Chapter 18
Meer ran.
Squall knew he would. A man who'd built his operation on other people's hands — Vasco's fire, Deane's enforcement, Sport Coat's smooth talk — wasn't the kind of man who stood and fought when the hands were gone.
He was the kind who ran, regrouped, and came back from a new direction with new people and the same playbook.
Squall wasn't going to let him get that far.
"His phone went dark six hours ago," Breech said.
They were in the great room, early morning, the table covered with Breech's maps and printouts and the laptop showing a cell tower grid of the coast. "Last ping was a tower near the marina district, south end.
After that, nothing. Either the battery died or he pulled it. "
"He pulled it," Squall said. "He knows we're tracking."
"The calls to Providence and Boston stopped two days ago. Nobody's coming to help him. His meeting's dead, his stock is gone, and his crew is either in zip ties or in the ground." Breech adjusted his glasses. "He's alone."
"Alone and moving," Diesel said from the bar, where he was drinking coffee and studying his road map. "I had two brothers on the coast highway and one on the inland route since yesterday. Nobody matching his vehicle description has left the area."
"So he's still in Sable Harbor."
"He's still somewhere. Doesn't mean he's staying."
Squall looked at the cell tower map. The last ping was the marina district — the south end of the waterfront, past the commercial docks, where the money boats sat on floating slips and the yacht club kept its teak-decked clubhouse locked against anyone who didn't own a forty-footer.
Not club territory. Not working waterfront.
The kind of place where a man with cash could tie up a boat or rent a slip and nobody would ask questions because asking questions wasn't polite.
"He's on a boat," Dana said.
She was sitting at the end of the table with a cup of coffee she hadn't touched, her chair pulled close enough to Squall's that their shoulders almost met. She'd been quiet through the briefing, listening the way she listened to engines — not for what was obvious but for what was underneath.
"A boat," Squall repeated.
"Think about it. His warehouse is gone. His plant is gone.
He can't use a shop because every shop on this waterfront knows what happened to his last three people.
He can't rent a room because the club owns every flophouse and motel in the harbor district.
Where does a man with money go when every door on land is closed? "
"The water."
"The marina district has transient slips.
You pay cash at the harbor office, they give you a berth, and nobody checks ID because the marina makes its money on seasonal renters, not background checks.
A man with a decent boat could sit on a slip for a week and the only people who'd see him are the dock boys and the yacht club crowd, and neither one of them talks to people like us. "
Breech was already typing. "Marina district has forty-eight transient slips. If he rented one in the last three days—"
"He wouldn't use his name," Squall said.
"He wouldn't need to. Cash slips don't require names." Dana leaned forward. "But they require boats. And a boat that showed up in the last three days that nobody on the waterfront recognizes — that would stand out. To the right person."
"What right person?"
"Cal Henning." She said it like it was obvious.
"He fishes out of the commercial dock, but his brother-in-law runs the marina fuel dock.
Cal knows every hull in this harbor. If a new boat showed up and doesn't belong, he'd notice.
He'd notice because it's in his water and fishermen pay attention to what's in their water.
" She looked at Squall. "Kind of like bikers. "
Squall almost smiled. Didn't.
He called Cal Henning from the compound yard, standing in the morning cold with Dana beside him and the harbor stretching out below the mill's bluff. Cal picked up on the third ring, the sound of a diesel engine idling in the background.
"Squall. How's my boat?"
"Running clean. New rings, new bearing, new shift cable. Dana fixed the whole drive."
"That woman's a wizard. What do you need?"
"New boat in the marina district. Last two or three days. Something that doesn't fit — wrong size for the slips, wrong type for the season, something a man with money would charter fast without knowing the harbor."
Cal was quiet for a moment. The diesel idled. A gull screamed somewhere.
"There's a fifty-foot Hatteras on slip thirty-one," Cal said.
"Showed up Tuesday night. Jersey registration.
Nobody on the fuel dock has seen the owner — he hasn't come in for fuel, hasn't hooked up to shore power, hasn't talked to the harbor office except to pay cash for a week's berth.
My brother-in-law said the guy paid in hundreds and wore a jacket too nice for the docks. "
Slip thirty-one. Tuesday night was the night after they'd hit the warehouse. Meer had moved to the water within hours of losing his operation.
"Anyone seen crew on the boat?"
