“Is she-”

“She’s breathing,” the oldest of the crew told me. As if to prove it, the semiconscious Ellie turned to her side and vomited up some river water.

“Jesus,” a young Hispanic deckhand said, watching.

“Are you all right, miss?” the old one asked me. His doubtful eyes were a piercing blue, although the rest of him was grizzled and faded. He looked Scandinavian, like a Minnesotan of old, but I heard Texas in his voice.

“I can’t feel the surface of my skin,” I said, pressing my shaking fingers into my triceps. It was a very disconcerting sensation. I got shakily to my feet, thinking that walking might help.

“I have rye,” he said.

In my first-aid training, our instructor had advised against offering or accepting “field medicaments” in time of trauma: alcohol, cigarettes.

But at that moment I wasn’t thinking about my training, the fact that I’d mostly quit drinking a few years back, or that the water patrol’s boat was on the horizon now, its prow bouncing on the water as it approached. A little rye whiskey sounded eminently reasonable at that moment.

But it was my own weak flesh that saved me from myself. When the riverman put the bottle in my hands, it slipped right through my shaking fingers and shattered on the deck.

chapter 2

Fallout from Ellie Bernhardt’s attempted suicide ate up most of my afternoon.

We were both taken to Hennepin County Medical Center. After they took Ellie away, a middle-aged physician’s assistant looked at me and said, “I’ll have a look at you in the second exam room down the hall.”

“Me?” I said, startled. “I’m fine.”

“Probably,” she said. “But I got to look at your ears and check-”

“My ears feel fine,” I said, ignoring the faint but telltale cool heaviness that meant there was water in one of them. At her skeptical look-medical people take challenges to their authority nearly as badly as cops-I said, “Really. I don’t do exams.”