Chapter 3
Squall backed the truck down the dock ramp with the club's outboard strapped in the bed and the harbor dark around him, running lights on the moored boats tracing thin lines across the water.
Past nine on a Thursday night, and Prescott Marine was the only shop on the waterfront still showing a light — one bare bulb over the bay door, left on the way people left porch lights on, more habit than invitation.
He'd been meaning to drop the outboard for a week.
Forty-horse Yamaha off the club's skiff, running rough and burning oil, and Torch had told him to take it to the shop that kept the fleet's boats alive.
Squall had put it off because he'd been chasing the freight problem at the fuel docks and because he didn't like owing favors to shops he didn't know personally, even ones that sat on club turf.
He killed the engine and stepped out. The harbor air hit him — brine, diesel, the mudflat funk of low tide.
Across the lot, the shop sat dark except for that one bulb, its two bay doors closed, the receiving dock around back facing the water.
A solid building. Old brick, good bones, the kind of place that had been fixing boats since before Squall's father was baiting hooks.
He was unstrapping the outboard when he heard the glass break.
Not loud. A sharp pop from the far side of the building, near the parts room, followed by a second one. Then a sound he knew in his chest before his brain caught up — the soft, hungry whump of accelerant catching.
Orange light bloomed in the parts room windows.
Squall was moving before the flames hit the ceiling.
He came around the building at a run and saw the parts room fully involved, fire eating through the shelves and licking up the wall toward the shared ceiling with the first lift bay.
Two figures were already at the lot's edge, walking — not running — toward a dark van idling on the street.
One of them carried something that caught the firelight. A bottle. Empty now.
He didn't chase them. The van was already moving, and the shop was burning.
The first bay door was unlocked. He hauled it up and the heat hit him like a wall — the parts room was an inferno behind the interior wall, flames already coming through the drywall seams and eating into the ceiling joists overhead.
The first bay was filling with smoke, the lift and the boat on it disappearing into a gray haze that tasted like burning paint and old rubber.
He grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall mount, pulled the pin, and put the spray on the ceiling where the fire was trying to cross into the bay. It pushed the flames back for about ten seconds. Then it ran out.
"Hey!"
He turned. A woman was coming through the bay door at a dead sprint, another extinguisher in her hands, her hair wild and her face lit orange by the glow from the parts room.
She was wearing a tank top and jeans — not work clothes, sleep clothes, like she'd been in bed and seen the light from wherever she lived.
She didn't scream. Didn't freeze. She took one look at the fire eating through the wall, raised the extinguisher, and hit the seam where the flames were worst.
"The second bay!" she yelled over the roar. "If it gets past this wall, I lose everything!"
Squall grabbed a moving blanket off a stack by the lift, soaked it under the utility sink, and slapped it over the section of wall where the drywall was buckling.
The wet fabric hissed and steamed but held.
Beside him, the woman — Dana, he realized, the one who ran this shop — emptied her extinguisher into the ceiling void and killed the spread that would have taken the second bay in another thirty seconds.
They worked side by side for ten minutes that felt like an hour, beating back the fire's reach with extinguishers, wet blankets, and their bare hands on the hot spots that kept flaring along the wall.
Dana moved through the smoke like she knew every inch of the building by feel, yanking tools off the shared wall before they heated, kicking a drum of solvent away from the fire's path, shouting directions without looking at him because she already knew where he was.
The parts room was gone. They both knew it. But the wall held, and the second bay held, and when the fire burned itself down to the studs on the far side of the brick, the rest of the shop was standing.
Dana dropped the empty extinguisher and stood in the ruined bay with her hands on her knees, breathing hard.
Smoke curled around her in the orange-tinged dark.
Her arms were streaked with soot, and there was a burn across the back of her left hand where she'd grabbed something hot without flinching.
Squall watched her straighten up and look at the damage.
