“Stop!” Sandy told him. “There’s got to be some good reason for us going through all this.”
“There ought to be,” Ken agreed grimly.
His eyes were watering from the wind. He rubbed his gloved hands across them, clearing his blurred vision in time to see the man they were following veer across the street on a long diagonal. Suddenly he vanished around the corner of a ramshackle building built directly on the river. The boys speeded up.
“Easy,” Ken said, when they reached the building.
Just beyond it the sidewalk was edged by a tall fence of corrugated iron, but between the building and the beginning of the fence was an opening.
“He went through here,” Ken said, as they approached it. He peered around the edge of the building and saw that the fence walled off a great cement-floored dock, stretching into the river some five hundred feet.
At its far end glowed a single light, which faintly silhouetted the figure of the man in the pea jacket, still moving steadily away from them.
The boys slipped through the opening after him.
“Keep against the wall,” Ken said.
They moved quietly forward, in the deep shadowy protection of the building that bordered the dock for its first hundred feet or so. Beyond the building, in the open water that surrounded the rest of the great pier, the boys could discern a row of moored boats, the stern of one snubbed against the bow of the next.