Chapter 2
Noah
“Vance. Bring her in. My office when you dock.”
Two years I’ve worked for Sunbreak Harbor Security, and Rafi Haddad has called me into his office exactly four times.
Once to hire me. Once to promote me. Once to tell me a client had died of natural causes before we could bill him, which Rafi found darkly hilarious.
And once to ask, with the delicacy of a man defusing something, whether I planned to attend the company Christmas party.
I did not attend the company Christmas party.
I bring the patrol boat in slow past the channel markers.
Morning’s my favorite shift for a reason.
Water like hammered pewter, gulls working the shrimp boats, nobody talking to me.
Out here the checklist is simple: watch the water, log the traffic, radio anything that smells wrong.
Boats make sense. Boats tell you everything through the hull—weight, wake, how they sit when they’re carrying more than they claim.
People lie better than boats. That’s the whole reason I’m on the water.
Rafi’s office smells like burnt coffee and the cigar he’s not supposed to smoke inside.
He’s behind the desk with two file folders and an expression I don’t like.
Rafi’s got a good face for poker and he’s not using it, which means he wants me to see the concern. That’s a technique. I taught it to him.
“Sit,” he says.
“I’ll stand.”
“You’ll sit, because this one’s long.”
I sit. First domino.
He slides the folder across. “Coast Guard flagged us Tuesday. Joint task force out of the district office has been building a case on a smuggling network moving product up this stretch of coast for eighteen months. Mixed cargo—stolen goods going out, other things coming in. They use legitimate fishing charters as cover. Cash changes hands, cargo goes over the side in dump zones, gets picked up clean later.”
“And this is our problem how?”
“It wasn’t. Then a marine biologist with a research permit and a GoPro filmed one of their drop runs over the reef north of town.” He flips the folder open with one finger. “She reported it. To everyone. Coast Guard, state environmental, and—I want you to appreciate this—her blog.”
“Her blog.”
“With a caption.” Rafi’s mustache twitches. “Do better, humans.”
I look at the file. Marlowe, Abigail. Ph.D. Photo’s a university headshot: sunburned nose, big smile, the kind of open face that gets people talking in line at a gas station. A civilian. The word lands the way it always lands, somewhere behind my sternum, and I move past it fast.
“The network noticed,” Rafi says. “Registration in her footage traces to a boat they’ve since scuttled. They don’t know how much she filmed or what she’s told the task force. There’s chatter. Yesterday one of their people followed her home from a grocery store.”
“So the Coast Guard protects their witness.”
“She’s not a witness yet. Task force wants the network intact—grabbing her up into protective custody tips their whole hand. So they came to us. Quiet, local, plausible.” He leans back. “Full-time close protection. Live-in. Starting today.”
“No.”
“Vance.”
“Give it to Torres. Torres likes people.”
“Torres is on the Whitfield estate through August, and Torres couldn’t clear a room with a map and a flashlight.
” Rafi laces his fingers over his stomach.
“I need somebody who can read the water, because the threat’s coming from the water.
I need somebody the task force will trust. And I need somebody who won’t get bored and sloppy on hour two hundred of nothing happening. That’s you three times.”
“I do boats.”
“You did protective details for eight years before you did boats.”
“That’s why I do boats.”
It comes out flatter than I mean it to. Or exactly as flat as I mean it to. Rafi looks at me for a long moment, and he doesn’t say what he could say, which is one of the reasons I still work here.
“One asset,” he says instead. “Low profile. She counts turtles, you keep her breathing, task force rolls up the network, everybody’s home by Labor Day.” He pushes the second folder over. “Protocols, comms plan, threat assessment. Backup rotates on the perimeter, but you’re inside.”
“Inside where?”
“Her rental cottage.” A pause I’d call theatrical from anyone else. “It’s cozy.”
“Define cozy.”
“One bedroom.” He’s enjoying this. Twenty years running protection details and the man still lights up like a groom’s uncle when the assignment’s ridiculous. “There’s a pullout couch. Delgado measured it off the rental listing photos. He says, and I quote, ’tell Vance to stretch first.’”
I take the folders. I don’t dignify the couch.
I do the workup before I roll. Standard: threat file, area map, principal profile.
The threat file is thin and ugly—organized enough to run charters as cover, disorganized enough to let a civilian film them, which is the bad combination.
Professionals you can predict. These people are improvising with money on the line.
