I open it. The layout matches the stack onboard, but the tone is different, jokier, like a playwright trying to imitate banter. SCENE: THE ANGELS AWAKE. LIGHT: HOUSE TO HALF, THEN CUT. SOUND: BREATH. Mid-page, a line addressed directly to me drops into italics:
Keene Bean, stop hiding in the booth. Stand where you began. Take a bow where the plaster boys can see you.
My throat tightens in a way I refuse to name out loud. “He wants me on stage,” I say. “He wants the Orpheum.”
“He plans to end at the Orpheum,” Elena answers, anchoring it for the record. “With you as a prop or a plaintiff.”
“Not a plaintiff,” I say. “A mic.”
She doesn’t smile. “We use this without giving him the finale he wants. We set the terms.”
I look at the microSD and consider the bite of evidence and the hunger of crowds. “We check this with counsel,” I say. “We redact anything that would hurt someone worse. We publish nothing live.”
“Good,” she says, and the good lands like a small dumpling across a sticky table at one in the morning—warm, sustaining, proof we can keep feeding each other better things than adrenaline.
Jonah’s text lights my screen for a second—Night Choir buzzing. You ok?—and I answer Hold. Orpheum likely. He sends back a string of dots and one tiny moon. I tuck the phone in my pocket and follow Elena back out.
On deck a gull complains. The river pulls its slow sheet tight over the boat’s wake and erases us. The floodlights die in stages until the bridge’s underbelly returns to its old darkness. The Proscenium looks smaller without the glare, like a mouth where teeth used to be.
“We’ll seal this,” Elena tells Harbor. “Chain. Camera posted. No leaks.”
“Copy,” Harbor says.
I tuck my chin into my scarf and let the cold in. The city hums above like my studio on a slow night—filters humming, pumps moving, glass reflecting me back at myself. Exposure heals and harms. Confession liberates and implicates. Tonight I carry both truths like live wires, one in each hand.
Elena steps closer so we can speak without microphones catching everything. “You go home,” she says. “You sleep three hours. Then we coordinate inspectors and keys. We write the terms before he writes the scene.”
“I don’t sleep before the angels,” I say, and I sound younger than I like. “But I’ll close my eyes.”
She studies me. “Don’t let him use your nickname.”
“He didn’t earn it,” I say. “He can’t pronounce it right anyway.”
We share a breath that could be a laugh and isn’t. The floodlights make one last lazy arc and finish dying. The Proscenium settles, relieved to be a boat again and not a stage. I pocket the fortune strip and the question that lives inside it.
The river answers nothing. The chair still burns in my memory like a spill of light that will never dim unless I cut the power myself.
I look down at the evidence bag with the page that called me Keene Bean and the instructions that were never his to give, and I ask the dark the only thing worth asking:
When the angels wake, can I keep the house to half—and still bring him down?