Chapter 4
Dana had the bay door up by six-thirty, the one working lift running by seven, and Cal Henning's lobster boat back in the water by eight-fifteen.
The parts room was a black hole behind a tarp she'd stapled across the doorframe.
The smell of char bled through anyway — melted plastic, scorched wood, the chemical bite of burned paint that sat in the back of her throat like a reminder.
She'd swept the ash out of the working bay before dawn, hosed the concrete, and set up a folding table where her parts bins used to be.
On it sat what she'd salvaged last night: two rows of gaskets, a handful of zincs, three impellers still in packaging, and a coffee can full of assorted hardware that might or might not be what she needed for the day's jobs.
It wasn't enough. It was what she had.
Marco showed up at seven with two coffees and a look on his face like he'd come to a funeral.
"Don't," she said.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"You were going to say something about maybe taking the day. I can see it in your face. Drink your coffee and pull the Gutierrez skiff onto the trailer. I need the lift clear by nine."
He drank his coffee and pulled the skiff.
By mid-morning she had three boats through the bay and was running twenty minutes ahead of schedule, which she needed because she was doing everything twice — checking parts against her salvage table instead of walking into the parts room, double-verifying stock she'd normally grab blind.
The rhythm was off, and the rhythm was everything.
Her father had taught her that. A good shop runs like a good engine: consistent, predictable, every part where it belongs.
Take one system out and the whole machine stutters.
She was stuttering. But she was running.
The rumble came up the harbor road around ten — a low, heavy idle that she felt in the concrete before she heard it. She straightened up from the Gutierrez skiff's lower unit and watched Squall roll into the lot on a black Harley Dyna with the club's outboard strapped to a cargo rack behind him.
He parked, swung off, and stood looking at the shop.
In daylight, without smoke and firelight, she could see him properly.
Lean and weathered, the permanent squint of a man who'd spent years reading the horizon.
Salt-cracked hands. A faded anchor tattoo on one forearm and a rope-burn scar ringing the opposite wrist. He moved easy, unhurried, his weight low like a man comfortable on a rolling deck.
The VP patch on his cut caught the morning sun.
He looked at the open bay door, the boats lined up, the work in progress. Then he looked at her.
"You're open."
"Said I would be."
"You did." He unstrapped the outboard and carried it to the bench one-handed like it weighed nothing.
Set it down, stepped back, and didn't say anything else for a long moment.
He was looking at the tarp over the parts room, at the folding table, at the stripped-down operation she'd rebuilt overnight.
She waited for it — the offer. Every man she'd ever known would have offered. Let me help you rebuild. Let me get my guys over here. Let the club handle it. Men loved solving a woman's problems. It made them feel necessary.
He picked up a wrench off the bench and turned it in his fingers, examining it like he'd never seen one before.
"Forty-horse Yamaha," he said. "Burning oil."
"I told you last night. Wrong rings."
"I think it's the head gasket."
Dana wiped her hands on her rag and walked over to the bench. She could smell him from three feet — leather, exhaust, and something underneath that was just skin and salt air. She ignored it the way she ignored everything that wasn't the job.
"It's not the head gasket."
"Burning oil, white smoke on startup, runs rough under load. That's a head gasket."
"That's a head gasket on a car. On a two-stroke outboard that's been sitting in salt air for six months with someone's shade-tree ring job holding the cylinders together, it's the rings." She leaned past him and popped the cowling. "Look at the spark plugs."
He leaned in beside her. Close. Closer than the engine required. His shoulder was an inch from hers, and she could feel the heat of him through her coveralls.
"What about them?" he said.
She pulled one. Held it up. "See the deposits? That's oil getting past the rings and fouling on the electrode. A blown head gasket would give you coolant contamination — milky oil, sweet smell in the exhaust. This is dry. It's mechanical wear in the cylinder, not a seal failure."
Squall looked at the spark plug. Looked at her. His eyes were gray-green, the color of the harbor on an overcast morning, and they held hers without blinking.
"You're right," he said.
"I know."
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something drier than that, something that said he wasn't used to being wrong and didn't mind it as much as he should.