She didn't cry. Didn't curse. Her eyes moved across the destroyed parts room — shelves melted, inventory gone, her father's labels curling black on bins that had warped in the heat — and then across to the second bay, where the lift still stood and the boat on it was smoked but intact.
She catalogued it the way he'd watched captains catalogue a storm's damage: what's gone, what's saved, what do I do first.
"Parts room's a total loss," she said. Not to him. To herself, out loud, already working. "Gaskets, impellers, zincs, filters — everything. But the lifts are good. Second bay's good. I can run jobs out of one bay if I source parts by morning."
She pulled her phone out of her back pocket — cracked screen, soot-smudged — and started making a list.
Squall stood there covered in ash, watching this woman plan her reopening while the embers still glowed behind her, and felt something shift in his chest that he didn't have a name for yet.
"You always work fires in your pajamas?" he said.
She looked up from her phone. Looked at him — really looked at him — for the first time. Her eyes tracked the cut, the patch, the VP rocker, and came back to his face without flinching.
"You always show up at other people's shops in the middle of the night?"
"Had an outboard to drop off."
"That the club's Yamaha? Forty-horse?"
"You know it?"
"I know every engine on this waterfront." She went back to her phone. "It's burning oil because somebody put the wrong rings in it last time. I'll have it on the bench tomorrow if tomorrow still exists."
"It'll exist," Squall said. "This shop's on club turf. Whoever did this just made it our problem."
Her head came up again, fast. "It was my problem before it was yours."
"Now it's both."
She held his gaze. The firelight was dying behind her, but her eyes had enough heat in them on their own.
He could see her deciding whether to push back, and he could see the moment she chose not to — not because she agreed, but because she was smart enough to know that the men who'd burned her parts room would be coming back, and standing alone against them was brave but stupid.
"I didn't ask for the club's help," she said.
"Didn't say you did."
He left her working her phone and walked the perimeter.
Two points of entry for the accelerant — parts room windows, both smashed.
Glass on the ground outside, pour pattern visible on the sill.
Gasoline, from the smell. Quick, sloppy, meant to burn fast and scare hard.
Not a professional job. Someone who liked fire more than planning.
He called Torch from the lot.
"Prescott Marine got torched. Parts room's gone, rest of the shop held. Two men, dark van, no plates I could see. I was here dropping the outboard."
Silence on the line. Then Torch's voice, low and measured. "The freight thing?"
"Has to be. Somebody wants this shop, and they're not asking nice."
"Who's the woman?"
Squall looked back at the bay, where Dana was already dragging salvageable parts out of the smoke and stacking them on the clean concrete. Working. Still working.
"She runs the place. Didn't fold."
"Bring it to the table tomorrow. Full sit-down."
Squall hung up and walked back to the bay. Dana had a flashlight in her teeth and was pulling bins off the shared wall, sorting what survived from what didn't, her hands black to the wrists with soot and ash.
"You should get that burn looked at," he said.
"I should get my shop put back together." She didn't look up. "You going to stand there, or you going to help me move these before the wall finishes cooling?"
He helped her move them.
They worked until midnight, sorting parts by flashlight and the glow of the harbor lights through the open bay door.
She didn't talk except to tell him where things went, and he didn't talk except to ask.
They moved around each other in the tight space like they'd been doing it for years — no wasted motion, no collisions, each knowing where the other was without checking.
When the last of the salvageable stock was stacked in the clean bay and the ruined parts room was stripped to the studs, Dana stood in the doorway and looked at what was left of her shop.
"I've got four boats on the board tomorrow," she said. "I'm opening."
Squall looked at her — soot-streaked, burned, standing in a gutted building at midnight — and believed her completely.
He rode back to the compound through the dark with the salt air cutting the smoke smell out of his lungs and the image of her refusing to stop burning brighter than anything that had caught fire tonight.
Someone was trying to turn the harbor mouth's repair shop into a laundry. Someone had just lit a match on club ground.
And the woman who ran that shop was already planning tomorrow's work before the ashes cooled.