The principal profile is a different problem.
Her research blog is public, which from a security standpoint is a catastrophe—dive schedules, site coordinates, a photo of her cottage porch tagged with enough background to geolocate in ninety seconds.
I scroll it with my coffee going cold. Reef surveys.
Nest counts. A video titled “loggerhead sneeze (WAIT FOR IT)” with two hundred thousand views, filmed, the caption notes, “at my north site,” with the GPS helpfully embedded.
She has, as far as I can tell, never once had a thought she didn’t publish, feed, or announce to a bird.
I write the first protocol line of the detail in my notebook: blog goes dark. Under it, after a minute, I write the second: expect resistance.
The cottage sits at the end of a sand lane off Harbor Road, and I hate it before I’m out of the truck.
Sight lines, terrible. Dune grass to the east high enough to hide a platoon, tree line to the west, a neighboring cottage with a fence a strong sneeze would clear.
One road in, which is good, and no road out, which is not.
The structure itself is maybe eight hundred square feet of blue clapboard with a porch, and the porch has wind chimes, and the wind chimes are shaped like manatees.
I do a slow lap of the truck’s mirrors, log the yellow cottage next door—elderly female resident, currently watching me through her kitchen window with open suspicion, which I respect—and walk up the shell path.
The door opens before I knock.
The woman from the file photo is smaller than I expected and louder than I expected, and I don’t mean volume, because she hasn’t said a word yet.
I mean everything else. Hair escaping a knot pencil-stabbed on top of her head.
Bare feet. And a t-shirt, faded teal, that reads, in enormous letters: I’M KIND OF A BIG DEAL IN THE MARINE BIOLOGY COMMUNITY.
“You’re the bodyguard,” she says. “Rafi called ahead. Do you want a muffin?”
There’s a beat where my training and I regroup.
“Ma’am. I’m Noah Vance, Sunbreak Harbor Security. I’d like to do a walkthrough of the residence before—”
“Because they’re blueberry, and they’re still warm, and I baked them for my neighbor but the batch made a dozen and if they sit out they lose the crumb.
” She holds the screen door wider. A smell comes out of the cottage that a man could make bad decisions about.
“You can walk through anything you want. Fair warning, most of it is turtle stuff.”
She’s not wrong. The living room is a research station with a sofa in it.
Waterproof cases stacked three high, a drying rack of wetsuits, dive fins in the umbrella stand, a laptop rig on the kitchen table cabled to two external drives, and a whiteboard covering half a wall, gridded in four colors of marker: nest numbers, dates, GPS coordinates, and one box in the corner that says CARL? ?? underlined twice.
Two exits, front and back. Windows original, single-lock, a joke. Bedroom hers; bathroom smaller than a boat head; the sofa’s a pullout that faces the front door, which is the only thing this cottage has going for it tactically.
“So how does this work?” She’s followed me the whole circuit, narrating.
She narrates. Everything. That’s a data point.
“Do you, like, check in on me at night? Drive by? I told Rafi this whole thing feels like a lot. I already sent everything to the Coast Guard, so threatening me is honestly pointless, it’s like threatening the mailman after the letter’s delivered—”
“I stay here.”
She stops. Blinks. “Here here?”
“Full-time close protection.” I nod at the pullout. “I sleep there. Where you go, I go. Groceries, work sites, everything. Until the task force clears the threat.”
“Huh.” She considers me the way I’d consider weather. Then she shrugs and holds out the plate. “Then you should definitely have a muffin. If we’re going to live together, you need to know what I’m capable of.”
“Questions,” she says, trailing me while I test the back door’s deadbolt, which is a deadbolt the way the fence next door is a fence. “One. Do you have a first name, or is it just Vance, like Madonna?”
“Noah.”
“Noah. Good flood energy, very on brand for maritime security. Two. What do you eat? Because I do a big pot of something on Sundays and I need to know if you’re one of those protein-and-sadness guys.”
I check the window latch over the sink. Painted shut, which for once works in my favor.
“I eat what’s available.”
“That’s not an answer, that’s a survival strategy.
Three.” She hops up to sit on the counter, heels drumming the cabinet, and points at me with half a muffin.
“How dangerous is this, actually? Scale of one to ten. Because Rafi was very soothing on the phone, and in my experience people are only soothing when the real number is higher than the number they’re saying. ”
That one, she means. Under the chatter her eyes have gone steady, and I revise the file’s assessment upward. Observant. Faster than she plays.