"Where'd you learn outboards?" he asked.
"Where'd you learn to be wrong about them?"
He laughed. Short, surprised, like he hadn't expected to. It changed his whole face — the permanent squint lines deepened and something warmer came through, just for a second, before the dry calm settled back.
"I'll be on the bench," he said. "Doing whatever you tell me."
"Damn right you will."
He stayed. That was the part she hadn't expected.
He didn't hover, didn't supervise, didn't stand in the bay door with his arms crossed watching her work.
He set up at the bench beside her and started breaking down the outboard with hands that knew tools, working steady and quiet while she ran jobs on the lift ten feet away.
He handed her things before she asked. He stayed out of her way when she needed the space.
And when she reached past him for a socket, his hand found her elbow — light, brief, a touch that guided her around the sharp corner of the bench without a word.
She felt it for twenty minutes after. The specific pressure of his fingers through the canvas of her coveralls.
Around noon, her phone rang. Coastal Marine Supply, her main parts vendor out of Gloucester.
"Dana, I'm sorry, but we need to pause your account for a while."
She stopped what she was doing. "Pause it."
"There's been some — look, I got a call. Somebody said there might be issues with your shop's insurance status after the fire, and until that's sorted out, we can't—"
"Jerry. I've ordered from you every week for six years. My account is current. My insurance is active. Who called you?"
Silence on the line. The kind of silence that meant he knew exactly who called and was too scared to say it.
"I'm sorry, Dana. I just can't right now."
He hung up.
She stood with the phone in her hand, heat climbing up her neck that had nothing to do with the bay's temperature.
Whoever had torched her parts room was now torching her supply chain.
Burning her from both ends — destroy the inventory, then cut off the replacement.
Professional. Methodical. The kind of move that said this wasn't a couple of guys with a grudge and a gas can. This was an operation.
Squall was watching her from the bench. He didn't ask. He just watched, his hands still on the outboard, his gray-green eyes steady on her face.
"Parts supplier cut me off," she said. "Somebody spooked him."
"Need me to have a conversation with him?"
"No." She pulled up her contacts and started scrolling. "I need you to finish pulling those rings while I fix this myself."
She called Harmon's Marine in Plymouth. Full price, no account discount, but they'd ship overnight.
She called a salvage yard in New Bedford that her father had used when the regular channels ran dry. They had impellers and gaskets, not the right brands but the right specs.
She called a retired mechanic in Fall River who kept a barn full of old marine stock and would sell at cost to anyone who'd worked with her father.
Three calls, twenty minutes, and she had parts coming from three directions by tomorrow morning.
Not perfect. Not cheap. But the boats on her board would get fixed, and the shop would keep running, and whoever was trying to squeeze her into a corner would find out that the corner had more exits than they'd counted.
Squall watched the whole thing from the bench without saying a word.
When she hung up the last call, he looked at her with something in his expression she couldn't quite read.
Not surprise — he didn't seem like a man who surprised easy.
Something quieter. Like he was filing her away in a category he hadn't known he had.
"Three sources in twenty minutes," he said.
"I know people."
"Yeah." He turned back to the outboard and started pulling the rings. "You do."
She went back to work. The Gutierrez skiff needed a new water pump, and the afternoon board had two more jobs behind it.
The sun moved across the bay floor in a slow arc, and the sounds of the harbor came through the open door — engines, gulls, the clank of rigging — and for a few hours the shop almost felt normal.
Almost. Except for the tarp over the parts room, and the smell of char under everything, and the man at her bench who hadn't left, hadn't pushed, hadn't tried to take over.
Who'd been wrong about the outboard and admitted it, and who was now doing exactly what she'd told him to do without acting like it cost him anything.
She didn't know what to do with that. Men who showed up wanted to fix things their way.
Men in motorcycle clubs, she imagined, wanted to fix things their way with more volume.
But Squall just worked the bench, handed her tools, and stayed in her peripheral vision like something she'd always had there, steady and sure and not going anywhere.
It was the staying that got her. More than the muscle, more than the patch, more than the club's implied protection. He'd showed up, and he hadn't left.
She didn't know what to do with that either.