Chapter 6 #3
Rone pictured the words typed on a dead report: Officer spoke to parties. No further action. He pictured the men he’d known who lived in the space between law and leverage, and how their smiles always looked like Fletcher’s when they thought time would do their cleanup for them.
He thought to ask Fletcher if he cared about the people of this town or just the votes from the criminals in his pocket.
There were rumors of a surf business laundering money that had popped up six stores after the hurricane, one across the street from another.
Or the fact that the funding came through for the elementary school to be rebuilt, but then it was determined it wasn’t needed.
So many interesting situations on this sleepy island town that no one bothered to check on; it made a perfect hideout for those looking to work quietly in the shadows.
“You might want to leave the boat for a few days,” Fletcher added, aiming concern like a weapon. “Let things cool down. I can have a patrol increase pass-bys.”
“You’ve increased them already,” Rone said mildly. “Election year.”
Fletcher’s teeth flashed; it didn’t reach anywhere that mattered. “You know how it is. Community wants to feel safe. Too many police hanging around makes locals and tourists nervous.”
“I want her to be safe.”
“Course you do.” Fletcher tipped his hat at the broken window. “You can’t help yourself.”
He disembarked. The deputy trailed, still clicking, still careful not to capture anything that couldn’t be filed under unlucky.
Rone let them go. He waited until the dock creaked and the footsteps thinned and a gull’s ragged complaint rolled in to take up space again. Then he exhaled slowly, like he was bleeding air out of a line before it burst.
Echo looked up at him, amber eyes sharp. “With me,” Rone said, and the dog flowed to the pilot house.
Isobel must’ve finished in the bathroom because he found her upstairs.
She had one of the push brooms they used for deck rinse-downs braced against her hip, and she was herding glitter into a trembling ridge, the bristles sighing and rasping over the nonskid.
It would have been admirable if she’d been moving anything but shards; as it was, the glass folded and skittered and leapt like fish from the path of the broom, catching the light and throwing it back at her eyes.
Her face was paper-white except for the shift of color in her cheeks each time she breathed.
Sweat had glued wisps of hair to her temples, and the hollow under her throat was working.
She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t talking. She was pressing movement over panic, and it had worked right up until it didn’t.
The broom juddered. The line of glass collapsed. Her hands shook so hard the handle ticked the window frame in little, helpless taps.
“Hey,” Rone said softly.
She jerked. Echo whined, a single syllable of concern, and nosed her calf. She blinked down at him, opened her mouth to say something that would be brave, then closed it again. The broom handle made one more delicate knock against the frame.
“It’s okay,” Rone said. He stepped in, caught the handle near her hands, and felt the tremor there roll through the wood into his palms. “I’ve got it.”
“I’m not scared,” she said. The sentence came out level. The muscles in her forearms told the truth.
“I know.”
He eased the broom out of her grip. Her fingers let go like a clutch letting out in first gear, uneven, reluctant, not convinced. He set the broom aside, then reached for her wrist because there wasn’t any other part of her that seemed like it belonged to this room yet.
Her pulse jumped under his thumb. He found her other wrist and brought her hands together between them, his larger hands closing around hers the way you cup a bird you don’t want to startle.
Her skin was cold, sweat-damp. He could feel the fine bones.
He could feel the stubbornness in the set of her shoulders and how it was holding a door closed against a flood.
“You’re in shock,” he said, and the truth wasn’t an accusation. It was a rope thrown for her to grab.
“I’m fine,” she said, and her chin lifted the half inch that meant she was daring herself, not him.
“I know that, too.” He didn’t let go. “Breathe.”
Her breath had been running; it tripped, caught, tried to catch up.
He breathed with her—not the ridiculous in-two-three, out-two-three of people who’d never been shot at, but something deeper, quieter.
He matched the hum of the generator and the lap of the water against the hull.
He gave her a beat that would meet her wherever she was.
Her chest hitched again, lowered. Echo pressed his flank to her shin and leaned, a warm, insistent brace.
Time moved strangely for a while. Outside, a neighbor shouted at someone speeding through the no-wake zone.
A second later, the boat under them rocked like they’d been entrenched in a storm.
The sun shifted and dragged the light a foot to the left.
A bead of sweat ran behind Rone’s ear, and he didn’t lift a hand to chase it.
He held her hands and the steadiness he’d been practicing since the first time everything went wrong.
When the tremor finally began to leave her fingers, her shoulders dropped a notch. Her jaw unclenched. She exhaled, and some sound came with it, a thin scrap of a laugh, disbelieving and angry and grateful all at once.
“I hate this,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“I hate needing anyone.”
He let the words land and didn’t dodge. “I know. Because no one’s ever been there for you since your father left.
And I’m sorry for that.” He brushed his hand to her soft cheek; a little heat returned.
Her delicate features didn’t match the fire of determination in her eyes.
She fought a war inside herself; she was brave, but her body betrayed her courage with its fright response.
She swallowed, eyes bright now for a reason that wasn’t shock. “You saved my life.”
He tightened his hand over hers, careful of her delicate bones. Didn’t say the first thing in his throat—you saved your own. Didn’t say the second—next time I might not be fast enough. The thought was salt and glass in his mouth. He set it down somewhere he’d deal with later.
He cupped her cheek and studied her gaze, but when his attention drifted to her lips, he released her slowly, one hand, then the other, and took a step back. She didn’t shake anymore. “Sit,” he said. “Please.”