"Nobody on board during the day, far as I can tell. Lights on at night. One person, maybe two. Blinds closed." Cal paused. "Something wrong with this boat, Squall?"
"Something wrong with the man on it. Appreciate the help, Cal."
"You tell Dana her stern drive job was the best work anyone's done on that boat in ten years."
Squall hung up and looked at Dana. She was watching him with the expression he'd come to recognize as the quiet version of I told you so — not smug, just certain, the face of a woman who knew her harbor and had stopped being surprised when it proved her right.
"Slip thirty-one," he said.
"Hatteras. Jersey plates. Figures."
"Why figures?"
"A man who steals freight and launders it through marine shops doesn't know anything about boats.
He'd charter the biggest thing he could find because he thinks size is safety.
A Hatteras in a transient slip in Sable Harbor is like parking a Rolls-Royce at a truck stop.
It screams money, and money screams notice me. "
"You're enjoying this."
"I'm enjoying being right. There's a difference."
He kissed her. Quick, hard, in the compound yard where Diesel and Talley could see and did see and pretended they didn't. She kissed him back with her hands on his cut and the coffee she hadn't touched still cooling on the table inside.
"Stay here tonight," he said.
"I know."
"I mean it this time."
"You mean it every time. I stay when I decide to stay." She held his gaze. "But tonight I'm deciding to stay. Because tomorrow you're going to finish this, and I want you to come back to something."
He looked at her — this woman who'd walked into his life through a fire and fought her way through every wall he'd built — and felt the weight of what he had to do tomorrow settle into his chest alongside the weight of what he had to come back to.
Both were heavy. One was worth carrying.
He spent the rest of the day planning with a precision that had nothing to do with caution and everything to do with wanting to come home.
The marina district was different from the warehouse, different from the Harmon loft, different from the fish plant.
Open water on three sides. Public slips.
Boats that cost more than houses, owned by people who called lawyers before they called anyone else.
This had to be clean.
"No guns on the dock," Squall told the table at church that evening. Torch at the head, Diesel and Anvil and Breech and Wraith around the sides, every patch in the chapter present. "We do this on the boat. On the water. Quietly."
"How quietly?" Anvil asked, which from Anvil was a legitimate question since his definition of quiet included throwing men through crate stacks.
"Quiet enough that the yacht club doesn't call anyone. We get on the boat, we handle Meer, we leave. The boat goes out and doesn't come back."
Diesel traced the marina layout on Breech's map. "Slip thirty-one is at the end of the south dock. The approach is a hundred yards of open pier with dock lights every twenty feet. You can't walk that without being seen."
"From the pier, no. From the water, yes."
The table was quiet. Wraith looked at Squall with what might have been interest, which on Wraith was practically a standing ovation.
"We take the skiff," Squall said. "The club's sixteen-footer. Two men, no running lights, come alongside from the harbor side where the dock lights don't reach. Board from the stern swim platform. The Hatteras has a transom door — standard on that model. We go in quiet, we come out quiet."
"Two men," Torch said. "Who?"
"Me and Wraith."
Nobody argued. The two of them were the water and the dark, and Meer was sitting on both.
"The rest of you hold the pier in case something goes wrong. Diesel covers the dock entrance. Anvil and Breech on the parking lot. Nobody comes or goes."
Torch looked at him from the head of the table. The president's face was unreadable — the same granite calm he brought to every decision, every vote, every order he'd given since the day he founded this club.
"Your water, brother," Torch said. "Your call. Bring it home."
Church ended. The brothers filed out. Squall stood at the table alone for a moment, looking at the map, the slip, the fifty-foot Hatteras where a man who'd burned a woman's shop and stolen a man off his porch was sitting in the dark thinking he was safe because he'd put water between himself and the land.
Water wasn't safety. Water was Squall's first language. And tomorrow he was going to speak it.
He went upstairs. Dana was sitting on his bed with her legs crossed and a parts catalog open in her lap, already planning the shop rebuild, already building the next thing before the current thing was finished. She looked up when he came in.
"Tomorrow," he said.
"Tomorrow."
He sat beside her and she leaned into him, her head against his shoulder, the parts catalog still open on her knee.
He put his arm around her and they sat like that for a long time, not talking, watching the river through the cracked mirror, two people on the near side of something that would be over by this time tomorrow.
One way or another.