Chapter 6
The call came at nine-fifteen on a Tuesday night, and it changed everything.
Dana was at her kitchen table with a parts catalog and a calculator, working out whether the Plymouth order covered Thursday's board or if she needed to hit the salvage yard in New Bedford again.
The numbers were tight. They'd been tight since the fire, and every day she ran the shop on one bay with improvised supply lines was a day the margin got thinner.
But the boats were getting fixed. The fleet was running. And she hadn't missed a single job.
Her phone buzzed. Ray Prescott's home number.
She picked up expecting the usual — the old man calling to ask about tomorrow's schedule, or to tell her he'd found a box of parts in his garage she might need. Instead she got his wife.
"Dana." Alice Prescott's voice was thin and shaking in a way that turned Dana's stomach before the words came. "Two men just took Ray off the porch. He was sitting out having his coffee and they — they put him in a car and they just drove away. I couldn't — I didn't—"
"Alice. Are you hurt?"
"No. No, I was inside. I heard him shout and by the time I got to the door they were already—" Her breath hitched. "They were already gone."
Dana was on her feet, keys in her hand, moving toward the door before the sentence finished.
"Did you call the police?"
"Ray would never — you know how he is about the police, he'd—"
"Alice. Listen to me. Lock the doors, stay inside, don't answer for anyone you don't know. I'm coming."
She drove to the Prescotts' house in seven minutes flat, running two lights and taking the harbor road at sixty. Alice met her at the door — a small, white-haired woman vibrating with the kind of fear that doesn't scream, it just shakes — and told her the rest.
Two men. One tall, thin, gray-haired. Quiet.
Moved like he had a schedule. The other was younger, bigger, and did whatever the first one told him.
They'd come up the walk like they belonged there, and by the time Ray stood up from his chair, the tall one had him by the arm and was walking him to a dark sedan at the curb.
No shouting. No violence. Just a man being collected like a package.
Deane. The enforcer Squall had told her about — cold, methodical, handles owners who don't cooperate. He'd taken Ray Prescott off his own porch to make a point, and the point was aimed at her.
Dana sat Alice down in the kitchen, made her drink water, and stepped onto the back porch to think.
They had Ray. The man whose name was on the shop door, whose sixty-year reputation made Prescott Marine worth stealing. They hadn't hurt Alice, which meant this wasn't punishment — it was leverage. Give us the dock, or the old man doesn't come home. Simple, ugly, effective.
She could feel the squeeze tightening around her like a vise grip. The fire. The supply chain. Now this. Each move calculated to strip away one more thing she needed until there was nothing left but the deal she'd already refused.
Her phone buzzed again. Unknown number.
She answered.
"Ms. Prescott isn't available," a voice said. Flat, unhurried, the verbal equivalent of a clean desk. "But he'd like you to know he's comfortable, and he'll stay comfortable as long as the conversation about your receiving dock moves forward."
"Where is he?"
"Close enough to return. Assuming you're ready to discuss terms."
Dana gripped the phone hard enough to feel the case flex. "If you hurt him—"
"We don't need to hurt him. That's the whole point. Think about what we're offering. We'll call back tomorrow."
The line went dead.
She stood on the Prescotts' porch with the harbor wind hitting her face and the dark spreading out below the bluff where the old neighborhoods stacked up above the waterfront.
Somewhere down there, in one of the hundred buildings she could see from here, Ray Prescott was sitting in a room wondering if anyone was coming.
The anger hit her like a wave — not hot, not wild, but cold and deep and so steady it felt like a foundation she could build on.
They'd taken a seventy-two-year-old man off his porch.
A man whose hands shook too much to hold a wrench, who still came by the shop twice a week to sit in the office because it was the only place he felt useful.
They'd taken him because she'd said no, and they thought that would make her say yes.
A sound from the street caught her. A motorcycle engine, idling low, from the direction of the harbor road.
She walked to the front of the house and saw a bike parked two houses down under a dead streetlight. A kid sat on it — young, nervous, watching the Prescott house with the rigid attention of someone who'd been told to watch and didn't know what to do when something actually happened.
Talley. The prospect. Squall's prospect.
Dana crossed the lawn and the kid nearly dropped the bike.
"How long have you been sitting on this street?"
Talley's eyes went wide. "I — Squall told me to—"
"How long?"
"Three nights. I was watching the shop, but tonight he told me to follow the guys who were clocking the dock, and they came here instead, and I was on the phone calling it in when they grabbed the old man and I couldn't—"
"You saw them take him."
"I tried to follow, but they turned off on Chandler and I lost them by the net-lofts. I'm sorry, I—"
"Stop apologizing. Which way on Chandler?"
"East. Toward the old fish houses."
Dana's mind was already moving, pulling up the waterfront the way she pulled up an engine schematic — every building, every dock, every property she'd been walking past since she was twelve.
Chandler Street east ran along the old net-loft district, a block of abandoned brick buildings between the fish pier and the fuel docks.
Half-collapsed, no utilities, no foot traffic after dark.
If you needed to stash someone near the water where nobody would look, that's where you'd go.
But which building? There were a dozen lofts in that block, and most of them had been locked up or boarded since the fishing fleet shrank.
She closed her eyes and thought. Not about fear. About the waterfront.
The old Garrett loft had a collapsed roof — no good for holding anyone.
The two on the pier side were open to the weather, no interior walls.
The brick one on the corner of Chandler and Dock Street still had a functioning door — she'd seen it open last year when a salvage crew pulled copper out of the walls.
And the big one at the end, the one that used to be Harmon's net storage, had a second floor with intact rooms and a back entrance off the water.
That one. If you were the kind of man who planned things clean and quiet, you'd want walls, a door that locked, and an exit that didn't face the street. Harmon's had all three.
"Call Squall," she told Talley.
"I already did. He's on his way."
"Call him again. Tell him I think the old man's in the Harmon loft at the end of Chandler. Second floor, back entrance off the water. And tell him I'm not waiting."
Talley fumbled for his phone. "He said — Squall specifically said to keep you—"
"I don't care what Squall said. Ray Prescott is in that building because someone wants my shop, and I'm the one who's going to get him out."
"Squall's going to kill me."
"Squall can take it up with me when he gets here."
She walked back to the house, told Alice to stay put and lock up, and got in her truck. Talley was still on the phone behind her, talking fast, his voice cracking with the specific panic of a young man caught between a woman who wouldn't stop and a VP who'd told him to keep her stopped.
She pulled out and headed for Chandler Street with her hands tight on the wheel and the cold anger still burning in her chest. She wasn't going to crash into the loft swinging.
She wasn't stupid. But she was going to be there when the club arrived, and she was going to know the building better than anyone with a patch, because this was her waterfront and she'd walked every foot of it since before any of them had earned their colors.
Her phone rang. She glanced at the screen.
Squall.
She let it ring.
Chandler Street was dark when she turned onto it, the net-lofts rising on both sides like brick cliffs in the faint glow of the harbor lights.
She killed her headlights and rolled to the end of the block, where the Harmon loft sat with its back to the water and a faint light showing through a second-floor window that should have been pitch black.
She parked, killed the engine, and sat in the dark watching that light.
Someone was in there. And she was going to make sure they knew what taking Ray Prescott off his porch had actually cost them.
Behind her, up the coast road, she heard the first rumble of approaching bikes.