“Six,” I say. “Today.”
“And what makes it a seven?”
“Them finding out you’re the only living person who’s seen that boat’s crew topside.” I let that sit for exactly as long as it needs to. “Which is why we do this my way.”
“Hm.” She takes a bite, chews, swings her heels. Recalibrating, I think. Good.
“Counteroffer,” she says. “We do it mostly your way, except for the turtles, which we do the turtles’ way, because they were here first and they don’t know about the smugglers.”
“That’s not how protection works.”
“It’s how nesting season works. I have permits with dates on them.” She smiles at me, bright as a flare, and slides off the counter. “You’ll see. It’s all on the whiteboard.”
I look at the whiteboard. Nest 41 has its own color.
I don’t take the muffin.
I mean not to take the muffin.
The muffin is outstanding, and I eat it standing at parade rest with my back to a wall of sea turtle nesting charts, and Abby Marlowe watches me with unconcealed delight, like I’m a wild animal that finally took food from her hand.
“Okay,” she says. “This is going to be great.”
That makes one of us.
The neighbor ambushes me at the fence line at 1745, while I’m walking the perimeter and cataloging everything wrong with it.
“You,” she says. Blue housedress, garden hose, the bearing of a woman who has outlived every threat this coast produced for eight decades. “Who are you and why were you photographing Abby’s roofline?”
“Noah Vance, ma’am. Sunbreak Harbor Security. I’ll be staying with Dr. Marlowe for a while.”
“Staying.” The hose lowers a degree. “Staying how?”
“Professionally.”
“Hmph.” She looks me over the way harbormasters look over hulls. “Is she in trouble?”
“Some. It’s being handled.”
“Well.” The hose comes all the way down.
“Good. That girl brought me chicken soup in June, in Florida, because I sneezed twice on a Tuesday. Somebody ought to be looking after her for a change.” She turns back to her tomatoes, then fires over her shoulder, “I keep Harold’s shotgun cleaned, if it comes to that. ”
“Hope it won’t, ma’am.”
“Mrs. Pruitt. And square your corners on that porch, the second board creaks.”
She’s right. It does.
The couch is six inches too short. Minimum.
I confirm this at 2310, lying in the dark with my feet on the armrest and my sidearm holstered on the floor within reach, listening to the cottage settle.
Every structure has a sound signature. This one ticks in the roof when the wind shifts, hums in the refrigerator, and, I now know, carries voice straight through the bedroom wall like the drywall’s made of paper towels.
“—and the thing nobody appreciates about loggerheads,” the wall says, “is the site fidelity. Same beach, Carl. They come back to the same beach across thousands of miles. You can’t teach that. You don’t get to be smug about it either, you can barely land.”
There’s no second voice. I checked the room myself; there’s no one in there. She’s on the phone, or—
No. She’s talking to a pelican that isn’t present.
I stare at the ceiling. In eight years of details I’ve guarded a senator, two CEOs, a sheikh’s nephew, and a witness who tried to bribe me with a jet ski to let him go to a nightclub. Nobody briefed a pelican.
The monologue winds down around 2340, trails into a mumble, and goes quiet. The cottage ticks. The fridge hums. Outside, the dune grass moves in the wind, and I get up twice to confirm it’s the wind.
The second time, coming back through the dark kitchen, I stop outside her door.
Habit. You verify the principal. Her breathing comes slow and even through the gap under the door, and there’s a sticky note stuck to the doorframe at eye level—her eye level—that says tide chart!
! with two exclamation points, and I stand there a second longer than verification requires.
Bad orders. A loud, warm town. A client who bakes for the neighbors and files her death threats under pointless.
I lie back down on the too-short couch and run the threat assessment again, because the threat assessment makes sense.
Network’s got resources, local knowledge, and an unknown level of nerve.
Cottage is indefensible without changes I’ll start tomorrow.
Principal is friendly, cooperative in tone, and completely ungovernable in practice.
I already know this the way you know a storm from a wave line.
She said this is going to be great like the situation was a puppy.
Six weeks, maybe eight. Keep her breathing. Go back to the boats.
Through the wall, asleep, Abby Marlowe laughs at something. Full laugh, from the middle of a dream, bright even filtered through drywall.
Eight weeks. Hell.