She sat on the couch like she was conceding something to someone who’d earned it. Echo moved a foot forward and placed his head on her knee, making it impossible for her to slide back into movement without lifting him. It was either accidental genius or training so old it looked like instinct.
Rone got a dustpan, the heavy kind with a rubber lip, and started a rhythm: push, gather, lift, dump.
When the floor was safe enough to stand barefoot without being a fool, he washed his hands at the tiny sink, let the water run pink with micro-cuts he hadn’t noticed. He dried them on a towel, then looked at her.
She’d gone from white to mortally pale to the chalky color of someone who had finished shaking and hadn’t yet decided what to do with the space that left. She saw him looking and lifted her chin again. It hit him in a place he didn’t have a name for, that fight.
“You’re in,” he said.
The line appeared between her brows. “In what?”
“This.” He gestured at the dock, boat, bullet holes, the shape of threat that had settled around her and refused to be shooed. “Deep enough that there isn’t an easy out. You already knew it. I’m saying it out loud so we stop wasting time pretending there’s an escape hatch that isn’t there.”
She stared at him for a long breath. Then she nodded, once, steady. “Okay.”
“We do this my way,” he said. “We pick ground, not panic. We don’t bargain with criminals. We move quiet, and we don’t show everything we have. Not even to the sheriff.”
“Okay,” she said again. The word wasn’t surrender. It was an agreement between equals. Her bravery had earned his respect. He’d never met a civilian with such strength and determination with zero training.
He went down to his boat and came back with the old laptop wrapped in oilcloth.
A thick, ugly computer with keys that still clicked like a proper machine and a hinge that had outlived newer, prettier cousins.
No network card. No drive that talked to the world unless you told it what to say.
He set it on the table, and the sound it made when he opened it felt like a vow.
He didn’t look at her when he reached into his pocket. The Altoids tin was warm from his thigh. He set it down, popped the lid. Mint dust swirled. He took the drive between thumb and forefinger, then slid it into the USB port with a click that sounded too loud.
The screen stuttered from black to a hungry gray to a patient blue.
The machine considered its life choices and then welcomed the stranger: removable device detected.
He didn’t let his breath out until the directory appeared with plain file names in a plain font, the way trouble always liked to dress.
He kept his hands light. He didn’t open anything yet. He stared the way you stare at a dog you don’t know: no sudden moves, no retreat.
Isobel moved from the couch and stood at his shoulder, steady as a lamp behind him. He could feel the heat of her through the thin cotton of his shirt, and he could feel Echo’s weight settle at his feet.
“Ready?” he asked without taking his eyes off the screen.
“No,” she said honestly. “Do it anyway.”
He double-clicked the only folder not pretending to be boring. It had a name that did nothing and everything at once in his blood: TideLedger.
A small box blinked up, requesting a password. Beneath it, a tagline he hadn’t seen in years traced across the corner of the window—an old logo like a watermark: a stylized wave curling around a laurel. His mouth went dry.
He knew that crest. Everyone who’d been on the job longer than five minutes in the wrong cities knew it.
A shell company that had outlived three administrations and four rebrandings—clean as a church on paper, rotten as a bait bucket under the pier in truth.
They used to call it the Laurel Tide Group and laugh about how the river cleans everything if you give it time.
“Rone?” Isobel’s voice was soft and far away, like she’d stepped to the other end of a long hallway.
He didn’t answer. He stared at the tiny digital laurel like it was a fingerprint blooming in powder. He clicked the little “info” arrow almost against his will. Metadata unfolded: last modified, a date that sat a week before Shade went into the water. Author: initialed. S.D.
His stomach went cold in a slow, sinking way. He’d expected numbers. Names. Maybe a ledger of payoffs. He hadn’t expected the brand stamped into the corner like a priest’s seal, casual and permanent.
“This isn’t bad, this is disastrous. This isn’t petty crime or a local group.
This is a huge global organization of drug running, mafia, and all things that go bump in the night.
It’s Laurel Tide,” he said, and the name felt dirty in his mouth.
“That’s a front. Old. Still used. It’s not…
This isn’t something Shade was gathering for somebody else. ”
“What do you mean?”
He swallowed. The cursor blazed, ready, impatient. His finger hovered and didn’t descend.
“He wasn’t informing on them,” Rone said. The words were heavy and quiet and cruel. “He was working for them.”
Silence ate the air around them. The generator hummed, indifferent. A boat two slips down coughed as somebody tried to turn an engine that hadn’t been loved. Echo lifted his head and whined, just once.
Isobel said nothing. Her hand came to the back of his chair and didn’t grip, it simply rested there, steady. He was grateful for the pressure and hated that he was grateful. He made himself click. The password prompt blinked, patient. In the lower corner, the little laurel glowed like a smirk.
Rone stared at the screen until the edges went filmy and his pulse found a hard, slow rhythm in his ears. “Shade told me once that truth is a weapon to be used wisely.”
The story cracked.
He felt it in the bones of the boat.
He didn’t look at Isobel. He didn’t look away from the thing he’d brought into the room.
“Whatever this is,” he said, and his voice came out like it had been pulled over gravel, “it just got bigger. And uglier.”
On the dock outside, footsteps passed, light and careless. A gull screamed. The cursor blinked. The laurel waited. Echo’s tail thumped once, twice, like a countdown.
Rone slid the laptop a fraction closer and set both hands on either side of it as if bracing a body for bad news.
“Shade,” he whispered to a man who wasn’t there, “what did you do?”